A Perfect "Proper" Greyhound

We have a favorite new cocktail in this house, and I think it might be time to think about a grapefruit tree for the potager. This all came about a few weeks ago, when James ordered one at the Hungry Cat in Los Angeles. On their menu, it's called a "Proper Greyhound." I'd kind of forgotten about them since we'd first tried them at their Santa Barbara restaurant a couple of years ago, but one sip and it all came flooding back. The tang of the grapefruit juice and the zip of the Plymouth gin are a match made in heaven - and with just a little sweetening, they go down easier than one might think.  I found some ruby red grapefruits at Sage Mountain Farms, and made a trip to BevMo where I picked up the gin. (That 5 cent wine sale is dangerous!) I had some simple syrup in the fridge and with that we were in business.

This is so not a fussy drink that it hardly even needs a recipe, but here is an approximate formula for one cocktail. Multiply it as you see fit and of course feel free to modify it to your taste. Perfection is subjective, after all!

A Perfect Proper Greyhound
inspired by The Hungry Cat

The juice from two-three large-ish ruby red grapefruits  (to make about 6 oz. of juice)
2 ounces of Plymouth Gin
1-2 teaspoons of simple syrup*

Fill two rocks glasses with ice cubes. Pour the gin over the ice, and top the glasses up with the juice. Add a teaspoon of simple syrup - taste, then add a little more syrup if needed. Isn't it a lovely color?

*to make simple syrup just combine equal parts sugar and water in a small saucepan, bring to a boil and stir to dissolve the sugar, remove from heat and allow to cool. Store in the fridge.

Bonus - if make the candied grapefruit peel using this method, which just requires simmering the halves in water then candying them in a sugar syrup. They make a lovely garnish, but by no means are they necessary to fully enjoy the intoxicating effects of this beverage.

Salud!

My Favorite Chocolate Cake (No Foolin'!)

I've tried a lot of chocolate cakes in my time, and baked a few myself, but I knew, the instant I tasted it at Starlite one evening last fall, that this one was The One. It was dark, dense, moist, not too sweet, and absolutely huge - with nice thick layers about one and a half inches tall. I liked it so much that I asked our server for the recipe and wrote my email address on a slip of paper for him to give to the chef. I'd almost forgotten about it when lo and behold - about two months later the recipe appeared in my inbox.

This is pretty rare for me, settling on one recipe I could use for the rest of my life. Aside from my go-to roast chicken I seldom make anything the same way twice. This cake just really does it for me though. Not only is it perfect in terms of its flavor, moistness and size - it's one of the simplest recipes I've seen and very nearly foolproof. It also stores well (I froze mine for a week) and it's so moist that I can't imagine it would ever dry out.

The only caveat is that the recipe makes a LOT of batter. So much, that at first I didn't believe it would fit into the two cake pans. When it came time to mix the wet and dry ingredients together, I discovered I actually didn't have a big enough bowl, and had to retrieve an enormous one I found at an estate sale, that I had planned to sell in my Etsy store. That bowl is now in my kitchen cabinet, which is where it will stay now that I know I will need it every time I make this cake. If you don't have an enormous bowl, you might try adding half of each of the wet and dry ingredients (by weight) to a third bowl in two batches.

This cake bakes up so tall that you could probably get away with halving the recipe and baking one layer for most occasions. It is nice to know though, that when one of those occasions comes along when nothing but a big, honkin' chocolate cake with thick, fudgy frosting will do - this one's your man.

Starlite Devils Food Cake
adapted from Sharon La Bate - Pastry Chef at Starlite, and graciously shared by Marguerite Grifka.

Dry Ingredients:
3 cups sugar
2 ¼ cups All Purpose Flour
2 ½ cups cocoa (I used Valrhona)
1 ½ teaspoon baking powder
1 Tablespoon baking soda
1/8 teaspoon salt

Wet Ingredients:
3 eggs
3 yolks
1 ½ cups coffee
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla
6 oz. melted butter (1 1/2 sticks)
1 ½ cups buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Line two nine inch cake pans with parchment and grease well (grease the pan before putting the parchment in so it doesn't slip, then grease the paper too.)

Whisk all dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Whisk all of the wet ingredients together well in a separate bowl.

In a very large bowl (a six quart or larger Kitchen Aid should also work) gently fold the dry into the wet ingredients, and whisk gently, just to get rid of any lumps. (If you don't have an enormous bowl but you do have a kitchen scale, you can also weigh out half of each and blend them together in a third bowl, then just pour each batch directly in the cake pans.)

Evenly divide the batter between the two pans, and bake for about 45 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out nearly clean (a few moist crumbs are ok) Allow the cakes to cool on a rack for 15-20 minutes, then turn out of the pans, peel the parchment off, and allow to cool completely before storing.

This batter would also make great cupcakes - just fill your papers about 3/4 full, and bake for about 15-20 minutes, until dry and springy to the touch. Take the cupcakes out of the pan as soon as they are cool enough to handle, so that the steam doesn't cause the papers to come off.

Thick Fudgy Frosting
1 pound of powdered sugar
3 sticks of butter, softened
8 ounces of semisweet or bittersweet chocolate, melted
2 Tablesoons cocoa powder
1/3 cup sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
dash salt

Whisk cocoa powder and salt into warm melted chocolate until dissolved set aside to cool to warm. Using a stand mixer with the whisk attachment on high speed, beat butter until light and fluffy. Lower the speed and gradually beat in powdered sugar, then sour cream and vanilla, scraping the bowl down as needed.

With the mixer running on low speed, add melted chocolate to mixture and blend, scraping the bowl well to make sure it's all incorporated. Frost the cake immediately. If the mixture gets too thick, you can thin it with a little milk or cream.

Frozen Assets and Lemon Pie

With taxes done and over with, and the possibility of a really great sailing trip coming up in the next couple of months, we're pretty much on financial lockdown around here at Chez Robertson. What that means for you is a lot more posts about cooking at home, and fewer posts about us going out - at least for a little while. Luckily, this situation coincides with the arrival of some of my very favorite ingredients in the markets - fava beans, english peas and strawberries among them - and the arrival of a bumper crop of lemons on our tree.

One of the branches broke off the tree this week so I suddenly had a bucketful of lemons that needed to be used. I squeezed them all on Saturday, and stashed the pitcherful of juice in the fridge. (James: "Wow, this lemonade is really tart!") The funny thing about most lemon recipes is that they generally don't call for that much lemon juice. Still - with so many around, making something with them just seemed like the right thing to do.

On Saturday we were invited over our friends Jora and Bryan's house for dinner - and I was supposed to bring dessert. It was over 90 degrees - so nobody was doing any baking. I had forgotten to freeze the ice cream maker, which meant no homemade ice cream, so I started researching icebox pies and frozen desserts. Turns out Lemon Icebox Pie is loaded with sweetened condensed milk, and those chiffon pies are loaded with gelatin - neither of which sounded very good to me. Then I remembered a dessert we had at Lucques last summer, a semifreddo with fruit that tasted like frozen whipped cream with candied orange zest and pistachios. Bingo.

There are a lot of different ways to make semifreddo as it turns out - but the defining characteristic seems to be whipped cream either used as a base, or folded into a base - then frozen, usually in a loaf form - often with amaretti cookies or some type of cookie mixed in. I happened to have a container of gingersnaps on hand, and liked the idea of making a frozen pie. I also liked the sound of the recipes that folded meringue into the mixture along with the whipped cream - I thought it might make the mixture less icy, and I think it did.

By Saturday afternoon, I had the recipe worked out - but no time to make it. So instead, I took ice cream. Jora made a pot of phenomenal Spaghetti con Vongole and afterwards, we made sundaes with Double Rainbow coffee ice cream (the best in existence except perhaps Gelato Vero's) - topped with sweetened espresso, whipped cream and crushed meringues - with biscotti on the side. I also brought vanilla with strawberries and limoncello - in case anyone (besides James) didn't like coffee desserts - 'cause some people are weird like that.

On Sunday, I finally had the chance to make the pie. We had it after dinner on Sunday night, with my copycat version of the Hungry Cat's Pug Burgers. Oh my gah. But we'll get to that in a minute.

I started with a lemon ice cream base from this recipe, cutting down the sugar to accommodate the meringue, and upping the lemon a little to compensate for the dilution with the meringue and whipped cream. (To make this into ice cream - you'd just have to stir in another cup of half and half or cream and put it in the ice cream maker.) I then made a nice sticky marshmallowy meringue with three egg whites and 3/4 of a cup of sugar, and whisked that into the custard (it's too sticky to fold in, truly - and it needs to be incorporated fully) - then, I whipped a cup of cream (no sugar, since the meringue is so sweet) and folded that into the mixture. After I baked my pie shell (in a 10 inch Pyrex pie pan) I put it in the freezer to cool - then poured in the lemon mixture - and away into the freezer it went. I also had some of those Trader Joes meringue cookies still on hand from the sundaes the night before - so I crushed some and sprinkled them over the top before freezing.

The pie froze in about four to five hours - it just has to be completely flat, which is kind of tricky. I was really happy with the fact that it didn't set up rock hard, you can cut it straight from the freezer. The sharp lemon flavor comes through despite the richness of the cream. If I do say so myself, this one's a keeper.

Then there were the burgers - oh man, the burgers. I haven't tried making these at home since our dinner at the Hungry Cat last summer, but now I don't know if I can ever make another kind of burger again. I was inspired by the blocks of Organic Ground Beef they are now selling at Trader Joes. The blocks are one pound each. Can you guess how many burgers a block made? Anybody?

Two. That tells you all you need to know right there. The good news is this burger requires absolutely no accompaniments. Anything with it would be overkill - no fries, no salad - the restaurant serves it with onion rings and even those are superflous. The meat and its garnishes are so over the top it's all one can rightly absorb by itself.

I divided the beef block into two big thick patties - just over one inch thick and about four inches around and griddled them in a saute pan in a mixture of butter and olive oil until they were just this side of bloody - then put them on toasted focaccia buns with blue cheese, Niman Ranch Bacon, sliced avocado, sliced tomato, red onion and green leaf lettuce. There's something about the combo of the blue cheese, bacon and avocado - and with the rich rare beef and the juices running all over the place? Wow. Just, wow.

Lemon Semifreddo Pie in a Gingersnap Crust

For the crust:
3 cups of gingersnaps
2 Tablespoons of butter, melted

For the lemon custard:
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh lemon zest, divided
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice
3/4 cup sugar
3 large eggs
1 cup half and half

For the meringue:
3 egg whites
3/4 cup sugar

3/4 cup of whipping cream

3-4 storebought meringues, crushed

blackberries, macerated in lemon juice and sugar

For the crust:
Preheat the oven to 275. Put the gingersnaps in a food processor and process into fine crumbs. Add the melted butter and blend together - press into a 10 inch glass pie plate. Bake at 275 for about 15 minutes, until firm.

For the pie:
In a medium non-reactive saucepan, whisk together 1 Tablespoon of the zest, the 1/2 cup of lemon juice, the sugar, and the eggs. Whisk in the half-and-half, and cook the mixture over moderately high heat, whisking constantly, until it coats the back of a wooden spoon and starts to thicken. Strain the custard through a fine sieve into a bowl, pressing hard on the zest. Whisk in the remaining tablespoon of lemon zest and chill the mixture, covered with plastic wrap, until cold (or use an ice bath to chill it down.)

Place the three egg whites in a stand mixer fitted with the whisk, and beat until foamy. Gradually add the 3/4 cup of sugar and beat until the mixture is stiff and glossy. Gently whisk into the cooled custard.

Add the whipping cream to the mixer and beat just past the soft peak stage - it shouldn't be too stiff, but should have plenty of body. Gently fold the whipped cream into the custard mixture.

Pour the custard mixture into the gingersnap crust, and top with crushed meringues. Freeze until firm - about four hours (making sure it's completely level.) Serve with blackberries.