Roast Garlic Prosciutto Sandwich
slices of rustic Italian bread, ie) thick bread
sliced prosciutto
cheese (something country-like… like Asiago or goat cheese or Parmegiano Reggiano or something)
balsamic vinegar
pepper
head of garlic
mayonnaise
lemon juice
butter lettuce
tomato slices

1. Preheat the oven to 425F. Wrap the garlic in aluminum foil. Put the garlic in the oven and let it roast for 45 minutes. When the garlic is done roasting, take it out of the oven and let it cool (make sure it’s semi-warm or room temperature… you’ll see why).
2. Pop the garlic out of the skin and mash it. Add mayonnaise, a little bit of lemon juice, and pepper.
3. Spread some of the garlic/mayo on a slice of toasted bread. Layer on prosciutto on top of the garlic/mayo. Drizzle on a bit of balsamic vinegar. Layer lettuce and tomato on top of that, and top with cheese. Spread a little more of the garlic/mayo on the other bread slice, and place it on top of the sandwich.
4. Enjoy!

Note: I take no responsibility if this sandwich does not turn out well… as I just made it up and have yet to make it myself. I will update this post when I have…

Mariposa is located on the third floor of the Neiman Marcus in Newport Beach. If you have the money, it’s quite a nice place to have lunch, sipping on consommé and eating popovers on the patio while looking out at the ocean and the palm trees…

Mariposa is awesome because of three things: popovers, strawberry butter, and consommé. Flaky, buttery and airy popovers, freshly made strawberry butter, pure chicken consommé. They always give this to you. If you ask for more, they gladly give you some. Yum. The food itself is not much more than average for the price range, but still quite good.

Roast Chicken

I think caprese salad is delicious for barbecues… and similar events. It’s more of a summer thing. Yeah… this picture was taken in July, indicating how far behind I am on posting my cooking and baking and eating adventures. And it’s super easy. Tomato, basil, mozzarella. Salt and pepper.

Here it is, in pictures. It is the best red velvet cake I have ever tasted. It is better, I think, than SusieCakes, Sprinkles, and other bakeries combined. I don’t know exactly how I made it so that turned out so well for my palate, but I halved the sugar. Other than that, I followed the recipe exactly. Thanks, Smitten Kitchen.

Red Velvet Cake

Yield: 3 cake layers

1 tablespoon unsalted butter
3 1/2 cups cake flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa (not Dutch process)
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 cups canola oil
2 1/4 cups granulated sugar
3 large eggs
6 tablespoons (3 ounces) red food coloring or 1 teaspoon red gel food coloring dissolved in 6 tablespoons of water
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
1 1/4 cup buttermilk
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 1/2 teaspoons white vinegar.

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place teaspoon of butter in each of 3 round 9-inch layer cake pans and place pans in oven for a few minutes until butter melts. Remove pans from oven, brush interior bottom and sides of each with butter and line bottoms with parchment.

2. Whisk cake flour, cocoa and salt in a bowl.

3. Place oil and sugar in bowl of an electric mixer and beat at medium speed until well-blended. Beat in eggs one at a time. With machine on low, very slowly add red food coloring. (Take care: it may splash.) Add vanilla. Add flour mixture alternately with buttermilk in two batches. Scrape down bowl and beat just long enough to combine.

4. Place baking soda in a small dish, stir in vinegar and add to batter with machine running. Beat for 10 seconds.

5. Divide batter among pans, place in oven and bake until a cake tester comes out clean, 40 to 45 minutes. Let cool in pans 20 minutes. Then remove from pans, flip layers over and peel off parchment. Cool completely before frosting.

I like cheese. I like garlic. I thought putting them together would be a splendid idea, with a touch of truffle. Although I don’t want to be snooty, I agree that truffles smell delicious. The mushroom-y, fungus-y truffle that is friggen expensive. And although truffle oil (least, most truffle oil) is merely some sort of oil with chemical additive that smells like truffle, it still smells divine. Here is my grilled cheese sandwich. I shall name it the GG sandwich. And I feel proud because I’m almost certain I came up with it entirely on my own. Well, I did but chances are someone did the exact same thing.

When I made this recipe again for a special friend of mine, it was noted that the garlic flavor was much too strong. Well, first, the garlic wasn’t roasted to the point where it was just soft and mushy and heaven. It still retained some of that bitter/spicy garlic zing that so many people hate (I love it, especially with my nem chua). If it had been roasted more, I think it would have been more palatable for those who aren’t as good friends with garlic as I am.

GG Sandwich (makes 2 sandwiches)

4 slices rustic-y bread (like Boudin’s sourdough or at least something with a more substantial crust)
4-6 slices Jarlsberg cheese
1 garlic head (yes, head, not clove)
2 tbsp salted butter
extra-virgin olive oil
truffle oil (I used white truffle oil that I found at Whole Foods)
salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Cut about 1/3 off the top of the garlic head. Drizzle some olive oil, sprinkle some salt and pepper. Wrap the garlic in foil and pop it into the oven for 45-50 minutes.

When the garlic is done, take it out of the oven, let it cool a bit, and pop the cloves into a bowl. Preheat a griddle/frying pan/pan on medium heat. Mash the garlic up, add some pepper and truffle oil. Note, this is really all to taste. Melt the butter in a bowl.

When the pan is ready, smear the garlic paste on one side of a bread slice. Arrange the cheese slices (about 2) on top of the slice of bread. Brush the butter onto a sandwich top and place that side face down on the pan. Brush remaining side of the sandwich with the remaining butter. Cook until crisp and deep golden brown, 5 to 10 minutes per side, flipping sandwiches back to first side to reheat and crisp, about 15 seconds. Serve immediately, preferably with tomato soup.

The Classic Tomato Soup from Martha Stewart’s website is quite good.

So… three venues. Vanilla Bake Shop, Paulette Macarons, and Layer Cake Bakery.

Vanilla Bake Shop sells mostly cupcakes… and macarons on the side. Their cupcakes (assuming that their minicupcakes are tiny versions of their cupcakes) are delicious. They easily beat out all the other bake places. Too bad they’re in Santa Monica. Yes, I drove to Santa Monica to get cupcakes and macarons.

Anyway, I tried the pistachio and raspberry macarons. The flavor was superb, but the actual macaron didn’t match the “macaron guidelines” in my eye. It was too crunchy and crumbly, and had this big hollow space that should have not existed, and the foot (that squibbly thing that squishes out) of the cookie was too pronounced. Nevertheless it tasted pretty friggen good.

Then I tried Paulette Macarons. This is a store dedicated entirely to the macaron, and in its French form nailed what the macaron should look like. It looks like the straight A student of macarons, prim, proper, perfectly piped and baked. I tried about ten flavors… caramel, lemon, pistachio, almond, rose earl gray tea, violet cassis, passionfruit… the standout of the bunch was the caramel. Oh my god, the caramel. Sweet, salty, slippery caramel. I love caramel. I should have gotten the entire dozen caramel, because aside from that (I tried the caramel last, because I know my tendency to be biased against non burnt-sugar flavored anything) nothing stood out to me. Not even the sweet wedding almond, which many Yelpers have raved about. The passionfruit wasn’t bad… and that was about it. Poo.

And then there’s Layer Cake Bakery. What words shall I use to describe you? WTF. I thought these were good. They weren’t that sweet. Then came the aftertaste. And the layer of buttercream that shields the filling from the outside world. WTF? No, no. On top of that I ate their red velvet cake, twice. And twice it tasted… like poo. Least it was cheap.

Taste: Vanilla Bake Shop
Presentation: Paulette Macarons
Price: Layer Cake Bakery

By the way, Layer Cake Bakery is in Irvine. Vanilla and Paulette are both in Los Angeles.

yellow squash
potatoes
olive oil
parmesan cheese
green onion
salt & pepper

Deliciously cheesy… yumyum!

Stuffed Couscous Tomatoes

This one doesn’t really have a recipe, I just threw stuff together…

Enjoy, folks.

For her christening, I decided to make those delicious chocolate toffee cookies. And used Valrhona chocolate this time. Boy Valrhona is expensive, but the difference in taste is very noticeable.

Oh, my princess.

You take a can of condensed milk (the one with the old Chinese guy on front tastes good), open it up, and do one of two things: you place the can in a pot with water at the sides and simmer for a few hours, or you pour it into a pie dish (glass preferred) and bake it for an hour. The results are about the same, and apparently this is how Latin Americans do it if they don’t want to spend their time doing it the normal way which is much more time-consuming and requires a certain level of expertise.

Ok, now that that’s taken care of, on to alfajores! Or Latin American cookies, because Peru has a version, Argentina has a version, Chile probably has a version, and they call them all alfajores anyway so we’ll just keep it general.

I looked all over for a good recipe, and unfortunately I couldn’t find one. Not even this one was that great. Not that I know what the quintessential alfajores is supposed to crumble like…

I would give you the recipe, but that would require me backtracking a LOT.
So, just find one that works for you. Yay, caramel!
Told you I love burnt sugar.