Kevin's Birthday Cake Recipe!

This is the recipe for the cake I made for Kevin's birthday dinner. I suggest you try this out - it's sublime.

Birthday Cake - Chocolate soup with earl grey cake, Meyer lemon buttermilk sherbet, and Pear cider soaked pears

Lemon Buttermilk Sorbet

The recipe for this simple sorbet comes directly from Canelle et Vanille who got the recipe from David Lebowitz. It would be somewhat lame for me to repost the recipe here seeing as how I didn't change it one bit. It's perfect. So, so good. Just click here and enjoy!

Make this a day ahead of time to ensure you have everything you need to finish the dish.

Cider Soaked Pears

Ingredients

• 1 Asian pear
• 8 ounces pear cider

Use a melon baller to carve out (ball out?) little spheres of the yummy pear. Drop the spheres into the cider and let it soak a few hours.

Earl Grey Cake

This recipe comes from my all time favorite blog, the one that got me started in all of this, Playing with FIre and Water. I've tweaked it a bit from the original recipe, using Earl Grey instead of Roobios and baking it in a water bath. The original recipe is here. 

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup finely ground earl grey tea leaves
• 1 1/4 cups hot water
• 2 1/2 cup sifted cake flour
• 1 1/4 cup muscovado or brown sugar
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup honey
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, melted
• 2 eggs
• 1 egg yolk
• 1/2 cup buttermilk        

Preheat oven to 350F. Grease whatever molds you'd like to use. I used silicone egg poachers, but I made cupcakes with the remaining batter too.  Place the Earl Grey in a large bowl and cover with hot water. Stir well and allow to steep for 5 minutes. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, brown sugar, baking soda and salt. To the steeped Earl Grey, add the honey, the butter, and the eggs. Beat on high speed for 2-3 minutes. Beat in half of the flour mixture, then half of the buttermilk. Repeat, using the remainder of flour mixture and milk. Beat for 2 minutes more to aerate. Pour into prepared molds. Place molds in large enough pan and fill up to half way with hot water. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until the top springs back when pressed, or a cake tester comes out clean. Allow to cool for 15 minutes before turning out of molds to finish cooling. Let rest.

Chocolate Soup

This recipe also comes from Canelle et Vanille. I love, love her blog. So beautiful. And the few things I've made so far have been amazing. I tweaked this a tad as well, but the original recipe is here.

Ingredients

• 500 ml heavy cream
• 200 ml whole milk
• 100 grams sugar
• 5 grams cocoa powder
• 6 egg yolks
• 135 grams dark chocolate, chopped 

In a medium saucepan, heat the cream, milk, and sugar. Bring it to a boil. Turn the heat off and let it steep for about 10 minutes. Return the mixture to a boil and add the cocoa powder. Whisk well.

Place the egg yolks in a large bowl and temper the milk mixture into them while whisking. Return this mixture to the sauce pan and cook for a couple of minutes while constantly stirring until lightly thickens.

Place the finely chopped chocolate in a large bowl. Place a fine sieve over the bowl and pour the custard over the chocolate. Mix until all the chocolate is melted and you have a smooth cream.

To serve:

Spoon chocolate soup into saucer, top with cake. Cluster 3 pear spheres on the other side of the plate, quenelle the sorbet and place on top of the pears. 

Note: In the photos the cake is dusted with cacao powder. Pretty, right? Unfortunately, no one who ate it could do so without inhaling the powder. So I'd go without that.

Enjoy!

Review: Yu Me Ya; Encinitas, CA

Yu Me Ya (Sake House)
4 out of 5 stars

Check out the review here!

Top Ten Songs of 2009 - Evening Recap Images: Courses 6-10

Course number six was based off of Grizzly Bear's "Two Weeks." To be honest, this dish was a last minute change. Tyler and I were going over the menu on Friday and he mentioned how many dishes were sweet. I realized that 7 of the dishes all had something sweet in them, and 6 were entirely sweet. So I made a few changes and one large one - this dish. Originally this dish was going to be a Urfa Biber cake with Chicory Chocolate Chantilly and dehydrated Bacon. At the last minute I decided to switch it out for a savory dish to balance the meal. And so I still used the same ingredients, only in an entirely different dish. The inspiration for the dish was based on color. For some reason, whenever I listen to ANY grizzly bear song, I immediately think "brown." Before I even committed to doing this dinner, I thought about doing this dish out of primarily brown elements. This whole dish was much more of a instinctual reaction to the song as opposed to a well thought-out "this is why I did this dish this way" sort of thing. So brown. Yeah...that's about it.

Course number 7 was based off of "I'm an Animal" by Neko Case. I thought it would be cheeky if I did a course called "I'm an Herbivore" and served only plant eating animals. Then I realized that mostly everything we eat is a plant eating animal. But I'd already bought the quail. So be it.

 

Course Eight was based off of the "Ego's Last Stand" by the Flaming Lips. Ashley was describing the song to me after hearing it for the first time on a drive to our butcher shop. As she was describing the way it sounded, I realized that I wanted to take those descriptions of the song and apply them to the texture of the food. I wanted to create something with a muffled and yet sharp feel in the mouth.

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Course Nine was based off of "Brother Sport" by Animal Collective. This was the funnest dish to come up with. The chorus of the song goes, "Open up your, open up your, open up your throat..." so obviously I wanted to do a dish that required you to open up your throat to enjoy it. My first thought was to do some sort of shot, but wanting to stay away from alcohol, I moved on to the next obvious thing...oysters! 

Course Number 10 was based off of "Useful Chamber" by Dirty Projectors. I chose to end the meal with a cheese plate, which is a pretty traditional way to end a meal. Dirty Projectors may look like your typical band, guitar, bass, drums, lead singer, back up singers - but they are anything but normal. They are creating some of the most interesting, sublime, catchy and fun music I've heard in a few years. So I tried to do the same thing with my last course. I took something pretty normal, yet good - a cheese plate - and tried to reinvent it in to something different and new, or at least unexpected.

 

All photos be Laurel's!

Top Ten Songs of 2009 - Evening Recap Images: Courses 3-5

Course number three was based off of Atlas Sound's "Walkabout." There was just something so innocent and so nostalgic about the song. I swear it could be played during an episode of Happy Days and no one would notice. Ok...well maybe they would. The minute I heard this song I knew I needed to do a milkshake.  And even though milkshakes aren't actually something that I have a strong childhood connection to, they seem to represent America's collective memory of it's youth. They are the ultimate "good 'ol days" food. A burger seemed a pretty great companion to the milkshake and I'll jump at the chance to put anything in a steam bun. 

Ashley had come up with a pretty great idea for this next course but unfortunatley I couldn't pull off some of the logistics. I'll keep her ideas under my hat for the time being and try to use them in a future dinner. In any case, I had wanted to do a cocktail for one of my dishes, and this seemed a pretty fitting song to do it for. From what little Ash and I could make out, the song used the idea of weather as a metaphor...for what I don't know. So I decided to do a bit of a thunderstorm in a glass sort of thing. I wanted to make something that you'd make on a rainy day to remind you of Spring. The drink ended up being a bit of a mash-up of a Whiskey Sour and a Ramos Ginn Fizz. Tyler also put the rest of the dry ice out on the table for added effect.

So course five was the first course that necessitated cutlery. This course was based off of "Knotty Pine" by Dirty Projectors and David Byrne. I chose to make a dish that utilized very simple ingredients, pork tenderloin and potatoes, but prepared them in a new and interesting way without loosing what makes these ingredients familiar. The combination of the Dirty Projectors and David Byrne is basically the fusion of something I know so well (Talking Heads) and something I'm still getting to know (dp's). The song really captures the strengths of all the artists playing on it. And it's the first new David Byrne song that I've heard in a LONG while where he really sounded like his old 77 self. SO a dish filled with familiar things in an unfamiliar setting seemed fitting. 

Up next: Courses 6-10


All photos be Laurel's!

Top Ten Songs of 2009 - Evening Recap Images: First Few Courses

Let me take a moment to say that though this blog is currently titled "Your Best Friend" this blog is not the work of just one person. It takes a rather small army of creative, hard-working individuals to make YBF work. Tyler and I will be transitioning this blog over to encompass all the personalities and musings of this small gaggle of food aficionados in the coming months. You may have noticed that our web address has changed. We're no longer a dot blogspot. This is one of the few changes coming in the next few weeks. 

Up next are more photos taken by the lovely Laurel of our latest YBF effort. 

Ashley - my Sous Chef. 
For all of you REAL chefs out there (if there are any real chefs who read this blog. Which I believe there are, in fact, none) - please just let me have my labels...no neither Ashley or I have ever stepped inside a culinary institute - nor have we seen the inside of a professional kitchen. But short of buying tall white hats and refashioning street jackets to look like reputable aprons - this is all we've got. So Sous Chef it is, crucify me for my flamboyant use of terms - so be it. 

I also wonder what would happen if I paid her? Ashley works so hard she may as well be wearing a girdle.

More people show up!

I'm explaining things to everyone.

The first course was based off of a YACHT song whose chorus goes, "Will we go to heaven? Or will we go to hell? It's my understanding the neither are real." In the spirit of the song's cynicism I decided to do two tastes and title one heaven and one hell. My initial idea was to create two somewhat identical tastes and let the guest decide which one was heaven and which one was hell. Unfortunaltey, my heaven taste fell apart at the last minute and I was able to create something entirely new in it's place. It's still a fun concept that I'd like to play around with in the future, but for now this course was more about kitsch titles than conceptual consumption.

Course number two was based off of Mos Def's song "Quiet Dog". Again, this plate was more kitschy than conceptual. I liked the idea of creating my own hotdog, which I had never done, and making it look cute but making sure it had a nice kick to it. I ground dates, chipotle peppers, pork and bacon and stuffed them in to lamb casings. Then I smoked them in my oven over a low heat for a few hours. Then on the night of, Ashley stuffed them on to Pine sprigs, from my dearly departed tree, and we tempura fried them. 

Up Next: Courses 3-5

Top Ten Songs of 2009 - Evening Recap Images: Setting Up

So Laurel sent me over a hundred images from the actual night of the dinner. I'll be uploading them over the next few days. This first round shows us getting ready right before everyone came over. We had a few minor mishaps along the way - most were pretty funny. This time around was a bit of scramble - kinda like how you imagine last few minutes of iron chef to be - except not anything like that at all.

Laurel was a champ and sent us images from the night before at 4 O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING. People...THAT is dedication. Imagine what she'd do if I paid her. *cough, cough* what?


So Tyler threw together a powerpoint type presentation of all of the images so that we could show them the images as the course was served (along with playing the song it was based off of).

Then the powerpoint crashed. After Laurel had entered in ALL of the dish descriptions. So at the last minute Tyler threw the images back in to the program and finished literally as people were walking in the door.

Up Next: The first few courses!