Honeyed Plum Sorbet

Ingredients:

1 quart strained plum juice
1/2 cup honey

Procedure:

1. Combine juice and honey and whisk well to combine.
2. Taste. Adjust sugar/acid balance if desired.
3. Chill.
4. Freeze in your ice cream freezer according to manufacturer’s instructions.
5. Enjoy with some kind of contrasting element: something smooth and creamy or salty and crunchy. Or both.

I do not often bake cakes. Cake, somehow, has become dessert of higher order. Cakes mark birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, graduations – and evidently conception – and these are no ordinary events. Cakes signal extra-specialness. I’m more of a cookie girl myself. I’m big on breakfast pastries and quickbreads. I like me a real nice tart once in a while. But I only make cake when someone else is having a party and I am asked very nicely to provide dessert.

There are two noteworthy results of this trend: One: Whenever I do make a cake, I am always eager to test a new recipe that I’ve been sitting on for weeks, maybe months. Two: Since I get such little practice, I’m not terrifically good at it.
I have picked up a few tricks over the years, though – most from the Infamous Frenchman – and this handful of techniques has served me relatively well. Attempting to be sensible, this time around I only altered one piece of the cake puzzle and stuck with the rest of my usual construction. There was little chance that the fillings, frosting, or decoration would go awry – the only wildcard this time around was Sally Schneider’s Nut Cake recipe. But it isn’t as if I found the Nut Cake recipe stuck to the underside of a MAX seat, Ms. Schneider seems to know what’s what (far better than I).

J9′s Nuts and Berries Cake, for Julia and Skippy

Components:
• Berry Compote (I used cherries and marionberries and a little bit of sugar, cooked down until very thick.)
• Fresh raspberries
• Fresh blueberries
• Candied hazelnuts
• Lemon Chantilly (chantilly = heavy whipping cream + confectioner’s sugar)
• Edible flowers
• Sally’s Nut Cake (mine was almond and hazelnut)

The Chef was, in fact, unflappable. But the class was fantastic. He taught us about amaranth and other “ancient” grains. I had my first introduction to quinoa, a previously overlooked complete protein that has as much protein per ounce as cow meat. Triticale. Loquat. Quince. Kiwano. Fiddlehead Fern. Durian. The man was full of stories – travel adventures and culinary experimentation. One day we tasted twenty two grains back to back, picking apart the differences between long- and short grain rices, red and yellow lentils. We had a blind salt tasting, our task to name the origin of a tray full of refined salts – sea, or rock. It was the ultimate foodgeek class, the only time we had during school to just sit around and talk about how neat foods are.

Neat (and too often overlooked) food no. 484: Cherimoya.
The Cherimoya is an Andes native now cultivated in Spain, Ecuador, the US, Chile, Israel, Australia, and Mexico as well and, according to the class’s required text, the Visual Food Encyclopedia, is borne of a thorny-branched tree that can reach up to 24 feet high. The trees often have to be hand-pollinated as the flowers are too fragrant to attract most insects. When ripe, their soft fruit is intoxicatingly sweet, creamy, and a little tangy. Visual Food recommends using the cherimoya in salads, ice creams, yogurts or jellies. Me, I think there’s no better way than standing in the kitchen, spoonin’ the flesh from a halved fruit right into my hungry little mouth.

It went like this, and I think you should try it:

You’ll need a medium-smallish saucepan, a mesh strainer, and a candy thermometer.

• •• Peel 1/2 pound fresh ginger and slice thin. Be sure to cut against the fibers, not with them.
• •• Put the ginger in your saucepan and cover with water.
• ••Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and let cook 3 minutes.
• •• Drain.
• •• Repeat.
• •• Drain.
• •• Repeat. That’s three blanchings when all is said and done.
• •• After the final draining, return ginger to saucepan and attach the candy thermometer.
• •• Add to the saucepan 3 cups of water and 3 cups of sugar.
• •• Stir to help dissolve and crank the heat up.
• •• Cook until the temperature reaches 222º F. (I’m not making that up.)
• •• Once desired temperature has been reached (this takes a while – the last five degrees especially), turn off heat and let ginger sit in syrup for one hour.
• •• Strain the ginger from the syrup, again for an hour. You may wish to reserve the syrup for another use. I’m keeping mine for sweetening drinks at least, and perhaps as a jam component. It’s the color and consistency of runny honey and it tastes just delightful.
• •• Toss the ginger in 3/4 C sugar. Make sure all pieces are separate and well coated.
• •• Store in an airtight container in the fridge for up to several months.

Not to toot my own horn – because really I just followed directions; a monkey could do it – but what I like about the way mine turned out as discrete from the stuff I’ve been paying $10 or more per pound, is that it’s soft, not hard or crunchy or dry at all. Maybe I did it wrong. Either way, I’m happy.