Croissant in the City

I was baking bread this morning when a front of house manager came and dropped this Yelp review on the prep table for us to read. A diner went to NOCA the other night and didn't enjoy himself. He made a comment to a fellow diner and soon found an angry chef tossing a bag of Mickey D's on his table. 

As a diner, I can understand feeling a meal wasn't very good and was expensive. However, as a chef, having someone sitting in the dining room making snarky comments, being disrespectful? 

I'm biased, I guess. You decide for yourself. 

I am pastry. I crave precision. Live to measure. Make lists for my lists. Culinary, known rival to pastry, are made up of mostly boys, all of whom are pinchers'n'dashers (what I call people who "pinch of this, dash of that" aka my arch nemesis). Never measure, or try to do it as little and inaccurately, as possible. They hate lists.

I've been assigned a culinary boy to work in pastry with me. He doesn't measure. He scoffs at my lists. He is not precise. All the bong hits have rendered his ability to tell time, useless, resulting in burnt bread. The other day I walked in to find him shorting a recipe of 3 cups of mascarpone. Then, I come to find he doubled the yeast in the bread recipe because he thought it would help the dough rise faster. Really? I can't even make this stuff up!

I find comfort in the precision. I love when I have exactly enough dough to fill the white oversized pizza dough bins I'll later haul into the walk-in. I hate when the lemon panna cotta is not dispensed perfectly, or when it is done sloppily. (Ahem, Culinary Boy! AHEM!) 

Patience, however, is the great lesson that I'm apparently suppose to be learning in life. I have the utmost patience for a tart that takes 20 steps or allowing the perfect dinner rolls to rise. Roasting tomatoes for 4 hours, easy! Patience for people? That eludes me. 

One is NOT required to have patience for a quickie Sunday night dessert (without which I'm pretty sure I would have been barred from Sunday night family dinner). Let's face it, I need to save all my patience for work tomorrow!

This is a pretty easy dessert I threw together from a leftover cake I had made on Saturday. The recipe for the cake is from Gesine (pronounced GEH-SEE-NEH, pronounce it right!) Bullock-Prado's new book Confections of a Closet Master Baker. Go and buy this book. I loved the book and could not put it down, so I baked one of her cakes. I'm pretty sure Gesine and I would be fast friends, bonding over our love of pastry & coffee, leaving careers we disliked to become bakers and a general impatience for people. But, I digress.

Basically, you need a piece of leftover cake. You can use whatever hits your fancy in the store, make your own, perhaps someone gave you some cake, or maybe a creepy stranger plied you with some in lieu of candy, either way, you need cake. Some ice cream. I used Vanilla Haagen-Dazs. The new five ingredient kind. Then make a caramel. 

If you have never made a caramel, it is one of the simplest things, honest to Pastry Gods. Here you go:

1 1/2 cups of sugar

1/4 cup of water

a squeeze of lemon juice (to keep sugar from crystallizing) 

Combine (should look like wet sand – if you need a little extra water, add some, but not too much) and place in a pot (make sure that your pot is large enough. Smaller than a stock pot, but bigger than the little baby pot you melt butter in). Keep the sides clean. Wash down sides with a wet pastry brush if there are sugar particles. 

Cook the sugar till it is a rich golden color. If you don't like very dark caramel, take your pot off earlier, if you like darker, keep it on longer. Sometimes the coloring of caramel can be deceiving, meaning that it can look in the pot quite dark, but once you take it off, you realize it's a lot lighter. This is a matter of making caramel a few times to learn what the perfect caramel color looks like.

Add to this:

1 1/2 TBSP. Butter

Swirl the caramel in the pot a little to incorporate. DO NOT spill on yourself…this is 320-350 degree sugar! It will burn you and it hurts like a bitch! So, be careful.

Then add:

1/4 cup heavy cream

Again, be careful! Cream will react with the caramel and it will bubble and rise up in the pot. Using a heat resistant spatula or a wooden spoon, stir the mixture and pour into a heat resistant bowl to cool. 

I just leave it on the counter for a little bit so that it's still a little warm when I spoon it over the cake and ice cream. 

You think that I'm crazy to say this is simple, but I pinkie swear, it is! Yes, you could go to the store and buy caramel sauce, but then you don't get to go to work tomorrow and brag to all your co-workers about the amazing dessert you made. Take pictures, they will be jealous!

As for me, I'm back to the pastry grind tomorrow at 5am. Maybe patience will come this week and I'll become enlightened. But considering that Culinary Boy told me on Saturday that he dislikes chocolate and doesn't really care for sweets, I'm not counting on a visit from the Patience Fairy anytime soon. 

Song of the Day: Burn by: Anoushka Shankar & Karsh Kale