Cookies, the 2nd (How Do You Mess Up Oatmeal Cookies?)

You don't. Sometimes they work out perfectly and, well, sometimes they don't. These didn't, but it was all my fault. They don't look so bad, right? They didn't taste bad either, but they didn't taste like rich, buttery, chewy deliciousness either. That was kind of what I was going for.

What I did wrong:
1. I used mostly Earth Balance (a vegan margarine) instead of butter and I topped up the measuring cup with oil so that the cookies would be dairy-free, but I forgot how bland both of these things are, and un-butter-like
2. I used a gluten-free flour blend instead of all-purpose white flour, so the cookies spread out very thinly on the baking sheet instead of rising a little.
3. I placed the cookies too close together on the baking sheet, so they spread into each other and into a giant, but thin, cookie rectangle. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it makes the cookies look more like logs or slices than cookies when you try to figure out how to remove them from the pan.

Ingredients:
1/2 butter (I should have just used butter or a flavourful margarine. Anything is better than earth balance it seems. I just got a new vegan cookbook and all the desserts are made with oil. I'm so very much not excited)
1 cup minus a tbsp white sugar
1 tbsp molasses (you can also just use 1/2 cup white sugar and 1/2 cup brown sugar. It's the same thing)
2 egg whites
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 cup gluten free flour blend (I should maybe have used 1/2 cup all-purpose flour and 1/2 cup whole wheat, like the original recipe suggested, but my gluten-free flour blend is supposed to replace all-purpose and 1 cup of all-purpose would in theory be better than 1/2 cup all-purpose and 1/2 cup whole wheat)
1 1/4 cups large-flake rolled oats, blended (ground) into a flour (this is the same thing as oat flour, but you're much more likely to have rolled oats lying around than ground oat flour. It'll also be fresher this way. You could just leave the rolled oats large but it's a completely different texture and having done both, I think the grinding method tastes and works better)
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 cup dried cherries or raisins, optional (I skipped this because I just wanted plain oatmeal cookies. Savoury, not sweet)
1/2 cup grated chocolate, optional (I would only have used 1 oz if I used this, but again, I didn't feel like it. Besides I already had the chocolate in my biscotti)

Nothing fancy to this recipe, which may also be why the cookies spread on the baking sheet instead of staying in their cookie mounds.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.

Beat the margarine and sugars in a large bowl until light, about 2-3 minutes. Maybe I skimped on this step? Beat in the egg whites and vanilla. Doesn't say how long. At this point I'm missing Alice Medrich. She would have specified...well, in at least one of her recipes she would have specified and then you'd be expected to use that recipe as a guide for all other cookie recipes because God forbid she copy and paste...

In a slightly smaller bowl combine the flour, ground oats (I just used my blender to grind them. It worked great), baking powder and soda. Whisk to combine (stirring is also fine, apparently). Now stir the flour mixture into the creamed margarine mixture until combined. Then optionally stir in the dried fruit and/or chocolate.

Drop batter (or shape artistically - in mounds...not exactly Da Vinci) by the tbsp (approximately. Who actually gets out a tablespoon to measure how big the cookies are?) onto parchment-lined baking sheets. The parchment is just so you don't have to use butter to grease the pan. You can also use aluminum foil, or God forbid, cooking spray. If you think cooking spray is your best option I vote that greasing with butter will add calories and fat, but you'll be better off this way than with the chemicals in the aerosol spray can.

I used just one cookie sheet and a small tray for the toaster oven but I definitely should have done two batches. They only bake for 12-14 minutes so I should have just been patient. The recipe is supposed to make 32 cookies and 13 cookies per pan is standard. So AT LEAST two cookie sheets. I guess that's why my cookies oozed into each other. Still, they were absolutely delicious when fresh out of the oven - fresh and soft and a little gooey, but still chewy from the ground oats. I couldn't taste the butter, which was a little sad, but when your mouth is full of fresh cookie you won't complain.

How to save a pan of spread cookies: The thing about creating a pan of cookies is that it's hard to remove them from the pan if they've spread into each other. I'm big on geometric shapes, but I don't exactly have any spatulas that are good at creating circular cookies from a rectangular pan. This is called a cookie-cutter, I know, but then you waste all that cookie i between the piece, and you don't get the nice finished edge. You basically need to cut the cookie like a piece of cake into squares. It's not that attractive and the mixture's a bit crumbly. So wait until it's cooled but not stiff (20 minutes, approximately) and then carefully slice through the pieces in whatever shapes you want. My cookies didn't have to be pretty, but I ended up re-cutting them later once they had hardened up a bit and at that point it was too late. They were a little bit brittle and crumbly. I hate wasting cookies and I hate jagged edges so I had to eat the crumbly bits. Not the worst thing in the world, but also a bit of a waste. Normally I would never say that but it would have been WAY too unhealthy for me to eat all the crumbly bits and so there are all these little leftover pieces that I can't really serve anyone else. The point is, when you make a new cookie recipe, make some small cookies on the baking sheet and some larger ones. That way if the cookies spread at least the small ones will be fine and pretty. Then you'll know for next time how large you can make them. Pencils were created for a reason - make notes in your recipe book to remind yourself next time of what to do. The definition of insanity...

Because I Can Never Decide Which Cookies To Make: Chocolate Studded Almond Biscotti and Oatmeal Cookies

I've been eating too many fresh fruits and vegetables. I feel like I've been on a diet of soft foods. Sure, they're delicious and fresh and I know I'm doing good things for my body by eating them, but my teeth need more work! I need strong flavour! So I knew I wanted to make biscotti. That way I could finish a meal with a satisfying crackle and crunch. I don't drink coffee but I knew that dipped in plain, bitter yogurt the sweetness of the biscotti would marry well with the tang, especially when made with bittersweet chocolate. I didn't want a lot of sugar, but I wanted a mildly sweet treat.

Okay, fine, so that's decided, I thought.

Nope, I also saw a recipe for oatmeal cookies and I'd been dreaming of soft chewy cookies for awhile. I wanted the chew of oatmeal and the density, not the air of plain chocolate chip cookies. I didn't want any fruit messing with the flavour. All I needed was a plain oatmeal cookie.

So I made both. It's been so long since I've baked, and it's so good for the soul. There's nothing like a fresh cookie to make looking for a roommate better. You probably don't believe me. I counted today; I've lived with 28 people in the last 6 years. 3 men, 25 women. I've had enough roommates. My next roommate will be #29, and if I make it to 30 I'll feel much older in terms of living experiences than the number. Perhaps I'll have an early midlife roommate crisis. Perhaps I'm already having one.

This is why I needed to spend a few hours baking in my kitchen. Emotional therapy.

These are amazing biscotti. They're from my favourite chocolate book, Alice Medrich's "Chocolate and Art of Low-Fat Desserts". My mother bought an extra used copy online (it's discontinued) just so that I don't have to lug it home in my suitcase whenever I go home. That's how much I love this book. It includes everything from ridiculous buches de Noel, 5 different mousses, cakes, creams to petite sweets - quarter-sized cookies, meringues and haystacks. There is, of course, an exceptional biscotti recipe. There are, in fact, three, and I sort of combined the first two to create my perfect snack.

Chocolate Spiked Biscotti:
2 cups flour (I used my gluten-free flour blend, which worked perfectly in these and less perfectly in the oatmeal cookies I made later)
1 tsp baking soda
1 square of bittersweet baking chocolate, grated
1/4 tsp salt (I feel like I added too much, because my cookies taste way too deliciously salty. It could just be that I used fleur de sel so the little salt rocks explode in the bites where my teeth find them)
2 eggs
3/4 cup cane sugar
1 tbsp molasses (the recipe calles for about 1/2 a cup of white sugar and 1/2 of dark, but white sugar just has more of the nutrients from molasses - the brown in brown sugar - taken out of it, so it's an easy fix)
1 tsp vanilla
1/3 cup ground toasted, blanched almonds (Oh, for more info on toasting nuts, check my bittersweet chocolate truffle hazelnut mousse torte recipe)

I think because I used fleur de sel and cane sugar the biscotti turned out grainier than expected, but it was actually so perfect since they helped the crunch. I love it. Dipping these in coffee to soften them would be a sin. Well,in a few days when they're a bit more rock hard it may be a necessity, but freshly hardened, they're perfect.

I whisked the flour, salt, baking soda and grated chocolate. Grating the chocolate was annoying, since I grated it very finely. What was good about it, though, was that it was so difficult I decided to only do one square of it instead of two, keeping the fat down. It was just chocolate-y enough, especially when eaten right after an oatmeal cookie. Actually, then it seemed VERY chocolate-y. You could also coarsely chop the chocolate but then it doesn't go as far. You don't get chocolate in every bite. So there's a balance.

In a large mixing bowl I then beat the eggs with the sugar and vanilla. None of this "3 minutes until pale" business. Medrich gets right down to it and just says "util combined". Apparently biscotti aren't so fussy. You're not going for perfect cake texture. They're intentionally supposed to be tough. These are hardy cookies. No frills, just exceptional flavour. Then I stirred in the flour until combined (you can also beat, if you don't mind flour flying everywhere), and then added the nuts. Stir, stir, stir. Actually, I more so folded with a whisk, but as long as it gets combined it'll be just fine.

I preheated the oven to 300 Fahrenheit and lined my cookie tray with aluminum foil. Then I shaped the cookie dough into three long logs on the tray. They're supposed to go lengthwise and stay about 2 1/2 inches apart, but my cookie sheet isn't big enough for that. I figured it didn't really matter because these didn't have to be gorgeous cookies, and if they flowed into each other, well, I could live with that. I can live with a lot of things. A bad roommate is not one of them.

So these long logs are kind of like freshly planted gardens. Spiked with chocolate and almonds and in 35 minutes they'll come out of the oven as fully-grown cookies. That's where the fun starts. Biscotti means "twice-baked" in Italian. It also just means "cookie", since this is generally what they eat as a cookie. Not so much into the oatmeal raisin thing. This is only the first baking stage. Some vegetables and planted things can be eaten raw, but many need to be cooked, or re-baked, like these biscotti. I did eat one after 35 minutes to see what they were like, and they were very much like a cookie, but not quite yet like the crunch I was craving.

So the logs came off the aluminum foil, got cooled for 10 minutes, got carefully sliced back apart (they had baked into each other a little, but not irreparably so), and got sliced into 1/2 inch slices.

This is where Medrich assumes you read all her biscotti recipes before making one. I've made biscotti before, and generally you slice them on the diagonal to make the pieces longer. The biscotti you see in coffee shops are ridiculously long and are the equivalent of 3 biscotti, but even so, these biscotti become prettier when cut diagonally. One of her biscotti recipes says to cut on the diagonal and the other doesn't. I was surprised not to see it in the first, and didn't check the second. It really doesn't make a big difference, besides an aesthetic one. Now it also says to place the cookies on the oven rack. I did a double take. Put the cookies directly on the oven racks? Well it didn't say "directly", but the next line said "or arrange slices on two baking sheets" and bake them for half the time, rotate, flip front to back, top to bottom, fuss, fuss, fuss. So I figured I'd go with the less fuss step of baking directly on the oven rack. By the way, the rack should be on the bottom of the oven. I put it on the second bottom rung because the very bottom seemed bizarre. Actually one of the recipes didn't even specify where the rack should be. In the other recipe it did say explicitly to put the cookies "directly" on the oven rack. I don't know why publishers don't employ the copy and paste function of their computers when it would help a poor baker out.

Anyway, on the racks the slices went, carefully placed one by one. The oven was still "on" and hot, so I did this all very carefully. It's not great for the back. I miraculously didn't burn myself. 20 minutes later the cookies were carefully removed from the oven one by one. Medrich gives a trick (in one recipe only, of course) to take one cookie out when the timer goes and leave the rest in for another minute or 2. Once the removed cookie is cooled you can test it. If it's crunchy enough then you can take all the cookies out. If not, leave them all in there for another few minutes. Repeat test procedure. This can get dangerous, for both the tongue and waistline. Don't rush the testing or you'll burn your mouth, and call it quits when the sugar rush kicks in. It shouldn't go longer than 5 minutes, this whole "extra baking time" business.

Now the important thing is to cool the cookies completely before storing. If they get stored while they're still hot they'll soften up. NOTE! THERE IS NO BUTTER IN THESE COOKIES!!! and because they're so dry, they last for WEEKS at room temperature in a sealed container. I also just noticed that Alice and I agree on alternatives serving methods for the cookies. She thinks a scoop of yogurt is a lovely idea (though she specifies a "really pretty coffee cup" for presentation. Apparently yogurt is nothing special on its own. She is not French or Greek, it seems. She also think coffee should get poured around the yogurt. I agree with her that it's a great topping for frozen yogurt or non-fruity gelato, but one idea I didn't foresee was crushing them and pressing them against the sides of a cheesecake or iced cake (the iced cake is my addition, what we the fact that I don't eat a whole lot of cheesecake). Alice, we're a good team, you and I. You probably already have a roommate, right?

Sweet Chestnut Torte with Butterscotch Frosting and Blueberry Syrup

I brought a can of chestnut purée home from Montreal to Newfoundland along with my sezchuan peppercorns and dried Anaheim, New Mexico and bird's eye chili peppers (these things are still hard to come by here, though at least the peppercorns may soon be available at Food For Thought on Duckworth Street. Ask and ye shall receive) and I was set on using all of them...not all in this one recipe, thank goodness...oh dear.

I mainly wanted to make this recipe because I had tried it in Montreal and failed rather miserably. It involves egg whites and I certainly don't get along with those. Especially from eggs that had frozen a little in my fridge. They didn't want to rise very much and when the cake came out, it immediately deflated. It was a crushing defeat.

It's a beautiful recipe, though, from Alice Medrich's Chocolate and the Art of Low Fat Desserts. The chestnut purée is a traditional French ingredient, incredibly low in calories and with almost zero fat, often served on its own, direct from the can, sweetened, or with a dollop of cream. It is simple, refined and elegant (not if served DIRECTLY from the can to your plate in a restaurant). By adding it to a cake, you cut a lot of the fat and flour since the purée is moist but thick. Kind of like adding applesauce or fruit purées, but a much more savoury and unique flavour that you don't necessarily want to cover up with cocoa powder or chocolate. I did remember from making the cake before that it was still kind of bland, even with a little thick yogurt on the side, so a fruit sauce would do it well. Then I remembered that frostings should be rich and sticky (I rarely forget this) and fruit just wouldn't cut it. So I made a butterscotch frosting from the Joy of Cooking and made a quick blueberry syrup to garnish. Fruit + butterscotch + chestnuts = Heaven. Only problem is that the cake only keeps for 2 days max, but you can put it in the freezer and I kind of find that the freezing makes it deliciously denser and the butterscotch flavours jump out even more. No need to defrost or heat anything.

Sweet Chestnut Torte
1 cup chestnut purée (sweetened purée is what the recipe calls for, but if all you can find is unsweetened, or you prefer, you can just add sugar or a sugar substitute as long as you keep a similar consistency)
2 egg yolks
brandy
vanilla
1/4 cup flour
4 egg whites
cream of tartar
sugar

That's honestly all the ingredients. So simple. This works best with a springform 8-inch pan but any kind of deep cake pan works fine. Line the bottom of the pan with parchment paper. It will make your cake life easier. For your other life, you're on your own.

1. Combine the chestnut purée, egg yolks, brandy and vanilla and then mix in the flour. Yeah, Medrich didn't get around to saying how hard this one little step is...the purée is ridiculously thick that you can't whisk it, but it gets clumpy if you just use a spoon. It's also too thick for a blender, so a food processor or your hands are really your best options. A handheld mixer might almost do, but it might be frustrating.

2. Now the egg whites. Beat them on medium-high speed with the cream of tartar to the ambiguous level of "soft peaks". Then slowly add the sugar and beat at high speed until the egg whites are "stiff but not dry". Hmm...after so many mousses I still feel like a fool. I still am never sure if I do this step correctly...it's not like if you ate the egg whites they would taste like dry goods, but they're certainly not like a fluid anymore. Oh I don't know.

3. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit

4. Fold a scoop of the egg whites into the chestnuts. Again, HARD! The chestnuts are pretty dense and the whites are not. How are you possibly supposed to keep any air in the whites when they're being suffocated under layers of chestnut cement? I think next time I will sweeten my purée with honey instead of sugar to make it creamier and easier to mix. Maybe the can I bought is more dense than other cans? American cans? No, they're all imported, so who knows why it didn't work as well? I've made my own before but it's a lot of work.

5. Fold in the remaining whites. A little easier now that the first 1/4 is in. Scrape the batter into the pan and use a spatula to smooth down the top. This cake does not rise anymore, so how you put it into the oven is how you hope to take it out.

6. Bake 25 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out with just a few moist crumbs, says Medrich. How many is a few? This was a hard call. Know your oven is all the advice I can offer. Just know you're probably just as uncertain as I was. When the cake is cool, remove it from the pan and peel the parchment paper off the bottom. Then flip it back into the pan to add the icing. If your torte collapses like mine tend to do, there's no need to be careful when you're flipping it over. There is nothing delicate about the egg whites anymore. Like a flower that bloomed and now is on the down-swing. Circle of cake-life and all. It makes me feel better about the results if I think of them as inevitable. Such is life.

This serves 10 people, apparently, with a grand total of 1.5 grams of fat per serving. What kind of cake does that? That's why it needed the icing below:

Butterscotch Frosting (milk-free, optional vegan recipe)
4 tbsp butter, margarine or vegan margarine
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/8 tsp salt
2/3 cup almond milk (or soy milk, or regular milk, or 1/3 cup evaporated milk)
2-2 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/2-1 tsp vanilla or rum

First, you need to evaporate your milk. Almond milk does not come in convenient cans like evaporated cow's milk, but it's simple to make. Just heat your 2/3 cup of any type of milk in a saucepan over medium heat until it reduces by half. Almond and soy milk won't curdle like regular milk if you put it at a higher temperature, so really you could bump up the heat to make this go faster if you watch it carefully and stir to make sure it doesn't burn. You want to end up with 1/3 cup.

Then combine the milk with the butter (or margarine), salt and brown sugar in the top of a double boiler. I use a stainless steel bowl set over a pot of boiling water. Just make sure the bottom of your bowl doesn't touch the surface of the water, and only have the water at a simmer, not a rapid boil. You just want to get everything melted and stirred together until it's smooth. This step is beautiful.

Remove the bowl from the heat and let it cool for 5 minutes before beating in 2 cups of powdered sugar and the vanilla. My icing seemed too thin, so I added more powdered sugar until it seemed right. You should actually first set your bowl in a pan of ice water and beat without adding more sugar for awhile, just to see if it isn't thickening because it's still too hot. That way you can maybe save yourself multiple heart attacks from all the sugar in the icing. One is enough, thanks.

I wasn't sure if this was going to be one of those icings that gets grainy and hardens on top. Those are gross. I poured it on the cooled cake right away. It's actually a nice icing, not hardening and all, and even after sitting for a day before it was served, it held up decently. It kind of slid off the cake because it was still a bit runny, but more powdered sugar would have been a bad idea, so I left it at that.

Quick blueberry Syrup
My parents have about 5 open jars of jam and jellies and fruit-based sauces in the fridge that will never be used. So I took the remains of a wild blueberry spread, heated it in the microwave for 20 seconds and drizzled it over the iced cake. It wasn't exactly artful but it looked interesting, and you can't really undo a drizzle anyway. The mildly tart wild blueberry flavour was really good at cutting through the sweetness of the frosting. Mmm...delicious cake.

The Sky fell back up (I destroyed a milk chocolate mocha mousse)

Back to Alice Medrich's "Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts".

Oh Alice, I'm not happy with you right now. I'm not happy with me, sure, but I'm not happy with you. Your bittersweet chocolate truffle mousse recipe is sublime - manageable and delicious. but your white chocolate mousse recipe which is also used for the milk chocolate mocha mousse I tried make yesterday) is not very good at all. It follows the same general guide to mousse-making (add soaked gelatin to chocolate mixture and let thicken, make safe meringue and then fold together) but the chocolate mixture doesn't have any egg yolks, which would help thicken it, and the meringue just didn't work the same way using a skillet as it did when I used a pot of water.

Take 1: the eggs I was using (brought to room temperature so they would cooperate), wouldn't separate, and I got yolk in my cream of tartar and water mixture.

Take 2: The water couldn't go up the sides of the bowl inside the skillet, and the recipe didn't say how hot the water should be, so even with incessant scraping and stirring to keep the egg whites from cooking, they cooked. Scrambled egg white mousse is not delicious.

Take 3: I lowered the heat of the water in the skillet and got assistance to hold the candy thermometre in place. The trick is that when you place a bowl of egg whites, sugar, cream of tartar and water in a skillet of hot water, you need to stir quickly so the eggs don't solidify, but you don't want to over-stir and minimize the rising potential of the whites, which you'll need once you remove them from the heat. The whole purpose of this ridiculous method is to make sure the whites reach 160 degrees Fahrenheit to prevent the possibility of salmonella poisoning, which is rare enough, but does happen. Does the end of not possibly getting sick from salmonella outweigh the pain of fussing with a thermometre while you try so hard to not cook eggs? Depends how much mousse you make in your life time, and how lucky you feel. I initially tried my tested method of stirring with the thermometre while waiting to see if the eggs were hot enough. Nope, they started scrambling. Quickly help came in the form of a friend holding the thermometre for me while I stirred. It was safe! Unfortunately I think the eggs can scramble at a lower temperature if you're not stirring, so just because they're starting to cook doesn't mean they've reached the right temperature. Quickly off the heat, I stuck the egg beaters in the bowl and beat at highest speed until stiff peaks formed. Well, see, that was tough to tell, because the eggs didn't rise. Like my naan, they had nothing left in them to give. I beat until it seemed like they may have been stiff and then let a mousse novitiate fold the chocolate mixture and whites together. It was a bit soupy.

So I decided to call it pudding. It was not light and fluffy. Like the naan, it was a bit dense. "Stunned as me arse", we'd say in Newfoundland. Once it refrigerated a bit, it did solidify a little, but there was certainly no more air getting into it. It was not a fluffy pillow on my tongue.

Well, mousse, I'll try again tomorrow. Christmas still needs three more meringues out of me. That's a lot of second chances. Lemon mousse cake, frozen chocolate mousse cookie filling and mocha buche de noel await.

The Sky is Falling (I made a passable lemon mousse)

I did exactly what should be never be done when making mousse...

...I multi-tasked. I was rushed and nervous and my egg whites started boiling, and I made a drastic substitution, but my goodness, it worked. The pillows of fluff that I tasted yesterday were enough to convince me that chocolate is not always the best kind of mousse, or cake, or guilty pleasure. I know it's blasphemous, but dear lord it was a mound of lemon-flavoured heaven. The meringue melted on the tongue, and it was so light because there was no dense chocolate to weigh it, or me, down.

Oh, Alice Medrich, you should write another cookbook. It will be my other favourite. It will be exactly like your other "Chocolate and the Art of Low-fat Desserts" from which I took my birthday toasted hazelnut and dark chocolate mousse cake, but this one will be all lemon recipes. In the introduction to the recipe Medrich even says, "Every dessert chef needs a lemon mousse recipe". This is it. I didn't even think I liked lemon that much. I usually skip over the lemon recipes looking for the next decadent chocolate one, but you have shown me to be naive, Alice. So many wasted years thinking mousse could only succeed in chocolate form.

Yes, I'm done waxing poetic about lemons. Ridiculous, I know.

I did almost everything right:

gelatin
lemon zest
lemon juice
sugar
eggs, separated
vanilla
cream of tartar
heavy cream

When I see 'heavy cream' in a recipe, I turn the page. So I had turned this page a lot. Heavy cream needs to be whipped and needs to expand. Almond Breeze, my milk substitute, does not expand. Basically I replaced heavy cream with milk. I thought my mousse would collapse. If I actually managed to get the egg whites to the elusive 'stiff peaks' stage it would all be for naught. Well, sometimes you just shrug and push your luck.

The recipe: You sprinkle the gelatin over cold water and set it aside until you're ready for it. Then combine the zest, juice and sugar in a saucepan. I really need a juicer, because it's a little cold these days and my hands are a little dry. Lemon juice all over dry hands is painful and only a little short of self-flagellation.

Here was my problem with the recipe: It said to heat this mixture on medium heat and bring to a simmer. In the meantime you beat an egg and egg white until light in a bowl and then pour some of the hot lemon mixture into the egg. Well my lemon mixture didn't simmer and then it boiled so I was extremely careful pouring it into the egg. I was not about to mess this up so early in the game by letting my eggs cook. Then pouring the egg mixture back into the pan, I checked the recipe to see that I was supposed to stir it until it barely started to simmer around the edges. Well it got to about a rolling boil in 5 seconds because I had waited so long for it to simmer in the first place.

This was Alice's fault, but the next part was my fault. I have a very small strainer and you're supposed to strain this mixture (which had thickened up probably too much) into a bowl to remove the lemon zest. This process took about 5 minutes because it had to be done in stages of pouring, straining, pouring, straining. In that time I was praying that the eggs didn't get stuck to the pan I ended up with lemon frittata. Miracle of miracles...

Then you add the vanilla and gelatin to the bowl, which is placed in a larger bowl of ice water. I was also worried that I had taken too long straining and adding the gelatin and vanilla now would be too late. I did it anyway. Perfection be damned.

Then meringue. See first blog-post ever re: chocolate mousse to summarize my fear of meringue. I don't own a stainless steel bowl. I own very nice and, I hoped, heat-proof, bowls but when you're dealing with temperamental (hah!) candy thermometres, 90 seconds, and the difference between salmonella and a happy stomach, it's a little risky to throw caution to the wind. So I threw it in the right direction, but threw it none the less. I whisked the egg whites, cream of tartar, and sugar with one of the beaters from my hand beaters (I need a whisk too I think) and held my breath while I put the beater down to get the thermometre into a cup of hot water by the stove (poor planning in advance on my part). The whites were okay. I don't trust my thermometre. It has wrecked or jeopardized my food in the past, so I stirred with it to help it along a little, carefully avoiding the bottom of the pan that would trick it into thinking it was hot enough. It got...well, close enough to 160 degrees. The book said a minute and a half and then check it. I hate removing the bowl from the water though because if it's not ready then it has all this time to cool down before you put it back in and start counting again. It seems like it'll never get to a safe temperature that way and your egg whites are losing their potential fluffiness...So again, wind/caution, and I removed the bowl without spilling the egg whites into the water in the pot (Oh, I used a big pot instead of a skillet to get more water boiling and heat the eggs faster through the thicker bowl) and beat to what I figured might pass for stiff peaks. Really it was all I could do because the bowl was just about too small for the quickly-rising egg whites. I always under-estimate the size of bowl I'll need for expanding egg whites, but once you're beating you can't stop and change bowls, you need to keep to keep going. So again, prayer helped and only a little egg white flew from the bowl onto various appliances. WAY better than my pumpkin pie disaster.

At this point I realized I hadn't added the milk to the lemon/gelatin mixture like I'd planned. So I hoped it wouldn't make it too runny to add it now, but what choice did I have? Leave it out? Leave milk out of a mousse? Hmm...even I don't have the courage for that yet.

Folding. After all this hard work, how much air would be lost from my meringue? How many clumps of egg whites would remain because I was scared of mixing? This is another reason lemon is better than chocolate. Mocha-coloured chocolate really stands out from white meringue, but lemon is much more forgiving. I tried a new folding technique - scooping under and letting the mixture fall off the spatula toward the back of the bowl, before rotating the spatula back toward me to make another incision. This made a whole lot more sense in terms of 'folding' the mixture over, as it created a nicer hill than when I rotated the whole mixture over and it kind of plopped down on top of itself. Basically I shoved the meringue off the spatula while it was still horizontal and instead of turning the spatula over to follow the falling meringue, I rotated it toward my body. It seemed to work anyway. The nice thing about no whipped cream was that there was one less folding step. It's hard enough beating part of the lemon mixture into the egg whites and then everything back into the lemon mixture.

Finally, it was done. Nothing collapsed. Nothing got salmonella. And the taste?

Oh it was so good. Organic lemons. Amalfi, the home of limoncello and the ridiculous rules for the selection of lemons for their alcohol of choice, would be proud.

So I beg you all. Try a lemon mousse next time.

I think that's enough religious imagery for one day.

Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts by Alice Medrich

After hours of searching for a real, but cream-free, chocolate mousse in vain (so many unwanted tofu and avocado options) I gave up. Some things are just not meant to be. Until my birthday. Then looking through my favourite cookbook, I decided on a Bittersweet Chocolate Truffle Hazelnut Mousse Torte. Yes that's a lot of adverbs, adjectives and nouns slung together, but I got over it when I realized that the back of the cookbook featured three mousse recipes with no avocados, no tofu, no whipping cream and no soy. All I needed to replace to make my lactose-intolerant stomach happy was the milk. How I love Almond Breeze.

Ingredients:
Sugar
Toasted and blanched hazelnuts
Cocoa
Instant espresso or coffee powder
Brandy (or vanilla or other flavouring or liqueur)
Egg whites

Bittersweet Chocolate Truffle Mousse:
Gelatin
Eggs
Cocoa
Sugar
Milk (Almond Breeze)
Bittersweet or semisweet Chocolate
Vanilla
Cream of Tartar

Giving myself 5 hours for this undertaking, I started blanching the hazelnuts. The trick is boiling them for 2 minutes in water with two tablespoons of baking soda, then squeezing them out of their skins in cold water. Finally drying and toasting them in the oven at 350 for 15-20 minutes (until fragrant). This took a bit longer than planned, but there was no chopping, no mess, only slight dying of my fingers black, and a delicious snack of toasted hazelnuts which far surpassed the raw ones. I nver knew the skins were so bitter, but the sweet results were eye-opening.

The food processor is a wonderful thing when you know how it works. Double- and triple-checking that everything was secured before plugging it in and turning it on, I processed the hazelnuts with the sugar and cocoa. It was so fun pouring in just enough egg white to turn it into the consistency of fudge frosting, a delicious image. I had to remind myself to not eat it with the raw egg inside. Then another nit-picky detail: tracing three 8-inch circles on parchment paper on baking sheets (unfortunately I only had enough for two full circles and one circle made of two pieces of parchment. Not so good for spreading stiff layers of hazelnut. It turned out to be a very thin layer, more wafer-like than cake-like, but more than enough flavour from the hazelnuts would later result in a glad feeling for not consuming way too many nuts in a dessert that tastes rich but really isn't that bad. Don't get me wrong, two chocolate bars in a cake is easy math to figure that if you cut it into 8 pieces, you're eating a quarter of the chocolate bar per piece (more than enough fat per serving) but so much flavour and so much less fat than a traditional mousse. After baking and cooling the hazelnut layers, they peeled easily off the parchment, making me very happy I hadn't caved and baked them directly into cake pans, greased or not.

Then the mousse. I've always sucked at meringue, so making a "safe" meringue, where the egg whites are cooked to 160 degrees celcius before being beaten until stiff and cool, was a daunting challenge. The chocolate part was easy. Let the gelatin sit with water five minutes or until needed, combine ingredients up to milk in saucepan (the trick is stir only a little almond breeze or milk into cocoa/sugar mixture until smooth, then add the rest, to resist clumps of cocoa), heat without scalding and when taken off the heat stir in the chocolate. Cool in an ice bath to thicken.

Then the egg whites. Stainless steel bowl in skillet of bowling water to create a quasi-double-boiler. Instead of whipping the eggs directly in the bowl, however, you first stir with a wooden spoon while burner is on high heat to get the egg whites hot enough to not have to cook more, but to keep it from scrambling. Unfortunately, I THINK I didn't have the heat high enough on the skillet as it took way too long to get the egg whites to 160 (only supposed to take a minute) so when they finally got there and I hurriedly got the bowl to the stand-mixer and set it to high, the egg whites had mutinied and decided to rise. they did get stiff...and then limp...but I hoped they might change their mind, or think about something stiffening, but in the end, I was left unsatisfied and disappointed. I couldn't be angry at them. It was my fault. I didn't handle them properly. How could I expect them to perform with all the pressure I'd put on them and how nervous I had been. I certainly am no professional, but I will persevere and try again sometime.

Anyway, it really wasn't that bad. The mousse just wouldn't be as fluffy and light as it should have been. Even folding egg whites in to chocolate is a dangerous thing, but I figured not much more harm could be done and I diligently cut in, scooped under and let fall back into the mousse until fully combined. The mousse seemed a little runny so I stuck it in the fridge to encourage thickening, in a juvenile attempt to cheat death...or maybe that's a little too macabre? Maybe just to cheat sickness, like a cold, or a sniffle.

When I gave in to defeat-by-mousse and decided it was time to layer the mousse anyway in a springform pan, my genius idea to make the hazelnut rounds a little smaller than 8-inch no longer seemed like a brilliant idea. the mousse had thickened a little and didn't drip everywhere but it did extend past the borders of the layers. The cake should have been a lot taller in an epic ode to the triple-layer cake, but this squished version was going to be just as tasty, so I poured and topped with another hazelnut layer and poured and topped. Back in the fridge until dessert.

Finally the cake came out, the springform sides were removed from the pan and the mousse was cut. The hazelnut cracked, but by now it really didn't matter, and the delicious, chocolatey glop was spatula-d and knifed and scooped onto plates. Chocolate got everywhere as the mousse overflowed it bounds and the advantage was that the mousse needed to be wiped from the pan sides. Fortunately my non-discriminatory cake-eating friends ate happily, accompanied by prosecco (isn't everything better with prosecco?) and the chocolate was not too sweet, not too bitter, and I woke up the next day with not even a sugar headache, miracle of miracles.

My new goal, to make more of the chocolate desserts in the book involving mousse. I WILL get it right. This will culminate in the ultimate mousse adventure: Triple celebration cake, featuring three kinds of mousse. Not sure how I will substitute the cream cheese in the mocha mousse recipe, but I have brainstorming plans with raw fresh cheese, LEGAL in Quebec (take that Ontario!).

Also looking forward to trying the Buttermilk pound cake (have to find yogurt that I can eat...I think baking kills the probiotics that eat the lactose in my yogurt, so may have to resort to difficult to digest soy). It will be worth it, however, as it calls for a liqueur soak and glaze that I bought an amazing bottle of blueberry liqueur at an 18th Century Quebec marketplace in the Old Port. Another day will produce a sweet chestnut torte, my new favourite flour replacer.

Alas, mousse can be made better, but it still tastes absolutely and completely divine.