Another birthday: Pink-Iced Biscotti

Put these two pictures together and this is what I made:

Appetizing, I know.

Frosting freezes just fine and I'm not one to throw out a cup of butter. So when I had tons of leftover frosting from my roommate's birthday cupcake-cake I put it in the freezer until another birthday rolled around. Inevitably, one did. I was going to make a cake. I had recipes out and everything, but then I got working on an Ayurvedic food interview and editing takes an age...

So I ran out of cake-making time. What I had left was biscotti - the quintessence of biscotti, mind you: Almond Chocolate-Spiked Biscotti. Like the birthday cupcakes for my roommate, however, I couldn't quite figure out to go about giving someone 4 biscotti as a cake replacement. A birthday isn't a birthday without an iced cake.

Well, I figured you can ice biscotti. You see it all the time. They get dipped in chocolate or coated in sticky things that harden and are delicious. So that's what I did. My icing was defrosting slowly, so it wasn't too liquid like it had been before. I foolishly thought it might stay that way.

How do you dip biscotti in frosting? The unforeseen problem was that frosting is not melted chocolate. Any idiot know that, right? I dipped, and nothing held. My biscotti came out of the leftover beet buttercream frosting completely naked. So I tried with a tool.

A knife would help me create a coating. But then there were all these weird ends. It was more like spreading hummus on a carrot stick than icing a cake. I at least stopped icing about 2/3rds of the way up the biscotti so there would be something to hold on to, but by now I could foresee the inevitable disaster. I had to somehow make it from my house to a subway station halfway across the city carrying these biscotti in my granny grocery cart, then trek with said cart to a farmers' market before ending up at a BBQ (the one that lead to the discovery of Joy the Baker) about 10 blocks away. Hopefully at the BBQ I could rid myself (I mean 'give') of the iced biscotti to the birthday girl.

The thing about Montreal metros is that the city isn't flat, so a lot of the stations have a lot of stairs. The subway cars themselves certainly aren't going to go up and down. That's a roller coaster, not a subway. Imagine that...

The other thing about the Montreal metros is that they were constructed before anyone thought that it would be a good idea to install elevators to make them all wheelchair accessible, and somehow they still get away with this. Where are the petitions and lobby groups, from both people with reduced mobility and people with enhanced mobility (traveling with bikes)?

My granny cart is rugged, but that's a lot of bumping around and lifting and carrying and rolling, and by the time I got to the farmers' market I'd stopped checking my cart to make sure the biscotti were okay. I knew they weren't. The frosting was melting and oozing and the biscotti looked like long rocks that had the misfortune to drown in something slimy and pink.

But I got there. I arrived at the BBQ with a laden cart from the farmers' market; eggplant, lettuce, half a watermelon, tomatoes, tomatillos, cilantro, and red onions. Jean, my tomato, corn, raspberries and now watermelon guy and I had a chat. It was comforting. Ritual, and all. Buried under this produce was my dinner in tupperware and the biscotti, worse for wear.

Then, you know what? The birthday girl didn't even come. I'm not sure if she reads this, but if she does, I'm not angry. It was her birthday and you can't be angry at someone on their birthday. I also had a fair-trade hand-made card from...well I got it at 10,000 Villages but forget the country of origin. The paper is artisanal and thick and beautiful and she'll still receive that the next time I see her, but the biscotti...they met their end. My roommate got birthday cake #2. I figured since he'd enjoyed the first one so much (or suffered through it silently) he may appreciate more beet buttercream. He may have. He didn't say either way, nice fellow that he is. I hope my new roommate is so kind. Oh, yes, I have a new roommate. He has no idea what he's getting himself into. I suppose he could be reading this, but again, I doubt it. This post is rather long. In fact, if you're still reading this I invite you to tell me when it's your birthday and I will personally make you a GREAT, from-scratch birthday cake with absolutely 0% beets. The frosting will not ooze or spread and it will have candles, not a match or biscotti.

Birthdays are so great, aren't they?

Hero Worship and Birthday Cake: Chestnut Meringue Cupcakes with Beet Buttercream Frosting

I went to a BBQ yesterday and discovered Joy the Baker. No, she was not at the BBQ, but her pretzels were. When someone I know whose baking I respect tells me there's a great baking blog I should check out, I'm no fool. I check it out.

This is not her recipe. Her recipes all have beautiful pictures. Her wit is what I aspire to but often fail to possess. She does not take a hunk of butter and combine it with icing sugar in unmeasured porportions, then add some beet juice for colour and a little vanilla extract. Yes, those are the basic ingredients in frosting, but she has the experience to know that you need to be careful with the butter:sugar ratio or you end up with pink soup.

Now it's not as bad as another lady I respect: Renée Zellweger, aka Bridget Jones and her blue soup (I respect Renée, not Bridget), but this is turned out to be far from gourmet.

Joy the Baker would know that cupcakes stopped being popular last year. For awhile there they were the new cake, but then came macaroons. Now macaroons are done and gelato has filled the void. There's a shop in Montreal called Point G (G Spot for anglos...same meaning) that tried to combine the new gelato with the old macaroons. I feel sorry for them. Macaroons are done. That's like trying to wear bellytops again - give it 10 years and the circle will come around again to all bakers' chagrin. They just don't get it, these Point G people, but I suppose a lot of people don't. At least I'm still doing better than that. 

Marginally. My roommate had a birthday. Birthdays mean cake, but all I had was cupcakes. I used a chestnut torte recipe but poured the batter into lined cupcake tins. Light as air chestnut cupcakes, mind you; the epitome of cupcakes, but they needed icing. Then a problem:

How do you give someone 5 cupcakes for their birthday? I couldn't eat the icing because I'm lactose-intolerant and it was made from a cup of butter. But it's weird to say, "Here are 5 birthday cupcakes! Hurray! You're older!"

Besides, my frosting was too liquid. I'd made a ton of it because a cake requires a ton, but it would just slide right off the cupcakes. I had an idea! I'll build a cake tower! Or something kind of resembling a trifle, where the cake is in cubes and covered in cream (in this case frosting)! What a novel idea! 2 cups of icing sugar would replace 2 cups of whipped cream in trifle for a diabetic coma of aging.

Except I thought that would look messy. A birthday cake needs to look pretty or it doesn't feel like much of a present. So I placed the cupcakes as close together as possible in a circular shape (like a cake) and poured the icing over them. The picture above is what happened. I figured candles would make the birthday intention clear but I didn't have any. I had matches, though. So I stuck one lone match in the middle cupcake and waited for my roommate's return.

Boy was he surprised. Nice person that he is, he didn't even second glance it. There was no quizzical look. I suppose he's come to expect this sort of thing from me - the weird food. There was really no way he could predict the pink frosting on carefully placed cupcakes. That would be a scary talent/secret power.

The fun part about sing a match as a candle is there's really no time between lighting it and blowing it out. You need to have your wits about you (as mentioned above, these I don't have. Joy the Baker would probably manage to maintain her wits about her). "Did you make a wish?" I asked.

...

No response. Well, I suppose he didn't really have any time. Ah well. One year older, one year wiser. Him, not me.

Note: About the title...I don't think I ever told him I made the frosting pink with beet juice. You can't taste it and it's what's traditionally used in red velvet cakes, not food colouring. Food that has a number in its name, like Red2 or whatever food colouring numbers are are not real food and have no place in my cooking or baking. I hope Joy the Baker would agree.