le sauce

chocolate banana stuffed french toast pockets, with maple syrup and cream

This is casual fare, to be sure. Kid-stuff. Food to be eaten on the couch.

Or, you know, to be served to guests at a dinner party. Guests who will love you for it.

Because where else are they going to get their own, individual, stuffed french toasts, oozing with melted chocolate swirling around with sweet banana, pooling into maple syrup and pillowy cream? (Other than at their house the next morning when them make this very, simple, decadent thing to enjoy again as soon as possible.)

 

(See how this recipe fits into a lazy, Sunday, spaghetti dinner party menu!)

Chocolate Banana-Stuffed French Toast Pockets, with Maple Syrup and Cream

1 tbs unsalted butter at room temperature
3 large eggs
1 cup heavy cream, divided
1 tbs dark rum
1/2 tsp brown sugar
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
Kosher salt
12 thin slices of bread, a non-seedy, non-airy kind ("sandwich" bread will do)
12 dark chocolate feves (Valrhona feves or any disk, button or thin 1-inch piece)
1 ripe banana
1/3 c good maple syrup at room temperature
Icing sugar, optional

Preheat youe oven to 400F degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and use a wad of paper towel to rub it with butter. Set aside.

Beat eggs in a large bowl, then add 1/4 c of the cream, the rum, sugar and cinnamon season with a touch of salt. Mix well and set aside.

Lay 6 slices of bread on a work surface. Place a chocolate feve in the centre of each. Slice 6 piece of banana on a bias and place a pice on top of the chocoate. Cover each with the remaining 6 slices of bread and press down with your palms to flatten the sandwiches. Take a 2 1/2-inch round cookie cutter or thin-edged juice glass and centre on top of your bread, ensuring that your filling is not close to the edge you'll be creating. Press down to make your sandwich pockets and reserve crusts for another use (toast them in the oven following this recie to make croutons or bread crumbs out of them which freeze well, for instance).

Press down all around the edges of your 6 sandwich circles to create a seal. One by one, dip and turn them in the egg batter and place on the buttered parchment paper. Bake for 15-20 minutes, turning half-way through until golden on both sides.

Meanwhile, whip remaining cream with a wisk or hand blender until thick and creamy and almost to the point of forming peaks.

Remove toast pockets and allow to cool for a couple of minutes. Plate and drizzle with maple syrup, a dusting of icing sugar if using and a dollop of cream.

Makes 6 servings.

 

first taste: hot cocoa in the murry kitchen

Childhood picture books, stories and TV shows that depicted food and dining made a real impression on me. Illustrations of steaming bowls of pasta or a piece of toast smothered in purple jam gave me my first taste of foods I'd yet to try, and are sometimes still the archetypes I hold food up to today. Instead of simply reminisce, I'm going to bring those dishes to life the way I imagined they'd be.

On a dark, stormy night, on her journey to the kitchen from her cold attic room, Meg had time to get down on herself about everything from her mousy appearance, to her IQ level to her recent scrap with bullies at school. This girl needed a drink! She knew it, and decided on hot cocoa. That this was a romantic choice, for a young girl, chilled, a little scared and a lot bummed out, was only part of the appeal to me as I read those opening pages in A Wrinkle in Time. There was also the accepted adult-ness of the whole situation, because who should be heating up milk in anticipation of both Meg and her mother showing up in the kitchen in need of some, but the "baby brother" of the family, Charles Wallace, wise and weirdly intuitive beyond any human's years. He goes on to offer to make Mrs. Murray a liverwurst and cream cheese sandwich and Meg a tomato sandwich but they had me at hot cocoa. 

Don't get me wrong, I loved every page of the popular sci-fi novel and I still do. (I just downloaded the audio book read by the author, Madeline L'Engle herself. There were parts that still scared me when I listened before bed. "There is such a thing as a Tesseract!") But it was the first "scene" hooked me, no question. The idea that you could wake up in the night and have a luxurious snack--that you could dirty a pan at that hour to boil milk for cocoa (how much?? who had cocoa powder at the ready? I'd have to work for months to first explain to my parents that it was the opposite of Nestlé Quick, that no, microwaved chocolate milk would not cut it and then try to source it because there was no way their half-hearted wild goose chase would be successful. And God help me if it was expensive...), and that your family would join you instead of chasing you back to bed yelling about the hour and rising early for school/jobs in the morning--that was fantasy I ate up as much as any other part of the book.

I don't blame my parents for not knowing what hot cocoa really was, how to make it, or how it differed from hot chocolate which was a little more widely known (read: marketed). I had a chalky mug or two of cocoa that I tried to enjoy (read: use to transport me to the Murry's kitchen and their entire messed up, brilliant, multi-time+space-dimensioned adventures). But we can do better today. 

First, on hot cocoa, CHOW notes the same, that while "...hot cocoa is sublime. At its worst, it’s chalky, watery, and too sweet. This version, provided by François Payard, of François Payard Bakery in New York, is definitely in the former category: so creamy, rich, and chocolaty that it’s a suitable stand-in for dessert.

2 tablespoons cocoa powder (such as Weiss)
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup whole milk
Granulated sugar, to taste

Bring chocolate powder, fresh cream, and milk to a boil; stir; and pour in a cup. Add sugar if desired.

Note: For a lighter version, use 1/3 cup fresh cream and 2/3 cup skim milk."

And An Enlightened Palate adds: "Hot cocoa lacks the creaminess and luscious mouthfeel of  a cup of hot chocolate, but it is more concentrated and has a more chocolaty taste...there is less vegetable fat (natural cocoa butter) in the cocoa than there is in shaved chocolate...fat coats the palate and minimizes flavor."

And offers a different method (note the technique):

2 teaspoons dutched cocoa powder ( we prefer dutched process cocoa because we feel that these cocoa powders have a deeper flavor, darker color and a smoother texture that blends flawlessly in hot beverages.)
2 teaspoons sugar
2 tablespoons cream, not heated
6 ounces boiling water

Optional: whipped cream or mini marshmallows for garnish

Place the cocoa powder and sugar into a mug and mix well. Add the cream and stir into a smooth paste. Add the boiling water and stir until the mixture is smooth and well blended. Ladle the hot cocoa into a mug and garnish if desired.

And, though this wasn't a contest, there is a winning technique in my mind. An Enlightened Pallette's method resulted in the best cup of cocoa I've ever had--the blend and pour method made for a deliciously creamy cocoa and it came together in seconds with water from a kettle and no pot to stand over. It was perfection with just one tweak that I would add to either recipe...

...a tiny sprinkle of salt.

Charles Wallace probably saw that coming.

...

I thought of Katherine, whose illustrations you've seen here in the past, as soon as I wrote this post. I hoped she would agree to bring Meg and the Murry kitchen to life and I hope you love her illustrations in this piece as much as I do. For more of her delicious illustrations, check out Drawn and Devoured.

...

LS baking academy: cookies & bars

It's been more than I expected it would be--for instance, I actually learned how to bake!--but the le sauce baking academy is wrapping up soon. At least it is in its current form, however, given my almost-comfortable comfort level when it comes to all things involving flour, you will definitely see baked goods from now on here at le sauce. I've learned how to make bread, the best pizza dough, light cakes, oil cakes, every kind of pastry (with success! to my surprise) and more. I'll have a round-up of the highlights for sure, and you can bet we'll be ending with a bang. For now, all I can tell you is that we're rounding out the lessons with how to make cookies, but you'll have to keep an eye out for the grand finale!

For the first cookie recipe on this site, and the first one I've ever baked, I choose one of the most the most famous. Jacques Torres' 36-hour chocolate chip cookies are reknown across the internet for two reasons: the recipe's appearance in the New York Times three years ago and because testers everywhere widely regard them as the "best". You can read the article for yourself but here's why this cookie and method are deemed superior:

• the 36-hour rest in the fridge allows the liquid (eggs in this case, which are thicker and therefore slower than water) to fully absorb into the dough, making it drier, and firmer and yeilding in a better consistency than freshly-made and baked dough...
• ...but this is really about flavour. That rest results in a cookie with deeper flavour and a darker, more caramel-y sweetness and...
• size matters, it turns out. The 6-inch cookie allows for a soft centre, a chewy but crisp edge with caramel flavour and the "ring" between where the flavours and textures combine. But as you can see above, a baking sheet can hardly contain 6 of these generously-sized cookies (I weighed mine for accuracy). They bled into each other while baking so mine were a glorious mess by the end.

Oh, and one more thing...

fave new movie snack: bitter-sweet chocolate chips

On garbage/green bin/recycling day each week, it's my job to go through the fridge and toss out browning herbs, limp celery and blue cheese that wasn't blue when we bought it. Last week I found a nearly empty package of Ghirardelli bitter-sweet chocolate chips. There were maybe 5 tiny chips kicking around in there so I poured them into my hand and tossed the foil bag. By the third chip, I was audibly "mmm!"-ing. I guess when I bought them to make chocolate pudding I didn't try any on their own, and attributed the delicious end result to the holiness of pudding. I mean, chocolate pudding is always good, who thinks about why?

That empty bag of bitter-sweet chips was replaced no more than two days later, with no pudding or chocolate recipe on the horizon. I'm smuggling them into the cinema with me, if they last until my next movie outing--they're so much tastier than concession-stand options. And I have my incentive to make them last until then. I've already imagined alternating melting those chips on my tongue with crunching kernels of salty popcorn and now I won't rest until I experience that.  

hot chocolate

Once you've had chocolate in Europe, say from Angelina's in Paris, you may have a hard time drinking hot chocolate that is, well, anything less than melted chocolate. The hot chocolate in this recipe tastes a bit over-the-top, but I'd rather have a few sips of this than a large bowl of too-sugary, thin, only mildly-chocolately hot chocolate, which is what you often get when you order some. This home-made version is ridiculously easy to make and you can control the flavour, opting to use more or less milk-chocolate which is the where all of the sweetness is coming from. There's only one rule...