Chocolate Blackout Cake + How to Frost a Cake Video

Chocolate Blackout Cake | Photo by Zoë François

Over the holiday break I traveled with my family to Brooklyn to visit my mother. A little respite from the winter wonderland of Minneapolis. I packed all my on-the-town shoes, in varying degrees of heels for walking through museums, dining out and seeing shows. My husband checked and rechecked the NY forecast and weather.com promised the most we’d see was 1/2-inch of snow, which would melt before it ever hit the pavement. By the end of our first full day in NY there was a complete whiteout and some of the subways were cancelled due to the blizzard. This NEVER happens. Our second day was spent shopping for winter boots, something all Minnesotans have plenty of and do not need to spend our vacations shopping for. But, the snow was now up to the boys’ knees and my suede heels were no longer as chic. The next morning we were quite happily trapped in Brooklyn by the snow. We put on our new boots and forged our way to the only open restaurant for breakfast and then watched movies all day, it was relaxing and felt quite luxurious after working so hard these past months.

My mom’s Brooklyn garden during our visit

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Lemon Brown Sugar Meringue Tart

Lemon Brown Sugar Meringue Tart | ZoeBakes | Photo by Zoe François

This lemon brown sugar meringue tart is the cousin of the Lemon Meringue Pie, an all American classic. The lemon is intense, smooth and bracing, which is the perfect contrast to the pillowy brown sugar meringue that floats on top. They sit on an almond pastry crust that is tender and not overly sweet. The filling is simply made with just lemon juice, egg yolks and sugar, no need for cornstarch or sweetened condensed milk. The brown sugar in the meringue gives it more personality and a deeper flavor, which goes so well with the sourness of the lemons.

A lemon tart is a bit untraditional for the holidays, but I find it a wonderful addition to a Christmas buffet. It looks festive and is a nice contrast to the Bûche de Noël, a Christmas Stollen, Panettone and all those cookies you have been baking.

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Happy Thanksgiving and a couple of announcements!

Thank you for visiting Zoë Bakes! I wanted to write a short post to let you know how much your lovely comments of encouragement have meant to me. As many of you have noticed I’ve taken a sabbatical of sorts from blogging. I miss it and will be back soon. Jeff and I are working on our third book (Pizza and Flatbreads in Five Minutes a Day) together and it is due at the beginning of December. It is so exciting and tremendous fun, but it is like a child and has taken most of my time.

I have also been presented with an opportunity to work with one of my all time favorite Twin Cities chefs. Steven Brown, who I worked with many years ago is opening his own restaurant in Minneapolis called Tilia. I got down on my knees and begged him to let me be a part of it and help him with the desserts. What a crazy good time, playing with sugar in the presence of such an inspired chef. The picture above are just a few of the desserts I created for our first tasting together (sticky toffee cake, soaked in caramel and glazed with chocolate, a German Chocolate Cake and an apple-pear spice cake with orange cardamom glaze). It will be a menu of our interpretation of some classics, made with the best local ingredients and a whole lot of love. To find out more about Tilia and watch the process of opening a restaurant you can visit the Tilia facebook page.

and there are now gorgeous Tilia gift certificates for holiday giving. I hope you will come and visit.

I have so much to be thankful for this holiday season and I look forward to coming back to Zoë Bakes soon to blog about all that I have been working on.

Thanks, Zoë

Sugar Plum Pie with a Folded Flaky Crust

Sugar plum pie | ZoëBakes | Photo by Zoë François

I know I promised a tour of the spice market in Istanbul, but I had to show you the plum pie I made for my stepmother’s birthday first. When I returned home after a month away my refrigerator was bare, nothing but a jar of capers and a bottle of sriracha sauce. After shopping in Europe, the grocery stores here in MN seemed obscene with selection. The produce isle was filled with every fruit and veggie you could ever want, despite the fact that many of them wouldn’t be in season for months. It was both overwhelming and a bit thrilling to have all this at my fingertips. I’d been eating juicy plums and peaches in Italy and had decided to make my stepmother a pie with them for her birthday. They were perhaps a little firm, but they looked and smelled gorgeous. Because it was a special occasion I cooked the plums in champagne and vanilla. I made a tender crust and folded it a few times to add some flaky layers. This is my kind of birthday pie!

Do you have pie questions or need to troubleshoot your recipe? Check out my guide on how to make pie crust.

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Fried Stuffed Squash Blossoms with Golden Tomato Gazpacho

Squash blossoms | ZoëBakes | Photo by Zoë François

While we were in Italy this summer it was squash season. Every menu we looked at had squash and their blossoms on it, fried, stuffed with many different fillings and even on pizza (which will find its way into our new pizza book). I ate them in all their various forms with delight. When I returned to Minneapolis and saw this dazzling display at the farmer’s market I bought them, more out of a sense of nostalgia than having any real plan for them. Honestly, they intimidated me. I didn’t want to make a mockery of anything this beautiful. I considered just keeping them in the little vase I’d set them in, but that would have been a touch lame and so I soldiered on and learned a valuable lesson…stuffing and frying squash blossoms is easy! Read More

Chocolate Berry Trifle

Chocolate berry trifle | ZoëBakes | Photo by Zoë François

The chocolate berry trifle acts as the perfect vehicle for cleaning out your refrigerator/freezer of all those tasty little treats you just had to hang on to. I am guilty of an overstuffed freezer. It must be my pastry chef days of NO waste, ever. It is something I am both proud of and annoyed by, because it means I have dozens, or more, of incredibly well wrapped packages of buttercream, truffles, cake, cookie dough, puff pastry and just about everything else you could ever want. BUT, there really isn’t enough of any one thing to make a full dessert, except trifle. Add some of the frozen berries from last summer, a touch of sherry and rich pastry cream to those too-good-to-throw-out cake scraps and you have a gorgeous dessert and less stuff in your freezer. Not sure why this essential dessert is named trifle, when it is clearly nothing shy of brilliant.

This all came about because I am trying to eat down my refrigerator before we leave for our trip. Next week I take off for Istanbul, Greece and Italy and the contents of my refrigerator will be much less charming when I return in a month. Some things will be left for the house-sitter, but the random packages in the freezer are something I’d rather they read about on my blog than see in real life.

While making this chocolate berry trifle, with a mind of not wasting anything at all, I discovered that I could use the left over egg whites to lighten up my pastry cream, instead of the customary whip cream, which doesn’t really “lighten up” anything. Since the pastry cream uses mostly egg yolks, I had the whites just sitting around. Whipped up and folded in, they make the most exquisite textured custard I’ve ever had. This pastry cream recipe is destined for eclairs when I return!

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