Beth's Birthday Torte

My dear Beth had her 22nd birthday on Thursday and we celebrated this palindromic occasion with friends, a back porch, a grill, beers, hotdogs, and Dorie Greenspan's Fifteen-Minute Magic: Chocolate Amaretti Torte. After seeing so many incredible delicacies arising from Greenspan's book Baking: From my home to yours on TasteSpotting, I bought the book for myself and chose this recipe when Beth answered "chocolate. dark chocolate" in response to her cake preferences. I nearly went with the Tarte Noir, but the Amaretti Torte seemed to be a little less serious, and a little more fun.



Instead of flour, the Amaretti Torte uses ground up almonds and Amaretti cookies, a delicious almond macaroon from Italy that I frequently see at Marshall's and TJ Maxx. The "fifteen-minute magic" refers to the amount of time it takes to prepare the batter, which is easily done in the food processor, and thankfully the torte doesn't require any fancy equipment, just a cake pan and icing spreaders.




For the chocolate, I used Valhrona bittersweet dark which mixed seamlessly into the torte, making it velvety and rich, all the things you would want a torte to be, while the ganache stands to satisfy your pure chocolate needs. I chose to keep the decoration simple, using leftover almonds and amaretti cookies, which inevitably produced tensions over who got a cookie piece. To conclude, Dorie Greenspan's Amaretti Torte is chocolate and almond heaven, decadent and full of character, and cemented my position as a culinary talent.















"Better than oral sex."

Family and Food

In spite of schoolwork and work work I managed to make a visit with my family at the bay for Easter Sunday. Being a family of mostly agnostics, Easter didn't actually have much to do with it, but we did enjoy a good dinner of rotisserie chicken, and started off with Dad's Cold Asparagus Soup.


Here is Dad, pictured with soup

























Made with the "rag-ends" of your asparagus, it doesn't force you to choose between eating asparagus and making some soup, but rather putting to use what would otherwise be thrown away.

We all happily sipped at our goblets of cold, creamy soup although Dad, highly pleased with his culinary product, drank them, and finished most of everyone else's too.

The Recipe, in Dad's words:

Cut bottom half of Asparagus stalks into 1" pieces and put in pan with water and boil til soft. Add some chicken stock and simmer a good while (an hour or more). Let cool a bit and put into blender and puree. Put thru a sieve using wooden spoon to shove it thru. Pour liquid back in pan. Add milk or 1/2 and 1/2. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add a pat of butter. Warm but dont boil. Serve, or put in refrigerator and serve cold the next day.

Another shot, with a view over the bay