Mushroom and Gruyère Pizza

Mushrooms and gruyère definitely go great together, but I’ve never thought of this combination in terms of pizza. I saw a recipe for pickling mushrooms and making pizza with them, with the addition of gruyère, but ultimately I decided to skip the pickling part. I made my own dough (“Basic Pizza Dough,” Gourmet Today, pg. 302) because I am amazed by the process of dough rising — it’s like magic — but you could also just use already-prepared dough. I also made two small pizzas because I find the pizza dough is too difficult to wrangle onto the insanely hot pre-heated pizza stone if I make one big pizza.

Heat the oven to 500 degrees and pre-heat the pizza stone. Brush olive oil onto the dough. Grate about 2 cups of gruyère, slice about 2 cups of mushrooms very thin, chop 2 or 3 cloves of garlic, and chop up about 1/3 cup of fresh parsley. Top the pizza with the gruyère first, then the mushrooms. Bake for about 8 minutes or until it looks almost finished, then in the last few minutes of cooking, add the garlic to the top. When it’s finished, take it out of the oven and sprinkle the fresh chopped parsley on top.

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Chocolate Peanut Clusters

Why have I only just learned about this? I thought this kind of thing would be complicated and involve tempering chocolate, but it isn’t and it doesn’t. Take 2 cups of milk chocolate chips. Melt the chocolate in a double-boiler or in the microwave. Then add 1 cup of roasted, lightly salted peanuts. Stir together, then spoon out the clusters onto plastic wrap or parchment paper on a cookie sheet. Place in a cool place and let them set — it takes about an hour. These are addictive, almost like a home-made Snickers bar.

You could vary this recipe in all kinds of ways: you could switch to dark chocolate, or you could use butterscotch chips or even better peanut butter chips, or mix any of these up with chocolate chips. And you could use almonds instead of peanuts. The proportions would be the same for any of these combinations.

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Chocolate Roulade

This recipe is adapted from Southern Living magazine’s Christmas Cookbook (Oxmoor House: Birmingham, AL, 2008), another excellent collection of recipes that someone gave to me as a gift. I cannot profess any level of expertise regarding Southern living as such — in fact, I only learned yesterday that it’s considered very bad form in Texas to ask someone how big their ranch is or how many head of cattle they own — apparently it’s like asking how old someone is or how much they earn. Let’s just say it’s good I don’t actually know any ranchers or I would have committed that particular social faux pas immediately: if someone says they have a ranch, I would think the next logical question would be “wow, how big is it?”

Despite these shortcomings, however, I did make the Chocolate Roulade featured in this book. It was incredibly light and spongy and almost had the consistency of a mousse. The chocolate and cream layers blend together fantastically and it was super chocolately and very satisfying as a cake overall. And it was a particular triumph in our house, since David is especially fond of any dessert that is striped (see rainbow cookies) or rolled up (as the roulade).

In this recipe, you are basically making a very thin sheet cake and then spreading the whipped cream over it and rolling it up. It was pretty easy to make, though the recipe was quite long — unnecessarily so, I think, so I’ve just shortened it in my own words. And it used such basic and simple ingredients that you could probably make it with stuff you already have in the house.

* 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
* 1/4 cup water
* 5 eggs, separated into yolks and whites
* 1 cup of sugar
* 1 cup heavy cream for whipping
* 2 tablespoons unsweetened chocolate for dusting on top (they recommend 3 but that seemed to be too much).

Combine the chocolate chips and water and microwave until smooth and melted, about one minute. Then beat the 5 egg yolks together with 3/4 cup of sugar, at high speed for about 3 minutes until thick and pale yellow. Add the egg mixture to the chocolate chip mixture. Then, separately, beat the 5 egg whites at high speed until stiff peaks form. Add this to the egg yolk and chocolate mixture. Next, lightly grease a jelly roll pan and line it with parchment paper, making sure it overhangs a bit on the sides, and pour the batter into the pan. Cook for 15 minutes in a 325 degree over. After cooking, place a damp kitchen towel over the cake and let it cool completely in the pan.

This is the slightly high-stress tricky part: you need to flip the cake out of the pan. Cut a second long strip of parchment paper and place it on another cookie sheet. Dust the top of the cake with the cocoa powder and then overturn the cake onto the other cookie sheet with the parchment on it. (Since you don’t want the delicate cake to break at this point, I just brought the other parchment-lined cookie sheet down on top of the cake pan, and then, holding the cookie sheet upside down on top of the jelly roll pan, flip it over). Whew, it worked.

Now, you just make the whipped cream using a cup of cream and the remaining 1/4 cup sugar. Spread the whipped cream over the cake, leaving about an inch free around each edge. Then, pull the parchment up on one side until the cake turns in on itself and rolls over. Slowly continue rolling the cake up by pulling on the parchment paper, ending with the seam-side down. Chill in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour before serving, or up to 8 hours.

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