Reine de Saba

What a dreary day it has been. It started with drizzle, which changed to snow about 9:30. The first snowfall is always cool, of course. It even stuck for a while on the garden and the trunk of the fifth oak. The snow stopped and melted. Fog came in under a uniformly gray sky. It feels much like winter. At 5:15, it is pitch dark.

The pullets have FINALLY started to lay. Such cute little pullet eggs! I thought the event was much later than last year, but in the middle of the week, a picture of a pullet egg popped up as a Facebook memory from a year ago. Apparently I thought it would never happen last year either.

The first pullet egg next to a hen egg.

Not only are the pullet eggs cute as a bug’s ear, they are also more intensely colored. I don’t know why the color fades over time. The Black Star eggs are a beautiful chestnut brown.

Three pullet eggs and three hen eggs

I’ve been battling the winter blues as the weather has gotten cold and damp and the days shorten. I needed a project. There are no tadpoles available this time of year, so I thought I’d try my hand raising wild yeast. I saw it on America’s Test Kitchen and downloaded the instructions. Last Saturday, I mixed all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, and water, covered it with plastic wrap and let it sit. The next morning (16 hours), it looked like this.

Wild sourdough starter at 16 hours

Monday morning, it was getting even more bubbly.

At 36 hours

By Monday night, it seemed like it was time to feed it. The black spots on top were a little concerning. I stirred it up, removed 2 ounces to a clean bowl, added 2 ounces of water, and 2.5 ounces of the flour/whole wheat flour mix.

At 48 hours, blubbly and with suspicious blackish patches on top

Every day, I repeat the feeding steps. It looks like this right after the feeding.

Starter right after feeding

And it looks like this the next day.

Starter after 24 hours

Right now it smells exactly like an old, wet dog. I am not certain that this experiment will be successful, but the folks at ATK said that it smells “funky” at first but after two weeks will begin to smell more like normal yeasty bread dough. The idea is that the desirable yeasts and bacteria out compete the stinky ones. We’ll see.
In a more successful experiment, I tried one of Julia Child’s recipes from The French Chef. It was called Reine de Saba (Queen of Sheba) and was subtitled “chocolate, rum, and almond cake.” I found an 8” cake pan, which I buttered and floured. I also put parchment paper on the bottom even though the recipe didn’t say to. Nobody knew about parchment paper in 1968. I wanted to be sure the cake would come out of the pan.

Then I had a problem. One part of the cake involved creaming butter and sugar. Another part was beating egg whites. I have but one hand mixer. One stick of butter would be lost in the bowl of my stand mixer. If you have experience with egg white beating, you know that the bowl and beaters must not have any trace of fat or the eggs will not develop the proper structure. To use the hand mixer for both would require a thorough cleaning of the beaters in between. I hate washing beaters, especially with the pressure of removing every molecule of butter.  Julia said you could cream the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon. I didn’t believe it, but I knew she did her research. I tried it. I soon had balls of sugar-coated butter. I changed tactics, mashing the butter into the sugar with the back of the spoon. That went better. Quite suddenly, as if by magic, it all came together and was easy to stir vigorously. Julia was right!

From there, it was simple to add the melted chocolate, rum, ground almonds, almond extract, egg yolks, and all-purpose flour (It was supposed to be cake flour, but I keep four kinds of flour in stock at all times, and I have to draw the line somewhere. )

The recipe called for adding cream of tartar to the egg whites to stabilize them. To my amazement, I had cream of tartar on hand. I can’t imagine why, but it was a pleasant surprise. I got the egg whites to shiny white peaks and folded them into the rest of the cake. Into the oven.

After letting the cake cool for two hours, I made the glaçage au chocolat (chocolate-butter icing). Really it was more of a ganache, but nobody knew about ganache in 1968. I melted 1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips with 1.5 tablespoons dark rum. I beat in 6 tablespoons of softened butter one at a time until it was perfectly smooth. Best. Icing. Ever. The cake was good, too! It reminded me of Europe.

Reine de Saba