After work, I finished that horrible cake for Jim's mom. Actually, this morning I made more sugar syrup to try to salvage the brittle, which I managed to do. When done correctly, the sugar caramelized beautifully and the overall effect was quite pretty. I sampled some of the brittle this afternoon and liked it. Jim, not so much, but he's not a big fan of nuts, so he's biased.
Anyway, to make the frosting, I used a hand mixer to combine 16 ounces of marscapone, a cup of heavy whipping cream, powdered sugar, and vanilla until soft peaks formed. I folded in the brittle (which Jim helped me break up). Then came the frosting of the cakes, which was pretty hard with all of the brittle in the stuff. Jim took about a year to assemble the food processor. To see his many failed attempts was pretty amusing. Luckily for his fingers, the food processor has the safety mechanism that wouldn't let him turn it on until he had it right. The funniest try was when he had the mini bowl upside down on top of the main bowl make some sort of strange bubble. His job was to blend 1/4 cup of chocolate chips together, which took him the same amount of time as it took me to frost between the two cake layers and then all over the outside. And this was without a spatula and with the difficulty of the brittle chunks. But Jim finally finished and dusted the chocolate bits all over the top of the cake.
I wasn't too impressed with the end product. I did like the frosting, which was rich and creamy without being too sweet. Jim said it was too cheesy, which granted it was cheese-based, but at the same time, it didn't have the tang of cream cheese, so I didn't think it was that big of a deal. Mr. Picky proved me wrong. The bottom line was that it was on the ugly side and a buttload of work.
We delivered the cake to Jim's mom and then went to Walnut Creek for the evening. While waiting for our table at Tomatina, I returned some stuff to Nordstrom and tried to return something to Banana Republic (denied cuz of no receipt). The host said it would be about 25 minutes, but we ended up waiting closer to 45 minutes.
Unfortunately, our table was in one of the worst possible spots in the entire restaurant--right by the mini lobby, which meant that we were right there with all of the waiting people staring at us on from the benches right next to our table. We were able to ignore them, but it was still loud and crowded.
For the first time ever, I didn't get my piadine, which made me sad. We ended up sharing a Garden pizza with light cheese. The toppings were mushrooms, garlic paste, roasted red pepper, kalamata olives, red onions, spinach, and basil. It was pretty good stuff, and we managed to finish it. We also split a semi-freddo, which, for the record, was absolutely nothing like Giada's version. I was very shocked to see it come in a glass, presented much like a milkshake. Basically it was scoops of hazelnut gelato with espresso poured over it and topped with whipped cream and chocolate shavings. While it was good, I don't think it was actually semi-freddo. I trust Giada more than Tomatina to tell me about authentic Italian food. We ended up getting the dessert for free cuz of Jim's company discount. I was quite bummed--I thought the pizza was 50% off, but it was actually buy one pizza, get one 50% off. If I had known that, I would just have gotten my piadine.
After dinner, we walked over to the movie theater to watch Leatherheads, starring George Clooney and Renee Zellweger. I enjoyed the movie, and Jim also liked it. There were definitely some amusing parts. I still can't get over how far he's come since his Batman days. And while the move was planned, we were also treated to another show over dinner--a couple waiting for their table spent quite a bit of that time making out. Nice.
No comments:
Post a Comment