Bloggings of randomness

I’ve been looking to make some tiramisu, and for that I’ve decided on a recipe. It’s from “Spise med Price”, a Danish cookbook made to accompany a TV show of the same name. This recipe uses – for 6 persons – 4 egg yolks beaten with 100 grams sugar, with Mascarpone mixed in (500 grams), lightened with 4 beaten egg whites. Easy.

However, when I went to get the ladyfingers to use for the recipe, it had a different recipe. This called for – for 5 persons – 3 egg yolks, sugar and only 250 grams Mascarpone. Still the same with the egg whites.

Curiosity now piqued, I looked at my new Joy of Cooking for a recipe – and lo: 12 servings needs 5 egg yolks, half a cup whipped cream(!), and about 400 grams Mascarpone. This is quite different, since it uses whipped cream instead of the egg whites – and doesn’t seem to need as much amount of filling as the others.

I decided to press on and look at my Italian cookbooks, namely one called “Culinaria Italia” and one called (in Danish) “Italy – temptations of the Mediterranean”. The first calls for 4 egg yolks, a cup whipped cream and 500g Mascarpone, while the second (for 4 people) uses 2 egg yolks and whites and 250g Mascarpone – same proportions as the original one I looked at.

To sum up: To make tiramisu, you need a number of egg yolks and some Mascarpone, between 30 and 80 grams per person, and either whipped cream or beaten egg whites to lighten it with. And I haven’t even started to look at whether to use Marsala, Amaretto or other sorts of liquor for the ladyfingers…

What’s your favourite way to make tiramisu?

The latest Batman movie, The Dark Knight, includes quite a few instances of Danish design. Having moved to a new flat recently, and not actually having bought all my lamps yet, I am quite attentive to nice lamps I see around town when shopping and such. And lo, there were some in The Dark Knight as well:

AJ Gulv

Arne Jacobsen floor lamp

The Arne Jacobsen floor lamp was designed in 1957 for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen. Bruce Wayne has a number of them in black in his Gotham City penthouse apartment.

PH 4½/3½ (or one like it)

PH 4½/3½ lamp

The Poul Henningsen glass shade lamps were designed in the middle of the 1920′es, and based on a logarithmic spiral. The mayor of Gotham City has one in his office in the movie.

Apart from that, one of my friends noticed a Danish designed Kirk telephone in it as well, Bang & Olufsen are getting more business because one of their stereos was featured in it, and I’m certain more of the furniture was Danish designed as well. I like this trend.

Writing a post like this in English might seem a little strange – but at least it will be readable for foreigners who may want to visit Århus: I’ve found a nice place for coffee in Århus. It’s Sigfreds Kaffebar.

For anyone who knows Århus, it probably shouldn’t come as a big surprise. Sigfreds is known as a place of good coffee, and even though we have the Starbucks-style Baresso around here as well, producing somewhat consistent quality coffee, Sigfreds is just a different league – and a wholly different atmosphere. It’s a lot more cosy and café-like. Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture to place here, but I think I’ll be going back tomorrow and might get one.

I had a cortado, basicly a double espresso with about the same amount of steamed milk in it, for 32 kroner. It doesn’t come with any accessories, apart from an optional glass of water, but it didn’t need any: The taste was great. Freshly ground beans, and judging by the videos on the website and the behaviour of the barista, a very keen attention to hygeine and cleanliness. Thoroughly recommended.

I’ve come up with a plan. A masterly plan, to leave me independent of the chocolate store near where I work: I am going to make my own chocolate coated pineapple rings.

The first attempt is in my fridge now to cool down – some might say that choosing a day with my kitchen at 30-some degrees celsius as the day to test out my idea wasn’t smart, and I’m inclined to agree – tempering chocolate, when the ambient temperature is higher than the level you’re trying to cool to isn’t easy.

Not giving up that easily, I decided to follow David Lebovitz’s instructions for tempering chocolate, albeit not with quite the care I might do in the future. Looking in my fridge now, it seems I didn’t succeed – partly due to my thermometer being too slow, and partly due to not having the patience to wait for the temperature to go down. I’ll have to do a bit more work on this in the future.

The biggest problem was probably the unexpected viscosity of the chocolate: Pouring it in a way to coat the pineapple rings was far from as easy as I’d thought. Perhaps that’s a problem with temperature, but it seemed that the chocolate I was using didn’t really want to be poured, as much as it wanted to sit in a thick, smooth but unmoving mass. I’ve looked a bit at some websites about additives in chocolate, and I think the answer may be trying out adding some lecithin, a soy or egg yolk extract used as an emulsifier to make chocolate pourable. Perhaps making an improvised mould for the rings would make things a little easier

Pineapple rings are rather wet when direct from the tin, which also created a bit of a problem. I was prepared better for this, though, and patted them dry with some kitchen paper – perhaps other methods might be employed with more success.

There’s no pictures this time, since I didn’t really expect to succeed, but when the weather cools down I’ll try again for a slightly more serious attempt. I’ll be sure to add some tasting notes later, though, when I can’t hold myself back any further.

Edit: The results

I’ve just tasted one of the pineapple rings I made earlier, and I have a few observations. First of all, the chocolate wasn’t tempered at all. In fact, it melted almost seconds after being removed from the fridge, so I guess I’ll have to eat them all myself

Secondly, the insides were too wet. I had suspected this, and come my next try, I’ll have to figure a way to dry it out. I suspect the ones used by professionals might be soaked in a light syrup, to make it a bit more candy-like. Might try that out.

Thirdly, and most importantly, the taste: I liked it. I am still very fond of the combination of pineapple and chocolate, and with just a bit of practice I’m sure I’d be able to cure some of my addiction to the local chocolate shop.

I have a new neighbour, but I’m not quite sure what he or she is called yet. I sense (s)he’s a bit shy, and would probably flee if I asked… but perhaps I should try someday.

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I’ve signed up to receive a box of vegetables from a Danish company called Aarstiderne every other week. Today was the first delivery, and I was quite excited to get home and see what was in it:

The contents are all organic, and even though they’re trucked around, Denmark is a small enough country that a lot of it counts as “local”, anyway. The box I got contained:

• Emmerys malt rye bread
• Voelkel grape juice
• Vivani milk chocolate with almonds
• Babyleaves – of some leaf vegetable of unknown origin as of yet
• 5 tomatoes
• 5 plums
• 7 apples
• 10-or-so carrots (one gone already, yum!)
• a box of grapes
• a bunch of (5) leeks (edit: these are supposed to be spring onions. They’re bigger than the ones I’m used to…)
• a head of broccoli
• a cucumber
• a courgette

Costs me 223kr, which is about £24 or €30.

Now I have to figure out what to use all that stuff for.

After buying some really nice bread at a nearby bakery, at the to my mind quite expensive price of 42 kroner for a loaf (about £4.50), I decided to bake some myself. I found a recipe on the net, and followed it pretty closely, this being the first try.

Ingredients

• 12.5 grams cake yeast – or I am guessing, a quarter of a packet
• 300 ml cold water or milk
• teaspoon of salt
• teaspoon of sugar
• 350-400 grams high-protein flour
• 100 grams wholemeal flour

Method

Step one, basically mix it together and knead. Okay, perhaps dissolve the yeast first in the water, and add the flour little by little. But get it mixed together, and knead well. I kneaded until my wrist started hurting, and then a bit more since it didn’t feel quite right yet. This isn’t no-knead bread.

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Last week, I started working at my new job (which is the same as the old one, but full time) at DAIMI. At the same time, moving has been going on, and I’m almost done now, only really needing to bring along a few things to put in the store room, as well as my electric piano, which I’m going to bring today.

Working full time and moving as well has taken up almost all of my time, which is why I haven’t posted much here. I’ve started cooking a lot more, and I’m really enjoying having my own kitchen and a separate living room and bedroom. So expect some news about food in not too long.

PHP is taking up a lot of my time at work, I’m trying out Zend Studio which seems to be really nice, albeit quite expensive. I may have to try out PDT to see if it’ll do the same sort of things. More about this later as well.

Lastly, if you haven’t seen them yet, you should take a look at the photos I’ve taken of my new place: The first ones taken when I was about to move in, the next ones when I got my dining table and curtains in place, and the latest with my new sofa and sort of living room arrangement.

I’ve moved, and gotten my blog back up after I accidentally knocked it over. Pictures from the new flat are available at my gallery.

As soon as I get the last stuff moved – Monday or so I hope – I’ll take some pictures of the flat with furniture in it. I still need to get my bed, though, and because of an error on the part of the furniture supplier, that won’t be coming until the 16th. Ick. Luckily, one of my friends let me borrow his folding bed, which will have to do for those two weeks.

The recent post I made about Mozy received a few comments, concerned with a piece of software called Memopal. Akismet identified one of them as spam, but the other one got through. Looked pretty much like a regular comment:

I’ve read on Wikipedia about remote backup and I tried some services, but the only one I bought is Memopal.

Memopal offers a search engine online that helps me find archived documents in few seconds. Some Competitors have a search engine too but it’s very slow and usually it is not online.
Memopal is online storage, online backup and file sharing services into one product.

Memopal saves all versions of my documents. Moreover I have two computers, desktop ad laptop, and I can install Memopal on both buying only one license. It’s great!

But googling it, it’s completely identical to something posted elsewhere, namely here, at the end of last week.

The other comment was more of the same, and had been posted in a bunch of different places by a character name of “michelle79″.

Memopal: Don’t post spam comments. It’s really bad publicity, and makes you seem like scammers and cheats. I certainly wouldn’t want to buy any license from you, if that’s the sort of marketing strategies you employ.