There are a few different ingredients that can be used to stabilize foams made in a whipped cream siphon. Gelatin is one of the easiest and most common, but has the drawback that it must be served cold. If you want a warm siphon foam, you have to base it on something else, such as egg whites, which essentially use the siphon to make instant, flavoured meringue. The microwave sponge cake is simply an extension of this, taking that meringue (with a little flour added) and cooking it.

The result is, like aerated chocolate, a “set foam”: when you heat an egg-white foam, the bubbles in it expand, and eventually the egg proteins coagulate, forming a solid matrix and trapping those bubbles forever. That’s more or less how a soufflé works. Only instead of whipping the eggs with a mixer, this cake uses a siphon, and instead of baking it in an oven, you cook it in a microwave.

Although I’d never used this technique before, I decided to try developing my own recipe with it. I made up a spreadsheet of the ingredients in a handful of other recipes I had, and decided the basic ratio of ingredients is about 20 grams of flour, 100g of egg whites, 80g of sugar, anywhere from 0g to 80g of egg yolk, and 120g of your chosen flavour, preferably something that has about 50% fat. I’ve seen recipes using pistachio, chocolate, yogurt and black sesame. There are, of course, outliers to this, but that seemed like a good starting point.

For flavour, I wanted red velvet cake. I’ve had this popular cake only once or twice, but I’m well versed in its distinguishing characteristics: bright red colour, buttermilk, and a hint of chocolate. I devised a recipe that I thought reflected this and would work with this technique. After mixing all the ingredients, straining them, and charging the siphon, I dispensed some into a paper cup with holes punched in the bottom, and microwaved it on high for 40 seconds. Success!

To round out the dessert, I made a beet fluid gel (since beets are sometimes used in the original cake instead of artificial food colouring, and beet pairs nicely with chocolate), cream cheese icing, and candied pecans. I really wanted a green element on the plate, but I couldn’t find any traditional garnish for red velvet cake that was green. And I’m not a fan of the token mint leaf found on so many different desserts.

The one drawback I found to my recipe is that the cakes, left for more than a few minutes, will harden somewhat. I don’t have enough experience with pastry to know what causes this, though it would be nice to be able to refine the recipe so it doesn’t happen. Now that I’m past my “running before you walk” phase, it may be time to take a step back and make one of the professional recipes as a basis of comparison. In the meantime, here’s what I did.

How to make red velvet microwave cake

This recipe should easily serve 6-8 people

100g egg whites
70g egg yolk
80g sugar
20g all-purpose flour
5g cocoa powder
Pinch salt
60g butter, melted
60g buttermilk
Red food colouring, in paste form, as desired

Combine the egg whites, egg yolks and sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer. Whisk for 1 minute on medium speed to combine. Sift the flour and cocoa powder over top, and add the salt. Whisk again until just combined. While whisking, drizzle in the butter and buttermilk, and add the red food colouring until you get the colour you want.

Strain the mixture, and transfer it into a half-litre whipped cream siphon. Charge the siphon with two nitrous oxide cartridges, shaking well after each one. Keep refrigerated.

How to make beet fluid gel

140g beet juice
55g 1:1 simple syrup
1.95g agar

Combine the beet juice and syrup. You can adjust the syrup to taste; just make sure you adjust the agar to be 1% of the total combined weight of the two. Bring to a low simmer, and sprinkle the agar over top, whisking to combine. Bring to a full boil and boil for 1 minute to hydrate the agar. Strain into a heatproof container and allow to set at room temperature.

Once set, cut the gel into cubes, and puree with a blender until the mixture forms a smooth gel. Transfer to a squeeze bottle and reserve in the fridge.

How to make cream cheese icing

150g cream cheese
75g icing sugar
60 ml whipping cream

Beat the cream cheese in an electric mixer until very soft. Sift the icing sugar over top, and beat again until combined, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary. Add the whipping cream and beat again until combine. Transfer to a pastry bag fitted with a large plain tip, and reserve in the fridge.

How to make candied pecans
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 Tbsp. white corn syrup
1 Tbsp. water
25 pecan halves

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Spread the pecan halves on a baking sheet, and place in the oven. While they cook, combine the sugar, corn syrup and water in a saucepan. Heat over medium heat until the sugar caramelizes. Immediately remove the warmed pecans from the oven, add to the caramel, and stir to cook. Spread on a parchment-lined baking sheet, keeping each pecan half separate, and allow to cool. Break off any extra caramel, transfer to an airtight container, and reserve.

To plate the dessert

Pipe random dots of cream cheese icing and beet gel onto a plate. Take a 9-oz paper cup, poke four holes in the bottom, then dispense the microwave red velvet cake batter into the cup, filling halfway. Microwave on high for about 40 seconds (you may have to adjust the time, depending on the power of your microwave). Allow to cool briefly, then run a thin-bladed knife around the inside of the cup to loosen the cake. Tear in half and place on the plate. (I cooked 6 microwave cakes for 4 servings, allowing one and a half per person.) Lean candied pecans against the cream cheese icing.

Certainly Canada isn’t the only place it can be found, but pea soup is definitely part of the fabric of Canadian, and especially Québécois, cuisine. I mean, the brand I grew up with was called Habitant! It’s a great dish for a region with a long, hard winter, because it relies on ingredients that store well: dried peas, carrots, onions and salted pork.

With the weather getting colder around here, I’ve been making more and more soups lately. (Unfortunately, it’s tough to make photos of soup look interesting.) When I realized how long it had been since I last made pea soup, it quickly rose to the top of my “to-cook” list.

I picked up a smoked ham hock and some dried peas and, working from a recipe in Jehane Benoit’s New and Complete Encyclopedia of Cooking, simmered them for a couple of hours with some carrots, onions and salted herbs. I also added a pinch of baking soda, which helps dried legumes break down while they’re cooking; I like my pea soup to have a thick, pureed consistency. I mixed the shredded meat back in (and then coaxed it into a little pile for the photo above), but you could arrange a pile in the middle of the bowl and pour the soup around it for a slightly more elegant presentation. I almost always grind a little black pepper over top, too.

How to make Canadian pea soup

1 Tbsp. rendered bacon fat (or butter or vegetable oil)
2 medium onions, diced
1 medium carrot, diced
1 smoked, cured pork hock (about 1 pound)
1 pound dried split yellow peas, rinsed and drained
2 bay leaves
2 Tbsp. salted herbs (or substitute a mix of fresh celery leaves, parsley and savory)
1/4 tsp. baking soda

Melt the bacon fat or butter, or heat the vegetable oil, in a large soup pot, and sweat the onions and carrot until softened but not browned. Add the ham hock, split peas, bay leaves, salted herbs, baking soda and 2 litres of water (or enough to cover the peas and mostly cover the ham hock), and stir. Bring to a boil, skim, then cover, reduce the heat to low, and simmer for two hours, flipping the ham hock and stirring the peas occasionally. When the meat and peas are tender, remove the bay leaves and ham hock. Shred the meat, discarding the bones and skin. Puree the soup, if desired, adjusting the texture with more water as needed. Return the shredded meat to the soup, taste and adjust seasoning, and serve with freshly ground black pepper.

How do you like your pea soup?

Take Swedish punch. Despite having read about it many times, I never had the chance to try it until this summer, when I found myself in Seattle’s famous Zig Zag Café and ordered a happy hour-discounted Doctor Cocktail. It was similar to a Daiquiri, but with an edge of spice and smokiness from the Swedish punch. A conversation with the bartender ensued, in which he told me that their Swedish punch was house-made, and that he couldn’t tell me what was in it except “tea and spices.” Between that and my taste memory, I didn’t have a lot to go on in making my own batch.

Fortunately, I had a couple of other sources for ideas, including eGullet, Erik’s Savoy Stomp, and David Wondrich’s book Punch. Recipes vary, but all call for an ingredient that may be hard to find, depending on where you are: Batavia arrack, a rum-like spirit from Indonesia. (And unrelated to the Mediterranean “arak” or “raki,” an anise-flavoured liqueur.) I brought back a bottle on a previous trip to New York, but because it’s not available locally, I combined it in my Swedish Punch with conventional rum to extend my supply and in keeping with some of the recipes I’ve read. If you don’t have access to arrack, you could make a similar punch with Cognac (an extant variation called “Bimbo punch”) or make an all-rum version. Just be sure to use a funky rum, like the Pusser’s I used.

Below is the recipe I used for making my first batch. I find the spices don’t really come through as strongly as I would like, so you might want to add them earlier in the steeping process. (I wanted to err on the side of too weak, rather than too strong.) I also used a Benriner to slice my lemons, which may have liberated a bit too much juice; next time, I’ll just slice them by hand.

How to make Swedish Punch

1/2 cup Batavia arrack
1/2 cup Jamaican rum
2 lemons, thinly sliced

2 cloves
1/2 nutmeg
1 small black cardamom pod

300 ml water
150g raw sugar
2 tsp loose leaf tea (I used oolong)

Combine the arrack, rum and lemons, and let steep for 5.5 hours. Then add the spices and let steep for another half hour. Meanwhile, bring the water to a boil, remove from the heat, add the tea leaves and sugar, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Let the tea steep for 4 minutes, the strain. Strain the arrack-rum-lemon mixture, but do not press on the lemons. Allow it to drain naturally. Combine the tea syrup with the alcohol mixture and bottle. It may develop a sediment after a couple of days; if so, strain again.

How to make a Doctor Cocktail

2 oz. rum (Jamaican or Barbados preferred)
1 oz. Swedish Punch
1 oz. lime juice

Add to a cocktail shaker, add ice, shake for 15 seconds, then strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a lime wheel.

In this case, it was myoga, a Japanese ingredient related to ginger. Nearly every Japanese cookbook I have mentions it, but I had never seen it for sale until last weekend, when I stopped by Sanko and they had some. I had to buy it.

Of course, then I had to figure out how to make the best use of it. Fresh, it would only keep for a couple of days, so I immediately sliced some and put it in miso soup. (Any time you want to know the role a given ingredient plays in Japanese cuisine, you can do a lot worse than throw it into a bowl of miso soup.) It tastes pretty much like ginger, perhaps a little more floral, but has the texture of a member of the allium family. It’s pretty cool.

The rest of the bunch needed to be preserved somehow, so they got pickled.

How to make pickled myoga

myoga
1/2 cup rice vinegar
3 Tbsp. sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
A 1-by-1 inch piece of kombu

Combine vinegar, sugar, salt and kombu in a small saucepan and let stand at least 20 minutes. Meanwhile, trim and clean myoga and slice them in half. Bring a pot of water to a boil and blanch myoga briefly, 1-2 minutes. Bring the vinegar-sugar mixture to a boil, stirring to dissolve. Transfer the hot blanched myoga to a glass jar, then pour the hot vinegar over them. Allow to stand, uncovered, until cooled to room temperature, then cover and store in the fridge.

The Tiki tradition calls on a wide array of different syrups, from plain old simple syrup to orgeat to cinnamon- or ginger-infused syrup to coffee syrup. One of my favourites, though – a syrup that says “Tiki” to me more than any other – is passion fruit syrup. It adds a wonderful tropical fruit note to drinks that instantly makes them seem exotic.

Unfortunately, it can be hard to find a commercial passion fruit syrup that’s good for use in Tiki drinks. (One notable exception is B.G. Reynolds’ syrup.) Fortunately, if you have a store near you that carries Latin-American products, you’re halfway to making your own! Look in the freezers for passion fruit puree; it may be labelled with its Spanish name, “maracuya.”

Perhaps the most classic Tiki drink that incorporates passion fruit syrup, and almost certainly the simplest, is the Hurricane. There are myriad different Hurricane recipes floating around, but Beachbum Berry attributes the original to Pat O’Brien’s restaurant in New Orleans. Nowadays even they use a powdered mix, but the original original was nothing but rum, lemon juice and passion fruit syrup.

How to make passion fruit syrup

Sugar
Water
Frozen passion fruit puree

Make some simple syrup by combining equal volumes of sugar and water and stirring over medium-low heat until the sugar is completely dissolved. Allow to cool completely. Meanwhile, break off some of the frozen passion fruit puree and allow to thaw. Once thawed, measure it out, and combine with an equal volume of simple syrup. Store in the refrigerator. It may separate out as it sits; if so, simply shake to recombine before using.

How to make a Hurricane

2 oz. dark rum, preferably Jamaican (I used Coruba, but Gosling’s works fine, too)
1 oz. passion fruit syrup
1 oz. lemon juice

Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker. Shake for 15 seconds, then strain into a glass filled with crushed ice. It should be a hurricane glass, if you have one. (I don’t.) Also, you may then have to double all the ingredients to fill the glass, as the original recipe actually calls for… and I just can’t drink that much in one drink!

I do have a strong connection to jerk chicken, though, because it was one of the first dishes I ever cooked for my husband. I was living on my own in a one-room bachelor apartment, so I didn’t have him over for dinner very often: It’s kind of awkward, especially early in a relationship, to have dinner in the room where the bed is. But that night, I marinated some chicken breasts (I know, I know) in bottled jerk sauce, and cooked them in the oven. (I didn’t have a grill at the time.) He found it so spicy that he couldn’t finish it.

Of course, given my interest in all things homemade, I was never going to use bottled jerk sauce forever. Every now and then, when I get a craving, I’ll make up a small batch, enough for one dinner, improving on the previous iteration. This is the latest version: it’s not perfect (for one thing, it wasn’t spicy enough!), but I think it’s pretty darn good.

How to make jerk sauce

1 tsp. ground allspice
1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. dried thyme
1/4 tsp. grated nutmeg
2 tsp. raw sugar
3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
3 green onions, sliced
1 Tbsp. white wine vinegar
1 Tbsp. lime juice
1 Tbsp. dark rum (optional)
2 Tbsp. vegetable oil
1 or more Scotch bonnet chillis, seeded and chopped
Black pepper to taste

Combine all ingredients in a food processor, and process until blended to a thin paste. Season 8 chicken pieces (I used thighs) with salt, then coat with the paste. Allow to marinate up to overnight. Grill the chicken until cooked through.

Okay, maybe that’s not literally true, but if you read early cocktail books, like Jerry Thomas’ Bartender’s Guide, you’ll see plenty of references to raspberry syrup… and none to grenadine. It’s an indispensable ingredient in the East India Cocktail and Clover Club, and makes a pretty fine substitute for grenadine in many other recipes, too.

Based on the state of my local farmers’ market last weekend, now is the perfect time to make raspberry syrup. The raspberries this year have been small (and expensive!), but intensely flavourful. Early methods for raspberry syrup involve letting the raspberries ferment for three days before straining, sweetening and cooking, but with modern refrigeration, there’s a much simpler approach.

How to make raspberry syrup

1 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1 pint raspberries, the more flavourful, the better

Combine sugar and water in a small pot and heat, stirring, until the sugar is dissolved. Allow to cool completely.

Place the berries in a non-reactive bowl and add enough of the cooled syrup to cover. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and allow to stand overnight.

The next day, strain the berries out, and pour the syrup into a clean bottle. Store in the fridge.

How to make a Knickerbocker

2 oz. light-bodied amber rum (ideally Cruzan Aged Dark rum, or substitute Havana Club 7)
3/4 oz. lime juice
1/2 oz. raspberry syrup
1/2 oz. Grand Marnier

Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake for 15 seconds, then strain into a rocks glass filled with more ice. Garnish with additional raspberries, or an orange wheel and a cherry, or whatever fruits you have on hand.

Mussels are one of my favourite types of seafood, partly because they can act as a blank canvas for any number of ingredient permutations, whether rooted in a specific cuisine or allowing for free-wheeling fusion. So they seemed like a good application for miso butter.

On its own, miso can be a hard ingredient to disperse in broth unless you have a miso-koshi, but the butter seems to make it easier to simply whisk it in, in much the same way that it helps you disperse flour more easily in a beurre manié.

How to make miso-butter mussels
For the miso butter
Miso of your choice (I like white miso in this preparation)
Butter, softened

For the mussels
2 lbs. mussels, cleaned
1 cup dashi
2 tsp. regular Japanese soy sauce
0.5 tsp. light-coloured (“usukuchi”) Japanese soy sauce (optional)
2.5 tsp. mirin
2 Tbsp. miso butter
Sliced green onions

• Make the miso butter by combining roughly equal parts of miso and butter, mixing well.
• Combine dashi, soy sauces and mirin in a pot large enough to hold the mussels comfortably. Bring to a boil, then add the mussels. Cover the pot, and continue to boil until the mussels have opened, up to 10 minutes, shaking occasionally.
• Remove the mussels to a bowl, discarding any that haven’t opened. Strain the cooking broth through a fine mesh strainer to remove any grit, rinse the pot, then return the broth to the pot over medium heat. Whisk in the miso butter, but do not boil. Return the mussels to the pot to warm through quickly, then divide the mussels and broth between two bowls. Serve, garnished with sliced green onions. If you like, do what I did and serve them with Robuchon-method fries dusted with some shichimi togarashi.

I was first introduced to the idea of formulating frozen desserts mathematically by Michael Laiskonis, and the idea was further driven home in Francisco Migoya’s book Frozen Desserts.

That book suggests that the ideal sugar content for a dessert sorbet is between 25° and 32° Brix – which is relatively easy if you’re building your formula on an unsweetened base, but harder if the base already has significant amounts of sugar, as bianco vermouth does. So how do you figure out how much sugar is in a commercial product like that, especially when a refractometer or hydrometer reading will be thrown off by the alcohol content?

Enter a bartender friend of mine who goes by the handle bostonapothecary on eGullet. In a series of blog posts, he outlines how to calculate the sugar content of various liqueurs, drawing on the fact that alcohol and sugar have a predictable impact on the specific gravity of the product.

I’m not great with solution arithmetic, but I figured since I was working in the kitchen and not the chemistry lab, I could ballpark it and end up with something that works. I started by measuring the specific gravity of the vermouth with a hydrometer borrowed from a home-brewer friend: it read 1.050. Using the table linked to by bostonapothecary, and the 16% alcohol content stipulated on the label, I calculated the specific gravity, corrected for alcohol, as roughly 1.070. According to the other table, this works out to 183 grams/litre of sugar. To get the sorbet base up to 28° Brix (roughly in the middle of the 25°-32° range Migoya suggests), I needed to add 130 grams more sugar.

But wait… I also knew that alcohol suppresses the freezing point, so I decided to dilute the vermouth slightly. I figured 12% was reasonable, so I added enough water to bring the alcohol content to 12%, then enough sugar to bring it up to about 313 grams/litre. I also added some citric acid for flavour, and a touch of xanthan gum for insurance.

When I churned the base, it came out with a very slushy texture, and I was worried that I had done the math wrong. But after leaving it in the freezer for 8 hours, the final texture was pretty close to what I was looking for, only a bit too soft.

Here’s the recipe I used, which I might tweak slightly next time, with a little less sugar and more citric acid, and perhaps a pinch of salt to balance out the inherent bitterness of the vermouth:

How to make Bianco vermouth sorbet

500 ml Martini bianco vermouth
167 ml water
88 g sugar
1.97 g xanthan gum (optional)
1.3 g (about 1/4 tsp.) citric acid

Dry blend the sugar, xanthan gum (if using) and citric acid. In a bowl, combine the water and vermouth, then add the sugar mixture and stir to dissolve. Chill thoroughly, then process in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Pour into a container, then freeze for 8 hours to harden.

Syrups are an indispensable part of mixology, and have been ever since the days of Jerry Thomas. Early on, a few basic types covered most needs: gomme syrup, raspberry syrup, pineapple syrup. These days, the sky’s the limit. For example, the Food & Wine Cocktails 2011 book includes recipes for black lime syrup, Chinese five-spice syrup, fennel syrup, juniper syrup, spiced honey syrup and vanilla spice syrup, to name a few. (This is a trend that I find somewhat frustrating, because the recipes are often scaled for bar-sized batches, and are so idiosyncratic in their flavour profiles that I can’t easily substitute them into other drinks. But I digress.)

Still, there are a few staple syrups in the modern bar that everyone should be familiar with, and those are what I’m going to cover in these posts. While most of these essential cocktail syrups can be bought, they can also be easily made at home, and the homemade versions often taste better.

Drinking culture abounds with rules of thumb: red wine with red meat, white wine with white meat, for example. For cocktails, a useful rule of thumb is brown spirits in winter, white spirits in summer. This is not to say there aren’t exceptions, but I certainly tend to drink more white rum, blanco tequila and gin in the summertime. And one of my favourite summer gin drinks is the Gimlet. It’s easy to mix, it’s a crowd pleaser and it’s highly refreshing. It’s also got a long pedigree, albeit one whose details are somewhat fuzzy, not unlike your recollection of last night’s adventures. (Check out this good exploration of the Gimlet’s backstory.)

The key ingredient in the Gimlet is lime cordial, and the benchmark for lime cordials is Rose’s. But you can also make it yourself. I made mine as a downsized batch of this recipe, omitting the rosewater and using an acid blend that I bought at a home-brewing store in place of the citric and tartaric acid. You could use citric acid alone, though the amount may need to be adjusted; the cordial should be tart and refreshing, but not overly puckery.

How to make lime cordial

1 cup water
1/2 cup granulated sugar
3/4 tsp. acid blend (or citric acid)
1/2 cup lime juice + juice of 1 additional lime
Peel of 1 and 1/3 limes
2 kaffir lime leaves, sliced

• Mix the sugar and acid together.
• Bring the water to the boil , then add the sugar/acid blend and stir to dissolve completely.
• Add the lime juice, lime peel, and lime leaves, and simmer for 10 minutes.
• Remove from heat, cover, and allow to cool. Steep overnight in the fridge.
• The next day, strain the mixture, pressing on the solids to extract as much liquid as possible. Bottle and store in the fridge.

How to make a Gimlet

1.5 oz. gin
3/4 oz. homemade lime cordial (or to taste)

Build the gin and lime cordial in a short glass over ice. Stir to combine. (Note that some people assume that Gimlets are made with vodka. They’re wrong. I won’t judge you if you want a “vodka Gimlet,” but “Gimlet,” unmodified, should always be gin. Too bad this doesn’t bear out in the real world.)