You don’t have to leave a /2008/05/braised-lamb-according-to-heston.html”>lamb to braise for five hours – it will be good at higher oven temperatures as well. This one is rubbed with a herb mixture of fresh garlic greens, sage, thyme and rosemary, quickly browned on all sides, and then braised in white wine in a rather warm oven (about 175°C) until the inner temperature was about 65°C. Delicious!
We hosted Google I/O at the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week, with 3,000+ developers in attendance. They took advantage of nearly 100 in-depth technical sessions, on-site massage therapists, and 3,500 pounds of assorted snacks (including 395 pounds of M&Ms and 190 pounds of Gummi Bears).
While we can’t embed snacks or massages directly into this browser — we’re hoping the Gears team will make this possible next year — presentations will be posted to Google Code shortly. In the meantime, feel free to check out the Google I/O keynote:
I have some hesitations about posting this right smack in the middle of summer, since saffron is so very much a christmas spice here in Sweden, but really, don’t let that deter you from making these delicious truffles. I also know that many people aren’t very fond of white chocolate. Well, I’m not one of them, and apparently, neither are any of the girls here at work because they scarfed these down like crazy when I brought them in for our morning coffee. I don’t think I’ve ever had so many beg me for a recipe!
So – I’m pretty confident about these. They really are easy to make, and they’re totally delicious. Even in the summer.
Saffron White Chocolate Truffles
makes 30
200 g white chocolate
100 ml cream (full-fat)
0,5 g saffron
1 tbsp honey
powdered sugar
Finely chop the chocolate and place in a bowl. Mix cream, honey and saffron and bring to a boil. Add this to the chocolate and stir well until it’s melted. Place in the fridge to cool and to firm up. It needs to be pretty stiff before you can roll it. Shape small balls and roll them in powdered sugar. I then placed mine on a baking sheet and froze them for a few minutes, and then I just kept them in a bowl in the fridge. They kept very well!
Recipe in Swedish:
Saffrans- och vitchokladtryffel
I still find having preserves with your cheese to be quite a new and exciting concept. Falbygdens, a cheese producer, is taking it to the next levels with these cheese toppings. They’re released five flavors (pear-truffle, strawberry, orange, fig-truffle and honey-truffle) and they mostly consist of dried fruit, mustard seeds and spices. What you do is dip your cheese in it – or actually, try to cram as much of the things on top of your cheese, because it doesn’t stick very well. Tasty? Um, sure. Not bad. But I really find it more of a novelty. Honey-truffle was my favorite, by the way.
It has been a year since the launch of Google Gears, and we wanted to offer a glimpse into what’s changing, and what’s ahead.
First of all, to better reflect the open nature of this project, we’ve decided to rename ourselves. Henceforth, the project will be simply “Gears.” We want to make it clear that Gears isn’t just a Google thing. We see Gears as a way for everyone to get involved with upgrading the web platform.
Our first year focused on offline-enabling applications, but that was only the beginning. Our broader goal has always been to close the gap between web apps and native apps by giving the browser new capabilities. There is no shortage of web application pain points to be addressed! In its second year, Gears will begin to tackle some of these problems.
On the applications front, there have been a number of exciting developments. Today, MySpace is launching enhanced functionality for MySpace mail using Gears. They are using the original Gears Database API with Full Text Search to enable fast and easy search and sort capabilities. The latest build of WordPress also integrates Gears, to improve performance, and to let users manage their blogs offline. And as many of you know, the Google Docs team added offline capabilities just a few weeks ago.
Gears remains a completely open source project. We strongly support web standards, and we continue to work with the W3C and WHATWG committees to help define standards for browsers.
Finally, we want Gears to be available to everyone, regardless of platform or browser. To that end, we are currently adding Firefox 3 and Safari support. And Opera is working to support Gears on both desktop and mobile. These new platforms will nicely complement our current set: Internet Explorer and Firefox, across Windows, Mac, Linux, and even Windows Mobile.
We’re very excited about our progress this past year, and we have even bigger plans for 2008. All of you are welcome to jump in and join our fledgling community — we’re helping to push the web forward, and it’s a lot of fun! 
Daring Bakers time again! I was pretty excited when the theme for this month was announced: Opera Cake! As you might be able to tell from my photos, I didn’t really have much of an idea what it should look like, so I decided to just go my own way on that. It has four, or five components:
-nutty meringue-like cake layers
-syrup to moisten the cake layers
-buttercream
-mousse
-glaze
While normally done in chocolate versions, we were asked to keep things light and spring-timey, and we were given recipes for almond cake layers, a neutral buttercream and a white chocolate mousse and glaze. I decided early on that I’d go with raspberries and pistachio, so pistachio-almond cake layers, a simple vanilla syrup, a raspberry buttercream, and a white chocolate mousse. I opted to skip the glaze – I feared it would make the cake overly sweet, and besides, I don’t trust my frosting skills enough to pour a smooth glaze. (Oh, we’re supposed to be… daring? Sorry.) I added some whole raspberries for a nice, fresh and fruity touch.
So. The cake layers! I used about 150 g of pistachios, and 75 g blanched almonds. I ground them together in my almond grinder (which is technically my neighbor’s, I still haven’t returned it…) and then proceeded with the recipe. I used round springform pans (as I didn’t have a rectangular pan of a size that would work here), but… well, I had a bit of a problem. I was aiming for three cake layers, but I guess I didn’t estimate well enough because one ended up much thicker than the others. I did keep it in the oven for longer, but when I went to assemble the cake, it turned out to be almost completely uncooked in the center. Oops! So, my cake only has two layers. Never mind…
Syrup. I actually didn’t make this, as I had some vanilla syrup in the fridge from previous experiments.
Buttercream. I was a bit scared, because people in the forums had said that they’d had problems with this. I was in fact so scared that I turned to my /2007/04/raspberry-chocolate-cake.html”>own buttercream recipe, adapted from Rose Levy Berenbaum, instead. I didn’t have quite enough unsalted butter at hand, so instead of the 225 g I used in that recipe last time, I only used about 185. No difference as far as I can tell, though. And I added cold-pressed raspberry extract rather than raspberry purée – and, the flavor is at least as good as when I used actual raspberries. Go figure! I did add a smidge of color as well, raspberry buttercream has to be pink, right?
On to the mousse. Where I again, didn’t trust the recipe. I’ve tried the “fold melted chocolate into whipped cream” before, but I like my mousses to be a bit sturdier than those… So – I went for a slightly different approach: I chopped about 200 g of white chocolate finely and put in a bowl. I then heated 300 ml of cream, and poured it on top of the chocolate. I stirred it all together until the chocolate was completely melted and then I put it in the fridge overnight. Next day, on the day of cake assembly, I whipped it like you would any whipping cream, and it turned into a beautiful, thick, silky mousse. (This is a great method for making cake filling actually – it works with pretty much any chocolate, and I’ve used melted candy /2007/12/call-me-log-lady.html”>before, very yummy. But you MUST leave it to cool overnight.)
And no glaze. So for assembly, I moistened my cake layers, covered the first layer with raspberry buttercream and raspberries, placed the second layer on top, covered it with more buttercream and then frosted the sides as well. I refrigerated it until it was really firm, and then used the white chocolate mousse all over the cake. A final touch: a sprinkling of pistachios.
This cake was a huge hit! I served it for my birthday party and everyone really loved it. I personally am not a big fan of buttercream in cakes, I find it too stiff and well, too buttery. But the whole raspberries lightened things up, and kept the cake from being too sweet. And the white chocolate mousse was delicious!
You can find the recipes here, the blogroll here, and the discussion forums – open to everyone! – here. The four hosts this month was Ivonne of Creampuffs in Venice, Lis of La Mia Cucina, Fran of Apples Peaches Pumpkin Pie and Shia of Whiskful.
The Google Mini has been making its way across the globe, reaching thousands of businesses that have taken to our little blue box, and along the way picking up suggestions for improvement from devoted users. As a result we’ve just introduced to the Mini three greatly requested features that can make search inside businesses even more powerful. Finding the most up-to-date and authoritative document within your company has never been easier now that you can search for documents filed in shared drives and weight documents by date or value. We’ve also added support for six new languages (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Hungarian, and Polish).
We’re listening, so keep those suggestions coming.
Read more about the new Mini features on the Google Enterprise Blog.
