Dabbling in Mexican Candy

I don't believe that I have yet given a Pearwise shout-out to Lynne Rosetto-Kasper and The Splendid Table, her fabulous NPR show. It's one of the staples in the set of podcasts that keeps me company on my frequent treks between Toronto and Ithaca. One of the things I love about the show is her knack for identifying great new cookbooks, which I wind up purchasing more often than perhaps I should.

It's one of these interviews that is the reason I'm writing about Mexican candy today. It's not something I had ever really thought much about, at least since the occasional treat in middle school Spanish class or the spicy Pixy Stix-like candy that kids from Mexico used to get in care packages at camp.

Yet…Lynne's interview with Fany Gerson about her book -- My Sweet Mexico -- really intrigued me. She talked about coconut and limes; about candies that had origins in convents; about candied tropical fruits like tamarind and others. And this was suddenly an arena I wanted to play in.

The book is beautiful and fascinating. I've now made a few recipes from it, and they've been very unlike anything I've ever done before. This makes for some fun time in the kitchen, but also makes the book occasionally difficult to cook from. I can deal with some vagueness in a cookie recipe because I've made hundreds (thousands?) of cookies and know roughly what's going to happen. I know less about what "thick" means as a time to stop heating a mixture of coconut and sugar (um…how thick should it be?). The book assumes a bit of expertise I don't always have, and the suggested timings seem to be a bit off. But the results have been tasty.

A couple candies so far. First, I tried a lime 'jamoncillo' or milk fudge. This basically is the product of slowly cooking down sweetened condensed milk, condensed milk, and butter, flavored with lots of lime zest. It was a lot of stirring (though much less than if one had started with sugar and non-condensed milk; this is a shortcut), but the result was rich and flavorful. Many other flavors are possible.

I also made cocada -- a coconut caramel candy. These were not all that pretty, so no photo. Here you basically make a caramel syrup using coconut water, then stir in grated coconut (I used frozen) and cook it until quite thick (defined here as being able to see the bottom of the pot when stirring), and then add some lime zest. The resulting product is then formed into little balls. These were extremely sweet, but tasty. Mine came out a bit soupier than the ones in the cookbook pictures. I think this may have been because I used frozen coconut.

With that in mind, I bought a fresh coconut when I made limones rellenos de coco -- coconut-stuffed limes. These had fascinated me from the start; whole limes cooked, hollowed out, sweetened with sugar syrup and then filled with sweet fresh coconut. They were a lot of work, especially given the amount of new techniques I had to figure out. I had never cracked a coconut shell and grated the meat, nor had I ever hollowed out a lime. I'm still not sure I did either of these things correctly. The result, however, is pretty cool looking, I have to say. These are for my colleagues on Wednesday, so I'll withhold judgment until they've tasted them.

Some interesting things here. I'm wanting to learn more about candy, and to keep playing with this book. I'll keep you posted and would love to hear about your experiences.

Carrot Cupcakes With Rau Ram Icing

This cupcake began with that papaya salad in Cambodia. It was unique among the papaya salads I've had because it had a hefty dose of rau ram. Rau ram, a southeast Asian herb (aka Vietnamese coriander), has a vaguely citrus-y taste that is strong, but doesn't overpower. (I find it very unlike coriander/cilantro, so I'm not sure where the alternate name came from.) It gave the papaya salad a lovely fresh sweetness that contrasted with the salty fish sauce, sour lime and green tomato, and hot chilies. (Image of rau ram borrowed from Kitchentoworld.com).

I had not tasted or thought much about rau ram in a while, but that papaya salad was a jarring reminder that it might be a fun flavor to play with in a cupcake. Its sweetness and citrusiness might play nicely with sugar, and could be used like basil or sage. So I spent some time thinking about this.

First idea was to see if I could come up with a cupcake based directly on the papaya salad. No fish sauce or dried shrimp, but a similar combination of hot, sour, salty and sweet (the four key flavors in Thai cooking). Green papayas and mangoes are not unlike apples or carrots in consistency, so I probably could have used them directly. The problem is that they don't have a lot of flavor; they're really more of a delivery device in the salad. I might try this later, but wasn't sure how they'd stand up in baking. So I decided to use carrots. They're sweet and have a similar texture; and carrot cake recipes are abundant.

The problem was that carrot cake recipes are loaded with cinnamon and nutmeg, flavors you'd never find within miles of a good papaya salad. That wasn't going to work. So I started to think about substitutes. I started with a carrot cupcake recipe from Epicurious.

Papaya salads start by mixing garlic cloves, fresh chilies, and salt with a mortar and pestle. Garlic seemed inappropriate for a cupcake, but there's no harm in chilies and salt. Ginger, however, is a taste that makes its way into both sweet and savory dishes. It can plausibly be substituted for either garlic or cinnamon in the right context. So by the transitive property, so I used a teaspoon of ground ginger in place of cinnamon, along with some cayenne powder instead of the nutmeg.

I still needed tartness, so I threw in the finely grated zest of a lime just before baking.

And I haven't forgotten about the rau ram, which is pretty easy to find in Toronto's Spadina Chinatown (but you have to recognize it -- nothing is labeled). It was, well, the icing on the cake. Borrowing another technique from Vanilla Garlic, I chopped up the leaves and cooked them with sugar and water to form a thick syrup. I then mixed this with cream cheese (from Mendel's Creamery), butter, and powdered sugar to get a rich icing with little flecks of rau ram.

We'll see what people think of these...

Update after eating: The cake was moist, delicious and gingery. If I do it again, I'd like to add a bit more chili so it burns more. The rau ram, unfortunately, got a bit lost. I'm going to think about ways to possibly make it stronger, and also incorporate it into other ingredients. Considering some herbal candies if I can come up with a way to do it...