The Winner Takes It All (The Loser Standing Small)

Belated congratulations to my brother-in-law John, who was this year's grand champion of the Annual Koyama Family Poker tournament. This year's competition was fierce with a strong showing from the Anzais and Teradas, but John outmaneuvered them all. This year's tournament including trash talking, high stakes, and even a bloodied toe (which we won't go into too many details here). Here's John in the final showdown with Marti:

We hear that the Kentucky Posthauers have issued a Throwdown, and claim that this year's tournament didn't have quite the same luster as it has had in past years due to their absence. Hmmm... we'll see next year when we will introduce the winner's trophy!

p.s.-- note the traditional Koyama poker playing libations (well for those over 21 years old, anyways)-- nothing says "serious poker player" like tiny glasses of Bailey's!

Peppermint Jumble Takes a Tumble-- First Culinary Disaster!

Christmas dinner at my parents' house is a group effort. Jasmine and I decided that our contribution would be two desserts-- a bread pudding and, as the main showpiece, a 4-layer peppermint chocolate layer cake. Jasmine found the recipe in Gourmet magazine, which was a delicious confection made up of 4 layers of dense chocolate cake, with each layer separated by a delicious 2-layer filling of dark chocolate ganache and peppermint butter cream, with the whole thing covered in a fluffy and slightly sweet peppermint marshmallow meringue.

"No problem," I said confidently to Jasmine. "We can do this-- I've made lots of layer cakes before!" In my mind I heard the crowd cheering as Jasmine and I were parading around the room our towering masterpiece of chocolate and peppermint. Little did I know what was in store for us.

Jasmine started with the chocolate ganache and peppermint buttercream-- piece of cake (ha ha! couldn't resist). Next, we tackled the two round cakes which would form the 4 layers. The batter was very chocolately and yummy. My job was to butter and flour the cake pans. Our first indication that something was awry was then the cakes took about 1 1/2 times longer to firm up in the center than the recipe called for. "Oh well," we thought, "that's just the way it is." While the gift unwrapping was going on, I went to flip the cakes out of their pans. I confidently turned over the first pan, fully expecting the cake to slide out with ease in all of its glistening, round, chocolately glory.

Instead, as I flipped over the pan, only about a 1/3 of the cake came out, and it didn't smoothly glide out, but instead plopped out while ripping away and leaving the bottom of the cake firmly attached to the bottom of the pan. "Hmmm... well, that's ok, the next one will be fine." Nope. The second cake also clung to the pan like a baby to its mother. Jasmine and I stared at the cakes in dismay. "No problem," I over-confidently told Jasmine, "this has happened to me before, we can just stick it together with frosting and no one will know the difference!" "Oh-kay," said Jasmine doubtfully.

I cheerfully started slicing the cakes in half to make the requisite 4 layers. Unfortunately, the cakes started to further crumble and fall apart in chunks. "No problem," I reassured Jasmine again. By this time Jasmine was highly suspect of my layer cake abilities, irrespective of how may times I reassured her that a load of frosting cures many sins.

We tried layering the cakes and holding them together with a dual cement of ganache and a second layer of buttercream. What we ended up with was this:
Which doesn't look bad, except that after about 30 seconds a slow avalanche started as the ganache buttercream cement gave way, and it turned into this:

Still supremely confident in my mortaring skills, like a fool I continued to tell Jasmine that it wasn't anything the frosting couldn't fix. Now Jasmine was starting to seriously question if we should just give up and have Mom defrost another dessert she had hidden away in the freezer.
"No, no, no," I said, "we'll be fine! Bring out the frosting!" So we did. We frosted and frosted. And frosted some more. And this is what we got for our efforts: The slow avalanche turned into a fast one, and the smooth and fluffy peppermint meringue frosting was no match for the tumbling layers of cake as they tore away from the mountain of cake and ganache/buttercream mortar. "What are we going to do," we thought as we stared at the slowly disintegrating heap as large chunks of cake continued their slow descent. We better get the other cake out of the freezer! We thought about it for a while, and then Jasmine came up with a brilliant idea. We would get a large glass bowl, put the cake in it, and pretend that all along it was a new type of pavlova or trifle! Hooray for creativity! No one would be know of our culinary disaster, and we would still be heroes!

I went to the garage and fetched our favorite large smoked glass bowl, which held many picnics worth of potato salad and ambrosia. We hefted the cake up, which was VERY heavy, and plopped it in. Suddenly, our plan didn't seem so genius at all, because this is what it looked like:

Instead of a lovely, multilayered trifle, it looked like what it was-- a failed cake dumped into a bowl. But we had nothing to lose at this point, so we removed the wax paper, kept smoothing the top, and removing the excess cake that was flopping over the side like dead fish.

And, voila, wouldn't you know, after a quick sprinking of crushed peppermint and chocolate shavings, it came out looking like this:

We decided to call it "Peppermint Dump Cake" because of its unfortunate provenance. Our dad came up with a much more PR-friendly name of "Peppermint Jumble." Regardless of what it was called, it sure was tasty with a mix of different textures. Rich chocolate cake with the slightly bitter dark chocolate ganache, sweet and rich peppermint buttercream, cut by the slightly sweet and fluffy peppermint marshmallow. It was hit at the party, although it didn't induce the envious stares that I had originally pictured in my mind.

The only problem was that it was a HUGE cake. We ate and ate, and then had some for breakfast and snack a couple of days after Christmas, until we both threw in the towel, admitted defeat, and threw away the rest.

It was a good lesson in improvisation, and how to make dessert from a dump.