Dinner and a Movie: Breakfast at Tiffany’s

“I’ll never get used to anything.  Anybody that does, they might as well be dead. ” – Holly Golightly

Susan at StickyGooeyCreamyChewy, chose one of my favourite films ever as inspiration. coincidence love! as Y said on tumblr. rewatching the movie prompted a flurry of scribbling on sheets of paper – flavour diagrams and ideas – and furious consultation of cookbooks. after some input from various personages of impeccable taste, i concluded that there is no one food or flavour that adequately describes Breakfast at Tiffany’s. (read: i am totally indecisive and it’s just an excuse for me to bake stuff over summer break) i suspect that this is a project that will continue long after this month’s Dinner and a Movie ends (taking photos and making movie-inspired desserts is too fun) but this is what i’ve gotten out of my kitchen so far. more follow-up posts to come – maybe! there’s still summer homework languishing somewhere in my room…

you notice so much more when you rewatch a film. i’d missed, for example, all the WWII political undertones in The Sound of Music when i was about 7. similarly, i’d only noticed, this time, the insouciant way Holly pours herself a champagne glass of milk and has a pair of pink flats in the refridgerator. quel glamour, yes? so why not a glass of Iced Milk and Cream for breakfast, if you’ve never done it before?

slightly out of focus

miss top banana in the shock department also reminded me of cinnamon and honey, especially when she’s singing in the Moon River scene. something nostalgic, warm, wistful and familiar. Cinnamon Toast fit the bill – crispy, crackly-sweet and smelling like Christmas. this one’s a slightly froufrou take on cinnamon toast, with butter-sauteed sliced bananas adding a new creamy dimension to it. chopped candied ginger is optional and adds a nice, unexpected kick, but makes it overly sweet. maybe grated fresh ginger would work? and a drizzle of honey is a drizzle too much, unless there’s a little less sugar involved.

Capote’s Golightly liked exotic food, and she would probably have liked Lemon-Mint Turkish Delight, adapted from this recipe, although perhaps not the – excuse my French – fuckload of stirring involved, and i still ended up with a few lumps in the first lemon-mint batch. replacing some of the water with the juice of half a lemon and the zest of one gave it a little more zing. i’d use peppermint extract or oil as well as mint leaves next time, instead of the faintly medicinal Twinings mint tea, to give it a mintea-er flavour.

requisite silly and badly taken photo of the Pie with dessert

Red Wine Granita – a sophisticated way to say ice kacang without the trimmings or simply shaved ice, recipe via Alice Medrich’s Bittersweet. it apparently turns any not-so-stellar wine into a perfectly acceptable dessert, and was a good way to use up a bottle of opened, barely drunk Kobe wine that’d been languishing in our pantry for three years or so. a cup of red wine, 3 tbsp of sugar (to taste) and a quarter cup of water, stir, freeze, shred and flake with a fork every few hours or so.

not all went well, however…since Holly wasn’t much of a cook, i may as well ‘fess up to my own shortcomings: i can’t bake a sheet cake, one of the things that every other baker can do. cupcakes, panna cotta, even a layered Snickers – anything but sheet cake. ask me to put the batter in a 9-inch cake pan and it will fail. maybe it’s down to oven temperature or something, but it will pass the skewer test, have a golden crust and its innards will be wet and soggy and an epic fail. alas, there goes half a kilogram of white chocolate (not Valrhona, thank goodness) – two batches of cake down the drain.

i couldn’t face another baking disaster, so i made a klutzproof mousse instead – one flavoured with rosewater and the other with coffee. strictly speaking, it’s not a mousse since there are no eggs. egg yolks lend body and richness to a mousse, while egg whites lighten it and give it what my mum calls a “spongy” texture. in fact, it occurred to me that this is really a pared down creme Chantilly, with white chocolate replacing the sugar. the lack of eggs here then means that it’s just the cream and chocolate talking, at once dense and whisper-light, all velvety like a cloud in your mouth. it’s like picking a cloud out from the blue skies, and finding out that it’s lightly perfumed, with a whisper of sweetness. it’s like a day without the mean reds. it’s like being at Tiffany’s.

i should just shut up now, and let the recipe do the talking.

White Chocolate Chantilly Cloud
the extra cream at the end is optional, but without it it will be gooey and dense, and will not have that desirable cloudlike texture. this is a really flexible and versatile recipe – stir in liqueur, extracts, rosewater – whatever you fancy. use it to garnish cakes, in place of whipped cream on a sundae or simply have it on its own. use a good white chocolate which actually contains cocoa butter. beautiful eaten as dessert, even better illicitly swiped from the fridge at midnight when everyone else is asleep. ahem.

200 – 230g heavy cream
approx. 120g white chocolate, finely chopped, placed in a bowl (there can be some leeway in measurement here)
flavouring of choice (a few drops of extract, half a tablespoon or less of rosewater, etc)
approx. 100g creme fraiche or heavy cream (optional)

heat the cream in a small saucepan till it just boils. remove from the heat and pour over the white chocolate. let stand for 3 minutes, then stir until melted and smooth. at this point, add the flavouring of your choice. chill for at least 1 1/2 hours. remove from fridge and whip till it holds stiff peaks. in another bowl, whip the creme fraiche or cream till it holds stiff peaks. gently fold into the white chocolate mousse. pipe into glasses, chill for another hour. eat absolutely cold, straight from the fridge.

PS. i found a dusting of cocoa powder necessary to counterbalance the slightly cloying flavour white chocolate tends to have, but it’s not entirely necessary. it tastes surprisingly lovely with rosewater – the bitter cocoa hits your tastebuds first, followed by a rush of creamy, faintly flowery sweetness. for coffee, a combination of cocoa and espresso powder.

thanks very much to Susan@StickyGooeyCreamyChewy for hosting this event! and to N and Pie for, uh, posing.