“Hazelnuts make the best desserts,” says one of our favorite food bloggers, Vicky of Stasty.com. I feel like a lot of desserts are almond based, and poor old hazelnuts never get a look in. Hazelnuts are more complex and work well in both sweet and savoury dishes.

“This is a different kind of cake than what you are used to,” she continues. “It’s intensely nutty and full of different textures—the soft cream, the crunchy brittle and the nutty moist cake.”

Vicky found the original recipe for brown butter hazelnut cake on SmittenKitchen.com. Moist and nutty, she serves it with fresh whipped cream and a garnish of hazelnut brittle (hazelnut praliné). You can also serve it à la mode, with vanilla ice-cream.

This original recipe uses unsalted butter, but Vicky recommends salted butter: Sweet salty flavors go so well together, she comments.

To us, fall says “hazelnut cake.” Photo courtesy Stasty.com, where everything most definitely is tasty!.

Ingredients

Go ahead: Take a bite. Photo courtesy
Stasty.com.

For The Caramelized Hazelnuts

 
For The Garnish

 
Preparation

1. PREHEAT oven to 350°F/175°C. Once the oven has come to temperature, place hazelnuts on a baking sheet and toast for about ten minutes, until just golden. Remove and allow to cool. Leave the oven at the same temperature for the cake. Meanwhile…

3. ADD the vanilla to the melted butter, and heat the butter once again until it becomes nut brown. There will be a few sticky brown butter solids at the bottom of the pot; be sure and stir these in. When cooked the mixture should be pale brown and smell slightly nutty. It should take about 5 minutes to make the melted butter nut brown. Take the butter off the heat and leave aside.

4. PLACE the cooled hazelnuts along with the confectioners’ sugar into a food processor and pulse until the nuts are finely ground and incorporated into the sugar. Add the flour, and pulse to combine.

5. WHIP the egg whites and granulated sugar in a stand mixer or in a large bowl using electric beaters. Whisk until fairly stiff: You should be able to turn the bowl upside down without anything spilling out!

6. FOLD both the dry ingredients (hazelnut sugar) and wet ingredients (nut butter) into the egg whites. It’s a little time consuming, but you need to be patient and carefully fold all the ingredients without knocking out any of that precious air. Once everything is incorporated, place the batter into the prepared tin. Place the cake in the oven for about 40-50 minutes. You can check if it’s done by sticking a sharp knife into the center of the cake. The knife should come out clean when the cake is cooked.

7. MAKE the praline: Place the hazelnuts in a large frying pan. Heat over a medium heat for about 3 -5 minutes, until the hazelnuts are golden and just toasted. Then, add the sugar and allow it to caramelize. Once the sugar turns golden brown, pour it and the hazelnuts onto a sheet of parchment paper. Allow to cool and harden for about an hour. Then place the praline into a plastic bag and crush it into small pieces using a rolling pin or heavy object.

8. DECORATE: Halve the cake and fill the middle with whipped cream; add the second layer and place more whipped cream on top. This is not a very high-risen cake, so this is the best way to serve it. Garnish the top with the hazelnut praline pieces.

On Saturday, as we were enjoying a cup of coffee on a bench at an entrance to Central Park, a stream of people in dirndl skirts and lederhosen passed by us, en route to an Oktoberfest celebration.

That, and the arrival of a sample bottle of Samuel Adams Oktoberfest beer, reminded us that it’s that time of year.

Oktoberfest is an annual 16-day beer festival held since 1810 in Munich, Germany, the heart of Bavaria. While it’s called Oktoberfest (German for October feast), the event begins in late September and ends in early October.

It is said to be the world’s largest fair, with more than 6 million people drinking more than 7 million liters of beer.

Oktoberfest-style beer is traditionally the first beer of the brewing season in Germany: the Beaujolais Nouveau of Germany, as it were. It’s a Märzen-style beer: a lager that is amber in color, smooth and malty and about 6% or higher ABV.

A glass of Samuel Adams Oktoberfest beer.
Photo courtesy Fequals.com.

Märzen gets its name from the last month in which the beer was traditionally brewed. Before refrigeration, March was the last month that beers could be “lagered,” or put in cold storage. The beers would then age during the summer, to be enjoyed by fall harvest.

Brats and German potato salad: classic
Oktoberfest fare. Photo by Rudi Sills | IST.

Other cities around the world hold their own Oktoberfests, and you can do your own on a small scale: Gather the beer and the refreshments and call your beer-loving friends.

Oktoberfest beer is typically enjoyed with a variety of traditional German foods. Märzen’s rich roasted malt character pairs perfectly with traditional brats and roasted meats. The roasty malts also complement and mellow the sweetness of desserts with similar flavors, like the caramel richness of crème brûlée, a caramel sundae or blondies (not Oktoberfest traditions).

Here’s our guide to food parings and for throwing an Oktoberfest party.
 
HOIST A STEIN

Each Oktoberfest season, Samuel Adams hosts a National Stein Hoisting Competition at thousands of bars, eateries and festivals nationwide.

Stein hoisting events will be hosted at Oktoberfest celebrations in Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Denver, Miami, Nashville, Washington, D.C., among other places, from now through October 20. Visit SamuelAdams.com for full event listings.
 
HOW MANY TYPES OF BEER CAN YOU NAME?

Check out the different types of beer in our Beer Glossary.

One of the largest trends in education are MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses. The concept is being led by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which founded edX, the not-for-profit online learning enterprise.

Harvard’s popular Science & Cooking course, which brings some of the world’s top chefs into the science classroom, will start on October 8th at edX. “SPU27x: Science and Cooking—From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Physics,” is an online adaptation of an internationally recognized Harvard course that uses “deconstructivist” cooking techniques to illustrate the principles of science and engineering in the classroom.

Top chefs and Harvard researchers explore how everyday cooking and haute cuisine can illuminate basic principles in physics and engineering, and vice versa.

What makes gelatin go from powder to solid? It’s one of the many chemical reactions that will be explained in the course. Here’s the recipe. Photo courtesy Jelly Shot Test Kitchen.

Chef instructors include some of the world’s most acclaimed modern chefs. A sampling:

The syllabus. Image courtesy Harvard
University.

The original course grew out of collaboration between faculty at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Alícia Foundation, led by groundbreaking Spanish chef Ferran Adrià. When Adrià gave a public lecture at Harvard SEAS in 2008, his talk drew an audience that spilled beyond the auditorium doors. Encouraged by the crowds, faculty in applied physics developed a four-month undergraduate course that now, in turn, has inspired this offering on edX.

During each week of the course, Adrià and other top chefs will reveal the secrets of some of their most famous culinary creations—often right in their own restaurants. Alongside this exhibition of cooking mastery, the Harvard instructors will explain the science behind the recipe.

You can:

READY TO LEARN MORE?

Head to edX.

Barista Laila Ghambari, a member of the executive council of Barista Guild of America, has created a signature fall recipe for De’Longhi. Among other fine appliances, De’Longhi makes coffeemakers, from drip and steam coffee to espresso and the Nespresso and Nescafe Dolce systems.

Laila’s recipe can be easily made by at-home baristas. Combining the flavors of cinnamon and brown sugar into a delicious cup of coffee, you can enjoy it with dessert, or instead of dessert.

You can also try this fun technique with any other favorite pastries or even cereal.

RECIPE: COFFEE CAKE INFUSED LATTE

Ingredients

Coffee cake is in your latte. Photo courtesy De’Longhi.

1. SOAK coffee cake in milk overnight in the refrigerator.

2. STRAIN the coffee cake-infused milk into a container or your machine’s milk container, being careful to remove any large cake pieces

3. USE the milk to make any espresso-based beverage. Garnish with an optional shake of cinnamon and by all means, enjoy a standard portion of coffee cake with your drink.
  

Some might say that if this is our biggest problem, we should consider ourselves lucky. But the frustration of trying again and again to fish out a tiny piece of egg shell is it for us.

Maybe our local eggs have thinner shells that splinter more easily. But the result is too much time spent each day at this thankless task.

We have tried our best to fish out those fragments, using a:

 
The road to success is invariably long annoying.

And, stop buying extra large eggs (explanation below).

ARE EGG SHELLS GETTING THINNER?

Egg shells get thinner when calcium, phosphorus and vitamin D3 are insufficient in the hens’ diet. Mass commercial producers tend to cut costs wherever they can, so the hens may be a bit nutrient-deficient. Instead, try eggs from a local farmer. Small farmers and hobbyists often use ground oyster shells to provide additional calcium.

Summer eggs can have thinner shells, because in hot weather the calcium is retained less efficiently by the hen. The calcium doesn’t go directly from the digestive tract to the shell, by the way. First it’s absorbed into the bones, and then reabsorbed into the body to help create the shell.

Other factors that can contribute to thinner shells include age, stress and general health of the hen. The extra large eggs we’ve been using come from older hens, and those shells are naturally thinner. As the hens age, their bodies can’t keep up with the loss of calcium through shell manufacture. Eureka!

Solution: Try large or medium eggs.

If you have tips or suggestions, please share them!