The Tortefeasor

TWD: Translucent Maple Tuiles

2010-12-07T19:49:00.002-05:00

I had a feeling that this week's TWD recipe would give me fits, and my feeling was correct. Clivia from Bubie's Little Baker chose the Translucent Maple Tuiles -- those beautiful, delicate, paper thin cookies that I'd previously only seen atop elegant desserts in fancy restaurants. But as soon as I saw this was the pick, I knew I had to make them (to further my baking education and all).

The batter itself is so easy to mix up that it almost compensates for the ordeal that ensues once these come out of the oven. Mix together butter, brown sugar, maple syrup and flour -- no need to even haul out the Kitchen Aid; you can just use a sturdy spatula or hand mixer for this. The dough needs to chill well; I let mine refrigerate over night. I figured I'd bake them up first thing in the morning and then snap a few shots in that pretty 8 a.m. light -- you know, while the sun's golden rays illuminated the intricate patterns of my translucent honeycomb cookies.

Reality quickly jolted me out of that daydream. These are supposed to get baked on an unbuttered cookie sheet. They spread extremely thin, and then after they set for just a second, you're supposed to quickly get them off the sheet with a spatula and transfer them to a rolling pin, which will mold them into their traditional curved form. But when I went to slide the spatula under mine, the cookie completely crumpled into itself and dissolved into a pitiful pile of maplebuttersugarflour. I tried with a few other cookies and got the same result. There was NO way these babies were coming off with a spatula, at least not in my kitchen. I scraped the cookie remains into the trash and proceeded with the non-cookie aspects of my day, still undecided about whether I would try again with the rest of the dough.

But as good fortune would have it, when I was in carpool line this afternoon I jumped onto Facebook (carpool line is my favorite time to Facebook, which may explain why a disproportionate amount of my Facebook activity involves complaining about carpool line) and saw Tracey's post on these tuiles, in which she mentions Nancy's suggestion to make the cookies on individual squares of parchment to make for easier handling. That sounded like a brilliant idea, so I rounded up the children, took a quick detour to paint pottery with Santa:

and hurried home to try the tuiles again using the parchment trick. And it worked perfectly! I never had to touch a spatula; I simply transferred the cookies directly from the parchment square onto the rolling pin. Nancy, you are the best!

Note the incandescent light illuminating the intricate patterns of my translucent honeycomb cookies

I know he needs a haircut and plan to make it a top priority very soon

I only baked two of these cookies (successfully) so far, so I have a bunch of dough in the fridge to bake up later. David, while in the midst of enjoying his cookie, asked innocently "so you have to bake these one at a time?" I explained that others could probably bake several of these at a time, but yes, *I* need to bake them one at a time (well, I can probably work up to two or three eventually).

I don't know if I'll ever think of these as a stand-alone dessert or even a stand-alone cookie, but they are totally delicious, and a really lovely accompaniment to just about any dessert. What a fun pick - thanks Clivia! You can find her terrific post about these cookies here.

TWD: Cranberry Orange Galette

2010-11-16T00:01:00.000-05:00

This week's TWD recipe is the wonderfully seasonal Cranberry Lime Galette. When I saw that this was on the calendar, I initially thought that I'd make it for our wedding anniversary, which happened to fall on the weekend before the galette was due. It never occurred to me in the first 10 years of our marriage to bake pies to celebrate our anniversary, but then I started baking, and when you bake as much as I do, you make the dessert fit whatever occasion happens to pop up (and you actually invent whole new occasions so that you have an excuse to eat the dessert). As I read the recipe through when still thinking it would be the anniversary pie, I decided to go with the cranberry orange version, which Dorie describes as "a little less edgy but no less enticing" -- that seemed to fit a 12th anniversary just perfectly. But then we were invited to attend the Thanksgiving feast at David's grandmother's retirement home, and the "Baked Good Foisting Opportunity" bells just started blaring furiously in my head; we'd have to find another way to celebrate 12 years of wedded bliss, because this Cranberry Orange Galette would be taking its rightful place on the retirement home dessert table.

I made Dorie's pie crust again, and I think this was my best/most successful pie crust ever. I even rolled something approximating a circle. But I must have been spending too much time congratulating myself on the crust and not enough time concentrating on the filling, because I forgot the fresh ginger (which I think would have added a nice dimension to the other flavors). The rest of the filling was easy - cranberries, apples, dried cranberries, brown sugar, orange zest, orange marmalade.

Top the crust with a ground nut/bread crumb mix and then the filling, fold the edges up, then bake.

This baked up beautifully and was a rustic, yet attractive (in a homely way), dessert. We (the extended family) decided that David and his brother would attend the feast, because we knew the energy level at the party would be high enough without my 8, 5 and 3 year old running around. I packed it up carefully for David and made sure that he knew to tell the person in charge that there were nuts in the dessert (in case of nut allergies) and also sugar, fat, gluten, etc. -- basically, this pie was one big, delicious dietary violation. I also told him that he had to eat a piece and report back to me, and with that, I sent him on his way. When he got back later that evening, he gave me some general positive reviews about the galette, which was fine at the time, but when I sat down to write this post I told him that I needed descriptive adjectives, and "the galette was good" wouldn't cut it. So he told me it was "tart." And then he added "I figured you'd just say that it baked up well. The crust was perfect. All the old people loved it, and there was none left. It was a nice departure from the sea of pecan pies."

Whitney, April and Elizabeth of Celestial Confections chose this galette. Thanks for the crowd-pleading pick, ladies!

TWD: Not-Just-for-Thanksgiving Cranberry Shortbread Cake

2010-11-09T22:28:00.004-05:00

This week's TWD recipe is for the Not-Just-For-Thanksgiving Cranberry Shortbread cake, chosen my one of my favorite bloggers, Jessica of Singleton in the Kitchen. Any child who watched cartoons in the early 80s could tell you that Orange Juice is Not Just for Breakfast Anymore, but the fact that Cranberry Shortbread Cake is not just for Thanksgiving anymore has not been as widely known -- until now. Because thanks to Dorie (for creating this recipe) and Jessica (for choosing it) I have no doubt that TWDers everywhere are spreading the word about this cake and its late October/early November/anytime fabulousness.

The recipe begins with a cranberry/orange jam filling. Dorie's recipes are famously clear and easy to follow, and this one is really no exception, yet for some reason all the talk here about orange segments/orange membranes sort of confused me.

I may have done better if I'd had charts and graphs and the steady hand of a surgeon, but lacking all of those things, the process of removing the segments from the membranes went poorly for me, as my segments never completely released from my membranes, and my segments contained leftover pith (which required additional sugar later to offset the bitterness). Basically it was an orange train wreck. Dorie then says to try to squeeze some juice from the membranes, and if you could get 1/4 cup, great! I could not even get 1/4 teaspoon. (Seriously, did anybody out there get any measurable amount of juice out of the membranes?) No matter, water or additional orange juice worked just fine. I added the cranberries and sugar (and extra sugar to taste, per Dorie's suggestion) and the jam cooked up beautifully.

The cake is a shortbread cake {as the recipe name would indicate} and the batter tastes EXACTLY like super awesome sugar cookie dough. Cranberry filling between sugar cookies? Sign me up! As it turned out, the cake definitely baked into a cake, not a cookie - the texture was a little on the dense and chewy side (in a good way!), and the sugary/buttery flavor paired so well with the tart filling. We loved this one!

Jessica, thanks so much for the fantastic pick! Hurry over to Jessica's blog for fun narratives, beautiful pictures, and the recipe!

TWD: Peanuttiest Blondies

2010-11-02T00:01:00.002-04:00

I intended to make this week's TWD selection, Peanuttiest Blondies, to serve for dessert after Halloween (pre-trick or treating) dinner. It may seem insane to serve dessert before heading off to collect candy, but it always seemed to me that enjoying a quality dessert after dinner may actually reduce the impulse to pour grape-flavored Nerds into one's mouth before bed. In the end it didn't matter, as I woke up sick as a dog on Halloween, and was not able to walk to the kitchen for a glass of water, much less bake blondies (or make my kids Halloween pancakes using my new Halloween pancake molds, which I'm still pretty bummed about. I plan to make them for breakfast tomorrow (11/2) but they're no fools - they know that eating a bat shaped pancake in November is not the same). Anyway, as soon as I was certain that the plague had indeed left me, I went ahead and made these blondies. And what a great way to reenter the world of eating food!

The one ingredient I wasn't sure of here was the cinnamon. I'm funny about cinnamon - I love it, but I generally don't like to be surprised by it. If it's in something I'd expect it to be in (pumpkin-spiced things, oatmeal raisin cookies, apple pie), I'm fully on board with it. But when it shows up in something unexpected (like chocolate), I find myself wishing it wasn't there. I almost skipped the cinnamon here because I didn't see why it needed to be here, but OH MY, am I glad I listened to Dorie. The cinnamon MAKES these blondies. It's subtle, but it's there, and it just works.

Dorie calls hers the peanuttiest blondies, but I believe mine are even peanuttier, as I added peanut butter chips instead of chocolate chips so that my husband would eat them. Every ounce of my being wanted to add chocolate chips, but the peanut butter chips really worked well as a distant second choice. My dream peanuttiest blondie would probably skip the peanuts and add both chocolate and peanut butter chips - oh yeah.

I will make these again and again - no doubt about it. We all loved these, and I'll take one over a fun-size Milk Dud any day of the week. Nicole of Bakeologie chose these blondies. You can find the recipe here. Thanks for the great pick, Nicole!

TWD: All-American, All-Delicious Apple Pie

2010-10-27T11:17:00.001-04:00

I haven't ever tallied up my posting average for the time I've been in TWD. I figure I post at least 50% of the time -- I'll go stretches when I post every week, and then I'll go two months without a post {which is a flagrant violation of TWD rules by the way, and (justifiably) grounds for being cleaned off the blogroll when housecleaning occurs}. That said, even when I go through a posting drought, I still bake the vast majority of the TWD recipes. How I can't manage to throw up a bad picture and a "loved the cake!" sentence those weeks is beyond me, but oh, crazy life, it just gets in the way sometimes. But one thing I've never ever done is post on a day other than Tuesday. If I miss the Tuesday deadline, I just don't post. Because this is Tuesdays with Dorie. But this apple pie was so delicious that it warrants the unthinkable - a Wednesday Tuesdays with Dorie post.

I went ahead and used Dorie's good for everything pie dough this week (after using the Cook's Illustrated pie crust for the pear torte and the caramel pumpkin pie). I think that both crusts are equally delicious. The Cook's Illustrated crust may be a tad easier to roll, but I've never had to drain and wring out Dorie's pie dough the way that I did with the CI recipe, a stressful process that I'd rather avoid. So I'll probably stick with Dorie's going forward.

The apple pie filling here contains the usual suspects -- apples (I used a mix of honeycrisp, gala, granny smith and golden delicious), cinnamon, nutmeg, sugar, lemon zest as well as the unexpected, quick cooking tapioca, which is used as a thickener. I lost my quick cooking tapioca, which forced me to wander around the house asking "has anyone seen my quick cooking tapioca?" over and over again. If there is anything worse than having to make a special trip to the store to buy quick cooking tapioca, it's having to make a second special trip to the store to buy quick cooking tapioca to replace the quick cooking tapioca you bought two hours ago and lost. Fortunately, I found the quick cooking tapioca under the passenger seat in my car, next to a can of canellini beans I lost two weeks ago. (I'm sure you could use corn starch or something else as a thickener, or skip the thickener -- my grandmother never used anything to thicken her apple pie and it will always be my favorite pie ever).

This pie baked up just beautifully. It was all-American and all-delicious alright! It is pretty much the quintessential apple pie, and if you like apple pie, you'll have a hard time doing better than this one.

Emily of Sandmuffin chose this pie, and be sure to check out her post here. Thanks for the perfect October pick, Emily!

TWD: Caramel Pumpkin Pie

2010-10-19T07:19:00.002-04:00

Albert Einstein once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, and if that is true, Albert would have been the first one to tell me that I would not enjoy this pumpkin pie, and that I was insane for even thinking that I might like it. As is well documented on this blog, I do not enjoy boozy desserts. And if I happen to like a boozy dessert okay, I always think that I would have liked it more if it hadn't been boozy. For those of you keeping score at home, that is over two years' worth of boozy desserts; over two years of not liking boozy desserts; and/or over two years of thinking thoughts like "that dessert wasn't bad, but a little too boozy for me -- I think it would have been great without the booze." And yet what do I do every. single. time a boozy dessert shows up on my calendar? I use the full amount of booze called for in the recipe, while thinking "I bet this rum will complement the fall spices nicely." Why would I think that? Because I'm insane, that's why. That is not to say that the rum does not complement the fall spices nicely; it very well might, it's a matter of personal taste -- *I* will just never think that it does. I will just think that it is too boozy. And that is what I thought about this pumpkin pie.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not a huge pumpkin pie fan to begin with. I love pumpkin flavored baked goods and pumpkin spices, but the texture of pumpkin pie is not my favorite. This pie offers a fun spin on the classic pumpkin pie with the addition of a very dark caramel. The caramel begins with sugar in a skillet, and after it turns a dark amber color and starts bubbling furiously, cream, butter, and dark rum, cognac, or apple cider get added to the mix. Had I been sane, I would have opted for the apple cider since I know/should know what my personal preferences are by this point, but instead I decided to prove Albert right by going with the 2T rum (although in fairness to my inner sane person, I know that a lot of people in my world like boozy desserts way more than I do, and I don't bake to eat it all myself, anyway). I actually think I nailed the caramel for once, without setting off the fire alarms or frightening small children.

This pie? Really not the pie for me. I felt like the rum was simply overpowering. I did not taste caramel at all - rum, just rum (and a slightly bitter aftertaste). The next night, I served a piece to David, who had been on a haunted camp out with Jacob the day I made this, and I issued a warning before I served it. And David liked it WAY more than I did. That is why I want to be clear that this might be -- heck, probably is! -- an incredible pie - but it is not your pie if you don't like pumpkin pie or boozy desserts. If you do like pumpkin pie and boozy desserts, you should absolutely try this pie, because it's a Dorie dessert - i.e., money in the bank - and therefore without a doubt the best boozy pumpkin pie ever.

Janell of Mortensen Family Memoirs chose this pie. Janell made the pie twice because she did not enjoy it the first time, and voila! -- the second time was a charm. Janell suggests not cooking the caramel quite as long as the recipe calls for. This is an interesting point, and it makes me wonder if that was part of my issue - my caramel was definitely deep amber (I thought the perfect color), but perhaps if I hadn't cooked it as long I would have tasted more "caramel" and wouldn't have gotten that bitter aftertaste. Anyway, food for thought. Janell, thanks for the great seasonal pick!

TWD: Foldover Pear Torte

2010-10-12T00:01:00.000-04:00

I made this week's TWD recipe, Foldover Pear Torte, late last week. But you'll just have to take my word for it, as I have no pictures to share of it, since I forgot to take pictures. It's as if I was baking pear tortes on a random Thursday without some underlying blogging purpose or something! I forgot, just plain forgot, even after my husband (as he's been conditioned to do) asked me on two or three separate occasions if he could eat the torte. You'd think that at least one of those times before granting permission I would have done the whole "do I need anything more from that torte, like a picture?" analysis, but I did not. I told him to eat it, and then it was gone, and I had no pictures to prove that I made it. I'm thinking that might have been divine intervention though, as my torte was not pretty, and it's probably best that anyone who may stumble upon this post be spared the ugly evidence.

I did snap a picture of the pear/apricot/nut mixture, which will hopefully suffice as proof that I made the torte:

This torte has three major components - fruit/nut mixture, a cream/egg custard filling, and pie crust. I've made Dorie's Good for Anything Pie Dough numerous times, and it is fabulous. But I've long been intrigued by the Cook's Illustrated Foolproof Pie Dough, so I decided to try that recipe this time. And I can report that it is indeed foolproof, because never has a pie crust been so abused and mangled yet still managed to bake up so flaky and delicious. I still cringe when I think about what this poor pie crust endured -- after I added the liquid (water/vodka), it was simply drowning. No amount of mixing would incorporate that much liquid (and of course, everyone knows that overmixing pie dough is the death of it, so I faced an impossible dilemma). I finally ended up pouring off the excess liquid, ringing out the dough the best I could, and sticking it in the fridge. I called out to my baking friends who've made this crust before, and nobody could recall having had excess water issues. Once again, I'm making good on my promise to put any recipe writer's claim of foolproofedness to the test. I was shocked, truly and utterly shocked, that the crust ended up being delicious. The process was so traumatic that I will probably stick with Dorie's pie dough from now on; on the other hand, if I could not ruin the Cook's Illustrated crust, I believe that it simply cannot be ruined -- i.e., is foolproof -- and therefore I have to recommend it as an excellent option for any pie crustaphobes out there.

But of course with a dessert like this the crust is simply a vehicle for the torte filling. The recipe calls for a fruit/nut mixture of pears, dried apricots or raisins, and walnuts, topped with a custard filling. Pears tend to be pretty unassertive, especially when baked, but I think they were perfect in this recipe, since the real star here is the custard. It'a made of eggs, sugar, rum, vanilla and almond extracts, butter and cream, and it is simply fabulous. I think Dorie made a great call pairing it with a mild fruit like pear, which will not compete with the custard (that said, I'm very eager to see what other TWD bakers used in this torte!) The dried apricots were kind of distracting to me -- perhaps because I didn't cut them small enough -- and next time I'll be sure to dice them really fine, use golden raisins, or skip the dried fruit altogether.

The result? We thought this torte was great -- definitely a perfect "seasonal transition" dessert, as Dorie describes in her notes. Somehow this one seemed like a whole lot of work to me. I think that was my fault, as I kind of started out unorganized, and in a train-wreck of a kitchen, and then there was the Waterlogged Pie Crust Incident that kind of flustered me out of the gate; and it seemed like there were bowls and knives and zesters and extracts and small kitchen appliances everywhere, etc. I'm not sure how that was any different from any other baking session, but for whatever reason I emerged from this one in need of a {insert nap/massage/drink/break/maid/online shopping session here}.

Cakelaw of Laws of the Kitchen chose this fantastic torte. Cakelaw is an Aussie lawyer with a fun food blog -- you can find the pear torte at her blog right here. Thanks for the great pick, Cakelaw!

TWD: Foldover Pear Torte

2010-10-11T00:01:00.001-04:00

TWD: Double Apple Bundt Cake

2010-10-05T09:06:00.001-04:00

I'm sure if you gave my husband truth serum he'd tell you that I have a whole host of annoying habits, but the only one I know of that really really bugs him is when I buy myself presents in the month before my birthday. I was trying REALLY hard to be good this year, and was doing so well until Dorie Greenspan's highly-anticipated book, Around My French Table, was released a month earlier than planned. I tried to ignore it -- added it to my Amazon cart and then deleted it, added it again and deleted it -- but in the end my pointer finger was powerless against the Place Order button. Sorry honey. The good news is that as a recreational baker/wannabe photographer/book collector/clothes lover/handbag hoarder, I've got to be right up there in the top 10 Easiest People In The World To Buy For. The other good news is that we won't have to wait until late October to start enjoying regular dinners out of Around My French Table -- I've already made the gourgeres and the roast chicken for les paresseux -- and they were both fabulous. But to make it up to my hubs for violating the sacrosanct "no self-gifting in the 30 days prior to gift-giving occasion" rule, I figured I better bake him a bundt cake.

As luck would have it, this week's TWD recipe is Double Apple Bundt cake, and the timing of this cake is perfect, as we've finally seen a hint of real fall weather around here. I've made this bundt cake before -- I don't remember exactly why or when -- but I do remember it being delicious. I made a full bundt the first time I made it, but this time, I went with a loaf cake and a dozen mini bundts (because my 5 year old was having a friend over, and 5 year old girls appreciate cute food).

The "double" in this double apple bundt refers to shredded apple and apple butter. The cake also calls for a nice assortment of fall spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger), nuts, and raisins. I did not ice it, and served it our favorite way -- in a domed cake stand on the kitchen island with a knife next to it -- and we helped ourselves to slices and/or mini cakes for several days (this one is a good keeper). The cake has a great texture and hearty fall flavors - definitely a perfect fall snack cake. Our little houseguest chose a mini cake over pancakes for Sunday morning breakfast. This was a hit around here for sure.

Lynne of Honey Muffin chose this week's Double Apple Bundt Cake. Be sure to visit her blog for the recipe. Thanks for a great pick, Lynne!

TWD: Tarte Fine

2010-09-28T09:06:00.000-04:00

The only thing that has gotten me through the twenty-three (23) days of 90+ degree weather in September has been the appearance of apple desserts on the TWD schedule. I'm a fall/spring lover, winter/summer hater, which means I have never lived in the right place in any of my almost 38 years (Connecticut: winters too long/cold. Alabama: summers too long/hot). But I won't dwell on that, and will instead thank Leslie for picking this week's fabulous recipe, Tarte Fine. I've actually made the tarte fine before, because it's one of those delicious and impressive desserts that is super easy, thanks to the miracle product that is frozen puff pastry.

When I started baking/blogging, I had no idea what frozen puff pastry ("FPP") even was. I remember googling "frozen puff pastry" and printing out a picture of the Pepperidge Farm package so I would know what to look for at the store. And now two years later, not only am I a regular consumer of FPP, but I have brand preferences and everything! I first tried Dufour Pastry Kitchen's all-butter FPP after reading Dorie's recommendation -- she claims that it is so good that she stopped making her own puff pastry. Other accolades: winner of the International Fancy Food Show, and called "The most buttery and flaky pastry you will ever find" by Details Magazine {as an aside, I always thought of Details as more of a "Jessica Alba reviews the iPhone 4" kind of magazine -- but I may be mixing them up with Maxim}.

In any event, this dessert would be wonderful with just about any kind of FPP. Roll out the defrosted FPP, top with lemon juice soaked apples, top with sugar, brush the pastry edge with milk or cream and the apples with an egg wash, and bake. Easy!

My daughter just picked it up and ate it like pizza.

I may not have defrosted my pastry quite long enough, and may not have achieved optimal puffage as a result. No matter, it was still delicious. I served this with David Lebovitz's cinnamon ice cream, my favorite. The cinnamon sticks seeped in my milk for two hours rather than the prescribed one hour, because I never seem to be home for an hour straight. So it was very cinnamony, and so delicious, especially with this scrumptious tarte!

Leslie, thanks for the fabulous fall pick! Please run, don't walk, to Leslie's great blog, Lethally Delicious, for the recipe.

TWD: Cranberry Upside Downer

2010-09-14T19:54:00.000-04:00

One of my mother's favorite sayings has always been "everything in moderation." While it induced major eye rolls when I was in high school (but then, what didn't?) something about that message sunk in, because now that I am indisputably an adult, I am extreme in my moderation. I sleep not too much, not too little. I drink a glass or two of wine a week. I will never be a workaholic. I get regular, non-compulsive exercise. I try to eat healthy most of the time, with all of the food groups represented. My midlife crisis car will probably be a Maxima. I have a strong preference for those glorious, moderate seasons, spring and fall (and really want to live somewhere where it is spring and fall all the time -- suggestions?) and tend to get winter/summer fatigue in a hurry. Yup, I am pretty much a moderate by every measure except for Cranberry Upside-Downer consumption, as evidenced by the fact that I ate 90% of this by myself in hourly, 1/8th inch slice increments over the course of a couple of days. And what can I say? -- extreme behavior never tasted so good!

I bought a bunch of cranberries during cranberry season last year, and they've been taking up awkward space in my freezer ever since. I was thrilled to get to use them a little bit earlier than planned; with more room in the freezer and an upside down cake on the counter, everybody wins! This was an easy cake to make. Melt some butter and sugar on the stovetop, mix in walnuts and cranberries, and spread the mixture into an 8" round pan:

Top with batter and bake.

This came out of the pan nicely and made for a festive presentation. I l-l-l-loved this cake! It has the perfect texture, and the tart cranberries and the cinnamon cake make for a heavenly combination. I We treated this as a breakfast/snack cake, but it would totally work as a true dessert with ice cream or whipped cream. David, who luckily got the first slice before I ate the rest of it, noted that while he is not usually a cranberry fan or an upside down cake fan (Really? Who thinks about upside down cakes as a distinct genre of cake, and then forms an opinion about whether to be a fan or not? Apparently my husband does.), he thought the cake was delicious. I have no idea what we are doing for Thanksgiving this year, but if I am anywhere near an oven and willing eaters -- strike that, I don't need the willing eaters; I can handle this baby myself -- I am making this cake.

Sabrina of Superflous chose this Upside Downer, and you can find her post here. Sabrina, awesome pick!

TWD: Espresso Chocolate Shortbread Cookies

2010-08-31T07:00:00.000-04:00

The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is have a cup of coffee. If I plan to run that morning, I have the coffee before I run, which I'm sure violates all sorts of fitness rules. It is very important that I have my coffee before I speak to any human beings. My children know that I do not make/find/reach/feed/retrieve/help/turn on/turn off/mediate until I have the first sip of coffee, which has led to some pointed questions about the limits of my rule: "What if someone is bleeding?" "What if there is a fire?" "What if there is a lizard in the house?" I think I've helped them understand that I will rise to the occasion in case of a true emergency {as defined by me}, but that the house default rule is that nearly everything can wait the approximately 3.5 minutes between when I get out of bed and when the first splash of java hits my mouth.

But while coffee is a vitally important element of my morning ritual, it is only a part of my morning ritual. I have one cup in the morning, and then no interest in it -- in fact, kind of an aversion to it -- the rest of the day. Except for that one morning cup that is so essential to my sunny disposition, I rarely drink the stuff. And, more relevant to this week's post {not that I have ever been constrained by relevancy when writing blog posts}, I don't really care for coffee flavored food. So I wasn't sure how I'd like this week's TWD recipe, Espresso Chocolate Shortbread cookies, chosen by Donna of Life's Too Short Not to Eat Dessert First. {Amen!} They sounded interesting though, and I have enjoyed many of Dorie's shortbread recipes, so I was eager to try them.

I just celebrated my two year blogiversary by . . . actually writing a blog post for the first time in two months! It's funny to think about the things that help us mark time. My baby was an infant when I joined TWD two years ago. I would wait for her to go down for her nap, or fall asleep at night, and then start baking {sometimes recruiting my two older children to be my helpers}. Well, these two years in TWD have flown by, as evidenced by the fact that my baby is now a chair climbing, kitchen-aid monitoring, bowl-scraping, rolling pin-wielding helper in her own right:

The dough is made with confectioner's sugar and a tablespoon of espresso powder, in addition to the usual suspects -- lots and lots {and lots} of butter, flour, vanilla. Chocolate chips or chopped chocolate get folded into the dough, and then the {extremely soft} dough gets rolled out in a ziploc bag. It then needs a good stint in the refrigerator in order to be properly cuttable. I let mine stay there overnight. Then cut off the bag, slice the dough into little rectangles, and bake.

The verdict? Well, my older two children would not try these, and my youngest spit it out {which is hardly a reliable commentary about the quality of the cookies - I don't think that espresso cookies are likely to be embraced by the preschool set any time soon}. My husband did not eat these because they contain chocolate. Which leaves me. I like most things that contain copious amounts of butter and sugar, and these cookies are no exception. Will they go down as my favorite cookie ever? No. This may be the first recipe I've baked with confectioner's sugar (as opposed to white or brown) and I'm not sure I cared for the resulting texture {if the texture was in fact sugar-related}. But I think folks who like coffee-flavored desserts will enjoy these immensely, so I'm filing this one away in my "coffee-flavored dessert" arsenal. Thanks for the pick, Donna!

TWD: Crunchy and Custardy Peach Tart

2010-08-24T11:24:00.001-04:00

For some reason, baking in the summer is a challenge for me. The kids are out of school and we're running around a lot. It is hotter than Hades here (we're going on 50+ straight days of temperatures near or above 100 degrees). Air conditioning does not work (I mean, it technically works, but I keep waving my hands over the vent to make sure cold air is really coming out -- it is, but is no match for what nature is dishing out). In these circumstances, I sometimes balk at the thought of cranking up the oven for mere recreational purposes. That said, my favorite dessert of all time may very well be the Summer Fruit Gallette, which was covered by TWD right before I joined. So I know that summer baking (baking in the summer and/or the baking of summer fruit) can be so very worth it.

I've had my eye on this tart, to put it mildly. In fact, I initially picked it for my TWD selection when I was up back in June. But then I started fretting that the peaches would not be in prime form in as early as late May, when TWDers would actually be making it. I polled friends who are more familiar with the peach cycle than I am, determined that late May/early June was indeed too early to count on great peaches, and emailed Laurie back with Plan B. Then I prayed that someone with a July or August pick would come through with the Crunchy and Custardy Peach Tart. Thankfully, Rachel did. Rachel, you are my hero.

The tart begins with Dorie's trusty sweet tart dough. Top with peaches, an easy custard, and an almond struesel topping. Try not to burn the almond streusel topping, as I did, but know that even if you do, the tart will still be wonderful. Such is the magic of a Dorie dessert -- it's so otherwordly delicious that a few minor (or major) mistakes can't hurt it!

Thanks for the perfect summer pick, Rachel!

TWD: Lemon-Drenched Vanilla(ish) Cakes

2010-06-29T01:43:00.000-04:00

The really awesome Wendy of pinkstripes chose this week's Tuesdays With Dorie recipe, Rum-Drenched Vanilla Cakes. Both "rum-drenched" and "vanilla cakes" sounded great to me in a vacuum, but after years of trying, really trying, to like boozy desserts, I've finally accepted that I'm just destined to be a dessert teetotaler. If I like a cake with rum in it, you can be sure that would like the cake without rum in it even better. Therefore, I decided to skip the rum and instead go with the lemon variation suggested by Dorie.

I was so happy to see that this was a loaf cake, and a simple one at that. My other baking project over the weekend was to try to make a chocolate swiss roll cake that looked like a lightsaber - a test run for my son's birthday in a couple of weeks. I'd never made a roll cake before, or used rolled fondant for that matter. Suffice it to say that after my practice round I am not brimming with confidence about my ability to pull off the edible lightsaber under pressure. I've got the bakery on speed dial, just in case. But a loaf cake? That I could do.

This cake is hand mixed -- no mixer required. That endeared the cake to me immediately, especially because my beloved Kitchen Aid started to make some ugly squeaking noises during the lightsaber batter mixing. I don't even want to think about My Precious conking out on me, and since this cake was mixed by hand, for five minutes I didn't have to. This is a straight up mixing process -- combine the dry ingredients, whisk eggs into sugar (since I was doing the lemon version, I first rubbed lemon zest into the sugar), add vanilla (Dorie says that the rum/vanilla version depends on the "very best vanilla you could find" - presumably vanilla beans from Tahiti or Madagascar, but since I was just doing the modified lemon version, I went with the very best vanilla I could find in my pantry - Kirkland Signature Pure Vanilla Extract from Costco), then whisk in heavy cream. Finally, add in the dry ingredients and fold in melted and cooled butter. Pour into a loaf pan and bake.

After the cake is out of the oven, poke a bunch of holes in it with a skewer or something similar, and then brush the cake with a simple syrup of sugar, water, and, (for the lemon version I did) lemon juice. I've never drenched a cake before - it was tons of fun!

The results? Wow, we really love this cake. The crumb is exactly as Dorie describes - tight, compact and sturdy, but still soft and moist. The lemon flavor here was fabulous - I LOVED how the lemon syrup infused the cake with extra tartness. This cake is delicious enough to stand on its own, but it would also be great with berries and cream, lemon curd, etc. It's been a while since I made the French Yogurt Cake, another lemon cake that we adored around here, so I can't really say which is better. But it would be hard to beat this one for the total "simplicity and pure deliciousness" package.

Run, don't walk, to Wendy's blog to read more about this cake (and tons of other fabulous creations) and for a daily dose of fun and adventure. Great pick, Pink!

TWD: Dressy Chocolate Loaf Cake

2010-06-22T00:01:00.003-04:00

Dressy Chocolate Loaf Cake - Take 1

I first made this week's TWD recipe, Dressy Chocolate Loaf Cake, on a whim one day after Amanda and I decided to bring Heather lunch. Heather is on bed rest with baby #4, and by gosh, Heather deserves some chocolate cake. Plus, the baby likes my baked goods, and we all want the baby to fatten up over the next few weeks, so any way you slice it, this chocolate cake had Heather's name all over it. I wanted the cake to be fresh as possible, so I baked it the morning of our lunch date, but I didn't really have time to do that, so the cake ended up ugly. That is my excuse and I'm sticking to it. Close your eyes:

Okay, you can open them now. If you did sneak a peek, I will tell you that the photo captured the cake at its absolute prettiest. It went downhill from there as it survived multiple car rides, elevator rides, the take out window at La Paz, the 40% off sale at Grandmother's Joy Children's Clothing Boutique, and temperature swings of 50 degrees depending on whether it was inside or outside. When Amanda and I finally got to Heather's, I quickly hid the cake in the refrigerator and hoped that I'd be able to sneak into the kitchen to cut it without anyone having the misfortune of seeing it. Because it's one thing to bake an ugly cake, it's another thing to bake an ugly cake when you've been baking cakes for two years straight. It is bruised and battered by now, but I do have my pride.

Fortunately, once it was sliced it pretty much looked like any sliced chocolate loaf cake, so my "ugly cake" secret was safe for another day. And it was delicious! We all enjoyed it, and it was the perfect way to cap off a light ladies' lunch of cheese dip and burritos.

Dressy Chocolate Loaf Cake - Take 2

Much as I liked the cake, I almost didn't blog about it because of the ugly picture. So instead of doing the sane thing and posting about it in spite of the ugly picture, I decided to bake it again. Just a half recipe this time, in mini loaf pans. I rationalized my bizarre behavior by telling myself that I could keep it in the freezer so that I'd have something on hand if unexpected guests arrived. The prospect of "having dessert in the freezer for unexpected guests" never fails to persuade me to go ahead and bake that unnecessary dessert, notwithstanding the fact that in the 19.5 years since I've reached adulthood, I have never once had an unexpected guest. If my doorbell rings unexpectedly it is either (1) the UPS man, or (2) a guy in a pickup truck asking if I want to buy pine straw. But I think I inherited my freezer-stocking compulsion from my grandmother, who regularly kept things in her freezer for unexpected guests (although she actually had unexpected guests -- so many, in fact, that at some point I imagine it ceased to be unexpected). I frequently watched her pull a pie out of nowhere when Uncle Bill and Aunt Theresa stopped by to play pinochle, or turn out some tea and cookies in two minutes flat for Rosie and Adeline, the sisters renowned for their housekeeping prowess - legend had it that they "cleaned on top of clean" (the highest compliment my grandmother could bestow on someone.)

So despite my historic dearth of unexpected guests, I now have one and a half mini dressy chocolate loaf cakes in my freezer at the ready, just in case. Thanks to the fabulous Amy Ruth from Amy Ruth Bakes for picking this wonderful, crowd-pleasing, freezer-friendly cake. Be sure to visit Amy Ruth and the TWD blogroll to see some beautiful cakes (and obtain actual relevant information about the cake!)

TWD: Tender Shortcakes {my pick!!}

2010-06-08T00:01:00.004-04:00

I know that many people know well ahead of time which recipe they will choose when their turn comes up in Tuesdays with Dorie. But there must be others like me, who really have no idea which recipe they'll pick, and then end up having a kind of out of body experience that involves typing "I choose the Tender Shortcakes" in response to Laurie's "Your turn to pick for June!" email. And who wake up the next day thinking "did I really pick the Tender Shortcakes over a gazillion other amazing-looking desserts in Baking? Let me check my sent items folder. Yes I did." Now, don't get me wrong -- I like strawberry shortcakes. But my sister has always been the real strawberry shortcake lover in the family - she'll choose it for her birthday dessert and order it in restaurants, and my mother will always serve it for dessert if she knows Diane is coming over for dinner. I, on the other hand, can usually be found rummaging through the pantry to see if there is anything in there that can be turned into chocolate cake.

But I was never going to pick anything chocolate, because I needed David, who has been my most faithful and loyal taster for the nearly two years I've been in TWD, to eat and review whatever I chose. And once I knew that I had a June pick, I started zoning in on seasonal recipes. Dorie calls these tender shortcakes "the quintessential shortcakes" and, well, I think of strawberry shortcakes as the quintessential summer dessert. So Tender Shortcakes it was!!

Some desserts/techniques have a reputation of being somewhat difficult or fussy (e.g., meringue, custard, caramel), and generally speaking, if they are difficult for anybody, they are difficult for me as well. Then there are the desserts that do not have a reputation for being difficult (e.g, brownies) but which manage to be difficult for me anyway (chronic underbaker here).

That brings us to biscuits, or members of the biscuit family (as these shortcakes are) which also have the reputation for being a tad tricky, yet which inexplicably have never given me any trouble. For whatever reason I am square with the biscuit/shortcake gods. I really hoped that this biscuit magic continued through these shortcakes, because I really didn't want to have to write a "fail" post for my week.

Whisk together flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar together in a large bowl:

Make sure your cold, unsalted butter is ready to go:

Drop the butter onto the flour mixture:

And then working quickly using your fingers (Dorie's preferred method) or a pastry cutter, cut and rub the butter into the dry ingredients:

At this point Dorie says you should have pieces the size of peas, the size of oatmeal flakes, and everything in between. {I also had many pieces the size of . . . flour, but (SPOILER ALERT) the finished product was fabulous anyway.}

Pour the cream over the dry ingredients and toss and gently turn the ingredients with a fork until you've got a very soft dough.

Spoon out about 1/3 of a cup of dough for each shortcake onto a baking sheet:

Pat each mound down until it is between 3/4 inch and 1 inch high:

At this point you can freeze the shortcakes on the baking sheet, and then wrap them airtight and keep them in the freezer for up to 2 months. I froze the dough for all of my shortcakes before baking them off, and the frozen shortcakes baked up perfectly after exactly 18 minutes in my oven. I love this "freeze the dough" technique -- it gives you the freedom to turn out fresh, delicious homemade shortcakes on a moment's notice.

With my shortcakes safely in the freezer, I set out to my favorite farmer's market to hunt down June's finest berries:

With my first round of shortcakes, I went with a combination of strawberries and blueberries. Top the berries with a little sugar to taste and let them sit for 10 minutes or so, until they are juicy. Once the shortcakes are baked and the cream is whipped, it's really just a matter of assembly.

Peach variation:

The verdict? One bite of these shortcakes and all second-guessing about my choice ceased immediately. David and I agreed that these are in a completely different universe from any other shortcake we've ever had. They are tender, flaky, and melt-in-your mouth delicious. They have just the right hint of sweetness while maintaining the buttery essence of a great biscuit. They are indeed the quintessential shortcake -- the perfect vehicle for the summer's bounty of fresh fruit and berries.

I hope that everyone enjoyed these shortcakes as much as we did. Thanks to my fellow TWD bakers for baking along with me this week! And thank you, Dorie, for another winner in the treasure trove that is Baking!

Tender Shortcakes, from Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan

Makes about 10 shortcakes

FOR THE BISCUITS:

4 cups all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons sugar
1 1/2 sticks (12 tablespoons) cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1 1/2 cups cold heavy cream

FOR THE FILLING:

Berries (about 1/2 cup per shortcake), hulled and slice if using strawberries
Sugar
Lightly sweetened softly whipped cream

GETTING READY:

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment or a silicone mat.

TO MAKE THE BISCUITS:

Whisk the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar together in a large bowl. Drop in the butter and, using your fingers, toss to coat the pieces of butter with flour. Quickly, working with your fingertips (my favorite method) or a pastry blender, cut and rub the butter into the dry ingredients until the mixture is pebbly. You'll have pea-size pieces, pieces the size of oatmeal flakes and pieces in between - and that's just right.

Pour the cream over the dry ingredients and toss and gently turn the ingredients with a fork until you've got a very soft dough. When the dough comes together, you'll probably still have dry ingredients at the bottom of the bowl - just use a spatula or your hands to mix and knead the dough until it's evenly blended. Don't overdo it; it's better to have a few dry spots than an overworked dough. Even with all the flour mixed in, the dough will be soft and sticky.

Spoon out about 1/3 cup of dough for each shortcake onto the baking sheet, leaving about 3 inches of space between the mounts of dough. Pat each mound down until is is between 3/4 and 1 inch high. (The shortcakes can be made to this point and frozen on the baking sheet, then wrapped airtight and kept in the freezer for up to 2 months. Bake with out defrosting - just add at least 5 more minutes to the oven time.)

If you have more dough, repeat, cooling the baking sheet first.

Bake for 15 - 18 minutes, rotating the sheet from front to back at the midway point, until the shortcakes are puffed and give just a bit when prodded. Pull the sheet from the oven and transfer the shortcakes to a cooling rack.

TO MAKE THE FILLING:

Put the berries in a bowl, sprinkle with sugar to taste and let sit for about 10 minutes, until they are juicy.

The cakes are tender and really pretty fragile, so go easy with them. Use a serrated knife and not much pressure to cut each cake in half horizontally. (Alternatively, you can use the tines of a fork to prick a ring around the middle of the shortcake, then use your fingers to gently pry the halves apart.) Put the bottom halves on plates, top with the berries - make sure to include some of the sweet juices - and spoon over some whipped cream. Put the tops on the shortcakes or lean them against the cream, my preference. If you decide to go for the open-faced shortcakes, you'll get two textures - moist and moister.

TWD: Banana-Coconut Ice Cream Pie

2010-05-25T15:50:00.000-04:00

I feel like I am a much more adventurous eater since I started baking with TWD. I enjoy things I didn't used to like (coconut, custard), and I have come to appreciate certain flavor combos that I never would have expected. I trust Dorie, I do. She rarely leads us down the wrong road. That said, I have to draw the line somewhere, and a pie that involves banana, coconut, rum and CHOCOLATE ice cream seemed like as good a place as any. Swapping vanilla ice cream for the chocolate was pretty much a no-brainer for me, since my husband wouldn't eat the chocolate version anyway, and vanilla just seemed safer to boring, rule-following, never-did-a-single-crazy-thing-in-her-life me.

UNDERACHIEVER'S DISCLOSURES

(1) I did not make my own ice cream for this recipe
(2) I did not make my own butter cookies for this recipe
(3) I used all "ripe but firm" bananas for the recipe, not some "very ripe" bananas and some "ripe but firm" bananas

I've never made a crust like this before - it's a no-bake crust that contains a stick of butter, a couple of cups of coconut, which get toasted in the melted butter, and crushed up butter cookies. After it's all mixed together, it gets pressed into a pie dish and then frozen. After the crust is ready, it gets topped with slices of "ripe but firm" bananas. The pie filling starts with making a puree of "very ripe" bananas (I used "ripe but firm"), lemon and dark rum in the food processor. Add vanilla ice cream to the puree and pulse to combine, but be careful not to melt the ice cream. My ice cream (which was very hard out of the carton) melted upon first or second pulse, so I'm not quite sure how to pull off that trick, but there was nothing do be done about that but pour it all into the pie crust and hope for the best.

My camera died, so the pie pictures here are iPhone photos taken by my 7 year old. I think he did a good job, even though he only took the pictures as a ploy to take my iPhone from me. Meanwhile, my camera is en route to Canon for fixing. Ever wonder what a shutter looks like when it won't close? It's that tiny bronze-ish dot in the lower right hand quadrant of the black box.

Incidentally, Canon customer service was awesome (so far - I don't have my camera back yet, of course). So awesome, that I almost forgot I was calling them because my 6 month old camera just conked out on me. The guy seemed almost as distressed as I was that my camera was broken, and by gosh, he was going to get to the bottom of it! We went through a whole battery of troubleshooting exercises. At one point he told me to hold down the picturetaking button (he didn't use the phrase "picturetaking button") and asked me to look into the hole (he didn't use the phrase "hole") and tell him if I saw a blue/green shade. I told him that I didn't think I saw blue/green, but more of a nailhead/pinhead against a black background, almost like the back of a small nail. It was at that point that he said: "Oh no. What you are seeing is your shutter. It's not closing" -- as if it personally pained him to have to tell me this. At that point there was really nothing left for us to talk about other than the instructions for sending my camera back to Canon.

The good news/bad news is that I'm not sure I would have done a whole lot better than this even if I had my camera.

David, his parents and I had this for dessert over the weekend. Everybody liked it. It's a nice warm-weather dessert with unquestionably tropical flavors. Tropical flavors tend not to be my favorite flavors, at least not in solid form (i.e., I'm more likely to be effusive in praise about a banana/rum/lemon/coconut/vanilla concoction that I'm supposed to drink) but again, this is a great dessert choice if you are looking for a tropical, cool dessert that requires teeth.

Spike of Spike Bakes chose this pie. You can find the recipe (and lots of other great things!) on Spike's blog. Thanks for the summery pick, Spike!

TWD: Quick Classic Berry Tart

2010-05-11T00:01:00.000-04:00

I am going to take my inspiration from this week's TWD recipe, Quick Classic Berry Tart, and submit a Quick (non)Classic Post. As has been the case with all of Dorie's tarts, this one was amazingly good and deceptively easy to make. It involves three components, two of which can be made ahead of time, and the third of which is fruit placement. Even I can't mess that up (although I can make it look less aesthetically pleasing than you). Part one is the sweet tart dough, which I have made and discussed here many times. Same old story -- I think I'm overhandling the dough, I probably AM overhandling the dough, but the taste and texture is of the tart crust ends up wonderful anyway. I can only imagine how great it must be when it is not overhandled. The great thing about the crust is that it actually needs to be frozen for a bit before it is baked, and while the recipe only requires a short stint in the freezer, you can keep the unbaked crust in there for days, weeks, months ahead of time! Perfect for the tart maker on the go!

Dorie's pastry cream is to die for delicious. I can usually take or leave puddings, custards, etc., as I generally prefer for there to be flour somewhere in my desserts, yet whenever I taste this pastry cream I have this crazy urge to tuck the bowl under my arm like a football and protect it from people who might try to strip it away from me. Then I remember, "oh yeah, I bake as a way to show people that I love them!" and I put the bowl down. Anyway, I've made Dorie's pastry cream several times for various recipes and have never had any trouble with it. It thickens easily and is rich, smooth and delicious. And it can be made a day or two ahead of time and refrigerated until it's time to assemble the tart. It's pretty much perfect -- I don't know why I'd ever want to make a different pastry cream.

The fruit placement segment of this dessert is our chance to flex our creative muscles. I went with randomly scattered berries, which seemed to suit my lifestyle more than some kind of orderly pattern.

Then brush the fruit with a jam glaze (I guess that's a fourth component), and you're done!

The result is a beautiful, impressive dessert that is really no more difficult to make than brownies (in fact, for me, it might be easier than brownies, since I'm riding a long streak of underbaking brownies). I made this when we had some friends over for dinner, and it was a huge hit. Dorie says that it's best the same day once it's assembled, but David and I enjoyed it the next day as well. This tart is now my go-to spring and summer dessert.

Cristine of Cooking with Cristine picked this tart. Great pick, Cristine!

TWD:Burnt Sugar Ice Cream

2010-05-04T00:01:00.001-04:00

This week's TWD recipe, Burnt Sugar Ice Cream, combines two techniques that have caused me significant angst over the past two years: (1) making caramel, and (2) making custard. I knew this ice cream would be good if I got it right, but the chances of that seemed so remote that I almost skipped it.

My big problem with custard early on was that I didn't have any experience with it, so I really didn't know what it was supposed to look like when it was ready to come off the heat. Therefore, I was overly reliant on my (unreliable) thermometers, which consistently did me wrong. As I failed and failed again, I became an expert on what custard looked like right before the point of failure, so I felt more confident going into this that I would catch it in time and maybe, just maybe, not fail.

My main problem with caramel is that as soon as sugar starts boiling in my house, I think of one hundred other things that I need to be doing. Something about sugar boiling makes me ambitious (to do things other than watch the sugar). This time, I decided that if I needed to glue my feet on the floor in front of the stove, I would not walk away from the boiling sugar.

Keep your eyes on me. Yes, you.

Seriously? The laundry has been sitting in the dryer for two days! It can wait another ten minutes.

Do. Not. Go. Check. The. Mail.

How about you call and make that hair appointment AFTER you don't burn the caramel?

You know, I wouldn't worry as much about other people trying to take pictures while doing this, but you? You really need to put the camera down.

That's deep amber enough - next step!!

The next step is to lower the heat and add milk and cream, at which point Dorie warns us that things will get a little wild, what with all the bubbling and seething and hardening of caramel. All of the above did happen, but just as Dorie says it will, the hardened caramel smooths out as you continue to heat and stir. At that point you temper an egg yolk/salt mixture with the warm caramel/milk mixture, add the rest of the caramel/milk to the eggs, return all of it to the pan and cook over medium heat until the custard reaches between 170 and 180 degrees. I knew better than to rely on a thermometer to test for doneness, so I used the "spoon test" (the custard coated the back of a spoon); the "track test" (when I ran my finger down the bowl of the spoon, the custard did not run into the track); and the "instinct denial test" (in which my instincts told me to cook the custard for a few more minutes, and I ignored them).

The results - perfect custard!! Woo hoo!! This ice cream base tasted incredible. I could barely wait for it to chill sufficiently so I could churn it. In fact, I probably churned it a little sooner than I should have - it just couldn't chill fast enough for me.

My husband likes a lot of the desserts I have made, but I think this ice cream might have been his all-time favorite. He just could not take a bite without offering up a new compliment. I bake for praise, so I was all over that. I loved the ice cream too -- I found it to be veeeeeerrrry sweet, so sweet that I added hot fudge to my bowl to cut the sweetness a bit:

You know something is sweet when hot fudge neutralizes the sweetness. Still, this was far and away the best ice cream I've ever made, and possibly the best I've ever tasted. I sure hope that the caramel/custard success wasn't a fluke, because I can't wait to make this again.

Becky of Project Domestication chose the Burnt Sugar Ice Cream. Great pick Becky!

TWD: Chockablock Cookies

2010-04-27T00:01:00.003-04:00

I know this happens to everyone who has baked along with TWD for any length of time. You get to the recipe of the week. You think "I would never in a zillion years make this on my own." Then you read the recipe more closely and think "there is no possible way that (x flavor plus y flavor plus z flavor) can be good together." Followed by "I will half the recipe and give these to A, and explain that I only made these for my baking club and would not have picked this recipe on my own, and then thank A for being such a good sport and eating them for me."

And then you taste the recipe and are amazed at how good it is, and equally amazed that you doubted Dorie for even a second, because you should really know better by now. Such was the case with this week's TWD pick, Chockablock Cookies, chosen by Mary of Popsicles and Sandy Feet (I can tell I'd like Mary just from her blog name!). The ingredient list for these cookies? Molasses, chocolate chips, oats, coconut, dried fruit. Even though I'm no longer a committed coconut hater, I was one for too long to ever feel genuine happiness when I see it on the ingredient list in a recipe. Same thing with molasses - I like, even love, several recipes I've made with molasses as a prominent ingredient, but I still can't feel the enthusiasm when it's time to bake with it. Chocolate chips are fine and dried fruit is fine, but not together. All in all, there just seemed to be way too much going on in these cookies for me to possibly like them.

I made them last Monday afternoon, before my photography class on Monday night [IMPORTANT NOTE: please do not expect my food pictures to improve just because I am taking a photography class. While I feel like my pictures of my children have indeed gotten a little better, food photography continues to stump me. You would think that a cookie would be easier to photograph than a two year old because the cookie doesn't run away from you, but you'd be wrong. To the many talented food photographers out there -- I bow to you].

Anyway, so I made these to bring to my photography class, the one group of people in my life on whom I had not yet tried to pawn off baked goods. Actually, that's not completely true, given that Heather, Amanda and I make up a full 1/3d of the class, and I've definitely pawned off baked goods on Heather and Amanda before. The class seemed to genuinely love these cookies (and seemed to be genuinely shocked that I baked cookies to share with the class. If only they knew! If they are not careful, I may collect their home addresses and start delivering baked goods to them weekly.)

When I was in law school, my then boyfriend (now husband) and I would sit in the back row of class and do the crossword puzzle. I've often wondered how today's law students manage to get through Corporations. It must be so much easier for the kids today, in the days of wireless internet and iPhones, than it was back in my day, when we had to hike uphill to class in the snow at 7 a.m. and rely on nothing but a tall cup of day-old coffee and the Cavalier Daily crossword puzzle to keep us awake. I got a taste of the life of the modern student while sitting in photography class last week, as the teacher was up in the front of the classroom explaining that "There are just three certainties in life. Death. Taxes. And an 18% gray image tone from a normally exposed simple subject."

***********************
To: Cathy and Heather
From: Amanda
Subject: Do y'all think

He looks like Albert Einstein tonight?

Sent from my iPhone

*************************

To: Amanda and Heather
From: Cathy
Subject: Re: Do y'all think

OMG yes. Totally thought that last week too. It's uncanny.

Sent from my iPhone

***************************

But the most gratifying electronic note I got passed during class on Monday was from Heather, who has almost two year old triplets and is pregnant with her fourth child, Penelope, due this summer. Heather sent me this message shortly after eating a chockablock cookie:

****************************

To: Cathy
From: Heather
Subject: Penelope likes the cookies

Sent from my iPhone

*****************************

If these cookies are good enough for Penelope, they are good enough for me. I did not expect to enjoy these, but I loved them. If you would have told me two years ago that I would make, and savor, a molasses coconut oat chocolate raisin cookie, I would have thought you'd been smoking the coconut. I officially no longer trust my own judgment about whether a recipe is worth making or not.

Thanks for the excellent pick, Mary!

TWD: Sweet Cream Biscuits

2010-04-20T00:01:00.001-04:00

Melissa at Love at First Bite chose this week's TWD recipe, Sweet Cream Biscuits. I really enjoy baking breakfast treats more than anything else. I don't think there is anything better than waking up (or, in my personal situation, waking other people up) to the smell of freshly baked blueberry muffins, or cinnamon scones, or coffee cake. It makes the day seem a little more special, right from the beginning.

These biscuits are simple to whip up, because there is no butter in the recipe, and therefore there is no need to cut butter into the flour. Flour, salt, sugar, baking powder and cream - that's it. I rolled my dough to the 1/2 inch thickness that Dorie recommends, cut them with a 2" cutter, and froze them unbaked.

I know going in that certain baking activities are fraught with danger, so I can do the requisite hand-wringing ahead of time. The sugar may not carmelize. The custard may not thicken. The egg whites may get under whipped. The egg whites may get over whipped. But strangely, I had no idea until I read the P&Q that I should be worrying about whether my biscuits would rise. I suppose that any time I use baking powder I have a fleeting thought that maybe it's lost its magic, but I did not have any specific worry about my biscuits. So I blissfully mixed and cut and froze these just a few days after the April recipes were posted (i.e., well before the P&Q was up) and baked them one Sunday morning while we had friends visiting us from out of town.

And they rose like champs!

Everybody devoured these. They got eaten with, inter alia, butter, bacon, jam, and eggs (not all at the same time) and were universally adored.
Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I learned that I was really lucky that my biscuits rose the first time. Since they were such a hit when I made them, I decided to try them again to see if my success was just a fluke. Usually if there is baking trouble to be had, I will have it, and it felt much more natural for me to head into a recipe with an acute fear of failure. Second go-round I decided to make minis using my 1.5" cutters. And once again, they rose! (See proof at top of post).

One by one my bed-headed kids padded down the stairs and ate biscuits:

I pretty much spent the whole morning spreading butter or jelly on tiny biscuits. They couldn't get enough of them. These are a big hit around here, to put it mildly. I can only hope my biscuit-rising hot streak continues, because these are simple to make, light and flaky, delicious, and hugely popular with my family.

Thanks for the great pick, Melissa!

TWD: Swedish Visiting Cake

2010-04-13T00:20:00.004-04:00

I'm twenty months into (mostly) weekly baking and blogging, and, much as I enjoy it, it can get a little tiring at times. Every once in a while we just get sweeted out around here, plain and simple, and the thought of baking another cake seems outrageous. Giving the goodies away sounds good in theory, but unless you're friends with the high school swim team (know anyone, Kayte?), even my most enthusiastic sweets recipients experience dessert fatigue after a while. Plus, it seems like everyone is watching some combination of sugar/fat/calories/carbs, while I'm a big proponent of "everything in moderation" myself, I certainly don't want to be the evil temptress sabotaging anyone's dietary efforts by showing up at their door with a bundt cake. Then there is the blogging part -- while I suppose it's not technically necessary to come up with new ways to say "I liked the cookies!" every week, if one is inclined to do so, well, that gets difficult after a while. New adjectives really need to be invented to do Dorie's desserts justice, but until then, some of us will stare at the computer and think: "this tart was fabulous. No, I already said the crust was fabulous. Maybe, this tart was most excellent! No, too Wayne and Garth. This tart was superb?"

But one aspect of blogging with Tuesdays with Dorie that has never gotten tiring for me is getting to know many great people, including Nancy of The Dogs Eat the Crumbs, who chose this week's recipe. Nancy and I realized early on that we share an alma mater (wahoowa!!), we're both born and raised Northerners living in the Southeast, and we both have husbands who don't eat chocolate. Clearly we were destined to be blog friends. Nancy's blog is wonderful (fabulous? superb? -- All of the above). Her posts are consistently detailed, informative and fun, and her pictures are beautiful. And wow, can she ever pick recipes!

Nancy chose the Swedish Visiting Cake, which Dorie tells us was traditionally brought by Swedish women when they visited one another. The cake is supposedly so quick to make that you could start making it when you see guests coming up the road, and it will be done by the time they arrive at your door.

We were not expecting any Swedish visitors this month (other than a Hanna Andersson package or two), so I decided to try the cake out on a Missourian visitor, a North Carolinian visitor, and a couple of Alabamian visitors. Also, I kind of cheated and made the cake early in the day that I knew our visitors were coming, rather than waiting until I actually saw them coming up the road. So I didn't really test "up the road/cake ready" speed claim.

No doubt this is a fast cake to make, though. And it's all made in one bowl! Rub lemon zest into sugar (a great Dorie trick - really brings out the lemon flavor); whisk in eggs, salt and vanilla and almond extract. (As an aside, Dorie says that the extracts are optional, but I feel like the almond extract makes this cake, and I will definitely use it every time). Mix in the flour, then fold in a stick of melted and cooled butter. And that's it! Impossibly quick and easy! Bake it in a 9" cast iron skillet for 25 or 30 minutes.

The first time I made this, I was a little worried it was going to be too thin. There is no leavener in the cake, so it wasn't going to rise much. And it is a thin cake. But once I tasted it, all worries flew out the window. This is an AMAZING cake! It's sweet but not overwhelmingly so, with an irresistible almond flavor. I think the texture is almost a combination of a cake and a blondie. It has a little chew to it, kind of like a blondie, but it also has a softness and a moistness that is more cakeish. David (who also loved the cake) told me not once, not twice, but at least three times over the course of two of these cakes that the texture reminded him of cornbread. And as I told him, that kind of remark makes me reluctant to ask him what he thinks about these desserts ever again, because this is NOTHING like cornbread. Cornbread is dry and crumbly and this cake is neither. I THINK what he was trying to get at was the cake was dense like cornbread, as opposed to being a light and airy cake? In any event, we may not agree about how best to describe the texture, but we both agree that this cake is incredible. Our visitors seemed to love it as well.

This is one of my favorite TWD recipes yet. It's delicious; it works as a dessert or as a snack cake; and it is insanely quick and easy to make. I won't just say I'll make this again and again -- I already HAVE made this again and again (and I'll continue to). Our first visitors (Missouri and Missouri-via-North Carolina) liked this so much that I made it again for the second wave of visitors (Alabama). It's a safe bet that any regular visitors to this house will have this cake sooner or later. Thanks Nancy for the great pick!

TWD: Mocha Walnut Bundt Bunny Cake

2010-04-06T00:01:00.003-04:00

This week's Tuesdays with Dorie recipe is Mocha Walnut Bundt cake. Since my special occasion dessert selections have a strange tendency to track the TWD calendar, I decided to make this cake for Easter. And seeing as I have this bunny pan, and a 7, 5 and 2 year old in the house, I opted to skip the bundt and go with the more whimsical bunny. This was my second bunny cake, but my first marble cake. How I've managed to go twenty months in TWD without marbling anything boggles my mind.

The vanilla cake batter that forms the basis of the entire cake includes ground walnuts. They add a little something something to the cake without making it overly nutty. A little less than half of the batter is added to a melted chocolate/coffee mixture to create the "mocha" portion.

I tried to marble:

I realize that "marble" in this context is a verb that suggests considerably more movement that what is seen here. I'll have to work on my marbling next time I'm making a cake that doesn't involve floppy ears and a cottontail.

I wasn't quite sure how long to bake the cake. I swear that the Joy of Baking site has conversions for every conceivable pan size except for three dimensional bunnies. I decided to start out at 30 minutes and go from there. The center (torso) was way underdone at 30 minutes. I kept adding 5 minute intervals and finally took the cake out after about 45 minutes.

Depanning went smoothly - whew!

I made Dorie's bittersweet ganache to hold the two bunny halves together. It worked, to my great relief (and was really delicious with the cake!)

As for decorating, the materials that came with the cake suggest three options:

Ding ding ding! Why yes, I went with door #3, the confectioners' sugar bunny. Unfortunately, although dusting always sounds easy in theory, I have a really hard time with it. I just don't know when to hold 'em, when to fold 'em when it comes to powdered sugar dusting, which my sweet husband likened to an artist who just can't stop dabbing paint. Well, he had the "just can't stop" part right, anyway. So unfortunately, it looked a little bit like a snow-covered bunny:

I wasn't sure quite what to do when it came time to cut the cake. I was as intimidated as I am when facing a whole chicken. I decided that typical chocolate bunny rules (first ears, then face, etc.) did not apply to a bunny cake. I started with the tail and cut it in slices, as if it were a loaf cake. That worked fine and wasn't terribly messy. Then I got to the head, checked to make sure there were no children in the room, got on my Mr. McGregor and chopped off the bunny head. I then removed the ears for good measure.

For reasons that I still don't quite understand, I left the head (i.e., two head halves) and the ears (i.e., two separate floppy ears) on the serving plate. As I'm sure is self-evident to you bakers, the head is essentially a muffin that has been baked for 45 minutes, and the ears are mini muffins that have been baked for 45 minutes. So those suckers were inevitably going to be overbaked, and not just a little bit. Clearly I should have thrown them out, but subconsciously, I guess I figured it was the slices that looked most appealing, so people would just naturally grab the slices. So I was horrified to see one person walk by with a bunny head half on the plate, and then another, and then someone else walked by with a floppy ear, and then someone else passed by with the other ear. Four plates, four overdone bunny head parts. I wasn't sure what to do at that point -- I'm pretty sure Emily Post does not cover what to do when family members serve themselves well-done bunny head cake parts that you stupidly left on the serving platter at Easter dinner -- so I just decided to not say anything. Still, I was so angry at myself - I survived the mixing, the marbling, the baking, the getting-the-bunny-out-of-the-pan, the making-the-ganache-thick-enough-to-hold-the-bunny-halves-together; the bunny assembly, the confectioner's sugar, the installation of the edible grass; and the transportation of said cake on my lap across the neighborhood in one piece ONLY TO SERVE SECTIONS OF THE CAKE THAT WERE, AT A MINIMUM, 90% OVERDONE.

I served myself an actual slice of cake, so I feel like I have a pretty good sense about how the cake really tasted. I did not seek or receive additional feedback about the cake - possibly because it was a fun, busy day with lots of activity, and everyone quickly moved from dessert to the next fun thing, and possibly because people literally could not speak after choking down the dried out, seared bunny head pieces. But nobody is more critical about my desserts than I am, and I can say with confidence that the center of the bunny cake (i.e., the bunny torso) was delicious. Even these slices were a wee bit overdone though - I probably should have taken it out about 5 minutes sooner. So I can't even imagine how awful the head and ears must have been. (Let it go Cathy. Let it go.) But the flavor (of the torso) was wonderful, and the texture was dense, rich and moist. I will make this cake again. Not in a bunny pan, though.

Erin of When In Doubt, Leave it at 350 (great advice!) chose the Mocha Walnut Bundt cake. Thanks for the delicious pick, Erin!

TWD: Coconut Lime Tea Cake

2010-03-30T00:01:00.001-04:00

I thought of myself as a coconut hater for so long that it is hard for me to remember that I'm now a (sometimes) coconut liker. My mind immediately defaults to its standard coconut setting (aversion, disinterest, lack of enthusiasm, Coppertone) when I see a coconut recipe, and this week's Tuesdays with Dorie selection, Coconut Tea Cake, was no exception. It wasn't until the neurotransmitters carried the "Coconut Butter Thins!" message to the "baking motivation" section of my brain that I was able to rally enough to make this cake.

And (how predictable is this?) I'm so glad I did! I decided to make the coconut lime version of the cake, since I've enjoyed that combo before. The cake came together easily. I did make one mistake though - I was supposed to beat together the eggs and the sugar until "pale, thick and almost doubled in volume." Instead, I just beat the eggs until pale, thick and almost doubled in volume, and then had to go back and add the sugar (and lime zest) later and beat for another few minutes. Those poor eggs. Believe it or not, I actually have to read things carefully for a living. Apparently when I'm not on the clock I prefer to read every third word.

The dry ingredients, coconut (I toasted mine), vanilla and dark rum get added to the ~~eggs~~ eggs and sugar, along with a melted butter/coconut milk mixture. I don't think I've ever used regular, full-fat coconut milk before. I've used light coconut milk in various Thai recipes. Dorie warns that you need to stir the coconut milk first, and it states clearly on the can that coconut milk naturally hardens and separates, but even so, I wasn't ready for this:

Mmmmmmm, can't wait for that coconut tea cake!

I poured the batter into my kugelhopf pan, and an hour later, D and I were eating and reviewing the cake:

D: It's really really good. It's kind of dry, but not in a bad way.
C: Exactly! That's just how Dorie's friend who grew up eating Austrian desserts likes it.
D: Um, yeah. I mean it's really good. It's not what I'd call a decadent cake.
C: Okay good, I nailed it then. I'd be worried if you thought this was decadent. Dorie specifically says that it is more of a well-mannered cake.
C: Good with coffee or tea.
C: Refined.
C: Perfect for cutting slice after slice every time you walk by it.
D: OH COME ON, that was a WALK!!!

(My taster got distracted by the end of the Tennessee/Michigan State game.)

One thing we both agreed on: the coconut flavor was VERY mild. If you are coconut-ambivalent, this is the perfect coconut cake for you. Honestly, if it weren't for the occasional coconut flake (more of a texture issue there), I'm not sure I would even identify this as a coconut cake. David said that he wouldn't go quite THAT far, but he agreed that the coconut was subtle. Either way, we loved the flavor and thoroughly enjoyed the cake.

Carmen of Carmen Cooks chose this week's recipes. Fabulous pick, Carmen!

TWD: Dulce de Leche Duos

2010-03-23T00:01:00.002-04:00

We recently replaced our ten year old tube TV with an LCD flat screen. Then just weeks later, after listening to our ancient desktop grind and sputter whenever we tried to switch between applications, we bought a laptop and got wireless in the house. After the cable guys left after installing the wireless, I could barely resist the urge to carry the laptop around the house and email my husband from each room: "Works in J's room!" "Emailing you from the garage." "Just thought I'd say a quick hello from the deck." Later that night, as we sat on the couch, David patted my back and said that we had finally arrived in late 2006.

But having the technology in the house does not mean that I understand any of it or can troubleshoot when things go wrong. None of this is intuitive to me, and to make matters worse, I find it a little boring, so I have a hard time paying attention when someone tries to explain it to me. Basically, I can turn the TV on and off, and change channels, and after much studying, I learned to switch between the TV and the Wii. But if one of the kids presses the wrong button and the screen goes to static? Well, there's just nothing to be done about that until David gets home.

Same with computer stuff. I can handle the most basic functions as long as nothing goes wrong, but as soon as it does, I wave the white flag. And that is why the only picture I can post of this week's Tuesdays with Dorie recipe, Dulce de Leche Duos, is this lone, sad "bottom of the cookie jar" shot:

I took other pictures of these cookies. I tried to make them look pretty and stack them up and take them outside in good light and everything. And I can see the thumbnails of these dulce de leche cookie pictures in the folder on my (old, since the dulce de leche pix pre-date our new) computer. The thumbnails are plainly dulce de leche duos. But bizarrely, when I double click on the pictures and/or upload them to Blogger, the dulce de leche duo pictures freakishly turn into pictures of my husband opening presents on his birthday.

Wait, that's not a Dulce de Leche Duo! It's David, opening the Star Wars Wii game, given to him by our seven year old, who just happens to have an interest in Star Wars Wii games himself:

Here's another one of my dulce de lecho duo thumbnails that, when double clicked, turns into a picture of David opening a pair of argyle socks:

Does this kind of thing even happen to other people? I can't even begin to find the right words for a google search to help me solve this problem. I'm just hoping that it's not a chronic situation and it goes away on its own.

I did happen to post one dulce de leche duo picture on Flickr, so if you are interested, you can find it here. But if I were you, I'd know that I could probably find a thousand better pictures of dulce de leche duos in other places.

I made these cookies over a month ago (around David's birthday, in fact) so I don't remember much about making them. I had a can of dulce de leche that I was excited to use. I loved the texture of the cookies -- soft and chewy and maybe a little cakey -- but I think opinions about the flavor of these cookies will come down to whether you like the taste of the dulce de leche that you use in the recipe. In the end, I wasn't a huge fan of the canned stuff that I used, and that affected my overall impression of the cookies. I know that several other people made their own dulce de leche for this recipe, and I'll probably give that a try next time. David, on the other hand, LOVED these cookies -- I would say he was as enthusiastic about these as he's been about any cookie I've made with TWD. The kids preferred the singletons over the duos - I guess for them a little canned dulce de leche goes a long way.

I will probably make these again because my hubs was such a big fan of them. I'll attempt my own dulce de leche next time and see how that goes. Jodie of Beansy Loves Cake picked the dulce de leche duos. These were fun to make - thanks for the pick, Jodie!

TWD: Soft Chocolate and Raspberry Tart

2010-03-16T00:01:00.000-04:00

I love this tart.

This tart is a perfect example of why I don't bother to order dessert in restaurants anymore. Even excellent restaurants. [Exceptions: the bread pudding souffle at Commander's Palace. And the chocolate souffle at Hot & Hot. Then there's the apple cake at Chez Fon Fon. Oh, and let's not forget the profiteroles at Highlands! Er, nevermind, I guess I do still bother to order dessert in restaurants. My husband told me in our early dating days that he wasn't attracted to salad-eating women, and I'm just doing my part to keep the fire burning.]

But if I wasn't bothering to order desserts in restaurants anymore, it would be because I can make THIS myself:

Dorie's recipes are delicious from top to bottom, but I think her tarts in particular are truly fabulous. After TWD is over and I look back and think about the experience and why it's been so valuable, one reason will be desserts like this one. I never would have even attempted a dessert like this pre-TWD. I would have assumed it was the kind of thing that real bakers make, not hacks like me. But Dorie has demystified the process and broken it down into manageable components, bringing these special, elegant desserts within the reach of the casual home baker.

The tart starts with Dorie's sweet tart dough, fully baked. I've made this dough numerous times, and every time I make it I'm afraid I'm handling it too much or somehow overworking it. And every time, it's delicious anyway. Delicious + forgiving = keeper.

Fill the tart shells with fresh raspberries. I know they're not in season, but mine were beautiful and really delicious.

I made two minis. Should have made the full recipe with this one - I wanted to sneak off for a good cry when this was gone.

It seems like Dorie has a hundred different recipes for ganache, and somehow one is better than the next. The ganache for this tart is made with a combination of milk chocolate, bittersweet chocolate, sugar, cream, butter and eggs. Dorie describes the texture of the finished product as "seductively slithery," which sounds rather snake-like to me. It is certainly seductive, though -- my intended "one bite" turned into a second, then a third, then a fourth, and then I started to think about rescinding that offer of half a tart that I had just extended to my dad. This tart turned me into a monster, a greedy monster, I tell you. Something about that slithery chocolate with the tart raspberries and the buttery shortbread crust - yup, this was pretty much heaven on a plate.

Nom nom nom . . .

Rachelle of Mommy, I'm Hungry! picked this week's most excellent recipe. Great pick, Rachelle!

TWD: Thumbprints for Us Big Guys

2010-03-09T00:01:00.000-05:00

The name of this week's TWD recipe, Thumbprints for Us Big Guys, makes more sense if you own the cookbook (which you REALLY should!), where it follows the "Kids' Thumbprints." The Kids' Thumbprints are peanut butter cookies (or maybe more accurately, peanut butter and jelly cookies), whereas the Big Guy Thumbprints are more of a buttery nutty shortbread cookie. And, as with many things associated with being a Big Guy, making these may involve the kind of minor hassle that you just don't have to deal with when you're a kid; namely, that of tracking down hazelnuts (Dorie's nut of choice for this recipe), which I never even knew were all that exotic until the mainstream Big Guy grocery store in my medium-sized city did not carry them, at least not in any of the normal places where you would expect nuts to be found, like the nut aisle, the baking aisle, and the bulk specialty foods aisle. I eventually asked, and was alternatively sent to the Asian food aisle (?) and told that it was a seasonal item (?). I was not to be deterred, though -- I've had my eyes on these Big Guys for over a year, so if I had to drive to Nashville or Atlanta or even New York itself (or the Whole Foods on 280), I WOULD find the hazelnuts I needed for this recipe. Then I heard that Kayte and Tracey were using almonds, which I had in the house and love, and suddenly NOT running around town on a nut quest seemed like the sane thing to do. And for once, I did the sane thing.

This is a simple recipe. Mix up the dough (a combination of flour and ground nuts, butter, sugar, salt and vanilla and almond extract). No dough chilling required. Then make thumbprints (pinky prints if you want to get technical) in the dough to make room for the jam. Bake. After they come out of the oven, a quick once-over with the trusty pinky may be necessary.

Once they cool, heat up some jam and fill the indentations. I used some raspberry and some strawberry. I had a helper.

She turned five a couple of months ago, and suddenly she can fill thumbprints as neatly as I can. Quit that growing up too fast, kids.

The verdict? Everybody enjoyed these. I baked the full recipe (which yielded 50 cookies) on Saturday afternoon, and here it is Monday night and they're already gone. I knew I could count on David to eat most of these, and he did not disappoint me. His dad and my dad helped him out - thanks, menfolk. I liked the crumbly texture of these. They teetered on the "dry" line, but not in an unpleasant way. If I make them again, I might do a 3/4 flour to 1/4 ground nut ratio rather than 50/50, but that's just quibbling for quibbling's sake - I thought the cookies were great. I think the stronger flavor of the raspberry jam worked better than the milder strawberry. All in all, this recipe is a keeper and I'll make these again. They'll probably show up again at Christmas.

Mike of Ugly Food Dude chose this week's recipe. Nice pick, Mike!

TWD: Coconut Cream Tart

2010-03-02T00:01:00.003-05:00

There are few desserts that just don't sound all that good to me, but coconut cream anything is one of them. I'm not a huge fan of coconut except in unusual circumstances. And while I'll never say no to a spoon dessert that is set in front of me, I generally don't get hit with those intense "must . . . have . . . custard . . ." cravings the way I regularly do with, say, brownies, or chocolate chip cookies. And that's just from the "eating" perspective. From the "making" perspective, there are few things I enjoy making less than custard. Caramel would be one of them, but that's only because of the devastation it tends to unleash in my kitchen. Even though caramel is more dangerous, I'd still rather make it than custard, because if by fluke the caramel works, I have caramel! But if the custard works, I just have custard. Did anyone follow that?

I'm trying not to eat sweets much over the next six weeks, however, so this week's TWD selection, Coconut Cream Tart, sounded like the perfect dessert to me. I could make it without being remotely tempted by it, and then pass it over to my husband, who doesn't have the coconut cream issues that I do. I would take one bite, purely for journalistic purposes.

Having thus hatched the perfect plan, I started with Dorie's sweet tart dough, which I've made several times and love. I made a full recipe of the tart dough, even though I knew I'd be scaling back the filling, because I planned to use some of the dough for this tart, and save some for the upcoming chocolate raspberry tart. I've got to tell you, every time I make the sweet tart dough and get to the part of the recipe where Dorie gives you the heads up that the food processor will start making a different noise when the dough is almost ready, I'm reminded of why Baking is such a truly fabulous cookbook.

Random photo of toasted coconut inserted into middle of post to break up the monotony of the long-winded prose
I made a half recipe of the custard, and it came off without a hitch. I think cornstarch really helps me in that regard -- thanks, Argo. I added the full (half recipe) amount of toasted coconut to the custard. And to make the tart even more resistible to me, I added the full (half) amount of dark rum called for in the recipe (both in the custard and in the topping). I'm not a big liquor girl (now wine is a different story), unless the drink is fruity and has a name that ends with the diminuitive "-ini," (e.g., "Sweet Tartini"), and I tend to have a real aversion to boozy desserts. But I knew I could count on my husband to take one for the team and review the recipe exactly as written.

I made poor David eat this when he was one his way out the door to take Jacob somewhere. ("What?! You're leaving now?! But Dorie says this is best right after it's assembled. You can't go now -- you need to eat this first. What? Well yeah, I knew it started at 3:15, but I had to assemble it now or it would be too dark for pictures later. Eat it. EAT IT!!!") Fortunately, he really enjoyed this. He said that even though this is not a dessert he'd ever pick on his own, he thought this was about as good as coconut cream pie (tart) could be.

I agree with that assessment. I thought this was delicious. While the rum was definitely noticeable, I did not think that it was at all overpowering, and it complemented the other flavors nicely. Leave it to Dorie to come up with a version of this dessert good enough to convert a coconut cream hater. Beryl of Cinemon Girl picked this week's tart - thanks for the great pick, Beryl!

TWD: Honey Wheat Cookies

2010-02-23T00:01:00.002-05:00

I actually made this week's TWD recipe, Honey Wheat cookies, several months ago, when I was trying to use up what was left in the gimormous jar of wheat germ that I purchased for my very first TWD recipe, Granola Grabbers. Wheat germ makers apparently believe that if you eat wheat germ, YOU REALLY EAT WHEAT GERM. You just can't find a small jar of this stuff (at least I can't). I foolishly did not take pictures of these when I made them before, and I almost did not make them again because I did not want to have to buy another monster jar of wheat germ that I later needed to use up. But my husband really liked these when I made them the first time, and I'm trying to be on my best TWD behavior these days -- so I decided to march into that grocery store, hoist that wheat germ into the cart, and go home and make these suckers again.

What I remembered most about these cookies from the first go-round was that they were mighty wheaty, but I remembered nothing about the process. The recipe calls for a full cup of wheat germ, half of which gets mixed in with the flour, and half of which is used to roll the dough balls before baking. This time around, as soon as I dumped the full cup of wheat germ into the flour mixture, it all came flooding back to me - that's EXACTLY what I did last time! I used all of the wheat germ *in* the cookies, rather than saving half of it to go *on* the cookies, which no doubt accounted for their epic wheatiness. This time, I was able to fish most of the excess half cup of wheat germ out of the flour. Repeat disaster averted!

These cookies, when made in accordance with the recipe, have a very pleasant, tangy honey wheat lemon flavor. They're fantastic with a cup of hot tea, but they would also totally work as a "summer" cookie, if you are one to assign seasons to your cookies.

My husband was really excited to see these cookies show up in the cookie jar again --you would have thought they were World Peace Cookies or something -- and seemed to enjoy the cookies as much as he did the last time, even without the excess wheat heat. I enjoyed them much more this time around. And now that I have a bushel of wheat germ in my freezer, I'm sure I'll make them again!

Michelle of Flourchild chose this week's recipe. Michelle has a great blog, and you can find this recipe, along with many other goodies, over there!

TWD: Dorie's Best Chocolate Chip Cookies - The Challenge

2010-02-16T00:01:00.000-05:00

Most evenings, you'll find the television on in our house, and it's almost always turned to ESPN or Fox Sports World. I don't really pay attention; I mean I like sports and all, but I can't really sit still for too long or I fall asleep. But every once in a while a sports story will catch my attention, like the hair pulling soccer player, or the Krispy Kreme Challenge. And of course every year come late fall, I look forward to watching someone on TV rant about college football's BCS system:

{on the TV}
Bob: All I'll say is this Dan - the BCS is a mess. It's a complete travesty and it is hopelessly broken. And until we fix it by instituting some kind of playoff system, we will never be able to crown an Undisputed National College Football Champion!
Dan: I agree Bob.

{in the living room}
Cathy: Um, David? WHY do we have to crown an Undisputed National College Football Champion? Didn't it just used to be like somebody won the Orange Bowl, somebody won the Cotton Bowl, and then it was New Year's Day and the sun came up anyway?
David: Yes, but that was that a very dark era in sports history, even though nobody knew it at the time.

Recently, however, I've become unsettled by the fact that I don't really know which chocolate chip cookie is the Undisputed Chocolate Chip Cookie Champion. I've become borderline obsessed with finding the best chocolate chip cookie -- and suddenly I understand where the football people are coming from. No, it's really NOT good enough just knowing that there are lots of swell CCC recipes out there. I want to know which is THE BEST, dammit!! And there are a lot of other people like me out there. Be afraid, be very afraid.

On my quest for the perfect CCC, I decided to have a cookie taste-off.

Despite what the lighting in these pictures would indicate, I did not actually hold my chocolate chip cookie taste-off at 3 a.m.

The contenders:

(1) This week's TWD recipe, Dorie's Best Chocolate Chip cookies
(2) The New York Times CCC.
(3) Alton Brown's The Chewy.

Notes and disclosures:

(1) The NYT CCC and The Chewy are both famous among those of us who frequent chocolate chip cookie chat rooms (just kidding) (kind of). I've made both of these cookies before and am in crazy love with both of them. I was really looking forward to making them again and tasting them head to head so I could figure out which was better. Because not knowing was really bugging me, even more than that year that Auburn went undefeated yet got shut out of the National Championship game.

(2) Dorie describes her CCC as being a "Toll House cookies' kin," but with her own tweaks. While I love Toll House cookies -- they are probably the only thing I ever baked from scratch until I started baking from scratch maniacally last year -- I felt like recipes such as the NYT, The Chewy and others, with their unusual techniques and somewhat different ingredients, were created in an attempt to improve on the Toll House Cookie, and I personally like them better than the original Toll House. Therefore, based solely on her description of the cookie -- and this has never happened before -- I bet against Dorie. I really went into this thinking either the NYT or The Chewy would win.

(3) Dorie says her cookies are "thin and crisp and a bit chewy in the center." They certainly were thin:

In fact I pretty much had one large thin chocolate chip pancake on my silpat. I would not describe this as a "crispy" cookie, though (that's a good thing, in my opinion) - it had a little bite to it, but I thought the hallmark of its texture was its wonderfully chewy center.

We held the taste-off at David's dad's birthday party. The voters were provided with milk to cleanse their palates between cookie tastes:

One of our voters, Caroline, age 2, found the whole "Crowning of an Undisputed Chocolate Chip Cookie Champion" process to be a bit overwhelming, so girlfriend spent a lot of time on the floor:

THE RESULTS:

The Chewy did not fare well in the taste-off -- it only garnered one first place vote. David's brother described it as a "pre-scone." I'm pretty sure that's not what Alton was going for. Don't worry, *I* still love you, The Chewy.

The contest between the NYT and Dorie's CCC was almost too close to call, but in the end, the NYT won by one vote. But several people said that they had a hard time deciding between the two and really could have gone either way. When I started to explain the differences (the NYT uses a combination of cake flour and bread flour whereas Dorie's just uses all purpose, etc), David's mom (who voted for the NYT) said that she would never go out and buy cake/bread flour just to make the NYT cookies -- Dorie's were almost as good, so she would just make Dorie's with the all-purpose flour that she was certain to have on hand.

I think what a lot of people liked about the NYT CCC was the sea salt that is sprinkled on the top before baking. Of course, nothing is stopping us from getting out the salt shaker before sticking any old CCCs in the oven.

In short, I should have known better than to bet against Dorie. Her chocolate chip cookie more than held its own in my taste-off. It is a delicious, classic chocolate chip cookie. While some people might prefer a cookie that's not quite so thin, it's hard to go wrong with her recipe.

Many thanks to Kait of Kait's Plate for choosing this wonderful cookie. I'm not sure I'm any closer to crowning an Undisputed Chocolate Chip Cookie Champion, but I'm sure having fun trying!

TWD: Milk Chocolate Mini Bundts

2010-02-02T00:01:00.001-05:00

The thing about Dorie Greenspan's recipes is that they are so good, so professional, and so foolproof that you can end up being kind of lazy about things and still wind up with a good result. Such was the case with this week's Tuesdays with Dorie recipe, Milk Chocolate Mini Bundt cakes. To start with, Dorie clearly specifies that you should use "premium milk chocolate." Well, my one grocery stop the day I made these was going to be Piggly Wiggly, where the best milk chocolate available was this:

My days tend to fall into one of two categories: (1) days when nothing will come between me and my Callebaut, and (2) days when the very thought of loading these three kids back into the van to drive to Whole Foods for fancy chocolate is the height of absurdity. I was having day #2, so I went with the Hershey's. I've also been known to make cupcakes from a box. But really, Hershey's is good enough to support an entire amusement park, so surely it could hold its own in a couple of mini bundts.

My pans weren't exactly mini, and they weren't exactly bundts. I can best describe them as smallish and bundtish:

I think I found the pans at Target - they were called "dome pans" or something like that. They annoy me every time I use them, because they are never exactly what I want. Anyway, the upshot of all that is that my baking times were a little off -- these really needed to bake longer than the recipe calls for. I lost count of how many times I stuck these back in the oven for another 2 minutes, another 3 minutes. In the end, I probably overbaked them by a few minutes. Nothing that a little Reddi Whip couldn't fix!

I intended to make the glaze, and even went so far as to melt some bittersweet chocolate (which overfloweth in my pantry, unlike milk chocolate) for the glaze, but then I realized I didn't have any corn syrup. So I ended up serving the first cake sans glaze, and I figured I'd pick up some corn syrup to make glaze for, and then photograph, cake number two.

The kids and I LOVED this cake warm out of the oven. I can't identify the flavor, but it sure wasn't chocolate. Just that magical combination of butter, sugar, flour, eggs, and Hershey Bar, I suppose (and mini chocolate chips, which I threw in there for fun). I immediately thought of my friend Amanda, who does not like bittersweet chocolate. I'm so making this cake for you, sister! This is really a great chocolate cake for people who prefer milder chocolate, or who don't like chocolate at all. I don't think anyone would know this was a chocolate cake if you didn't tell them (at least not if you make it with Hershey Bars and don't glaze it).

In keeping with the lazy theme, I never did make the glaze, and I never did photograph the second cake in natural light. I'll spare you my long boring list of excuses. But don't you love the twinkle of the incandescent light as it catches the glass cake stand under the overhead kitchen fixtures? Nope, you won't get that outside at 4 p.m.

I finally decided to eat the last (still naked) cake on Sunday night, several days after I made it. And it was still fabulous! But that's a Dorie recipe for you - you can use inferior ingredients, skip a major component of the recipe, and let it sit there for days getting stale, AND IT IS STILL DELICIOUS. So you can only imagine what her recipes taste like when you actually follow her instructions!

Thanks to Kristin of I'm Right About Everything for a great pick!

TWD: Cocoa-Nana Bread

2010-01-26T00:01:00.001-05:00

I'm not sure if I'm still on the TWD blogroll -- I'm kind of afraid to look -- but even if I'm not, I figure nothing is really stopping me from posting "unofficially." Back in the fall and through Christmas, I was doing a lot of baking-but-not blogging. Then after Christmas that kind of turned into not-baking-and-not-blogging. I hit rock bottom at my daughter's 5th birthday party, when I made cupcakes from a box:

Yes, that's how far I've fallen. Mind you, the cupcakes from a box got seriously rave reviews (they were "strawberry" cupcakes from a box, which kind of worked because I wanted them to be pink, but still). And while I was taught that you should accept compliments graciously and not try to explain to the complimenter why they shouldn't really be complimenting you, I couldn't help but immediately respond to every "these cupcakes are AWESOME!!!" compliment with: "okay look, they're from a box. Elizabeth really wanted strawberry cupcakes and she wanted them to be pink and I really didn't want to mess with fresh strawberries this time of year, um . . . yeah. I did make the buttercream though!"

Anyway, after the cupcakes-from-a-box incident, I figured I'd better do penance by baking up some cocoa-nana bread, and stat. Because everyone would know that something as weird as a chocolate banana loaf bread didn't come from a box! So I whipped some up using bananas that have been taking up space in my freezer since the mid-aughts. I thought I'd bring some over to my parents as a little peace offering after my son tried to put a Harry Potter spell on my mother after she told him he needed to do a better job sitting still at the dinner table.

This bread baked up beautifully and filled the kitchen with that irresistible cocoa-nana aroma that we all love. Okay I admit it - I didn't let it cool in the pan for the specified 20 minutes before depanning it. I hurried and snapped some quick pictures so I could get on with the tasting. I thought this bread was delicious, especially warm from the oven. I definitely thought that the cocoa was the predominant flavor, but the nana was definitely there. My kids loved this. Ate it, left crumbs everywhere, asked for more. I'm not sure the chocolate/banana combo will ever achieve the kind of legendary status as, say, chocolate and peanut butter, but this was still very good.

I cut the bread into thick slices and shared the slices with my parents (as noted), David's parents, his cool Aunt Missy, his grandmother, and my BIL, SIL, and cute nieces. One bite and the Harry Potter Incident was forgotten. Later, my SIL called me to say that they were all loving the cocoa-nana bread, but that I couldn't fool them - this was no breakfast food, this was chocolate cake. I agree that the cocoa-nana bread leans more towards "dessert" than "breakfast," but honestly, I found it to be more "3 p.m. snackish" than anything else. But we could debate this for hours over some wine. Or some cocoa-nana bread.

The always fun and talented Steph of Obsessed with Baking chose the cocoa-nana bread, and you can find the recipe (and lots of other great stuff!) on her blog. Steph, this one was enjoyed far and wide in my little world. Thanks for choosing such a great breakfast(?)/dessert(?)/snack(?)!!!

TWD: Cran-Apple Crisps

2009-11-17T22:06:00.000-05:00

Our fearless leaders at Tuesdays with Dorie have permitted us to post the November recipes in whatever order best accomodates our busy holiday schedules. The recipe that I've decided to post this week, Cran-Apple Crisps (chosen by Em of The Repressed Pastry Chef) is a classic fall dessert that would be a fabulous addition to any Thanksgiving table. But it was also great on that random Monday night in early November when I had my act together well enough to make a Cran-Apple Crisp for dessert. It is versatile that way - you can dress it up, you can dress it down. I never hesitate to make apple desserts, since my husband loves them and can be counted on to be a volume eater of them, and at least one of my three kids will eagerly join him (that's the best percentage I ever get).

Tempted as I was to make individual crisps, I decided to make a half recipe of this crisp in one large baking dish. It's an easy dessert to throw together. The only aspects of the recipe that might cause me to avoid it on those (numerous) Monday nights when I DON'T have my act together are that (1) it requires peeling/coring/cutting apples, and (2) it requires that I break out the food processor. But honestly, if either of those activities seems overly daunting, I know that I don't need to be making a crisp anyway.

This crisp is fairly traditional, but the topping has the unexpected addition of coconut. I'm not a huge fan of coconut, except when I am, and in this case, I think I'd have preferred the topping without the coconut. But I'm certainly not going to quibble - this is a delicious, crowd-pleasing dessert. It certainly pleased (3/5th) of my crowd!

You can find the recipe in Dorie Greenspan's amazing book, Baking from my Home to Yours, or by visiting Em's gorgeous blog. Thanks for the perfect fall pick, Em!

TWD: Sugar-Topped Molasses Spice Cookies

2009-11-10T17:04:00.000-05:00

Even though I've been a monumental blog slacker of late (which I am really sorry about, particularly to my friends whose blogs I have not been visiting), I always get as excited as a kid in a candy store when the Tuesdays with Dorie recipes for a new month are announced. It's the promise of a clean slate - the promise of a new month in which I CAN make caramel. I just can't click over to the TWD website fast enough when I see that "new recipes are up!" tweet. And typically, I am affirmatively excited about one or two of the recipes; one or two of them scare the heck out of me (usually custard or caramel-based); and one or two of them fill me with indifference. The Sugar-Topped Molasses Spice Cookies, chosen by the fabulous Pamela of Cookies with Boys, fell into my "overwhelmed by indifference" category for November. Other people were really excited about them, but as someone who, when presented with a platter of chocolate chip cookies, lemon cookies, and spice cookies, would ALWAYS choose the spice cookies last, my primary thought was "Good. These won't tempt me and David will eat them."

Well. Then I made them. And realized, after taking one bite of their crispy-on-the-outside-chewy-on-the-inside-perfectly-spiced-subtly molassesy goodness, that these cookies now rank solidly among my top three favorite cookies EVER, right up there with World Peace Cookies and Alton Brown's The Chewy. This, a spice cookie! I don't know if my taste buds have changed (there's been some banter on Twitter that your taste buds die as you get older, and I did just have a birthday) or if I was just young and stupid back in the days when I thought I didn't care much about spice cookies, or if these spice cookies are just particularly amazing, given that they are a Dorie Greenspan recipe and all. I don't know and I don't care. All I know is that I am deep deep deep in Sugar-Topped Molasses Spice Cookie love. If you see me sitting there with sort of a faraway look and a goofy half-grin, you can assume that I'm thinking about the Sugar-Topped Molasses Spice Cookies again.

I was a little thrown off kilter by my love for these cookies. I had to scramble to change my plans, because again, I was expecting to be indifferent to these cookies while my husband, he of the superhuman metabolism, ate them all. But after I had one, I knew I had to get some of them out of the house pronto. I needed a worthy recipient, though, someone who would fully appreciate their awesomeness - maybe someone who is eating for two. Yeah, that's it! So I brought some to my 8 months pregnant friend, Amanda. She called me after trying one and said "I am SO glad that you're on a diet." And I replied "I am SO glad that you are not."

Amanda can expect more of these cookies before she has the baby (and some after she has the baby); and I am going to start sharing them with some of my non-pregnant friends, too. If you are likely to receive baked goods from me for Christmas, these will be in the package. Just wanted you to know so you can plan your Sugar-Topped Molasses Spice Cookie needs accordingly. Don't worry, the World Peace Cookies will be in there too.

My only cookie-related disappointment is my pictures of them. I got a fancy new camera for my birthday, and I expected to take it out of the box and instantly start taking beautifully styled, perfectly composed, well-lit pictures (on full auto, of course). Instead, these are even darker than the ones I took with my old point & shoot! I'm taking an Introduction to Digital Photography class starting this week, so maybe that will help. But I'm afraid that there may be inherent talent limitations at work here, and at the end of the day, I suspect that this is just not going to be the place you want to come for pretty pictures. But this IS the place to come for unbridled enthusiasm about Sugar-Topped Molasses Spice Cookies!!

Pamela, I loved you before you chose these cookies, and I love you even more now. Thank you for introducing me to a new favorite cookie!

TWD: Chocolate Caramel Crunched Tart

2009-09-29T20:41:00.000-04:00

I should start by saying that there have been far, far more TWD desserts that I expected not to enjoy, but ended up loving, than there have been desserts that I expected to love but did not. I will also say that when I affirmatively do not like a Dorie Greenspan dessert, and cannot explain that dislike purely by personal taste (see, e.g. custard, flan), I assume that I made an error. Usually I can identify the error, but in the case of this week's Tuesdays With Dorie dessert, Chocolate Caramel Crunched Tart, I cannot. But since most of the TWD universe heard angels sing upon tasting this dessert, and I was most disappointed, I can only conclude that I messed something up somewhere.

I cut most of the recipe down to make one 4" tart, but I made a full batch of the caramel because I had visions of my non-chocolate-eating husband enjoying the leftovers over vanilla ice cream. And he might have, if we owned a jackhammer. I had one previous run-in with caramel that, um, did not go well, so I was nervous going in. In fact, when my husband asked me that Saturday morning what I had on the agenda for the day, I told him that I was totally flexible for most of the day, but that at 1:00, I needed to concentrate on caramel completely, and would be most appreciative if the children were out of the kitchen (out of the house = even better). He totally wrangled the kids during the appointed time, and I had zen-like focus on the caramel. It seemed to go fine. The temperature was right. The color was right.

But the caramel was so, so wrong. It was spreadable at first, but once it cooled, it became rock hard, and I found the flavor to be on the bitter side. Not at all the smooth, luxurious caramel I had been hoping for. The caramel was very hard to break through without a knife (or with a knife, for that matter), and the ganache did not seem to be properly set. While this screams "company dessert!" on paper, I would not serve it to company unless Dorie herself were in the kitchen making it with me, because I don't want to have to raid my toolbox for proper dessert utensils (wire cutters? needlenose pliers?) nor do I like to ask my dinner guests to sign a waiver before biting into my dessert affirming that they have not had any recent dental work.

Carla of Chocolate Moosey chose this tart. It is obviously wonderful in just about everybody else's hands, so head on over to Carla's website for the recipe!

TWD: Cottage Cheese Pufflets

2009-09-22T00:01:00.001-04:00

I find that participating in a weekly baking group is mostly a good thing, but one bad thing about it is that sometimes you bake for the wrong reasons. You might find yourself baking not because you feel like baking, or because you are going somewhere where it might be nice to bring a cake, or because you or anyone you live with or know actually wants what you're baking. No, sometimes you bake just to get the darn thing baked, because that's what you do. You get things baked.

But it's always great when you taste something that you baked for the sole purpose of getting it baked and find that you really really like it. Then it's all worth it. Such was the case with this week's Tuesdays with Dorie recipe, Cottage Cheese Pufflets, which were chosen by Jacque of Daisy Lane Cakes. It's not that they didn't sound good to me -- they did. But I baked these in a hurry several weeks ago before heading out of town to visit my adorable new baby nephew, so I was kind of checking things off the ol' list left and right, and the pufflets were just another item on the list, along with "buy TSA-approved baggies" and "pick up monogrammed bib." Therefore, I remember very little about baking them. I don't think they gave me too much trouble, or I would have remembered. I know that some people found the dough to be hard to work with, but I don't recall having any particular issues with it. I know that I did a poor job sealing them, as the jam kind of oozed out while they were baking, as you can see in the picture.

I do know that we really liked these. The pufflets were more breakfast pastry-ish than dessert pastry-ish, in my opinion. The dough puffed as it was supposed to puff and was flaky, tender and not too sweet. It went well with strawberry jam, which I can see from the pictures that I used. I might have made a few with apricot jam as well. David?

I knew that David would be turned off by the name "cottage cheese" pufflets. As I handed him one, I thought for a split second about calling them "jam pufflets" or "pufflet pastries" or "jam pastry thingies," but I told it like it was -- "cottage cheese pufflets" -- and watched him grimace. But fortunately, the worst thing about these is their name, and after one bite hubs was a believer in the deliciousness of cottage cheese dough. Who knew?

Thank you Jacque for the great pick!

TWD: Flaky Apple Turnovers

2009-09-15T20:00:00.003-04:00

This week's Tuesdays With Dorie recipe for Flaky Apple Turnovers was chosen by Julie of Someone's in the Kitchen. For whatever reason I did not get my act together and make these over the weekend, when the timing and lighting conditions would have been more favorable. So I found myself scrambling to get these done and photographed on Tuesday, which (fair warning) will be obvious from the quality of the photos and the post.

Dorie calls the sour cream turnover pastry a "miracle," because it is rolled, chilled, and folded in a way that encourages it to gently puff. Sadly, I tend to be a miracle killer when it comes to pastry, but I was very intrigued by this dough and hoped for the best.

I read the recipe and saw that the dough calls for three (3) sticks of butter.

[QUIZ: How annoying is it to watch someone who voluntarily signed up for a weekly baking group act horrified by the quantity of butter that she is using on a weekly basis? ___ kinda ___ really ___ really really.]

I decided to quarter the recipe, because my family of five (and only three sure-bet turnover eaters) did not need 16 turnovers, and because somehow three ounces of butter seemed less menacing than three sticks, even though the per-turnover butter quantity would be exactly the same as if I went with the full three stick version. Nope, deep down, I wasn't fooled. But I used light sour cream because I had a fridge full of it, thanks to a 3 for $5 special at Western. I didn't need three 16 oz containers of light sour cream (who does?) but I couldn't afford not to buy it at that price. I wasn't sure how light sour cream would work in the recipe, but decided to have faith that all the butter would carry me home in the turnover fat department.

The dough is a simple mixture of sour cream, sugar, flour, salt and, of course, butter. The butter gets cut into the flour with a pastry blender, two knives, or your fingers. I do not have a pastry blender, and even one knife at a time is plenty dangerous for me, so I decided to follow Dorie's lead and use my fingers. Worked like a charm! I achieved that coarse meal consistency, although there were still a few large gobs of butter in there. Dorie's instructions suggested that that was preferable to over mixing, so I left them, and then added the sour cream/sugar mixture.

After a couple of rounds of chilling, rolling, and folding like a business letter, my turnovers were filled and ready to bake:

I didn't expect to see anything as dramatic as puff pastry, but I was hoping to get flaky dough with some decent puffage* (*probably not a word).

Verdict?

Success!!! We LOVED these! They were puffingly* (*actual word) flaky:

The dough was wonderful - it is indeed miraculous; Dorie is not kidding. The texture was perfect, and it was not overly sweet, so it complemented the apple/sugar/cinnamon mixture very well. My hubs raved about these and said that they reminded him of a fried pie (that's a compliment) but without the grease. As expected, David, Caroline and I were the only ones who ate these. Someday, perhaps my older two children will look back with regret on those days when mom baked crazy delicious things multiple times a week, only to be rebuffed in favor of Transformers fruit snacks. Until then, more for the rest of us!

Thank you for this fabulous fall pick, Julie! And thank you Dorie for yet another incredible dessert.

TWD: Chocolate Soufflé

2009-09-08T05:00:00.001-04:00

I'd never made a soufflé before this week's Tuesdays with Dorie, although I joined TWD in the first place because I was excited about the prospect of making renowned desserts that I would never otherwise try, like soufflés. Soufflés are synomous with difficult and fussy (although Dorie assures us that this reputation is undeserved) and, as my husband pointed out, a plot point in numerous Tom & Jerry episodes (i.e., Tom & Jerry's antics cause soufflé to collapse). I couldn't wait to tackle it.

I never really knew what went into a soufflé, and now that I know, I'm totally amazed. Chocolate, eggs, sugar, milk. That's it. No flour. No butter. The fact that these four ingredients can combine to create a dessert with this crumb

blows my mind. It's nothing short of magical. I mean, do a few different things with those same ingredients and you get ice cream. It's almost too much for me to get my head around.

I didn't think that anyone would eat these besides me and my two year old, Caroline, so I decided to quarter the recipe and bake the soufflés in two 6 oz ramekins. The recipe is so simple that I can actually remember what I did without having to go upstairs and check the cookbook! Melt sugar and chocolate over a pan of hot water, whisk in milk. Let the chocolate cool for a few minutes and whisk in egg yolk. Meanwhile, whip egg whites until they are opaque, add in sugar, and continue whipping until they start to hold peaks. Fold egg whites into chocolate mixture. Fill ramekin(s):

And bake. I took a picture of them in the oven to prove that they rose, just in case they immediately deflated as soon as I opened the oven, which was very possible since I live in a Tom & Jerry kind of world:

These soufflés left me speechless. What can I say? They are shockingly easy to make. They are intensely chocolaty, decadent and rich, without feeling heavy. This is, hands down, a top 5 Dorie dessert for me. My only mistake was in making just two of these, because my seven year old and four year old loved the soufflé and wanted their own. Lucky for them, they won't have to wait long to try these again.

One of my favorite blogger friends, Susan from Doughmesstic, chose this week's recipe. Do yourself a favor and visit Susan's blog - she's talented, creative, and really fun. She made the most adorable (and delicious!) custom cookies for my daughter's birthday party a couple of weeks ago, and I've been telling all my real life friends about her ever since! Thanks for the cookies, Susan, and for this fabulous TWD pick!

BBA: Cinnamon Raisin(less) Walnut "Swirl" Bread

2009-09-07T20:28:00.010-04:00

The Slow & Steady subgroup of the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge took on Peter Reinhart's Cinnamon Raisin Walnut Bread this week. I tell you, the deeper I get into the Bread Baker's Apprentice, the more hooked I get on bread baking. It's like a little miracle happens every time that dough rises.

Of course, there's always something about my breads that keep them from being perfect (see, e.g, tiny ciabatta holes, preternatural hugeness, or gaping holes in cinnamon bread where swirl is supposed to begin) and therefore I don't usually get to revel in the miracle of my risen bread for very long. But still, even less-than-perfect homemade bread is pretty darn good, and this cinnamon walnut bread is Exhibit A.

Many of Peter's breads are two-day breads, requiring some kind of overnight soaker before the dough is mixed, but this one is a one day bread. It's also a one-bowl bread, so it is just about as easy as it gets. I started this one on Sunday evening at about 7:00. I don't usually like to start bread at night because I never know when I'm going to hit The Wall, and if I do happen to hit The Wall when my dough still needs to rise for another 30 minutes and bake for 40 minutes, I'm likely to make decisions that are good for my sleep needs but bad for my bread. Fortunately, on the first rise my dough doubled in 1.5 hours (rather than the 2 that Peter estimates it will take), and crested the pans on the second rise in about an hour. So the bread was out of the oven at the respectable hour of 10:30, and my night-owl husband graciously offered to cover the bread once it was cool. Delicious cinnamon bread and a decent night's sleep to boot - yup, it was a good day.

I left out the raisins here, but decided to try for a cinnamon swirl when shaping the bread. Peter provides clear instructions for doing this, and I tried to follow the instructions exactly, but my swirling clearly needs work. The slices of bread on the end of the loaf had these crazy half swirl things -- kind of like a semicolon with a huge hole where the top dot should be:

I'm a big fan of the semicolon, but not in the middle of my bread. Fortunately, when you got towards the center of the bread, the swirl looked a little more like a swirl is supposed to look (except for the big hole). I gave one loaf to David's parents, and I'm curious to hear how their swirl looked. I'm hoping that it didn't evoke thoughts of punctuation marks for them.

But mutant swirl or not, this is incredibly delicious bread. I was pleased with the crumb, and while I think this would be delicious fresh, cinnamon bread seems like it is meant to be toasted. So I toasted it, buttered it, and sprinkled it with more cinnamon sugar. My entire family loved this. Another great one from the Bread Baker's Apprentice!

Ellie: Nekkid Waldorf Chicken Wraps

2009-09-03T00:01:00.000-04:00

Jessica of Johnstone's Vin Blanc chose this weeks recipe for CEiMB, Waldorf Chicken Wraps. I fully intended to photograph and eat this in wrap form, but due to rushed lunch-packing and rushed picture taking, my chicken salad has yet to don a wrap.

I was happy to see this pick, because it is a perfect, portable lunch choice. I work in a field in which a 10 hour day is just a normal, ordinary workday, and during busy times, the hours can get much longer than that. But I've been working part-time ever since I had kids, which means that I have a limited amount of time in the office and usually have a lot to do in a short amount of time. Therefore, I don't usually leave my desk for lunch. Also, I'm kind of lazy -- that's another reason I don't leave my desk. Inertia just tends to take over, and unless acted upon by an outside force, the walk to Chick-Fil-A just never seems worth it. I will even go to great lengths to avoid having to walk downstairs two floors to heat something up in the microwave, such as buying Thermos hot food containers, or eating food cold that should be warm. So this Waldorf Chicken salad is really the perfect lunch for me. I could pack it in my pink Pottery Barn Kids lunch box in the morning, and enjoy it at noon with minimal movement required.

Yogurt replaces the usual mayonnaise in this chicken salad (there's just a touch of mayonnaise in the dressing). I used nonfat Greek yogurt, which I somehow lived without for 35 years, but I have no idea how. Ever since I discovered it last year (thank you, food blogging community!) it has been as much of a staple in my house as bread or milk. Lemon juice, dijon mustard, thyme, salt and pepper round out the dressing, and grapes, apples, and toasted walnuts combine with the chicken to create the salad. I know that I have walnuts somewhere around here, but I couldn't for the life of me find them while I was making this, so I used almonds instead.

Result: I really like this chicken salad. While it might not be the best chicken salad I've ever had, it is light, flavorful and perfect for the ol' lunchbox. I'll make this one again -- might even wrap it next time. Thanks Jessica!

TWD: Espresso Cheesecake Brownies

2009-09-01T00:01:00.003-04:00

I had the kind of mixed feelings about this week's TWD recipe, Espresso Cheesecake Brownies, that I have about almost every chocolate pick. On one hand, they involve espresso, cheesecake, and brownies, so they pretty much sounded like heaven in a pan to me. On the other hand, my husband does not eat chocolate-y things, and my kids do not eat espresso-y or cheesecake-y things, which left me as the sole Eater of the Brownies in my house. Which would be fine if I wasn't paying Weight Watchers International cash money to help me shed the last of my baby/enthusiastic new baker weight (my baby just turned two, and I'm not a new baker anymore). So as I was reading the recipe, my eyes saw notes in the recipe such as "Makes 16 brownies," but my brain interpreted them as "Makes all 15 of those pounds you just lost come back." Still, at the end of the day, c'mon -- they're Espresso Cheesecake Brownies!!!!! -- ain't no way I wasn't gonna make them.

The day I made these, I got a call from the school nurse about 20 minutes into the school day. "This is Nurse Monica. J is in here and says he has a tummy ache. Would you like to talk to him?" Well, since the child he sits next to in class has the swine flu, hell no, I don't want to talk to him! I want to do what any hysterical mother would do and check him out of school immediately so I could rush him to the pediatrician's office with the other hysterical mothers and their maybe sick, maybe not children. But we had a little time before our appointment, so I mixed up the brownie component of this recipe while my son dressed up as a ninja, which was my first clue that he probably did not have the swine flu (he didn't).

The brownie mixture was thick but pourable, sort of like magma (not "liquid hot magma," Mike Myers fans, just "magma") when I left it to go to the pediatrician's, but when I got back a couple of hours later, it was significantly thicker. I don't know if that long rest time affected the final outcome. But in the interest of full disclosure: I let the brownie mixture sit out for two hours when Dorie did not tell me to do that.

The cheesecake portion of this was easy. I used light cream cheese and sour cream, because I always use light cream cheese and sour cream, and therefore they taste normal to me.

Because of the thickness of my brownie batter after the long rest time, it was no longer pourable, and in fact, was pretty darn hard to spread in the bottom of the pan at all. I used a 9" round pan because I did not have a 9" square pan (I'm pretty sure that 9" square pans and 9" round pans have different capacities, but they are close enough for me). The cheesecake layer was pourable and spread nicely. My "swirling" of brownie batter into cheesecake batter was pretty pitiful, possibly because my brownie batter was so thick, and possibly because I'm just not cut out to be a swirler. I pretty much violated every one of Dorie's swirl-related warnings. Take care not to plunge knife into brownie layer? Oops. Swirl sparingly? Oops.

Despite all that, these baked up really well. I had to bake mine for 35 minutes before the cheesecake was set. Cool and refrigerate, and many hours later, you have . . . one delicious brownie! The brownie portion of mine was a little dry, but that may be because I let the batter sit out for so long. I think the brownie part tended towards "cakey" as opposed to "fudgy," which complements the creamy cheesecake nicely, although in general I prefer a fudgy brownie. Or maybe they were supposed to be fudgy and I just messed up -- always a solid possibility here. The espresso cheesecake part was to die for. These went straight to my freezer, where I've been doling them out to myself 1 oz at a time. They are actually great frozen, and the brownie doesn't seem quite as dry when it's frozen. They are not the easiest things to share because they need to be kept refrigerated, and because they bring out the Greedy Brownie Hoarder in me, but I may try to share the love soon if I can bear to part with them.

This wonderful brownie was chosen by Melissa of Life in a Peanut Shell. Thanks for the great pick, Melissa!

Ellie: Chicken Saté with Spicy Peanut Dipping Sauce

2009-08-27T03:01:00.000-04:00

I got to choose this week's recipe for CEiMB, and I picked the Chicken Saté with Spicy Peanut Dipping Sauce. I had a hard time choosing, of course, but since this one was on my short list back in January when I picked for the first time, when I saw that it was still available, I decided to go for it. After I sent my email to Sara, I suffered some picker's remorse and commenced serious hand wringing and second guessing. The ingredient list is so long! We just recently (like last week!) made recipes that had an Asian flair - is this redundant?! What will the vegetarians do?! What if everyone hates it?! But once I made it, I relaxed and felt really good about this pick. Let's face it: there's just something fun about food on a stick.

Despite the long ingredient list, both the marinade and the sauce came together pretty quickly. The chicken marinates for an hour in a marinade of chicken broth, light coconut milk, soy sauce, shallot, garlic, fish sauce (or more soy sauce, which is what I used), dark brown sugar, lime zest, and ginger. Then Ellie says to thread the chicken on skewers and grill in a grill pan, but when I tried them in a grill pan, the chicken would not lie flat because the long skewers came up over the rim of the pan. So I moved them over to a regular grill:

I'd skip the skewers next time I want to do this in a grill pan. Skewers or no skewers, this one is going to end up being a finger food - fair warning.

The chicken gets garnished with peanuts, basil and cilantro (except if you hate cilantro, then for the love -- don't use it!)

The chicken was great on its own. But hubs and I agreed that it was the peanut sauce that made this dish really outstanding. I mixed up all of the sauce ingredients with my trusty immersion blender: creamy peanut butter, chicken broth, soy sauce, dark brown sugar, lime juice, ginger, garlic, red pepper flakes, red curry paste, and a shallot.

The sauce was sweet, spicy, smooth, creamy and utterly irresistible. I was so glad that it was just hubs and I eating this so any bowl-licking that took place could be overlooked. As good as the chicken was, next time I'm likely to just make the sauce and serve it with simple chicken grilled with salt and pepper - I felt like the sauce is what gave this dish most of its flavor, anyway. Ellie mentions that it's a "sublime" dip for raw vegetables, and I think it would be wonderful with grilled vegetables or tofu as well, or in a Thai noodle bowl -- so I really hope that the non-meat eaters in the group were able to find a way to enjoy this fabulous peanut sauce.

I hope that everyone enjoyed this recipe as much as we did!

Chicken Saté with Spicy Peanut Dipping Sauce, 2006 Ellie Krieger, All Rights Reserved

Ingredients

1/2 cup low-sodium chicken stock
1/2 cup lite coconut milk
2 tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce
1 shallot, sliced thin
1 clove garlic, minced
1 1/2 teaspoons Thai fish sauce (or 2 additional teaspoons low sodium soy sauce)
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon lime zest
1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
1 pound skinless, boneless chicken breast pounded slightly and cut into 1-inch strips

Directions

8 (8-inch) bamboo skewers, soaked for 20 minutes

3/4 cup Spicy Peanut Dipping Sauce, recipe below
2 tablespoons minced fresh basil or cilantro leaves
1/4 cup chopped toasted peanuts
In a medium sized bowl, whisk together the chicken stock, coconut milk, soy sauce, shallot, garlic, fish sauce, brown sugar, lime zest, and ginger. Add the chicken strips and marinate for 1 hour. Remove the chicken from the marinade and discard the marinade.

Spray a nonstick grill pan with cooking spray and preheat over a medium-high flame. While pan is heating, thread chicken onto skewers. Grill 2 to 3 minutes per side, until meat is cooked through and has light grill marks.

Serve chicken skewers with Peanut Dipping Sauce, and garnish with basil or cilantro and chopped peanuts.

Yield: 4 servings (2 skewers and 2 tablespoons peanut sauce per serving)

Spicy Peanut Dipping Sauce:

1/2 cup natural creamy peanut butter
1/4 cup low-sodium chicken broth
3 tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce
1 1/2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger
2 tablespoons lime juice
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1/2 teaspoon chili flakes
1 teaspoon red curry paste
1 shallot, peeled and roughly chopped

Place all ingredients in blender and blend until smooth.

Sauce can be made 1 day ahead of time, and will keep 3 to 4 days in the refrigerator.

Yield: about 1 1/4 cups

BBA: Cinnamon Buns

2009-08-26T05:16:00.002-04:00

The Slow & Steady bakers in the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge are taking on Peter Reinhart's Cinnamon Buns this week. I sensed an overall lack of enthusiasm for the cinnamon buns at the beginning, a lack of enthusiasm that I shared to some degree -- we're in the middle of a stretch of enriched sweet breads with the BBA, and I think many of us are looking forward to getting to the crustier hearth breads. But once I tasted these cinnamon buns, my enthusiasm returned in full force. These rank right up there with the best cinnamon buns I've ever had. They also rank right up there with the best cinnamon buns I've ever made, although it is somewhat crazy to me to think that I have indeed made enough different cinnamon buns at this point to have several to choose from in declaring one "the best." I've made Dorie's pecan honey sticky buns using her brioche, and they were to die for fabulous. I've made raisin snails using Peter Reinhart's brioche - also very good. And I've made Ina Garten's easy sticky buns, which were delicious, and indeed easy. But for the perfect combination of both simplicity and out of this world deliciousness, I just don't think you can beat Peter Reinhart's recipe.

Making these is no more difficult than making a typical cake or brownie recipe. Mix together sugar, salt, and butter or shortening (I used butter). Another nice thing about this recipe, for all you health conscious cinnamon bun eaters out there, is that it uses significantly less butter than the brioche-based cinnamon buns (5.5 tablespoons, as opposed to a full stick of butter in a half recipe of Peter Reinhart's middle class brioche and a stick and a half in a half recipe of Dorie's brioche. Add an egg and some lemon zest or extract (I used extract because I have it and never use it). Add the flour, yeast and milk (I used nonfat buttermilk), mix until a ball forms, then switch to the dough hook and knead for 10 minutes. I had to knead (er, let the Kitchen Aid knead) mine for a little bit longer before my dough passed the windowpane and the temperature tests.

Once it passed the readiness tests, I transferred it to a bowl sprayed with oil and let it rise. It's supposed to rise for two hours, but as bad timing would have it, I had the opportunity to leave the house (alone) and run errands (by myself) right when the dough had been fermenting for a little over an hour. And NOTHING stands in the way of Mama and her alone time. Therefore, it rose for a good three hours before I was able to shape it. It had at least tripled in size by then, and I worried that I overfermented (is that a word?) it, but it certainly didn't seem to affect the final outcome.

Rolling up the cinnamon/sugar filled dough:

Cinnamon rolls sliced and ready for second proofing (I wanted to bake them fresh the next day, so I covered these with plastic wrap and retarded them in the fridge overnight):

The next morning, I took them out of the fridge - they had to proof for 3 or 4 hours before baking. This worked out perfectly with my timing, since I planned to serve them around "brunch" time at my daughter's two year old birthday party. It was a "Madeline" themed party:

I know that cinnamon buns aren't particularly French, but then neither are pigs in a blanket, and I served them too.

The cinnamon buns smelled incredible as they were baking, as cinnamon buns are wont to do. And they were really, really wonderful. I don't think that my two talking kids have ever been as enthusiastic about anything that I've baked as they were about these cinnamon buns. And my birthday girl?

She loved them too.

Suffice it to say that I will make these again. Peter, I'm sorry I wasn't excited about all these sweet breads. You sure showed me! I am in love with this recipe, and am already plotting and scheming to manufacture some other cinnamon bun occasions in the very near future.

TWD: Creamiest Lime Cream Meringue Pie

2009-08-25T19:32:00.002-04:00

I think many people get into food blogging because they read a lot of food blogs, think it looks like fun, and decide to start a blog themselves. I, however, had never read a food blog before I started food blogging, other than my friend Amanda's. All I knew was that Amanda was in this online baking club that had her baking something every week and blogging about it, and I thought it sounded like a riot. So I joined TWD and started a blog. At the time, because I had not read food blogs, I did not realize that attractive food photographs are kind of the point. Since most of my blogging was done as a part of organized groups with participation requirements, I assumed that my pictures merely served as proof that I actually made the assigned recipe. Sort of like turning in homework. Eventually, as I started reading more and more blogs, and viewing stunning photograph after stunning photograph, it dawned on me that I had woefully misunderstood the significance of the pictures. Once I got a clue, I began trying, within the confines of my limited photographic and artistic talents, to take better pictures. I took the food outside in the late afternoon light. I thought about things like whether a particular bowl complemented the food. I garnished with mint leaves. I tried.

I say all that just to make it clear that I really, really wish that I did not have to post the following photograph. I wish it so much that I almost skipped posting today altogether -- but when I make something, it always seems foolish not to post, thereby wasting a permitted skip that could otherwise be used on a week that I don't bake. So here is my Creamiest Lime Cream Meringue Pie, which I (1) turned into a parfait when my mini graham cracker crust fell apart, (2) accidentally burned with my blowtorch, and (3) photographed in my kitchen at approximately 10 p.m. And boy, does it show:

I fiddled with the photo editing software and tried to crop, adjust the light, etc. to help the situation, but nothing could help a lime pie that's been so abused. All I could do is post later in the day on Tuesday in the hopes of subjecting as few people as possible to this fugliness. I'm sorry if you're not one of the lucky ones.

I made one mini ~~pie~~ parfait for my husband. He really enjoyed it. I've made other (easier) key lime pies before (ones that don't require the whisking eggs over the stove routine) and he liked those a lot as well, so I'll probably stick with the easier kind (e.g., Mark Bittman's key lime pie from How to Cook Everything). Also, hubs prefers whipped cream to meringue, and I prefer whipping cream to whipping egg whites, so I'll stick with whipped cream going forward. But just because this probably won't be my go-to key lime pie does not mean that it wasn't wonderful. It was, says hubs! Linda of Tender Crumb picked the Creamiest Lime Cream Meringue Pie - thanks for the great summer pick, Linda!

Ellie: Grilled Thai Beef Salad

2009-08-20T00:01:00.001-04:00

My friend Jen from Jen B's Cooking Carveout chose this week's CEiMB recipe, Grilled Thai Beef Salad. Jen has the office two doors down from me, and we joined CEiMB around the same time. Therefore, our turns to pick recipes come around the same time. I pick the week after Jen, and this Thai Beef salad had been on my short list. I was thrilled when I saw that Jen picked it, because I was able to knock one recipe off my list, which turned an excruciating decision into merely painful one.

I think the Thai Beef Salad appealed to me because I love Thai food, but rarely cook it at home. I guess I tend to skip over Thai recipes because the ingredients (things like red curry paste, green chile sauce, fish sauce) always seem exotic to me, although they can't be all that exotic, because they carry them in Publix.

In any case, I was so glad that Jen picked this, because it forced me to stare down the "international" ~~aisle~~ shelf at Publix and gather the ingredients I needed to make an authentic(ish) Thai dish at home.

The base of the salad is simple: red leaf lettuce, basil, cilantro, and shallots. But it is the dressing/marinade that makes this salad shine. A combination of lime juice, soy sauce, oil, brown sugar, garlic, ginger and red curry paste makes up both the marinade for the flank steak and the dressing for the salad. It came together really quickly and was so delicious. Hubs and I had it for dinner on Sunday night. I served hubs a scoop of rice with his to make it more of a manly-man meal. We both thought it was fabulous. We used the leftover beef in a stir fry tonight. This one is officially in the rotation. Thanks for the great pick, Jen!

TWD: Applesauce Spice Bars

2009-08-18T12:01:00.004-04:00

I've got to be honest - I'm so mourning the end of One Sentence Blog Post Week ("OSBPW") that I almost couldn't even bring myself to post today. Something about the one sentence format was so energizing - I couldn't even wait to get to the computer to knock out that sentence. So the prospect of returning to multiple sentences kind of immobilized me for a while there. But then I realized that nobody is making me write long-winded non-OSBPW posts, and with a little bit of discipline, I could embrace brevity every week!

Karen of Something Sweet by Karen chose this week's TWD recipe, Applesauce Spice Bars. I first made these last fall to bring on a family trip to the lake, and I made the recipe as written, including the glaze. My memory from that trip is a little fuzzy -- I remember thinking the applesauce bars were very good, but didn't travel particularly well glazed. Fast forward ten months -- Karen picked the applesauce bars for TWD, and I decided to make them for another family trip. I decided not to glaze them this time because of that nagging recollection of a Tupperware container full of sticky, apple-y, spicy mess.

So I made the bars, sans glaze, before we left for vacation -- they're easy to make and did not unleash any kitchen drama. They even baked all the way through, which is by no means a sure thing for me when I bake bars of any kind. I brought them to the beach, where I prettied them up for a photo shoot.

There are lots of people taking pictures of all kinds of things at the beach, but I was the only one taking pictures of baked goods. I wanted to yell "What?! Haven't you ever seen anyone photographing applesauce bars on the dunes before?" But I was pretty sure I knew the answer. Kayte asked via Twitter if it was like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit shoot. Having never participated in such an event, I can't be sure -- but I can tell you that I did not tell my applesauce bars to "work it, baby," or assure them that they are way hotter than my other desserts, and at no point did the applesauce bars throw a diva tantrum.

We all enjoyed these bars. When I first tried them (last fall) I was a little surprised by the texture -- very cake-like, when I was expecting something more like an apple-spiced blondie. It's a little like when you take a sip of what you think is water, but it's actually milk (or maybe it would be more precise to say it's like when you take a sip of what you think is water, but it's actually ice chips). Not bad, just not what I was expecting. But once I got over that, I thoroughly enjoyed the light texture and lightly spiced flavor of these bars. Yet another winner from the great Dorie Greenspan! Thanks for the delicious pick, Karen!

Ellie: Stuffed Turkey Burgers

2009-08-13T00:01:00.001-04:00

My good friend Peggy of Pantry Revisited chose this week's recipe for CEiMB, Stuffed Turkey Burgers, and the posting day for this recipe happens to fall during One Sentence Blog Post Week (which I've been enthusiastically participating in), and I feel like I'm getting really lucky with this whole one sentence thing, because the recipes I've posted so far this week fall into one of two categories (1) simple and delicious; or (2) made so long ago that I can't remember anything much to say about it anyway -- and without question this one falls into the former category: two small ground turkey patties filled with a little mozzarella and some roasted red peppers, and then sealed together and broiled to perfection (simple, delicious, and a nice change from ground beef - great pick, Peggy!).

BBA: Ciabatta

2009-08-12T00:01:00.003-04:00

Since this is One Sentence Blog Post Week in some parts, including these parts, I am going to seize the opportunity to post the ciabatta that I made back in May for the Bread Baker's Apprentice challenge (since the one sentence limitation helps me out big time given that I remember so few details about the ciabatta, seeing as I made it back in May and all) but I do remember that (1) we loved it - this is probably the best bread that I have ever made;(2) it had tiny holes, which irritated me to no end given that the hallmark of a good ciabatta is big holes (i.e. when it comes to ciabatta holes, size matters);

and (3) the fact that I made this insanely delicious bread yet was annoyed about the hole size definitely made me pause and question what has become of me.

TWD: Brownie Buttons

2009-08-11T00:01:00.002-04:00

As the lazy days of summer roll on, it's become apparent that blog fatigue has set in, for me and others, as manifested by a generally low motivation to wax poetic about baked goods (or just about anything else), and which has threatened to turn a super fun hobby into (gasp!) a chore (i.e., another thing on the to-do list) which would be tragic, as that is exactly the kind of thing that causes fickle people like me to ditch blogging and take up, say, fly fishing, so imagine my relief when I saw that someone had the brilliant idea of One-Sentence Blog Post Week (starting with today's Terse Tuesdays with Dorie), in which blog posts would be confined to -- yes, you guessed it -- one sentence, which is awesome because this week's TWD recipe, Brownie Bites (chosen by Jayma of Two Scientists Experimenting in the Kitchen - thank you, Jayma!), is an adorable little two-bite treat, and a lil' blog post just seems right for such a little dessert, and a mighty fine one at that (even without the glaze, which I skipped - good thing, because that might have necessitated a second sentence), even though the full recipe only made 12 measly little brownie bites, which was not nearly enough for a week at the beach (in fact, they were gone before we even left for the beach), and because I don't have any pictures of the brownie bites at the beach, I'll close with a gratuitous shot of my kids at the beach.

BBA: Classic Banana Bundt Cake and 100th Post Giveaway

2009-08-04T00:01:00.002-04:00

This week's TWD recipe was chosen by the wonderful Mary, The Food Librarian. Mary is a bundt cake enthusiast, and she picked a fabulous one this week!

I have a couple of mini bundt cake pans that I should have been really excited to use, but for some reason I was feeling a strong pull to do a full-size bundt cake. Just when I could feel myself falling deep into that "obsessing over something that really and truly does not matter" abyss, I realized that I had two, count 'em two, overripe bananas. Since the full recipe calls for four bananas, my decision suddenly became easy: I would make half of the recipe and use my mini bundt pans.

The cakes came together easily, and rose very well, well past the rim of the pan:

Of course, when I took those cakes out of the pan and turned them over, they had a distinctly Weeble-ish quality to them:

Fortunately, Weebles wobble but they don't fall down.

And neither did my mini banana cakes.

This was not some ordinary banana bread. The banana flavor was just right -- not too overpowering, not too subtle -- and the texture was moist but not overly dense. It was simple and delicious. I glazed two of my four mini cakes with the lemon glaze that Dorie mentions in "playing around." David thought the glaze really complemented the cake nicely. And my almost-two year old so loved this cake that she was inspired to string a few words together: "ah wah mo kay" (translation: "I want more cake.")

Thanks for this fantastic pick, Mary! I will definitely make this one again, for reals.

I am particularly happy to have made such a stellar recipe to celebrate this, my 100th post! I will save my ~~profound~~ observations and my "Blogging and What it Means to Me" essay for my highly-anticipated-by-nobody-but-me blogiversary, which is coming up in a couple of weeks, but I couldn't let a good round number like 100 pass without doing something. And as luck would have it, I've recently been the lucky winner of not one, but two "pay it forward" giveaways, and this seems like as good a time as any to start paying forward. For this 100th post, I'd like to pass on the awesome prize I won from my bloggy friend Di of Di's Kitchen Notebook -- a $25 gift certificate for a new cookbook! I used mine to pick up this excellent one by Mark Bittman:

Thanks Di, I've been loving my book!

But if you win, you could pick out any cookbook (or heck, any kind of book, or even a board game -- I won't tell) you'd like! I'm offering one lucky winner a $25 gift certificate to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or another online bookseller of your choice that facilitates easy^* (^*in my sole and complete discretion) online giftcard transactions.

If you would like to enter, leave me a comment by midnight PST on 8/10 answering the following question: "If you were a classic bundt cake, what kind of classic bundt cake would you be?" (or some other question). I will use the random integer generator to choose a winner.

Thanks for playing along! And thanks again, Mary, for choosing one seriously delicious banana bundt cake!

BBA: Challah

2009-07-31T22:25:00.003-04:00

We continue to work our way through the alphabet with the BBA challenge, and "C" happens to be a big letter for bread. Possibly the biggest, so we will be here for a while. The "C" in this week's C-bread, Challah, is silent, but it can hold its own with the other C-breads in every other respect.

I am sure that I have a lot to say about the process of making this bread, but lucky for you, I am scrambling to get this post drafted so I could get out of town, so I won't say (most of) it.

I will note that proud as I was of Artie, I was pretty sure I couldn't handle birthin' another loaf of bread quite so big. So I decided at the outset that I'd divide the dough in half and make two smaller loaves. And I sure am glad that I did - even the smaller loaves looked plenty big to me, and one big loaf might have out-Artied Artie.

Getting ready to braid:

Braided:

Somehow the braiding looked slightly better before I baked it. Plenty of room for improvement with that braiding, yes there is.

I had a small bite of this bread fresh out of the oven and thought it was very good. But I didn't really see us eating it for dinner, so I decided to let the loaves get stale. One loaf is coming on vacation with us, and I plan to make Ina Garten's recipe for challah french toast for breakfast one morning. I will report back!

I turned the other loaf into croutons, which were really great - we enjoyed them in soup and on salad all week!

Aaaaaaand there goes Blogger, flipping my pictures again. Thanks for nothing, Blogger.

Next up: ciabatta!

TWD: Vanilla Ice Cream

2009-07-28T00:00:00.002-04:00

I've definitely been enjoying my ice cream maker this summer, so I was excited to see that Lynne of Cafe LynnyLu picked vanilla ice cream for this week's Tuesdays with Dorie recipe. Excited, that is, until I saw that this was one of those egg/custard kinds of ice cream. Some people learn to deal with their weaknesses by facing them head on until they conquer them; I prefer to deal with my weaknesses by avoiding them. And since there are wonderfully delicious Philadelphia-style (non-custard based) vanillas out there, it has been gloriously easy for me to avoid dealing with eggs in my ice creams. But I wanted to be a good sport and give the custard thing one more try. And this time, I was armed with some incredibly helpful comments and suggestions left by my fellow bloggers after my last custard failure. So I went into this one feeling really optimistic.

The main thing I took away from the honey-peach debacle is to ditch the thermometer. The thermometer's great if you want to figure out the interior temperature of your challah, or whether your steak is medium rare, but it can really mess with your head when you are trying to make custard. I do have my eye on a more custard-friendly thermometer that I might ask for my birthday or Christmas (along with some equally sentimental gift like a biscuit cutter) but until then, I decided to trust the spoon test and (shudder) my own common sense. And it worked like a charm! It only took the base 2 or 3 minutes to pass the spoon test. Now that I know what the custard is supposed to look like, I am very grateful that my family survived my honey peach ice cream, given how appallingly overcooked the custard for that actually was (I probably cooked that one for 30 minutes trying in vain to get it to reach temperature). I feel lucky that we all got away that time with nothing worse than "grainy mouth feel."

But there was no grainy mouth feel this time - this vanilla was delicious, and smooth as silk. It kept its wonderful texture even after a couple of days in the freezer, which might be the main benefit to using eggs in the ice cream. In terms of flavor, it's almost impossible for me to choose whether I like this one or David Lebovitz's Philadelphia-style vanilla better without an actual side-by-side taste test. They are both fabulous. I'm probably more likely to stick with the Philadelphia-style, simply because it has one less step for me to potentially mess up. But I loved Dorie's vanilla, and am glad to have finally conquered custard.

Thanks for this great pick, Lynne!

Barefoot Bloggers: Peach & Blueberry Crumbles and Pasta with Sundried Tomatoes

2009-07-23T00:01:00.002-04:00

I am in two blogging groups that post on Thursdays, Barefoot Bloggers and Craving Ellie in my Belly. Since Barefoot only has twice monthly "mandatory" (for lack of a better word) posting requirements, I originally planned to post CEiMB recipes on Barefoot off weeks. Well, I don't think that's happened once. Usually what I end up doing is double-posting on Thursdays, and dashing off some painfully long, disjointed, incohesive, confusing post that includes some weirdo dinner combination like a Tomato Goat Cheese Tart and Chicken with Mango Barbecue Sauce. But that's worked okay, up until now, because I get my assignments turned in that way, and besides, I have to believe that nobody is actually coming here to learn anything.

But recently I've fallen into a bad habit of cooking/baking, but not posting about the recipe. While it's true that people have cooked, but not blogged about it, for centuries, when you sign on as a member of a food blogging group and solemnly swear to share your cooking experience on the World Wide Web, do the cooking without the attendant blogging and you'll look at the group blogroll one day and find that you've been dumped more unceremoniously than Jessica Simpson. I don't want that to happen to me, so I'm trying to catch up.

Given that I am so far behind on blogging assignments, I find myself with faced with the Mother of all unwieldy posts -- Peach & Blueberry Crumbles, Pasta with Sundried Tomatoes, Baked Onion Rings, and Lobster Rolls. I've decided to break it down by group. So if you are here looking for the CEiMB recipes, go here. Stay right here if you want to read about Barefoot.

This week's Barefoot recipe is for Peach & Blueberry Crumbles, chosen by Aggie of Aggie's Kitchen. This is such a great summer dessert. It seems like we can hardly keep up with the wonderful bounty of peaches and blueberries these days, so this was a great way to use some of them up. This one is a simple mixture of fruit, sugar, flour and lemon (juice and zest), topped with a sugar/brown sugar/cinnamon topping. It was quick and easy to make, smelled incredible while baking, and was so delicious. I cut the recipe in half and made three mini crumbles (I used teacups since I don't have ramekins). I served one to David with vanilla ice cream, and had half of one myself. A little while later, I was in the other room when David shouted from the kitchen "Hey! What's the plan for these cobblers?" I yelled back: "There is no plan! I just halved the recipe and it made three!" When I returned to the kitchen, the second full cobber was gone. Even though I didn't get any real verbal reviews about the crumbles, I'm taking that as positive feedback. This is definitely a recipe I'll come back to again and again.

A couple of weeks ago the non-slacker Barefoot Bloggers posted Pasta with Sundried Tomatoes, which was chosen by Cat of Delta Whiskey. I loved this pasta dish so much that I still can't believe I didn't post it on time. You would have thought that the words would just flow when one is so inspired by the perfect sundried tomato/olive/mozzarella salad. From now on, if anyone asks me to bring a pasta salad to a picnic, this is the one I'm bringing. And if anyone asks me to bring a potato salad to a picnic, I still might bring this salad and say "What? I thought you said PASTA salad."

It doesn't get much simpler than this - fresh tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, sundried tomatoes, and kalamata olives (actually, Ina says use "good black olives, such as kalamata." I also think this would be good with regular old (i.e., not particularly good) black olives). Ina says to use sundried tomatoes packed in oil; I used the ones packed in a wrapper, because I had a sneaking suspicion that there would be ample opportunity to make up for that lost oil later. The dressing contains more sundried tomatoes, olive oil, vinegar, garlic, salt and pepper (the recipe calls for capers; I left them out because I'm not a fan). The recipe calls for 6T oil and 2T vinegar; I cut down the oil to 4T (I think). Top with fresh basil and parmesan.

I l-o-v-e-d this salad, even before the parmesan and basil was added. David was not quite so enthusiastic. I think it comes down to where you stand on olives. I won't go so far as to say that I love them - don't want to overuse that word - but I am strongly in like with them. David, on the other hand, feels a deep sense of relief every night that I don't serve an olive dish for dinner. He particularly dislikes good olives. So when I make this again, I will serve the olives as a garnish, along with the basil and parmesan, so hubs can skip them and enjoy it more.

You can find the recipe for the Pasta with Sundried Tomatoes salad here. The Peach & Blueberry Crumble recipe is not on the Food Network website, so I'm including it at the end of this post.

This was a great month for Barefoot Bloggers! Thank you, Aggie and Cat!

Peach & Blueberry Crumbles, from Barefoot Contessa at Home

For the fruit

2 lbs firm, ripe peaches (6-8 peaches)
2 tsp grated lemon zest
2 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup fresh blueberries (1/2 pint)
For the Crumble

1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup light brown sugar, lightly packed
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 lb (1 stick) cold unsalted butter, diced
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Immerse the peaches in boiling water for 30 seconds to 1 minute, until their skins peel off easily. Place them immediately in cold water. Peel the peaches, slice them into thick wedges, and place them in a large bowl. Add the lemon zest, lemon juice, granulated sugar, and flour. Toss well. Gently mix in the blueberries. Allow the mixture to sit for 5 minutes. Spoon the mixture into ramekins or custard cups.
For the topping, combine the flour, granulated sugar, brown sugar, salt, cinnamon, and the butter in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Mix on low speed until the butter is the size of peas. Rub the mixture with your fingertips until it’s in big crumbles, then sprinkle evenly over the fruit. Place the ramekins on a sheet pan lined with parchment paper and back for 40 to 45 minutes, until the tops are browned and crisp and the juices are bubbly. Serve warm or at room temperature. If you want to make these early, store the unbaked crumbles int he refrigerator and bake before dinner. Serves 5 to 6.

Ellie: Oven Baked Onion Rings and Lobster Rolls

2009-07-23T00:00:00.000-04:00

This week's CEiMB recipe for Oven Baked Onion Rings was chosen by Mary Ann of Meet Me in the Kitchen. Have you seen Mary Ann's blog? She makes the most beautiful, inventive food, and her photography is stunning. I knew she'd hook us up with a great CEiMB pick! I had really high hopes for this one - I love onion rings and was hoping for a healthier version that would allow for more frequent indulgences. And this recipe is it.

The onions here are coated with buttermilk, salt, pepper, and a baked potato chip crumb/cayenne mixture. The cayenne definitely packs some heat; I might cut it down next time so I could breathe when I eat these. But we really loved them. They are crispy on the outside, soft on the inside - just like you want onion rings to be. These would be perfect with burgers, or really sandwiches of any kind. Keeper! Thanks Mary Ann!

A couple of weeks ago, another one of my favorite bloggers, MacDuff from Lonely Sidecar, chose lobster rolls for the weekly CEiMB recipe. MacDuff's writing and storytelling skills are phenomenal, and I know that whenever I visit her blog I'll come away with much more than just a good recipe for lobster rolls. Not that that wouldn't be enough. Well, while the conscientious Ellie-ites were posting their lobster rolls a couple of weeks ago, I was making but not posting them. I kind of figured that that ship had sailed, but I just got back in town from my sister's baby shower, and I dumped a couple of hundred pictures onto the computer, and I thought "what am I going to do with those lobster roll pictures if I don't post them?" So here we go.

This is another simple Ellie recipe - thank you for adding some much-needed simplicity to our lives, Ellie. Instead of the usual mayonnaise-laden lobster (or shrimp, which I used) salad, this one is made mostly with Greek yogurt (along with a little bit of mayo, celery, green onions, lemon juice, salt and pepper). Fill up some toasted hot dog buns with the salad, and you're done!

I'm not the world's biggest fan of shrimp/lobster salad in general, but I really did like these. They make for a quick, fun, and easy summer lunch or dinner. And as luck would have it, they'd be great with some onion rings!

Thanks for the great picks, Mary Ann and MacDuff!

TWD: Brioche Plum Tart

2009-07-14T00:17:00.000-04:00

I'm really not quite sure what to say this week, because I've officially run out of ways to say "Oops, I underbaked it." I feel like I have no excuse for failing at a brioche-based recipe given how frequently I seem to make brioche these days. But the brioche in this recipe is of the "poor man's," i.e., lower butter, variety, and maybe I need the extra butter in my brioche to mask my inevitable mistakes. In any case, this one just seemed to go poorly from the beginning. To start with, I had the hardest time converting the active dry yeast that the recipe called for to the instant yeast that I had. Sure, I could have just asked Nancy, but I was determined to give the 'ol brain a workout and figure it out on my own. It's like at work - I work with a paralegal who is an honest-to-goodness math wiz, and while it's so tempting to just say "Mike, I can't figure out the post-judgment interest, can you?," sometimes I just need to prove to myself that I can still do basic math without spontaneously combusting. So while it hurt my brain, I sat there with a pencil and calculator until I finally determined that 1.5 teaspoons active dry yeast = a little more than 1 teaspoon instant. I think. That's what I used, anyway.

Dorie said that the dough would be fairly thin, more like a batter than a dough. But mine was unquestionably dough-like. Then the dough didn't seem to rise much, a problem that I always used to have, but haven't had in a while. In fact, if anything, I've had the opposite problem lately - dough that threatens to rise high enough to bust through the roof. I did the whole refrigerate/deflate routine, but my heart wasn't really in it because there wasn't really anything to deflate.

The next morning I pressed the dough into the pan.

I cut up my plums. I'm very curious to hear if anyone actually used 14 plums for this. That's a whole lot of plums. I used 5 or 6 and my tart was chock full 'o plums. Then I spread some plum jam on the dough. Actually, that's a lie. I used plum jelly, which I found at the farmer's market around the corner from my house. I never really did know what the difference is between jam and jelly, but if I could blame my tart woes on my misguided use of jelly rather than jam, I will. Topped my ~~jam~~ jelly with plums, and baked.

Once it started baking I began to feel better about my brioche. It was puffing up and browning nicely. I had to tent it after around 15 minutes to keep it from getting too brown. It looked done to me after 30 minutes, although, in retrospect, the juices were not bubbly. I should have baked it longer. Because:

Oh yeah! Raw dough under the jelly! And I wasn't going to try the re-bake thing again - I'd be kicked out of the club for sure if I pulled that one two weeks in a row. David worked all day on Sunday, and I could see him eyeing the tart as I headed upstairs to put the kids to bed. I told him to leave the tart alone because it was partially unbaked, and I'd have to deconstruct it to make it edible. He promised me that he would not go in without a guide.

So I cut up the plums and the baked portions of the brioche and threw them together in my beloved new pink Sur la Table ruffled ice cream bowl, and topped with ice cream. The result?

D: Where is the jam?
C: The jelly?
D: The jelly.
C: Well, unfortunately, the jelly was right on top of the raw dough, so when I scraped away the raw dough to get to the baked part, I probably scraped away most of the jelly too. Sorry.
D: Well, it kind of tastes like bread and plums with ice cream.
C: Yeah, I was afraid of that.

Thank you for this great summer pick, Denise of Chez Us. I've heard great reviews of this, so maybe I'll try it again someday when a dark cloud of bad baking luck is not hovering over my head.

BBA: Brioche

2009-07-11T22:10:00.001-04:00

I've continued to bake through the Bread Baker's Apprentice in order for the BBA challenge, although I've fallen a little behind on my posting. Brioche comes after bagels in the BBA, so we've moved from chewy water bread to rich butter bread. I think I've made brioche more than any other yeast bread, which is a little odd, but I love the sweet breakfast breads like cinnamon buns and sticky buns that are typically formed from brioche. I was interested to see how Peter Reinhart's brioche would compare to the other brioche that I made (Dorie Greenspan's), although I knew that I couldn't really reliably compare the two because of the two month time lapse between making them. Plus, I imagine that whatever brioche you're eating at the moment is the best brioche you've ever had anyway.

Peter Reinhart provides three different versions of brioche - rich man's (2 cups butter), middle class (1 cup butter) and poor man's (1/2 cup butter). In true Goldilocks fashion, I chose to make the middle class version, because it would provide a genuine brioche experience (and produce a bread ideal for sweet rolls) without the shock & horror factor that is always present for me when I unwrap four sticks of butter to use in one recipe.

The dough begins with a quick 20 minute sponge, then everything gets mixed together. Here is where I wish that I either wrote my posts right away, or took notes. I remember that the dough was very soft, and I vaguely remember not really enjoying working with it. I THINK the dough was sticky (and I know I need to buck up, but I can't stand working with sticky dough), but that might have been some other dough, or maybe just my kids pawing me with lollipop hands. In any event, I remember that I was happy to get this shaped and in the pans. The dough rose well:

And turned onto bread when baked:

I used half of my dough to make three mini loaves, and the other half to make Dorie Greenspan's brioche raisin snails. The snails were fun to make - they involve lighting raisins and rum on fire, how could they not be? - and were delicious. I skipped the glaze on the first few I made (I froze some of the unbaked rolls to make for hubs later on Father's Day), but after glazing the second batch I realized that the glaze really makes the snails. So from now on when I make raisin snails, they'll be glazed.

This brioche was wonderful, although I can safely say at this point that brioche will never be my first bread choice for sandwiches or toast. It's delicious, but there are lots of delicious sandwich and toasting breads out there that are not so rich. But I will definitely make brioche again to use for sticky buns, cinnamon buns and snails, so I'm thrilled to have it in the repertoire!

TWD: Tribute-to-Katharine Hepburn-Brownies

2009-07-07T00:01:00.002-04:00

Lisa of Surviving Oz chose this week's Tuesdays With Dorie recipe, Tribute-to-Katharine Hepburn brownies. Katharine Hepburn, screen legend . . .

. . . and brownie aficionado. Dorie explains that KH was famous for her brownies, and once convinced a young woman named Heather Henderson to stay in school over a plate of them. Ms. Henderson later shared her gratitude to KH for making her tough it out at Bryn Mawr, and for sharing some important life rules: "(1) Never quit. (2) Be yourself and (3) Don't put too much flour in your brownies."

I think that Katharine Hepburn was an enormous talent, so I was eager to pay tribute to her by whipping up a batch of her brownies. I mixed together the tiny bit (1/4 cup) of flour with some salt. I omitted the 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon, which was an optional ingredient. If I've learned anything since joining TWD, it's that (in my opinion) (1) chocolate=good. (2) cinnamon=good. (3) chocolate+cinnamon=just plain wrong.

Then I melted a stick of butter and mixed some cocoa and instant coffee over it when it began to melt. The recipe calls for 2 teaspoons of coffee, but I cut it down to 1 teaspoon after my experience with Ina's Outrageous~~ly Coffeeish~~ Brownies. I wanted the coffee to enhance the chocolate flavor, but I did not want to be able to taste coffee.

Once that's all blended, add in the eggs, sugar and vanilla, without beating anything too vigorously, so as to not add air into the batter. That's really the kind of instruction that I wish came with a video. It's like when our first child was born, and they were actually about to release us from the hospital to take care of this human being on our own. I asked the nurse if I could videotape her swaddling him so I could refer to the video to study her technique when we got home and started to swaddle him incorrectly. The nurse was used to dealing with crazy new moms, so she let me. Anyway, there are definitely times that I wish that I could videotape real bakers doing things like beating with just the right amount of vigor for any mixing situation. Left to my own devices, I just did the best I could.

Then add the dry ingredients, 4 oz. chopped chocolate, and a cup of chopped nuts. I left out the nuts because I prefer brownies without nuts, but in retrospect, I wonder if that omission can help explain what happened next.

That's a view of the underside of the brownies, after baking for thirty minutes and cooling for thirty minutes. Here's a closer look:

The pictures do not adequately convey the magnitude of the rawness of my brownies. Now, the problem with these brownies is that they are SUPPOSED to be gooey when they come out of the oven, so it is hard to really gauge proper gooeyness versus unacceptable gooeyness. In fact, the recipe does not call for the usual knife test, or even the divot test, to evaluate doneness. The only physical characteristic that Dorie says to look for is a "dry papery crust" on the top of the brownies, which mine had. See?

Well, it was clear that the brownies were not going to work in liquid form. My options at that point were (1) freeze; or (2) re-bake. Since I was taking these to a cookout, I decided to re-bake. I stuck them on a baking sheet and put them in the oven for another fifteen minutes, at which point they were finally done.

I feel terrible about mangling Katharine Hepburn's brownies; if Heather Henderson tried my twice-baked version of Katharine's brownies she would have quit Bryn Mawr for sure and bummed around Jackson Hole for a few years. But once again we can thank the redemptive powers of butter, sugar and chocolate for saving the day. I mean, how bad could these really be? I'm sure that my texture was off (what with the whole bake/cool/bake again thing), but at the end of the day these were still butter-filled, sugar-filled, chocolate filled bits of decadence. I held my head high when I handed these to the hostess - no shame here! Thanks for the great pick, Lisa!

Ellie Krieger's Breakfast Cookies

2009-07-02T00:01:00.001-04:00

I have to thank my good friend Peggy for talking me into making this week's CEiMB recipe, Breakfast Cookies, chosen by Natalie of What's For Supper?. The cookies sounded good to me from the beginning, but I just wasn't sure I was going to be able to fit them in. Then I saw Peggy, who had already made them and raved about how fabulous they are, and suddenly it was clear that nothing I had going on could possibly be as important as making these cookies -- my tire rotation, filing deadline, permanent crown, birthday party preparations, handyman meeting, and sleep could all wait.

I've had store-bought breakfast cookies before, and thought they were really pretty bad. Like actually kind of inedible. So I didn't know what to expect with these, but I figured they had to be better than the store-bought ones. Sometimes it's nice to go into a recipe with the bar set really low.

This is certainly an unusual recipe. It calls for whole wheat pastry flour, which of course they did not have at Publix, so I used white whole wheat. It also calls for all-purpose flour; cinnamon & nutmeg to spice things up; brown and white sugar; a little bit of butter and canola oil, an egg and vanilla. The "breakfast" in these is provided by oats, bran flakes, raisins and walnuts. And the secret ingredient:

My poor hubs almost had a heart attack when he came home and saw that sitting on the kitchen counter. He said "What's THIS for??" and I saw the color drain from his face. I don't know if he felt any better when I told him it was just for the cookies I was making. Yeah, he probably did.

Wow, we love these cookies! They have a lightly spiced flavor and a wonderful soft and chewy texture. They feel hearty but not heavy. Most of the fat in these comes from canola oil, so they are healthier than most cookies, but they don't taste "healthy" (which is a deal-breaker for me with cookies). I will definitely make these again, and not just because I have the second container of baby food carrots that came in the two-pack. These are really delicious, and perfect for grabbing and going on busy mornings. Thanks for the great pick, Natalie!

Breakfast Cookies, Ellie Krieger 2007

3/4 cup whole-wheat pastry flour
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/4 cup canola oil
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup (1 small jar) strained carrot baby food
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup bran cereal flakes
1/3 cup raisins
1/3 cup walnut pieces, lightly toasted in a dry skillet for 2 minutes, until fragrant and chopped
Directions
Place rack in center of oven and preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Whisk together flours, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt in a medium-sized bowl. Combine butter, oil and sugars in the bowl of a stand mixer and mix on high speed, scraping down sides if necessary, until sugars have dissolved and mixture is light in color, about 1 minute. Add egg, carrot puree and vanilla and beat an additional 30 seconds. Add flour mixture and beat an additional 30 seconds. Add oats, flakes, raisins and walnuts and mix over low speed just until incorporated. Dough will be slightly sticky and less cohesive than traditional cookie dough. Line a large cookie sheet with parchment paper. Using between 3 to 4 tablespoons of batter, form a ball and place on cookie sheet. Repeat with remaining batter, leaving about 3 inches between cookies. Wet hands and use palm of hand to flatten cookies until about 1/4-inch thick. Bake for 12 minutes, until cookies are fragrant but still soft. Let cookies cool slightly, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

TWD: Perfect Party Cake Cupcakes

2009-06-30T00:10:00.002-04:00

I'll admit that I'm a brat when it comes to kitchen failures. In general, as soon as I fail at a recipe, that recipe becomes the Fredo to my Michael Corleone - it's dead to me. I don't want it near my house. I move on and don't revisit it. That's right, I'm a quitter.

Last August, I was just a wet-behind-the-ears TWD newbie when I decided to make the Perfect Party Cake for my parents' birthdays (they conveniently have birthdays within a couple of days of each other, so cake consolidation just makes good sense). I was fresh off a rousing success with Granola Grabbers, so I was sure that I could just whip up a triple layer cake and delight my family. Well, the cake was a massive flop, not salvageable in any way. It didn't rise and it tasted terrible. I'm still not sure what went wrong - maybe my baking powder was old? That was back in the day when a thing of baking powder would last me seven years, not seven weeks. In any event, the cake went into the trash. (There was a happy ending though, because I ended up making the peach galette, and that turned out to be one of our all-time favorite desserts.)

I couldn't shake the Perfect Party Cake, though. It just looked so, well, perfect, for so many of life's white cake occasions. Fast forward five months when I was trying to figure out what cake to make for my daughter's fourth birthday. She easily settled on the theme (pink and purple princess), and I went back and forth a bit before deciding to give the PPC another try. I figured that I was a better baker in January than I was in August; I'd learned so much from my fellow TWD Bakers; and I had a new thing of baking powder. The stars were all lining up.

The cake turned out perfectly! I obviously did not do a layer cake since I was constrained by the Wilton castle cake pan, but the cake was lovely. I topped it with Dorie's buttercream, which came together without any trouble, if I recall correctly (sometimes I block out trouble though).

So when I saw that Carol of Mix Mix Stir Stir picked the Perfect Party Cake for this week's Tuesdays with Dorie, I wasn't sure if I was going to make it again, since we didn't really have an obvious occasion for a big layer cake around here. But I wimped out on the Coconut-Roasted Pineapple Dacquoise last week (lamely using the humidity as an excuse, no less) and I didn't really want to miss two weeks in a row; plus, it wasn't yet clear which one was the fluke - my PPC success or my PPC failure - and I figured a tie-breaker was the only way to find out.

I decided to cut the recipe in half and make cupcakes. There is nothing complicated about this cake. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt. Whisk milk or buttermilk (I used regular milk this time, buttermilk with the castle) and egg whites. Rub lemon zest into the sugar until the sugar is fragrant (this is one of my favorite Dorie tricks). Beat together butter and sugar, add lemon extract (I left the extract out of the cupcakes because I wanted the lemon flavor to be more subtle), then alternate adding the flour mixture and the milk mixture. I was hoping to end up with 5 or 6 cupcakes but got 10 large ones, even with a half recipe.

Cupcakes at Dusk
I decided to try something a little different and make strawberry cream cheese frosting for the cupcakes this time. I made half of this recipe, which was very good, although I ran out of powdered sugar, so it probably wasn't as sweet as it was supposed to be. But I thought it complemented the cake nicely.

I think the Perfect Party Cake lives up to its name. It is beautiful and delicious (but not too sweet) and the perfect vehicle for any frosting (or ice cream!) It is perfect even when there is no party in sight. Now that is what I call versatile. Thanks for the great pick, Carol!

Barefoot Bloggers: Gazpacho

2009-06-25T00:01:00.001-04:00

Gazpacho is on the menu for Barefoot Bloggers this week thanks to Meryl of My Bit of Earth. I've loved gazpacho ever since I was old enough to be willing to try it (willingness to try gazpacho, i.e. cold vegetable soup, might be as good of a demarcation line between childhood and adulthood as anything). Nowadays I find gazpacho to be like pizza -- I think even bad gazpacho is pretty good.

I'll never forgot a couple of summers ago when we were selling our first house. The whole house-selling process was a complete mystery to me. A couple of days after we put our house on the market, the doorbell rang. When I answered it, the husband of our real estate agent walked in carrying a huge Tupperware full of gazpacho for the agent walk-through. The fact that selling a house appeared to involve real estate agent spouses feeding gazpacho to other real estate agents did not help make the process any less mysterious for me. But we sold our house, so I guess it worked.

Much as I like gazpacho, I've never made it before. Well, I suppose that I did make white gazpacho a few weeks ago, but I've never made a traditional gazpacho like Ina's before. This is super fast to make if you use the food processor as Ina suggests that you do. Each vegetable gets processed separately and then thrown together in a huge bowl with tomato juice, vinegar, oil, garlic, salt and pepper. In the Barefoot Contessa cookbook, Ina suggests that you use Sacramento Tomato Juice for superior flavor. Well, some weeks I feel like running around town looking for things like Sacramento Tomato Juice, and some weeks I don't. This was a "don't" week, so I used Campbell's Tomato Juice, and the gazpacho tasted just fine to me.

Ina's recipe also calls for 1/2 cup oil (note: I made the full recipe in the book, which is double the version posted here on the Food Network website). While I love and trust Ina, I strongly suspected that I could get away with much less than 1/2 cup oil. I decided to start with 2T and go up from there if it needed it. It didn't - 2T was plenty in my opinion. Reducing the oil makes this a really light soup.

I was concentrating so hard on my planned oil reduction that I completely forgot the vinegar. Trust me, you definitely don't want to forget that. I think poor David thought that I was trying to kill him when he took the first bite of the soup without vinegar. Once I added the vinegar it was much better.

I really thought this soup was delicious, and I ate it every day for a week. A large container of this soup will be a fixture in my refrigerator this summer. Thanks for the great pick, Meryl!

Ellie: Jambalaya with Shrimp and Ham

2009-06-18T00:01:00.000-04:00

This week's CEiMB recipe, Jambalaya with Shrimp and Ham , was chosen by Anonymous New York. This had to be one of the best all-around dinner experiences we've had in weeks around here. Despite my best intentions to prepare ahead of time, I am usually the person chopping vegetables for that night's dinner at 6 p.m. The kids are crazy, the house is a wreck, and there I am, peeling garlic.

Well, this week my older two have swimming lessons, so I've been sitting in the oppressive Alabama heat for two hours every afternoon, getting eaten by killer mosquitoes while my kids learn to prone float. The lessons are taught in the backyard pool of a woman who's taught swimming in town for years. She is truly a gifted swim teacher, and my kids have learned so much from her, but she does not have a potty available for her 3-10 year old students. Don't get me wrong -- I don't blame her. I wouldn't want 100 wet little people a week trekking through my house either, but the upshot of it all is that I end up spending at least half the time there dealing with potty emergencies. She has a longstanding "don't ask, don't tell" policy with respect to her bushes, which we moms do appreciate, but sometimes bushes just don't cut it. So I end up driving one kid or the other to the nearest real potty and then racing to get back before the other kid's lesson is over. By the time we get home, I'm mildly delirious and completely zapped of any energy that might have otherwise been used to chop a pepper.

Therefore, I actually planned ahead for a change and completely prepared all of the ingredients for this jambalaya on Tuesday night, and then just threw it all together for dinner on Wednesday. Wow, our whole evening ran so much more smoothly! I really need to get into the habit of doing this.

Start out by cooking some bell peppers, onions, and garlic, then adding chicken stock, rice, ham, diced tomatoes (I used fire roasted) and an assortment of spices, and cook covered for 20 minutes. Add some shrimp at the end and cook it for a little bit longer, and serve with hot sauce (I forgot that part).

David and I LOVED this dish. I thought it had just the right amount of spiciness - plenty of kick, but not enough to cause physical pain. If you like pain, you could always add more cayenne. I think this would also be good with smoked sausage (turkey or otherwise) instead of the ham, or with chicken instead of shrimp. This might be my favorite Ellie recipe yet -- it is definitely a keeper!

JAMBALAYA WITH SHRIMP AND HAM, ELLIE KRIEGER 1997

Ingredients
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 large onion, diced
1 red bell pepper, diced
1 green bell pepper, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon salt, plus more, to taste
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, plus more, to taste
1 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1 bay leaf
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon tomato paste
6 ounces diced, smoked ham
2 1/2 cups low sodium chicken broth
1 (14 1/2-ounce) can no-salt added diced tomatoes
1 cup uncooked long-grain white rice
1 pound peeled and deveined medium shrimp
Hot pepper sauce

Directions
Heat the oil in a large Dutch oven over a medium heat. Add the onion, peppers and garlic and saute until they begin to soften, about 10 minutes. Mix in the next 11 ingredients, salt through the diced tomatoes. Bring to a boil. Stir in the rice, cover, reduce heat and simmer for about 20 minutes, or until rice is done and most of the liquid is absorbed. Add the shrimp and cook, covered, for 5 minutes more, or until shrimp is cooked through. Season with salt and pepper, to taste. Serve with hot pepper sauce.

TWD: Honey Peach Ice Cream

2009-06-16T00:01:00.001-04:00

Everyone is familiar with the old saying "if at first you don't succeed, try try again." I remember my mother cheerfully chirping that one to me as a kid if I messed up in soccer or didn't understand my math homework. I feel like old sayings with staying power get that way for a reason - they have merit, they embody wisdom, they hold some universal truth. And so, despite my multiple failures, I have continued to try to make custard, time and time again, like the good old adage-follower that I am. But this saying does not promise eventual success. It just tells you to keep trying. There is no follow up, no instructions for what to do "if at second you don't succeed." (Although I do think that the saying implies that you should try at least twice more after your first failed attempt -- "try try again" - that's two more tries.) But I have to believe that if we could ask the author of that saying what we should do if we keep try-trying and not-not succeeding, he would say "if at fifth you don't succeed, you really need to move on."

And that's where I find myself with custard. Custard is not my friend. I can't put my finger on exactly why things tend to break down for me when I make custard, but break down they do. And since custard was required for this week's TWD selection, Honey Peach Ice Cream, you can probably guess how it turned out for me.

But first, let's discuss what did work. My peach puree.

That simply required peeling and cutting up peaches, boiling them with honey, and then pureeing them with an immersion blender. Apparently some people really hate peeling peaches and will go to great lengths to avoid it. My bloggy friend Di and I have a deal that if we ever live near each other, I'll peel her peaches and she'll make my custard. I totally get the better end of that bargain.
Now let's discuss the more complicated matter of what did not work.

I know the drill by now. Whisk egg yolks & sugar in one bowl, boil milk in a different bowl, add a small amount of milk to the eggs to temper them, add the rest of the milk slowly while whisking vigorously. But this time, we had to pour the egg/sugar/milk mixture back into the pan and cook over medium heat until it hit between 170 and 180 degrees.

Kitchen thermometers mysteriously refuse to hit the desired temperature when they are taking the temperature of custard in my kitchen. When this first started happening, I thought that maybe the cheap thermometer I bought at Target or the grocery store just wasn't reliable, so I started diverting my children's college savings to fancy Williams-Sonoma thermometers in the hopes of ending my custard temperature-taking woes.

That's my fancy candy thermometer, hanging out at 155 degrees, a full 20 degrees shy of where it needed to be. It pretty much didn't budge from there, other than to drop a few degrees from time to time.

So I broke out my fancy new instant read and double teamed the custard:

Well, I can report, in true Consumer Reports fashion, that kitchen thermometers at all price points that are used to take the temperature of custard in my kitchen will reliably register readings that are a solid 20 degrees lower than required.

So my custard boiled and boiled away, never getting above 155 degrees. In addition to the temperature test for determining whether the custard is done, Dorie describes a "spoon test," in which the custard coats the back of a spoon, and if you run your finger down the bowl of the spoon, the custard won't run into the track. Well, I tried the spoon test, and it seemed to be holding the track. But then when I'd bend down to squint and read my thermometers while holding the spoon, the custard seemed to drip back into the track, so I started to doubt that it was satisfying the spoon test, especially since the custard appeared to be way short of hitting temperature.

I finally bailed after about 30+ minutes. As soon as it came off the heat, I knew that it was way overdone, probably by a good 20 minutes. I mixed the custard with the peach puree, refrigerated, and churned the ice cream the next night.

My first thought when I tasted it was "grainy." David didn't really notice the graininess, but he did think that it tasted like there was a film on it. I think that's even worse than grainy. The flavor was okay, as copious amount of peaches, honey, sugar, milk and cream have a way of keeping things from being truly awful no matter what you do to them, but I am sure the flavor was nothing like what it would have been had I not ruined the custard AGAIN.

The honey peach ice cream was chosen by Tommi of Brown Interior. Tommi, you couldn't have picked a better June recipe than this one, and I'm so bummed that I ruined it. I know that this had to be incredible for all the TWDers who cooked their custard for 5 minutes instead of 45.

BBA: Bagels

2009-06-14T21:52:00.001-04:00

It is no exaggeration to say that I was probably more excited to make bagels out of the Bread Baker's Apprentice than I've ever been to make anything ever. More excited that the Cover Cake? More excited than sticky buns? Yes, because I know that somewhere in my town, I can find great chocolate cake and fabulous sticky buns even if I choose to never make them again. But I know that I can't find a truly great water bagel. [NOTE to my local friends: please correct me if there are in fact great bagels to be had here in town. I currently go to Panera when I want a bagel.]

When I think of great bagels, I think of New York style water bagels, like the kind I used to get at H&H Bagels when I lived in New York, or at Bodo's Bagels when I lived in Charlottesville. In fact, I still wear my threadbare Bodo's t-shirt to bed at least three nights a week - that's how devoted I am to the water bagel. Hubs and I ate at Bodo's so much when we were in school that to this day when I walk in there, muscle memory takes over and "my sandwich" (smoked turkey on everything with provolone and lettuce heated) rolls off my tongue as soon as the guy at the counter asks for my order.

So given how much I love water bagels, and how frustrated I've been by my inability to find them locally, I was prepared to do whatever it took to make my own at home. Even if it meant braving an 8 page recipe and mail-ordering specialty flour. You know you've crossed some kind of invisible sanity line when your doorbell rings and you run to the front door singing "it's my high-gluten flour!"

The bagels start out with a sponge made from yeast, high-gluten flour and water. Mix it all together in a bowl and let it sit for a couple of hours until it's foamy and bubbly, doubles in size and "collapses" when the bowl is tapped on the countertop. To me "collapse" is a pretty dramatic word, much more so than "recede," which is what my sponge did. Fortunately, several of us were making the bagels "together" via Twitter, so I got instant reassurance that receding was probably good enough. Once the sponge is ready, add more yeast, more flour, salt, and malt powder.

It became clear pretty quickly that my Kitchen Aid was not going to handle this thick, heavy dough, so I had to knead it by hand. It was my first time hand kneading, I think, and while I don't have anything to compare it to, this seemed like a nice dough to handle. Once it passed the windowpane test and the temperature test, Elizabeth and I began dividing the dough.

Peter Reinhart recommends 4.5 oz bagels, but several people said they were enormous, and having just dealt with huge bread last time, I decided to go with a more manageable 3.5 ounce size. They seemed perfect to me.

After the bagels are shaped, rest for 20 minutes, and pass the "float test," they get refrigerated overnight.

I woke up like a kid on Christmas on bagel baking day. I brought a huge pot of water (with baking soda in it) to a boil and started boiling the bagels, one to two minutes per side:

Then baked them:

The verdict? There is plenty of room for improvement in my bagelmaking. My bagels were on the flat side, and I don't know why. They were also on the outer limits of the acceptably chewy spectrum - I'd probably limit boiling to one minute per side next time to achieve optimal chewiness. But oh. my. gosh. This is it! This is the bagel that I crave but cannot buy here, the bagel that I thought I would only get to experience every 10 years at class reunions. I never in a million years would have thought that I could make these at home. I'm still sort of in shock.

Now, I got the feeling that I liked these more than anyone else who tried them. That could be just because I just like chewy water bagels more than most people, or because I'm so utterly bagel-deprived, or because I sweated these bagels for two days. But in any event, I loved them, and I plan to work these into my baking schedule at least once every couple of months.

Bagels are the third recipe in Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice, which a couple of hundred of us are baking through as part of the BBA Challenge. Next up: brioche!

TWD: Parisian Apple Tartlet

2009-06-09T00:01:00.002-04:00

Jessica of My Baking Heart chose Parisian Apple Tartlets for this week's Tuesdays with Dorie. When I first saw that a tart(let) was on the menu this month, I assumed I'd be hauling out the food processor, examining for clumps and curds, and panicking about over processing tart dough. So I was happily surprised when I read the recipe and realized that this one is by far the simplest TWD recipe yet. It doesn't get "made" so much as assembled.

That's right, from top to bottom we have (1) frozen puff pastry, (2) apple half (mine might actually be an apple quarter; I lost track), (3) brown sugar, and (4) butter. Bake it until it's puffy and browned. Eat it.

Dorie discusses frozen puff pastry in her book, and strongly encourages bakers to forgo the more readily available Pepperidge Farm frozen puff pastry in favor of all-butter frozen puff pastry available at specialty stores. Dorie recommends a version by Dufour Pastry, which she says is so good that she stopped making puff pastry at home.

Let me list a few items that I have not been able to find in my local specialty store (Whole Foods) in the past few months: green lentils, lemon marmalade, fleur de sel, 00 flour, thyme, high gluten flour, amaretto cookies, and fresh yeast. But lo!

I rubbed my eyes to make sure that I wasn't hallucinating, that I wouldn't next wander over to aisle six and see flying pink elephants. Was it even possible that I was looking at not only all-butter frozen puff pastry, but the very brand of all-butter frozen puff pastry that caused Dorie stop making puff pastry at home? The winner of the International Fancy Food Show?

I was on such a high from my unexpected find that I barely flinched at the $11.99 price tag for my one sheet of puff pastry, and whistled and clicked my heels all the way to the checkout line.

Dorie says that peaches, plums, pears and apricots all work well in this, but I just don't think you can beat an apple tart. So I baked one apple tartlet for David and served it with ice cream. I traced my 4" circle for the tartlet (my sifter was the perfect size), and sprinkled sugar and cinnamon on the scraps (for me).

David really enjoyed the tartlet. I swear that he said something really clever when evaluating the tartlet last night (besides "this is really good!"), but I can't for the life of me remember what it was, and neither can he (I just asked him). The scraps were so amazing that I almost cried. That Dufour puff pastry really is as fabulous as Dorie says it is; I totally understand why it won the International Fancy Food Show. It's so good, in fact, that I am going to stop making my own puff pastry at home, just like Dorie. It's a splurge, so I'm sure I'll continue to rely on Pepperidge Farm for my day-to-day puff pastry needs, but for special occasions, I'm breaking out the Dufour.

The Parisian Apple Tartlet simply cannot be beat when you need a simple and delicious dessert quickly. I'll make this one again and again. Thanks for the great pick, Jessica!

[EDITED 6/9 9:15 a.m.]: David must have read my post this morning, because he left me the following message on Facebook: "Had I known the damage one sheet of that magical puff pastry would do, I'm sure I would have had something very clever to say about it. Sorry, did I say "clever?" I meant "profane," something very profane." D'oh!

Ellie: White Gazpacho with Grapes and Toasted Almonds

2009-06-04T13:00:00.001-04:00

I've been looking forward to this week's Craving Ellie in my Belly recipe, White Gazpacho with Grapes & Toasted Almonds, chosen by Lauren & Paul of I'll Eat You. I'm a huge fan of tomato-based gazpacho, so I thought that Ellie's cucumber based version sounded interesting.

This is a cold soup, as gazpachos tend to be, so it's a nice option when the weather gets warm. It's also one of those "throw everything in the food processor" soups, so you could pour yourself a cold drink and sit and fan yourself while the FP handles the hard labor.

The soup is thickened by white bread that gets soaked in water. I've made Ina Garten soups that use bread to thicken soup - it's really a pretty cool trick. And it worked like a charm here. The cucumber, garlic, scallions, white wine vinegar, lemon juice, toasted almonds, salt and olive oil get processed along with that soggy white bread. Ellie does not say to chill the soup before serving, but I chilled it. I like hot soup, warm soup, and cold soup, but not room temperature soup.

The soup gets garnished with more toasted almonds, more scallions, more cucumbers, and green grapes. Sidenote: I paid $8.14 for a smallish bag of green grapes for this recipe, a fact so shocking to me that I deemed it worthy of a Facebook status update ("Cathy just paid $8.14 for a smallish bag of green grapes.") For those of you not versed in social media, a Facebook status update is a far more serious and solemn affair than a Twitter status update (at least for me, as I will tweet anything). The cucumbers were 2 for 88 cents, though, so overall I am sure this soup was still far less expensive than take-out White Gazpacho with Grapes and Toasted Almonds would have been.

The verdict? I am not going to give up on this soup yet, because I think it has lots of potential. But the cucumber/garlic ratio in the recipe was WAY off, in my opinion, and I found the soup to be way too garlicky. The problem could be that the recipe calls for "2 large English cucumbers or 3 large regular cucumbers." Perhaps measurements (2 cups? 3 cups?) would have been useful, because "large" can be subjective. My three cucumbers looked large to me, but I sure wish that I had used that 4th cucumber (they were 2 for 88 cents, remember?) to help balance out the garlic. Other than that one issue, I felt like the soup had a nice texture, and it has the potential to be great, once we get the garlic situation under control. David noted that the garnishes make the soup, and I agree - garnishes are not optional here, kids. I will try this one again with some adjustments. It is a pretty, elegant soup (although I could not make it look pretty for pictures, sorry!), perfect for those summer garden luncheons that Ina always hosts. Thanks for the pick, Lauren & Paul!

White Gazpacho with Grapes and Toasted Almonds
2007 Ellie Krieger, All rights reserved

Ingredients

2 large English cucumbers (or 3 large regular cucumbers), peeled and roughly chopped
3 slices white bread, crusts removed
1/2 cup warm water
3 cloves garlic
6 scallions, whites only, divided
1/4 cup white wine vinegar or Sherry vinegar, plus more, to taste
1 teaspoon lemon juice, plus more to taste
1/4 cup plus 4 teaspoons slivered almonds, lightly toasted, divided
1/2 teaspoon salt, plus more, to taste
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup green grapes, halved

Directions

Set aside 1 cup of chopped cucumber for a garnish. Soak the bread in water until soft, about 2 minutes. Place soaked bread, the rest of the cucumber, garlic, 3 of the scallions, vinegar, lemon juice, 1/4 cup of the almonds, salt and 3 tablespoons of olive oil in the bowl of a food processor and process until cucumbers are completely blended and liquid and almonds are almost completely invisible, about 1 to 2 minutes. Season with additional salt and vinegar, if desired.

To serve, ladle 1 cup gazpacho into a bowl. Mound 1/4 cup reserved chopped cucumber, 1 tablespoon scallions, 2 tablespoons grapes and 1 teaspoon almonds in the center of the soup.

TWD: Cinnamon Squares

2009-06-02T14:26:00.002-04:00

Tracey of Tracey's Culinary Adventures , my twitter buddy and baker extraordinaire, chose this week's TWD recipe, Cinnamon Squares. When I first saw that Tracey chose cinnamon squares, I was really excited, because I assumed it was a non-chocolate dessert that I could serve to my non-chocolate eating husband. I love it when my hubs loves the desserts that I make, and I've found that a critical first step to getting him to love my desserts is for him to actually eat them.

So when I read the recipe more closely and realized that the cinnamon squares did indeed contain chocolate, I was a little disappointed, because I just don't have the creativity needed to turn chocolate desserts into non-chocolate desserts. I'm not a baker so much as a recipe follower. To the extent anyone in my life has ever complimented my cooking or baking skills, I know that they really should be complimenting my reading skills, or possibly my recipe selection skills.

Fortunately, I don't need to be a creative baker, because I can just shamelessly mooch off the creativity of my baking friends. Nancy had made this cake several days earlier, and told us that she did half the cake with a streusel filling. Streusel - perfect! So obvious once Nancy mentioned it, but I never would have thought of it on my own. So I decided to split the cake into two 8.5" x 4.5" loaf pans rather than one 8" x 8" pan, and make one pan with chocolate, in strict accordance with the recipe, and the other pan using the streusel from the Blueberry Crumb Cake that TWD made a couple of months ago. I skipped the chocolate ganache topping on both versions.

The cake is really easy to make. I didn't even have to break out my beloved KitchenAid! And while I do love my KitchenAid, I love it even more when I can leave it in its home in a lower cabinet. I know that I'm supposed to bend at the knees, not at the back, blah blah blah, but I ALWAYS lift that sucker by bending at the back, and it's just a matter of time before I add "back strain" to my list of kitchen injuries. But it won't happen when making cinnamon squares, dammit, because all you need to mix up this baby is a whisk and rubber spatula!

David's uber-cool Aunt Missy was visiting us for the first time ever when I served this cake. We love Aunt Missy & Uncle Jack, and don't get to see them nearly often enough. At the end of their youngest child's wedding reception last summer, I told Uncle Jack that I wish they had more children to marry off, because David and I had more fun at their kids' weddings than we've had in like eight years. To which Uncle Jack replied: "you two really need to get out more." True dat.

So I really wanted Aunt Missy to like this. She took a cinnamon square at the table, but before biting in said "wait, have you gotten a picture of this yet?" See, I told you she was the coolest! This spared me from having to have that awkward "hey, um, just hold on for one second while I take that cinnamon square out into the shade and snap a few pictures" conversation (which just never gets easier for me, no matter how long I do this). Not only did she just instinctively GET that we food bloggers must do strange things before anyone can eat the food, but she really loved the cinnamon squares, as did David's parents, who are among my most loyal tasters, and who must be getting really tired of me pushing baked goods at them all the time.

I've got to say that I vastly preferred the streusel version to the chocolate version. I think this is just where differences in taste buds come into play. We've made several recipes with TWD that combine chocolate and spice flavors, and I always feel, as David's mother stated perfectly, that these two flavors just don't improve each other (see also chocolate gingerbread). This is strictly a matter of personal taste, as many people love this combination. But I loved the streusel version of this cake so much that I'd rank it among my top 10 TWD recipes ever. The cake was soft and just melted in your mouth, and the flavor was perfect. And the streusel itself was as great as I remembered it being in the blueberry crumb cake.

Thanks for this great pick, Tracey!

It's a . . . .

2009-05-31T00:01:00.005-04:00

giant loaf of Greek Celebration Bread!!

My baby will turn 2 this summer. I've been sorting through baby clothes and donating baby gear. But it's a little emotional, moving on to the next phase in life. And I think in the wake of this "no more babies in the house" reality, I've been subconsciously looking for something else that will keep me up late at night, something that will require my attention and nurturing every couple of hours. Something like bread.

My first baby was born a couple of weeks early, and had a rough entry into the world. I had a conversation with my husband when he was about 6 months old.
C: I remember when they first showed me Jacob after he was born. I could not even believe how beautiful he was. All I could think was "Oh my gosh! He is perfect!" What did you think when you first saw him?

D: I thought "Oh my gosh! He is purple!"

And when some friends of ours had a baby, David and I spoke with our friend B, the dad, when he called us from the hospital after the baby was born:

C: Well, who does he look like? You or A?
B: Um. He sort of looks like Winston Churchill.
D: That's okay. All babies look like Winston Churchill.

But see, that's the thing. Mothers are blinded by love and pride when it comes to their children; they don't notice the purple and they NEVER think that their babies look like Winston Churchill. And such was definitely the case with me when my new baby, Artos, was born freakishly large:

We wrapped Artos in swaddling clothes and took lots of pictures:

Here is Jacob, the proud big brother, with his new baby bread:

Shortly after Artos was born, the nurse whisked him away to check his vitals. He was a perfect 190 degrees inside, and measured a whopping 18.5" x 6.5" x 4". Big boy!

The weigh-in:

Uh-oh. I feel a "beat the already-ridiculous metaphor to death" moment coming on.

Here is Artos' ultrasound picture, when he was just a bun in the oven:

Sorry about that.

Well, looks like I've gone off on some silly tangent again, and now if I take the time to actually talk about the bread in detail, this post will become way too long. I suggest you check out other #BBA blogs to get some real information about the bread. Just a couple of quick highlights about my Artos:

* Artos is a Greek Celebration Bread. It's a sweet bread, filled with cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, lemon zest, almond extract, honey, raisins, and almonds.

* There are several options for shaping this bread, but I decided to braid Artos. Peter Reinhart provides excellent, detailed step-by-step photographs of braiding techniques. His techniques require you to (mentally) number the strands of bread; for example, for the triple braid that I did, you've got, from left to right, 1, 2, and 3. But I was afraid that I would lose track of which was which when I started braiding; for example, once 1 goes over 2, is 1 now 2 and 2 now 1? My head started spinning just thinking about it, so I numbered my strands with dried cherries:

Pretty clever, eh?

* Here is Artos, fully braided and ready for his final rise:

I'm not quite sure why Artos was as ginormous as he was. Funny -- when I started baking bread, I was afraid that my dough wouldn't rise. Now I'm afraid that my dough won't stop rising.

Well, there is really no way to make this transition gentle. We ate Artos. And we really enjoyed him! He made great toast, and even better french toast. David really enjoyed the multicultural aspect of having Greek Celebration French Toast (it took me a while to get what he was talking about, but I'm a little slow that way).

Greek Celebration Bread, or Artos, is the second recipe in Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice. I'm baking through the book with my slow & steady subgroup buddies, and as part of the larger #BBA group. Next up: bagels!

Ellie's Crispy Fish Fingers and Ina's Outrageous Brownies

2009-05-28T00:01:00.009-04:00

This week's CEiMB recipe, Crispy Fish Fingers, was chosen by Rainforest Recipes. I've been totally confused all week about what day it is, and almost didn't get to this. But frozen fish sticks are one food (or at least "food-like product") that my kids will eat, so I thought there was a chance that the real thing would go over well. These are pretty easy to make - throw a couple of slices of wheat bread in the food processor to make bread crumbs and then toast the crumbs in a dry skillet; dredge strips of flounder in a mixture of whole wheat flour, salt & pepper; then eggs; then the bread crumbs, and bake. I used Aggie's trick and baked them on a cooling rack on top of a baking sheet, which really helped make them crisp all around.

I served the kids' with ketchup, and David's and mine with Ellie's dipping sauce (greek yogurt, mayonnaise, dijon mustard, Worcestershire sauce and a pinch of cayenne). Verdict? My littlest one loved these. My second born took a couple of bites of the fish, but was mainly distracted by the broccoli that she wanted removed from her plate. My oldest looked downright sullen at the prospect of having to eat the fish. He tried to negotiate his way to a frozen waffle with peanut butter, but we showed him who's boss and told him to focus on the sides if he didn't like the fish. David and I had a similar opinion of these - like many of Ellie's recipes, the fish fingers were very good, if maybe a little bland. But the sauce was really flavorful and pretty much took care of any bland fish problems.

The Barefoot Bloggers recipe this week is Ina's Outrageous Brownies, chosen by Eva of I'm Boring (note to Eva: No you're not!). I've had problems lately with raw brownie innards, so I was happy to see Ina's baking method for these brownies -- they get baked on a large baking sheet rather than in the usual 9"x13" pan. This worked out fabulously -- these were not thin brownies by any means, but they were baked all the way through. I should note that the full recipe makes an obscene amount of brownies. I needed a nap by the time I cut through all of them. This is definitely the brownie recipe you want to break out when you find out that the army of a small nation, an NFL team, or Kayte's 16 year old sons are coming over for dinner.

Here are the brownies. I took them out of the freezer to photograph, so they look kind of frozen in this picture:

I told the kids to scoot while I took a couple of pictures, and then they could have a brownie for dessert. Here they are, scooting:

These brownies are not just outrageous, they are "pound-of-butter-two-pounds-of- chocolate-two-plus-cups-of-sugar-half-dozen-eggs" outrageous. They really do shock the conscience even if you bake every week like I do. But if you are going to go all out in the brownie department, this is a great one to go all out with. My one mistake: the recipe calls for instant coffee powder, and I substituted an equal amount of espresso powder, which is what I had on hand. I think the coffee powder would have just enhanced the intensity of the chocolate, but the espresso powder (at least in the amount I used) gave these brownies an unmistakable coffee, or mocha, flavor. They were still very good, just not exactly what Ina (or I) had in mind.

Be sure to check out the Ellie and Barefoot blogrolls to see some fabulous versions of these!

TWD: Chipster Topped Brownies

2009-05-26T00:01:00.003-04:00

Great news! This is going to be a really short post! That's because (1) I made these brownies at the beginning of May and can't remember a thing about them other than the fact that 3/4 of the pan was raw; and (2) I spent 17 hours this weekend in a minivan with my three small children, and therefore can't form any coherent thoughts that don't involve holding it for just a little bit longer or not being there yet.

It is really difficult for me to write anything short because I've been trained in a profession that is renowned for its verbosity. I make a living writing things that begin with "Comes now the Counterclaim Defendant, by and through its undersigned counsel of record, and respectfully submits its Brief In Support of Its Motion To Strike the Counterclaim Plantiff's Affidavit in Support of Motion for Partial Summary Judgment" and go downhill from there. But I've recently joined Twitter, which is great for interfacing with other food bloggers, and that is helping re-train me to make my points in 140 characters or less. My grammar and spelling have gone to hell in the process, but I can make succinct points in a way that I never could before. And this reprogramming comes in very handy on nights like tonight, when deep fatigue has set in, because I can tweet my post.

This is why 30 Day Shred not working even tho been at it for 92 days:

Always eager to de-pan. D/n wait til room temp like told. Looks like I might get lucky:

Nope, d/n get lucky.

Used Pyrex pan, @ezrapoundcake says next time use metal pan, will solve raw brownie woes. Will do that, thx Rebecca.

Served outside edges 2 friends @ KY Derby party. Think they liked but coulda been bourbon talking. Brownie part better than cookie part IMO.

Beth at Supplicious chose Chipster Topped Brownies - thanks Beth!

TWD: Fresh Mango Bread

2009-05-19T00:01:00.004-04:00

Kelly of Baking with the Boys chose this week's Tuesdays with Dorie recipe, Fresh Mango Bread. Kelly makes me laugh every Tuesday; ergo, I make a beeline to her blog every Tuesday. I knew from Kelly's blog posts that she would not pick anything with nuts; and I figured that something with chocolate was a good possibility, since Kelly really seems to love her chocolate. Mango Bread was definitely the dark horse -- anyone who had money on "Kelly for Mango Bread" did well.

Dorie says that mango breads are popular in the South. But I've gotta say -- I live in Alabama, a pretty Southern place, and I've seen mango bread around here about as often as I've seen bumper stickers on pickups. But I am not from the South, so I didn't want to trust myself on this point. I polled some of my authentic Southern friends, people who were born and raised in such very Southern places as Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina. My question: "Did you grow up eating mango bread? Dorie says it's Southern." I got responses such as these:

"Mangoes are not a Southern food. I don't even like them, so they can't be a Southern food."
"Never heard of it. But if you deep fry it, you can Southern it up a little."
"Mango bread? That's a Yankee bread."
"Maybe she means WAY Southern. Like the Caribbean."
"I hear that mango bread is very popular in Southern St. Barts."

Well, Southern or not, the mango bread sounded great to me. It is a spice bread full of ginger, cinnamon, and lime zest, sweetened with both brown and white sugar, and studded with fresh mangoes and golden raisins. I started dabbling in yeast bread baking recently, and one thing about baking with yeast is that it makes quick breads like this one seem even quicker. This came together in a flash. Mix together the dry ingredients, add an egg/oil mixture, and then stir in the mango, raisins and zest.

Mmmmmmm, mango bread batter.

The only thing noteworthy about the batter mixing is that I needed two mangoes to get the two cups needed for the recipe (Dorie says that you'll get two cups from one large mango). I guess I just haven't bought enough mangoes in my life to know if mine were small, medium or large. Apparently they were not large enough to yield two cups diced.

This bread bakes for a LONG time -- one and a half hours. That sounded long to me, but seeing as I'm riding a streak of underdone baked goodies, I wasn't about the question Dorie on the baking time. I did have to tent the bread with foil about 35 minutes in to keep it from getting too brown on top.

This was delicious! I served it to David with ice cream when it was still a little warm. The bread is so dense that it's almost cakelike, so the cakelike presentation worked well (I did not garnish David's with mint; that was for artistic purposes only). I didn't serve myself the same mango bread/ice cream dessert; instead, I just cut myself an impossibly small sliver of it every time I walked by it, and since it was in the kitchen, where I lived last weekend, that meant that I ate approximately half of the loaf. I shared what was left with David's parents, who really seemed to enjoy it too.

Another winner from Dorie! Kelly, thanks for the pick -- we loved it here in the South!

Bread Baker's Apprentice: Anadama Bread

2009-05-17T03:00:00.004-04:00

This is my first post for a new baking group that I recently joined, and am incredible excited about -- a group of 200 bakers who have vowed to spend the next year or (two!) baking their way through Peter Reinhart's James Beard Award-winning book, the Bread Baker's Apprentice:

I have a hard enough time keeping up with the three blogging groups that I am already in, TWD, CEiMB and Barefoot Bloggers, so I initially questioned the wisdom of signing up for another one. But I just couldn't resist this particular group. First, it is all about baking bread. I've dabbled in a little bit of yeast baking over the past six months or so, and I have wanted to do more, but as a non-self-starter, I felt that I needed the external motivation of a formal(ish) group that has no rigid posting requirements with no draconian consequences for failing to comply with group rules.

Really, the only real Bread Baker's Apprentice ("#BBA," to use the Twitter hashtag) group rule is that you must bake through the Bread Baker's Apprentice in order, but you can take as long as you want to do it. There are not even any posting requirements (although we all know that if you don't blog about what you made for dinner, there is no proof that it actually existed). So this group is really like a college independent study program -- sure, you can sleep til noon, spend the afternoons sunbathing in the quad, and play beer pong with plastic cups of Natty Light by night -- nobody's going to stop you, and you might even fool 'em, but deep down you know you'd only be hurting yourself. Well, we're all here because we want to bake bread/learn more about baking bread, so you won't catch us slacking off, even without Rules or a Scary Enforcer.

While many people in the group plan to bake and post weekly, I and several of my favorite blog friends, Nancy, Kayte, Audrey, and Jessica, thought that an every other week posting schedule would be more realistic for us. So we are aiming to post #BBA challenges every other Sunday or Monday, starting today (or tomorrow!). So, without further delay . . .

The first recipe out of Bread Baker's Apprentice is Anadama Bread, a classic New England cornmeal and molasses bread. In the introduction to the recipe, Reinhart shares one version of the story behind the bread's name: a Massachusetts man who was upset at his wife for leaving him, and for leaving behind only cornmeal mush and molasses when she left, exclaimed "Anna, damn 'er!," which was later modified by "more genteel local Yankees" to "anadama." Having grown up in New England, I think the likelihood of that story being true really depends on what part of New England you are talking about -- get into the wrong part, and the local Yankees would have been more likely to work an F-bomb into the bread name. Be that as it may, I couldn't wait to try this traditional New England loaf, so I started out one night with . . .

THE SOAKER

I think part of what has scared me away from bread all these years is the esoteric terminology -- biga, poolish, pre-ferment, soaker. It's enough to send a non-science-minded person running to the nearest bakery. Flip through this book quickly and you will see phrases like "enzyme-catalyzing process," "protein molecules" and "pH level." But I think that our sensei does a fantastic job demystifying the science behind the art of bread making.

Psssst -- it's just cornmeal and water mixed together.

THE DOUGH

After the soaker does its thing overnight, it's time to make the dough, which starts with flour, yeast, the soaker, and water. After the sponge begins to bubble, mix in additional flour, salt, molasses, and butter, and knead for 10 minutes. I used the dough hook on my Kitchen Aid for the kneading. I know that I should knead by hand so that I could learn to get the proper "feel" for the dough, but I have a sweet little one year old who says no a lot and lives on my hip, which renders me one-handed the vast majority of the time. So Kitchen Aid it will be for now, and I hope to get a feel for the dough whenever Caroline works out her separation anxiety issues, hopefully sometime before she hits 30 pounds.

After the dough has been kneaded the proper amount of time, you can check for readiness with the "windowpane test," which involves stretching a small piece of the dough to see if it becomes transparent, but holds together. You can also check the internal temperature of the dough (I did both - check, and check). Once it's ready, transfer it to an oiled bowl and let it rise 60 or 90 minutes, until it doubles. This dough rose beautifully for me. Then divide it up, shape into loaves, place into bread pans, and proof until the dough crests the pans:

Then bake it. I got a little "oven spring" while my bread baked, although my three loaves ended up rising to slightly different sizes, even though they started out exactly the same weight.

Wow, we really enjoyed this bread! We had it fresh out of the oven with dinner the day I made it, and made a couple of different sandwiches on it over the course of several days (our favorite was a BLT!). But my hands-down favorite way to enjoy anadama bread was toasted with butter. I was glad that I made the full recipe, because I was thrilled to have extra loaves to share to say "thank you" (in the way that only New England molasses bread can) to people who helped us out over the past couple of weeks.

Special thanks to our group's fearless leader, Nicole from Pinch My Salt, for organizing this challenge and for taking on the large administrative job that comes with it. I am already completely smitten by this book, and I've got the bread baking bug bad. One down, fifty or so more to go!

TWD: Tartest Lemon Tart

2009-05-12T00:01:00.006-04:00

Today's TWD recipe was chosen by Babette of Babette Feasts. Last week was crazy around here (thank you for your nice comments on my last post, BTW), and we were lucky enough to have some amazing family and friends who helped us through the craziness by watching our kids, chauffeuring our kids, and completely stocking our fridge with food. Thanks to their kindness and generosity, I have not cooked or baked a thing in over a week, except for anadama bread (which I know sounds weird unless you are a baker, then it sounds perfectly normal.) It will probably be another week before I am back in full cooking/baking/blogging mode (but boy, there is no slowing me down on Twitter!), but I made this lemon tart before things got really nuts, so I figure I might as well post it.

Sometimes I feel like I get good end results with things, but my process is really, really painful to watch. For example, back in law school my friend Cara and I returned to school in late August one year and decided on a whim to sign up for the Richmond Marathon in mid-October. We were both casual, 3 miles-four-or-five times a week kind of runners at the time. But we started adding mileage during the week and doing a long run on weekends. On a typical Friday during training we might run 18 miles, come back, order a meat lover's pizza with a side of cheesy bread, pour some wine, and then clean up to go out and live unhealthily for the next 6 hours. We finished the marathon, which I completely attribute to the power of youth -- if I tried such a thing now I would suffer the same fate as Pheidippides, but well before the 26.2 mile mark. But at the time, my then-boyfriend, now-husband David kind of shook his head and said that after watching our training regimen he could no longer feel the same kind of reverence that he once did for the accomplishment of completing a marathon. I know that I would have done my fellow marathon completers a favor by just surprising David at the finish line without making him watch such an ugly 6-week training process.

Well, now that I am baking, I can't even tell you how many times I've wished that David did not have to see what went on in the kitchen en route to (mostly) great end results. Sometimes it would be nice to just be able to pull a fine dessert out of thin air for my sweet hubs to enjoy without him having to witness the spills and explosions, the profanity, the injuries, the verbalized self-doubt, and the equipment malfunction that invariably accompany my baking.

This lemon tart is a prime example. The tart calls for Dorie's sweet tart dough with nuts. That came together fine, but then I had to prebake it, which seemed easy enough in theory. But it seemed completely raw on the bottom after the prebake time elapsed. I tried to talk it out: "this looks raw. Is this supposed to look like this? David, does this look VERY underdone to you? Well, I guess the edges are kind of baked. Didn't I do this before? I don't remember it looking this underbaked last time. Or was that the pie crust? Should I just stick it back in the oven?"

I finally decided to just prepare the filling, proceed with the recipe, and hope that the crust would bake up properly in the end. The filling was fun and easy to prepare - it contains whole lemons! I understand that there was a lot of concern on the P&Q about the piths making the tart bitter, but for me the ease of throwing a couple of lemons in the food processor without peeling, zesting, or squeezing was just too irresistible, and I never considered doing anything else.

Once the lemon filling was done, I filled the tart and stuck it in the oven, where it was in grave danger of overflowing. Then it baked, and baked, and baked, but the filling didn't seem like it was setting up properly. More chatter to poor David: "This is so not setting. But it is really getting brown on top. Ugh! Do you think our oven temperature is off? I really don't think this oven has been heating right ever since David Beckham* (*our handyman, not real Becks, unfortch) broke that center glass panel when he came to take it apart after the shrimp incident. We really need to get him over here to get that replacement panel put in. Gosh, that is jiggly. I did call him, but you know it will be hell to get him out here if all we have for him to do is the glass panel. Don't we have something else that is broken around here? Do you think this will set up more in the fridge? I don't want it to get burned on top! Wow, it really smells good. Okay stand back - I'm taking it out."

Well, sure enough, after all that angst, the tart did set up nicely once I took it out of the oven. We had some friends over to watch the Kentucky Derby, and I served the tart then. Everyone really seemed to enjoy it. I did not find it bitter at all, did not get any complaints about bitterness from my guests, and didn't sense that anyone was holding out on me. I thought it was very rich, tart and lemony. Extremely lemony -- in my opinion whipped cream is imperative to neutralize all that lemony goodness; I would not consider whipped cream to be optional here. The next day David's mom came into town; she really loved the tart as well.

David himself was a big fan of this tart. Would he have been an even bigger fan if I did not psychologically exhaust him while making it? Possibly. One of these days I will effortlessly churn out these desserts, I just know it! Until then, we'll consider the turmoil of the process a small price to pay for the ultimate prize of such a fine lemon tart.

Thanks for the great pick, Babette!

Blog vacation

2009-05-04T03:00:00.004-04:00

We have some stuff going on this week that is going to keep me away from two of my favorite places, the kitchen and the computer, for a short while. Therefore, I will miss some TWD, Barefoot Bloggers, and CEiMB challenges over the next week or so. Depending on how things go with That Stuff, I hope to be back in full swing soon, screwing things up left and right but enjoying the vast majority of it anyway. I plan to live vicariously through you to experience the recipes that I miss, and will look forward to visiting your blogs for the full scoop. See you soon!

Ellie Krieger's Spaghetti Penne with Turkey Meatballs in Spicy Tomato Sauce

2009-04-30T06:00:00.003-04:00

The Craving Ellie in my Belly selection this week is Spaghetti with Turkey Meatballs in Spicy Tomato sauce, chosen by Oddball Oven Mitt. Meatballs are one of those things that I really enjoy eating, but not making. It is the manhandling of raw meat thing. I prefer to get my meat from raw to cooked with minimal manipulation on my part. Yet despite my disdain for the process, it seems like I've made a ton of meatballs within the last couple of months -- there were Ina's Real Spaghetti & Meatballs for a Barefoot Bloggers challenge that I made and then slacktastically failed to blog about; the chicken meatballs for Ina's Italian Wedding Soup; Mark Bittman's meatballs; and I swear I can remember bitching about meatball-making at least one other time in my blog recently, but I'll be darned if I could remember which post it was. So when I saw that this recipe was picked, I had my usual conflicted meatball reaction, but I forged ahead.

This time the meatballs are of the turkey variety, which I had not made in a while. Make them by mixing together lean ground turkey, bread crumbs, parmesan, onion, garlic, parsley, thyme, and egg, salt, pepper and shredded carrots. (Incidentally, I used that carrot shredding momentum to my advantage and continued shredding enough carrots to make Ellie's carrot cake cupcakes. Hubs loved them; I loved them once stopped thinking "cupcakes" and started thinking "muffins.") Anyway, once everything is mixed up, roll up your sleeves, take a deep breath, reach in and roll those meatballs, baby. Eyes on the prize.

The sauce here sounded interesting to me because it includes some chipotle chiles in adobo sauce, which I had previously only used in southwestern-style dishes. But I guess if you want to get something spicy, chipotle chiles are one of the quickest ways to do it. In addition to the chiles, the sauce calls for onions, garlic, tomato paste, fire roasted tomatoes, oregano, rosemary, salt, pepper and basil. This might be the first time I've used fire roasted tomatoes. Pamela sung their praises just last week, so I was really eager to see what all the excitement was about. And wow, I don't know if it was the fire roasted tomatoes or the chipotles or what, but this sauce was kickin! Definitely spicy, and just exploding with flavor. Ellie, I take back all the times I ever said that your dishes can be a little bland sometimes. There is NOTHING bland about this sauce. We loved it, and it will become my go-to spicy tomato sauce (doesn't everyone have a go-to spicy tomato sauce?) My only complaint is that the sauce-to-meatball ratio seemed a little low. I'll probably double the sauce recipe next time I make this. But in terms of flavor, I wouldn't change a thing. It is fabulous!

Also, I made Ellie's garden risotto over the weekend. See?

This risotto is next week's pick from one of my favorite bloggers, Jessica of Singleton in the Kitchen. I am about to be out of pocket and will be unable to do a full post about this next week, but I didn't want to miss Jessica's pick, especially since she picked risotto, which is much loved by my hubs and me. And this one did not disappoint. You all are going to loooooove this! Thanks Jessica!

Oddball Oven Mitt, thanks for the fantastic pick this week -- we loved it!