Busy Bakers

These last few months our house has been under construction, which, as far as I can tell, consists primarily of periods of violent demolition, followed by extended periods of silence, followed by even longer periods of desperate phone calls to absent contractors.

In all the chaos of tarps on the furniture, clothes in the office, pets in the bathroom, and dust absolutely everywhere, we've somehow still managed to bake.

My birthday was last month (some days I feel 30, other days closer to 90, but the real number is somewhere in between), and my first confectionery request of the Piemaker was this Mocha Espresso Cream Pie.

It looks like a lot of cream, but it's really just the camera angle...

Another great recipe from Southern Living - this one was in the Thanksgiving issue!

We have made a lot of chocolate pies. A LOT! But we think this is the best so far. The chocolate filling is a pudding, so it is not as rich as a ganache torte nor as dense as a chocolate silk or satin pie, but it actually has more chocolate flavor, somehow. I broke my rule of not putting cream on pie, because in this case the whipped cream is flavored with Kahlua, and definitely adds more than just calories to the plate.

Since we ate it so fast I forgot to get a shot of a pie slice, here's Southern Living's elegant version:

source

Next, I was intrigued by the concept of the Hummingbird Cake. It's a Southern tradition with mysterious roots. If you ask 20 people who invented it or where it came from, you'll get 20 different answers. I still don't know why it is called Hummingbird Cake - it is a heavy spice cake containing bananas and pineapple. It is layered with the standard cream cheese and butter frosting.


neatly layered and decorated by the Piemaker

This cake is incredible: rich, sweet, fruity, nutty, and just overall delicious. Definitely worth a try: recipe here. Ours had a very strong banana flavor that overpowered the pineapple, so next time we will adjust the proportions of the fruit slightly.  

Happy Birthday to me!

After recovering from all that overindulgence, I developed a craving for almond cakes, which seems to be an annual thing (see 2012 and 2013). My DSIL (who is highly sympathetic to my love of cakes and pies) sent me a lovely new cookbook called Bake It Like You Mean It, by Gesine Bullock-Prado. After reviewing the various almond-based recipes and the price of almond paste (!!!), I decided on "The Very Best Almond-Pear Bee Sting" cake.

Let's first recall that I rarely follow directions, whether for sewing, gardening, cooking, or baking. Thus, when I saw that I should poach two pears in white wine, I decided to poach them instead in a combination of water and port, rather than go to the store for wine. (In case you're wondering, port-poached-pears are DELICIOUS!) When the recipe stated that I would be making 8 mini-Bundt cakes, I ignored it and instead made one full-sized cake.

All patched up - you'd never guess the top fell apart

And finally, when the weight of the pears made the top of the cake fall off, and I had to patch it up, I decided to top the cake with almonds and honey rather than the smooth sugar icing called for in the recipe.

Delicious pears hidden inside

So why is it called a bee sting? I think it is supposed to be because there is honey in it, but it's also interesting to note that both almonds and pears are pollinated by bees.

Here's my version:

Almond-Pear Bundt Cake

Adapted from Bake It Like You Mean It

Pears 1 ½ cup water ½ cup port ¼ cup brown sugar 2 Bosc pears, cored and sliced   Cake 1 7-oz tube almond paste ½ cup sugar 1 cup unsalted butter ¼ cup honey ½ tsp almond extract 1 tsp vanilla extract 6 eggs 1 cup cake flour ½ tsp baking powder ½ tsp salt   Topping ½ cup toasted sliced almonds ¼ cup honey

Poach pears: Combine liquids and sugar in a saucepan, bring to a simmer. Add pear slices and simmer until tender. Remove pears to a plate and allow to cool.   Bake cake: In a mixing bowl, combine almond paste and sugar and chop with knife or pastry cutter until pebble-sized.  Use hand mixer or stand mixer to beat mixture at medium speed until almond paste is smooth.   Add butter, honey, and extracts and beat until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating thoroughly and scraping down sides of bowl.   Sift together flour, salt and baking powder in a bowl. Slowly add flour mixture to cake batter and beat just until well combined.   Lightly butter or oil a Bundt cake pan. Pour ½ of the batter into the pan. Place the pear slices into the batter. Add the remaining cake batter.   Bake at 325 degrees for 50 to 55 minutes, until golden brown. Allow cake to cool for 30-40 minutes, enough to loosen slightly from the sides, before inverting onto a plate.   Top it: Warm the honey slightly so it pours easily. Drizzle a small amount on the top of the cake to help the almonds adhere.   Sprinkle the almonds over the top, pat gently if necessary. Pour the remaining honey over the almonds and cake.

 

At least we have no shortage of calories to get us through the construction chaos.

 

Have you discovered any good recipes recently?

 

Katrina

 

 

Peaches!

It’s time for peaches here in Arizona. There are events at the local peach farms, mountains of peaches at the farmers markets, and low prices for ripe peaches at the regular grocery stores. I don’t have any peach trees here at home, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to eat them when the season rolls around.

Instead of peach pie, we’ve had two peach-filled cakes recently. The first was a very traditional Peach Upside-down Cake. These always seem risky - almost as unlikely as a soufflé to come out right.

But this one turned out of its pan perfectly, due no doubt to the Piemaker's superpowers!

 

The second was Blackberry-Peach Cobbler Bars. They seemed more like cake than cobbler, but they were delicious. I used almonds instead of pecans for the crunchy topping, and I think you could switch out different fruits with equally good results.

These were white peaches, that’s why they are almost invisible in the cake.

What seasonal produce are you enjoying now?

Katrina

Having Cake and Eating It

I went here for a few days:


Chicago - Brrr

It was chilly, but it was certainly pleasant to (briefly) experience actual winter scenes with snow rather than our Arizona quasi-winter with slightly less warm temperatures (although we did have that rare snowfall in February!)

We celebrated my brother’s birthday with some good meals and a delicious chocolate-raspberry cake. I got to spend time with my niece, who gave me a tour of the neighborhood, made special meringue cookies, and kept me entertained for the weekend.

 

Back in Phoenix, the Piemaker was not to be outdone by birthday cake, and he welcomed me home with this masterpiece.



Strawberries & Cream Cake

Wow! It’s really strawberry! And really good! The layers of filling start out separate, but over several days they soak into the cake layers until the inside of the cake is more red than white.

The recipe is from the April issue of Southern Living. I recommend it!

Cake, cookies, more cake. I know there are Easter eggs around here too. Did someone mention exercise?

Katrina

 

More Citrus Recipes

Our little orange/tangerine/mandarin tree took this year off from making fruit.

It's trying to have some flowers, in spite of wind, rain, and snow.

But I still have needs! And one of those needs is for a Tangerine Chess Pie, so the Piemaker bought a whole big bag of clementines for $2.99. (We know there’s a difference between tangerines and mandarins, but we don’t care. We use them interchangeably.)

 

He made the pie, and we ate the pie, but we were still left with most of the bag of fruit. I snack on them everyday, but I can’t resist baking with them, too. So I started going through my recipe books for interesting recipes to adapt.

 

Here’s one I came up with the assistance of Grandmother’s Pies and Cakes, by Jane Fallon. 

 

Usually you find this type of bread with walnuts and cranberries, but I happened to have raisins and almonds on hand, so I used those instead.

 

Mandarin Orange Bread

Makes one 9-inch loaf

Ingredients ½ cup butter 1 cup sugar 4 tsp grated rind (this is 1 - 2 oranges or 4 clementines) ½ cup orange/tangerine juice 2 large eggs 1 ¾ cups flour 2 tsp baking powder ¼ tsp salt Options: ½ cup dried fruit ½ cup chopped nuts

Directions ·       Preheat oven to 350 . ·       Grease and flour a 9-inch loaf pan. ·       Beat butter, sugar, rind, juice, and eggs on medium speed for 4 minutes. ·       Sift dry ingredients together. ·       Add dry mixture to orange mixture and mix with spoon. ·       Mix in fruit and nuts ·       Spoon into loaf pan (batter will be very thick) and bake for 60-70 minutes.

 

And I found another inspiration in Better Homes and Gardens’ Cookies and Candies, copyright 1969.

 This was my very first cookbook!

The original recipe was called “Apple-Orange Brownies”, but in addition to taking liberties with the recipe, I’ve also renamed it. The word “brownie” connotes chocolate to me.

 

Mandarin Bars

Makes 24 squares (approx. 2 ½ x 2 ½ inch)

Ingredients 6 Tbsp butter 1 cup brown sugar ½ cup applesauce 4 tsp grated rind (this is 1 - 2 oranges or 4 clementines) 1 large egg 1 tsp vanilla 1 ¼ cups flour 1 tsp baking powder ½ tsp salt ¼ tsp baking soda ¾ cup chopped walnuts

Directions ·       Preheat oven to 350 . ·       Grease 15 x 11 x 1 inch pan. ·       Mix first six ingredients together. ·       Sift dry ingredients together. ·       Add dry mixture to orange mixture, stir. ·       Mix in nuts. ·       Spread evenly in pan. There will only be a thin layer of batter over the bottom of the pan. Bake for 15 minutes.   Make an icing with: 1 ½ cups confectioner’s sugar and 2 tablespoons orange juice. Drizzle over the bars while still warm.   Or sprinkle with “orange sugar”: 1 part coarse-grained sugar (like Demerera or turbinado) mixed with 2 parts finely grated orange zest.

 

 

And we still have a lot of fruit left!

Katrina

Things I Forgot to Mention

I can’t believe I forgot to mention the two most important things in January: my birthday, and National Pie Day! Both dates came and went last week. In honor of these significant events, here is something that is neither a pie nor a traditional birthday cake:

Apple Streusel Coffee Cake

 

This is what I requested for my birthday dessert. Delicious!

 

From Southern Living, Sept 2012

The original recipe suggests caramel sauce poured over the top, but that was too much for me!
 

I liked the crunchy streusel and the sweet apples without any added caramel.

 

Did you celebrate National Pie Day (January 23rd)?

Katrina

Turning Disaster into Dinner

Although most of my vegetable plants made it through the hard freeze last week, the tomato plant decidedly did not.

 Yuck!

I should have harvested all of the green tomatoes before the freeze, but I left them on the plant. The freeze did not visibly damage the fruit, but since ice formed inside the tomatoes each night, causing cellular damage, the decomposition process will soon begin.

I needed to harvest and use them ASAP!

I found a recipe for chili verde that called for green tomatoes rather than tomatillos. The Piemaker dumped the whole batch in - enough for a triple recipe! - and cooked it for an entire day.

 Yum!

Katrina

Piemaker's Day Off

For the first time ever, the Piemaker declined to make a pie. Actually it was worse than that: he said I had a choice – he could spend Saturday taking down broken tree branches and clearing the yard, or he could make a pie. Well! I never! I chose the tree branches, and it serves him right, I say.

To recover from the shock of it all, I made a pie.  This is the Raspberry-Marzipan Tart from December’s Martha Stewart Living.

Usually the MSL recipes have too many complex steps and require too many expensive ingredients for me to have much interest in them, but this one had a short list of ingredients and was quick to put together.

I’m describing it as an inside-out Linzer Torte, because the layers of raspberry and almond are reversed. Linzer Torte usually has layers of fruit preserves between almond pastry crust.

The Raspberry-Marzipan Tart has a ground almond filling between two layers of preserves. The only major change I made to the published recipe was to double the amount of almond extract.

The tart is delicious! I think this crust and the almond filling would also be good with other fruit preserves and, of course, chocolate.

Yes, the Piemaker got to eat some of the pie after he spent all day working in the yard.

What’s cooking and baking in your kitchen?

Katrina

Preparations

Happy Thanksgiving to my US friends, and a happy weekend to you all.

Today the Piemaker will be in the kitchen all day, banging pans around and splashing and stirring and slicing. I will stay out of the way!

 

Yesterday I got a head start on the preparations by making the only thing that I personally am in charge of: the cranberry sauce. We have let go of whatever emotional ties we may have had to the traditional canned cranberries and jelly and are ready to branch out a bit. I love the cranberry-orange relish that my aunt used to make, but I decided to put a spicy twist on it with this recipe.

Cranberry Salsa

Ingredients

·        1 – 12-ounce package fresh cranberries
·        ½ cup sugar
·        1 large orange
·        2 jalapeño peppers, seeded and coarsely chopped
·        3 tablespoons coarsely chopped crystallized ginger
·        ½ cup chopped fresh cilantro

1.     Pulse cranberries in a food processor until coarsely chopped. Transfer to a bowl. Stir in sugar.

2.      Zest the orange and stir zest into cranberry mixture.
3.      Remove the remaining peel and pith and chop the orange into chunks.
4.      Pulse the orange, jalapenos, ginger, and cilantro in food processor 3 to 5 times or until orange, ginger, and pepper are finely chopped. Stir into cranberries; cover and chill 2 to 24 hours.

 

This is adapted from a Southern Living recipe that you can find here.

 

Yes, it is spicy, and delicious!

I hope you all enjoy a delightful meal wherever you are.

Katrina

 

Eating Snails

We have not resorted to eating gastropods from the garden, but we do have some delicious snails on the table.

Can you believe I actually baked something? These are schnecken from an old family recipe. The most basic of all cinnamon rolls, they are made with a simple pastry dough similar to pie crust, with cinnamon, brown sugar, and raisins rolled inside. Sliced into spirals, the little snails bake in a sugar-and-butter-lined pan to get the brown crunchy topping.

Our German schnecke is nothing like the enormous, yeasty, gooey cinnamon roll you find in America’s malls!

Cinnabon source

Ours are a little bit hard, a little bit dry, and just sweet enough. Perfect with coffee or tea, schnecken are supposed to be a breakfast food, but I eat them all day. Um, I mean, I could eat them at any time of the day.

I have resisted the Piemaker’s suggestions for “improvements” to this and all other family recipes (no chocolate chips, pecans, peanut butter, maple syrup, etc), because my grandmother lives in these schnecken. She also lives in marmorkuchen and streuselkuchen, German Christmas cookies, and many other precious recipes.

Hooray for grandmothers and old family recipes!

Katrina

Large Loads of Limes

I had to look back in my garden notes to see if it is normal to have limes in the summer, and it is definitely not. Our Key Limes are not supposed to come until November at the earliest. Usually I am giving away bags of them along with the lemons around the holidays. But here it is the middle of August, and ripe limes are falling off the tree by the dozen. Inexplicable.

This was just one day’s haul, a week ago.

The Piemaker used a favorite recipe from a couple of years ago, Key Lime Pound Cake.

As always Southern Living makes it look so simple yet elegant. The recipe is here.

Note: the recipe asks for butter and shortening – I have never used shortening and don’t intend to start now. We just use all butter. And of course we double the lime juice and zest simply because there is so much available.

Our version looks simple but not at all elegant.

It has a deliciously potent lime flavor and a surprisingly light texture (for pound cake).

I think this pound cake recipe could be easily adapted for other flavors, but for now we will gladly use it to contain the tide of lime juice.

Greetings

My inventory of handmade greeting cards was running low in the category of “masculine,” at least in the opinion of the male half of our household. I decided to make a new supply of cards, focusing on masculine themes and colors, rather than my usual florals and glitter and pinks and purples.

This is my kind of card: girls, flowers, butterflies, pink, lavender, and yellow.

I actually had to force myself to pick up the unused colors in my paint box: tangerine, rust, brown, olive, black. Once I’d covered a few sheets of paper with splashes of these unfamiliar hues, I added a few random dollops of “my” colors.

I got out some rubber stamps and stamped over the paint. Astronomy, zebras, antique hardware, old cars; those all seem okay for men’s greeting cards.

After some matting and collaging and more stamping I had a good two dozen manly cards in the orange, green, and brown colors.

I decided some pink therapy was in order, so I tried out some of my pearl acrylics in lovely colors like Cameo, Wisteria, and Cranberry.

Next came the pretty stamps: birds and flowers and ladies and happy children. It was interesting to see how different the stamped images appeared, depending on the colors of my paint on the background paper.

After cutting out the stamped images and layering them, I put together almost 30 more cards.

All together, I ended up with an even more lopsided card inventory (now totaling approximately 300 cards for women and 24 cards for men), and I haven’t yet gotten confirmation from the Piemaker on whether he considers my new “masculine” collection acceptable for him to send or for his friends to receive.

Anyway it was fun to mess around with paints again, and a good exercise to use a few new colors.

Katrina