Sweet cheesecake

Part 2 of our adventure with fresh bay leaves was a sweet ricotta-based cheesecake.  After the partial success with Part 1, we were optimistic to try a recipe using a less-salty cheese.

The ingredients for the sweet cheesecake were more or less the same as the savory, with the addition of some honey after the baking process:

4 oz. flour
8 oz. ricotta
1 egg
Bay leaves
4 oz. honey

The main prep difference came while shaping the dough on the baking sheet; instead of one larger cake, the recipe called for four smaller cakes (though these turned out to be large enough to share).  For the same reasons as the savory cheesecake, we used more than the specified number of bay leaves for each cake.

Fresh bay leaves ready for the cheesecakes.

The baking method listed for these cakes was the same as that used for the savory cheesecake, placing a weight atop the cakes before baking.  We didn't do that this time, mostly because we didn't want to either wash the weight afterward, or have the weight take up a bunch of dishwasher real estate.  We did observe afterward that the cakes would have been flatter and smoother had we used the weights; as it was, the cakes puffed like soufflés in the oven and subsequently collapsed.  If anything, this affected the texture more than the taste: we thought this might have led to a lighter texture in the finished cakes, which we liked, so next time we try the savory cheesecake we will not use the weight.

Finished cakes after being dunked in honey.  We substantially reduced the baking time from the specified 35-40 minutes to about 20-25 minutes so that the cakes wouldn't brown too much.

Overall, we both preferred the sweet cheesecake to the savory, but that comes with two disclaimers:

1. We both prefer Italian food over almost all else, so I think we're predisposed to go with ricotta over feta in general.
2. We'd want to try the savory cheesecake again with a higher-quality feta.

Both of the recipes seem to be a good use of the fresh bay leaves, but the bay flavor generally disappears after about a day in the fridge, so these dishes would be best served on the same day as baking.

A half cheesecake (minus the bay leaves): perfect for a single serving.

The Classical Cookbook (1996); Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger; p. 93

Writeup background noise: Free Practice 1 of the Russian Grand Prix (when I originally drafted this last night), and NBCSN didn't have their commentators for it, so it was basically just various levels of car noise for an hour and a half punctuated by occasional radio communications between the drivers and their engineers.

(Not Key) Lime Pie

I remembered, on the 14th, that it was Pi Day, so of course I had nothing prepared, no fruits in the apartment, and only 2 eggs.  Flipping through Joy of Cooking suggested a Key lime pie, and we thought that instead of using sweetened condensed milk, we could use a can of sweetened condensed coconut milk that I'd picked up in an impulse buy, since coconut and lime tend to go together well.

Purchased at our local grocery store, Don Quijote, which is, in fact, Japanese-owned.

Our notes:

• Not wanting to put the effort into a regular pie crust, Key lime's graham cracker crust was appealing.  Instead of regular graham crackers, I used some "Star Wars" graham snacks, as those were the only graham crackers at the store that didn't use shortening or artificial flavor (and were also a reasonable price).  When I made the crust, I did not add any additional sugar, thinking that the cookies were sweet enough.  However, I think the crust could have benefited from the crunchiness and the extra bit of sweetness that the sugar would have contributed.
• Also, it would have been best if we could have let the pie crust cool before filling it.  Because I wanted to minimize the amount of time the oven was on, I baked the crust, then worked on the filling as it was baking and then a bit more after it came out of the oven.  The resulting crust was a bit soggy.  Perhaps next time I'll make a frozen (not Key) lime pie so that the oven only needs to be on for the crust.
• The recipe called for a 15-oz. can of condensed milk.  As the photo above indicates, the condensed coconut milk was only 11.25 oz., which I lowered even more by pouring off some of the oil that had separated out.  I thought I'd make up for it using some leftover regular coconut milk from a different recipe.  Unfortunately, this may have made the resulting custard a bit too soft.
• The recipe called for ½ cup of lime juice; for us, this was 4 limes.
• We should have only had to bake the pie for 15-17 minutes, but we probably ended up baking it for about 25 minutes as it didn't seem set.  I suspect the extra liquid from the coconut milk threw off the baking time.
• The unbaked filling tasted great: both lime and coconut flavors were obvious.  Unfortunately, the coconut flavor baked out of the finished pie, and the lime flavor was not so pronounced.  Yet another reason for making a frozen (not Key) lime pie, but substituting coconut milks for the regular evaporated and sweetened condensed milks.

Using the pi dish for Pi Day!

Overall, this was a tasty pie, though with a few additional changes it could have been even better.  Clearly, our next project should be a frozen coconut-lime pie!  I'll need to get more Star Wars grahams before then.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 667-668 (crust), and 688 (pie)

Chocolate chip cookies featuring a secret ingredient

The secret ingredient?  Avocado!

No, I am not going vegan.  What happened was that about a week ago, we were given a bag of avocados from our landlady--from the tree in her yard.  There had to have been seven or eight avocados in the bag, and while we gleefully put avocado chunks on our salads each night, we had to do something fast when a few of them ripened at the same time.  And while avocados have a bunch of health benefits, it's probably not so healthy to eat multiple of them in a single day.  So thanks to the little something called the Information Superhighway, we found a recipe for chocolate chip cookies that both used avocado and was not vegan.

As you probably already know by now, I took some liberties with the recipe.

• Cut down on the sugar: instead of ½ c. white sugar and 1 c. brown, I used ¼ c. white and probably about ¾ c. brown.  Seemed to taste just fine.
• Just the all-purpose flour, please: the recipe called for a combination of all-purpose and white whole wheat flour.  There was even a special note for those who might want to omit all of that evil all-purpose flour and just go with white whole wheat; however, there was no corresponding note for those who might want to go all-out unhealthy and omit the white whole wheat flour.  I used 2¼ c. all-purpose flour.  The cookies were just fine.  Rebellious baking!
• Whole eggs: the recipe called for 2 egg yolks, omitting the whites.  No explanation is ever given in the recipe for this decision.  Is it to do with the texture?  Do egg whites not play well with avocados?  Will the combination of egg whites and avocados somehow cause a rift to open in spacetime?  I used 2 whole eggs with seemingly no adverse effects on either the final product or the local universe.  Rebellious baking!
• Baking time: the recipe called for 14-16 minutes; I took the cookies out at 13 minutes, but that's just my preference for how "golden brown" the cookies were at that point.
• Recipe methodology and writing style: these left a bit to be desired.
• First of all, prep time is listed as "n/a".  I suppose for some, gathering ingredients or mixing cookie dough might take the proverbial "no time at all", but for most of us non-professional bakers* those steps are gonna take some time.
• Both the "total time" and the "cook time" listed are 25 minutes.  Does not compute.
• Also, the recipe apparently makes 48 cookies (I got about 35 out of it), with a 14-to-16-minute baking time, and a cook time (for 2 sheets) of 25 minutes.  I'm skeptical that the home baker has access to a large enough oven to accommodate a sheet pan that can hold 24 cookies spaced 2" apart.
• The ingredients are not listed in the order that they are used in the recipe.  This is a pet peeve of mine with regards to recipes.
• The fact that there's that note suggesting that the home baker could omit the all purpose flour, without a corresponding note regarding white whole wheat flour: it's mildly amusing at this point more than anything.  Eyeroll, more than resigned sigh.
• There is a note regarding the amount of avocado used vs. the amount of avocado in, well, one avocado: "Baking is an exact science. [...] Be sure to measure."  The only thing that I can say right now is that this very recipe has inspired me to create a new label for this blog called "inexact kine baking" and apply it to this and past posts where I modify baking recipes without poor results.

It looks like normal cookie dough.  With perhaps a few flecks of green since I probably didn't mix the butter and avocado together for quite long enough.

Verdict: The cookies turned out pretty good (I heard they were popular when Dom took them to work today) and the recipe is probably fine, though if we ever find ourselves with a bumper crop of avocados again I'd want to try something different.  The avocado lent a bit of additional flavor to the cookies, but nothing overpowering: it's not like you're tasting guacamole in a chocolate chip cookie**, more like a faintly nutty richness.  All told, I'd rather have my salad with mounds of avocado cubes on top followed by a dessert of all-butter chocolate chip cookies. 

Finished cookies.  I say, parchment paper has been fantastic in my baking experience: no more using the butter-an-aluminium-foil-lined-cookie-sheet trick, which I always seemed to have problems with.

*Especially those of us who, like me, are recently, again non-professional bakers.

**ew.  Even I have my limits.

Writeup background noise: the soundtrack for The Lego Movie (2014).  Everything Is Awesome!!!...right?

Kitchen experiment: vanilla

At the same time that we purchased our jar of Ceylon cinnamon, we also picked up a bottle of Mexican vanilla extract.  I'd tried a Mexican vanilla ice cream at a shop in San Antonio which delivered a slightly different taste from most vanilla ice creams, so I figured, why not try the Mexican vanilla extract if offered the opportunity?

I used the same method as when we tried the two different types of cinnamon: two batches of 1/3 of a recipe of rice pudding, though this time I was able to do my as-close-as-two-people-can-get-to-a-double-blind-experiment design.  I made the puddings, assigned a number to each extract (1 for Madagascar vanilla, and 2 for Mexican vanilla), then labeled the bowls by number.  After dinner, Dom set the de facto order in which we each tried the puddings.

If I'd read the recipe more carefully, I would have seen that I could have made a single pot of rice pudding, then split the cooked pudding in half before adding the extracts.  Well, what's one more pot to wash, I suppose?

Turns out I tasted Pudding 1 first, and Dom tasted Pudding 2.  After testing each one, we determined that though we liked the pudding we had each tried first, there was not much of a difference in the taste; the taste difference was markedly less than the difference for the two cinnamon varieties that we own.  The following day, we switched it up: Dom tasted Pudding 1 first, and I tasted Pudding 2, though this time we probably introduced bias in that we knew which ones we were tasting first.  Interestingly, we again liked whichever pudding we had tried first.  Our results were more or less inconclusive since the difference between the two vanillas was too subtle for us, but we both agreed that we liked actual the rice pudding better without having cooked the cinnamon in it!  Just a sprinkling of cinnamon on top is all that we might need.

We wondered if by the time a flavoring reaches the extract stage and is then used to flavor something else, most of the nuances of the original flavor are lost, such that Mexican vanilla extract in cooked or baked goods tastes more or less the same as Madagascar or Tahitian vanilla extract in the same situation.  I would think it would be a different matter if, for example, one used the actual vanilla bean to flavor an ice cream or rice pudding.  Perhaps that should be a future experiment!




Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 820: once again, we used the "stovetop rice pudding", not the "baked rice pudding".

Anniversary apple pie

We wanted to have a special dessert for our anniversary.  I didn't want to get a cake from a bakery, and I have never had much success making a cake at home, so we decided to make a fruit pie.  After spending some minutes scouring all of our cookbooks and Google Drive recipes, we finally decided on a recipe from a cookbook we don't even own: the Betty Crocker French apple pie recipe, the one my dad always used and for which I have carried a scanned copy through numerous apartments in three states.

As you can imagine, apples aren't really in season right now, and we are at least 2000 miles from the nearest commercial orchard.  We had a mix of Fuji, Gala, and Braeburn varieties, and we had to really go through the bins at the grocery store to find the good ones.

I had found a new (for us, at least) pie crust recipe that substitutes sour cream for the ice water and some of the butter: for a 9" pie, it's 1 cup flour, 1 stick of butter, ¼ cup sour cream, ½ tsp. salt, and 1 tsp. sugar.  It looked pretty foolproof, and while I wasn't the one who made the crust this time, I can attest that the dough ended up in the refrigerator in near-record time, and the end result was tasty...so, I'd say it was a success.

While the crust didn't take long to put together, I had a very short time window to roll out the dough and get it into the pan; it got soft fast, and it isn't even very hot in our kitchen anymore.*  So this may have to be a wintertime pie crust recipe unless I can get quicker about rolling it out.  However, I stuck the crust into the freezer while I got the filling ready, and it was just fine by the time I was ready to fill and bake.

Betty Crocker's recipe is pretty simple.  For a 9" pie:

6 cups of apples
¾ cup sugar (white sugar, but I used brown)
½ tsp. cinnamon (I used our Trader Joe's stuff; maybe I should try the Ceylon cinnamon next time!)
½ tsp. nutmeg
¾ cup flour
Dash of salt (I used 1/8 tsp. of kosher salt)

To this, I added the juice of one lemon, partly to keep the apples from browning while I peeled and sliced all of them, and partly to punch up the flavour.  This could have been reduced to a half lemon as the pie had a pretty strong lemon taste (obvs).

I made half of the crumb topping recipe, as I've noticed in the past that a full recipe makes WAY too much.

½ cup flour
¼ cup butter
¼ cup brown sugar

This seemed to work just fine for the pie.  I also added some cardamom (because why not?); while good, for me it was not entirely necessary.  Take it or leave it.

I used the pi dish, of course.

Obviously, for me, this will always be a recipe to keep.  We made just a couple of small modifications to tailor it to us specifically, but the crust, the filling, and the topping all turned out great.

Similar to my experiences with peach pie, I cut the apples into chunks rather than thin slices.

*This is a relative statement, as the chocolate on our chocolate-covered shortbread cookies (a Christmas gift) became soft enough to stick to the plastic wrapper and peel away from the actual cookie as we'd unwrap them.  We now store the box in the fridge.

Betty Crocker's Cookbook (year unknown, c. 1960s-1970s), p. 321
Writeup background noise: an interesting assortment of music, including Kylie (1988-2007 selections), Tom Petty, Rihanna, Santana, the Jackson 5, KT Tunstall, Yael Naim, and Gavin DeGraw.  Not to mention the Australian Open on mute in the super-background (Serena's match is about to start).  Wow.

Kitchen experiment: cinnamon

On a recent trip to California, we took the opportunity to visit a Penzeys Spices store.  One of the items on my list was Ceylon cinnamon, supposedly 'true cinnamon' as opposed to the cassia that is usually packaged as cinnamon; they're both part of the genus Cinnamomum, so it's more a matter of labeling and semantics, I suppose.  We were curious, so we picked up a jar along with several other herbs and spices, some of which were on the original list...and multiple that had not been.

I wanted to test the Ceylon cinnamon against "regular" cinnamon, so I decided on rice pudding: a nice neutral background for a flavoring.*  I used the Joy of Cooking recipe, and made two batches of 1/3-recipe so that we wouldn't be inundated with rice pudding.  To each batch, I added 1 egg yolk (I had used some egg whites earlier in the afternoon and didn't have any other immediate use for the yolks) and 3/4 tsp. cinnamon, both mixed in with the milk and sugar.  When I opened up the Ceylon cinnamon, I decided to first compare the fragrance of the two: the ol' swipe-a-finger-across-the-inside-of-the-lid-to-pick-up-just-a-bit trick.  Of course, at that point, I couldn't stop making Dune references.

Puddings in process.  Yes, the regular cinnamon is from Trader Joe's, and we haven't lived in a state with a Trader Joe's in over 6 months.  Might the age of the cinnamon have affected our conclusions?  Our past experience with 'older' spices indicates that this is negligible for us, but perhaps not so negligible for a professional.

At the first tasting, we both decided that the pudding with Ceylon cinnamon was our preference: it seemed to have a stronger and punchier flavour, though both puddings were tasty.  Even after a day in the fridge, we still both liked the pudding made with the Ceylon cinnamon.  Neither cinnamon was 'better', as it were, and since neither of us is any kind of a connoisseur (wine, beer, coffee, cheese, etc.), we can't even really quantify the taste differences between the two.  Most likely we won't go too far out of our way to get the 'real' stuff (though we'd never turn it down if given the opportunity), but this was an interesting experiment that gave us a good excuse to try something new.  And a good reason to buy a bunch of stuff at Penzeys.

Our finished puddings: that's 1/3 of a recipe of rice pudding in each 25-oz. bowl.  Two servings each!

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 820: the "stovetop rice pudding", not the "baked rice pudding".

*With one actual scientist and one aspiring scientist in the household, I needed to create as close to a double-blind study as is possible when only two people are involved, so I devised this method: I would make the puddings and assign a random number to each bowl of pudding while Dom was at work.  Then, when it would be time for tasting, he would select the number of pudding that we'd test first, without telling me which number it was.  Unfortunately, time ran out on my day off and we ended up making the puddings together, but I'd say we have a solid design for our next experiment: Madagascar vanilla vs. Mexican vanilla.

Peach pie

I recently checked out the cookbook The Perfect Peach, written by a family who run a peach farm in California.  Not only does it have fantastic photos and great recipes, but it's also got a number of fascinating vignettes of life and work in the orchards.

Thankfully, the peaches at the store this week were in better condition than when I had shopped for the peach ginger scones, so before Dom had even gotten a shopping cart, I had already selected quite a few peaches for us.  I decided to try a peach pie even though Dom would be gone for the week; I honestly had wanted to wait until later in the week, but with the peaches ripening by the minute even in the fridge, I had to make the pie today.

Since butter (and dairy products in general) are far more expensive than on the mainland, I didn't have enough to make a 9" double-crust pie, so I figured I'd do a lattice top.  The crust took very little time to make, but that was just as well; time was very limited since it was already getting warm in the kitchen, and the oven wasn't even on yet.  I ended up using 1.5 recipes' worth of an all-butter recipe I had found before, and my tiny Cuisinart did the job admirably.

I would have woven the lattice, but the dough was warming up already and I had to really hustle to get the strips of dough laid out and back into the fridge before the butter melted.  I also discovered I need a better way to transfer the lattice to the pie, as the lattice defied my expectations by sticking to the parchment paper in places.

Quick notes

• Most recipes call for sliced peaches, apples, etc. when making fruit pies.  I find that chunks work better, both in terms of prep time and in terms of the texture of the finished product.  For whatever reason I find it easier to slice a pie of fruit chunks rather than a pie of thin fruit slices.
• Like many other instances, I used less sugar than called for; the recipe says to use 3/4 c. granulated sugar, while I used a little under 2/3 c.  Probably more of a case of having to adjust to the fruit's inherent sweetness.
• Lemon juice seems to be the acid of choice when making peach pies.  I substituted lime juice out of necessity, which I thought would lead to a better taste in the finished product, but this is 100% subjective.  In the end, the baking process seemed to have toned down the overt lime flavor, though I'm convinced that lime juice is a better choice than lemon juice.  Again, totally subjective!

Frankly, the peaches were tasty enough at this point that I could have eaten them without the crust.  Or without baking.

• I should take care to ensure that the pieces of peach lie flatter in the crust.  As you can see in the photos, I sort of just dumped the bowl of peaches and juice into the pie crust without much regard to orientation.  This causes the lattice to become sort of distorted.  It still tasted great; it simply wasn't as aesthetically pleasing.

Pie before baking.  I had a moment of panic when I flipped over the parchment paper with the lattice and some of the dough stuck, but it seems to look all right after all that.

• Many peach pie recipes, this one included, indicate that one should dot the top of the filling with butter before putting the top crust on.  I didn't have enough butter for this and I also had seen firsthand how much butter had gone into making the crust.  However, while the pie was baking, I noticed that the peaches on top of the filling started looking a little dried-out.  Maybe the butter helps prevent the filling from drying in the oven?  Ultimately, the pie tasted just fine, even if the peaches were a little wrinkly on top.  Much as I would have loved to put butter on top of the filling, it's probably ok that I couldn't.

Pie after baking!  I had not sprinkled sugar on top of the pie, though if I'd been making this for a dinner party or something, I probably would have.

• I baked the pie for about 55 minutes at 400°F.  I had put the pie in the oven without the crust protector at first, but then took the pie out at 20 minutes to fit the crust protector around, then baked for about 30 more minutes plus my "I'll stand in front of the oven and monitor until it looks done and/or I start to get impatient and/or concerned" phase.
• The juices in the filling were still a little runny, which would have made slicing and plating a bit problematic had I been serving this for other folks instead of just me.  I used about 3 1/2 Tbsp. of flour, which is right in the 3-4 Tbsp. range called for in the recipe.  Perhaps next time I should try using one of the recipe's other suggested thickeners instead (tapioca flour or instant tapioca), neither of which should be too difficult to find around here.

Tasty!

My next kitchen experiment is to freeze slices of this pie for when Dom gets back next week.  Though I could try to hold myself to one slice per day, I still probably shouldn't consume the entire pie on my own.

Addendum, 19 September: Thanks to Betty Crocker (and unfortunately, no thanks to our usually-trusty Joy of Cooking which only provided instructions on freezing unbaked pies), I was able to freeze roughly 4 slices of the pie.  I simply put the entire pie plate, obviously more than half empty, into the freezer; after several hours, I wrapped the pie in plastic wrap as best as I could.  We'll see in a couple of days whether or not it worked!

Addendum, 2 October: Apparently I had forgotten to update.  The thawed pie was, to me, just as tasty as it had been before freezing, with perhaps a slight decrease in texture.  Not a bad solution to the problem of how to preserve a baked pie, but of course the ideal would probably be to eat the entire thing before it would have to be frozen. :)

The Perfect Peach (2013): pages unknown as I was using an unpaginated ebook version.

Writeup background music: the soundtrack for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Since Dom is gone, I'm on a 6-day Star Wars marathon, which I started Monday.

Cardamom rice pudding

We recently purchased a jar of ground cardamom after seeing a suspiciously low price at Whole Foods, of all places (maybe it's not real cardamom??).  For the first time using it, I wanted to make something that would showcase the spice as opposed to making something like a curry where it would be combined with several other spices.  I finally settled on a rice pudding recipe from Joy of Cooking and used a 1/2 teaspoon of cardamom where the same quantity of vanilla had been called for.

There are two basic rice pudding recipes in the cookbook; there's the baked rice pudding, and then there's the stovetop version.  Here's how we decided to go stovetop:

"Should we do stovetop or baked rice pudding?"
"Hmm....."
"The stovetop has fewer ingredients, but--"
"Stovetop."

Fewer ingredients made it easier to get everything together, but at the same time it meant a less-flavorful finished product.  The only flavorings in the pudding were milk and white sugar, so it was similar to a fior di latte gelato.  The recipe said to add the vanilla (cardamom, in our case) after removing the pudding from the heat, but I wonder if adding the cardamom with the milk would have done more for the overall flavor, almost like steeping chai in milk instead of water.  Substituting brown sugar for white could also have added a little depth of flavor, as well as adding just a pinch of cinnamon.  I realize that I'd specifically wanted a dish where the cardamom would be the main flavoring, but a little more flavor would not have hurt.

Too much milk.

The other issue was the amount of liquid in the recipe.  I had to cook 3/4 c. of rice in 1 1/2 cups of water, which is much more than I would usually use for rice.  Once the rice was cooked, I had to then add 4 cups of milk.  The photo above was taken more than a half hour after adding the milk, whereas the recipe claimed that the pudding should only need about 30 minutes of cooking.  It probably took about 45 minutes for the pudding to cook down into, well, a pudding.  Good thing I didn't have to cook that night.*

Yum.

For a little extra flavour, we added sliced honeycrisp apples and a dusting of cardamom to the serving bowls, but a drizzle of honey or a sprinkling of cinnamon would also be tasty.




*We actually went out for dinner that evening to Masala Pakistani and Indian Cuisine in North Providence, RI.  Going out for dinner is a big, big deal for us since we strongly prefer cooking our own stuff.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 820
Writeup background noise: The Herd with Colin Cowherd on ESPN Radio.  All ESPN is talking about these days is some football game being played on Sunday, but as far as I'm concerned, football season ended two weeks ago.

Pumpkin pie

If you know me at all, you know that I greatly enjoy baking: cookies, cakes, rolls, you name it.  Pie is a relative exception, as I am not usually impressed with store-bought pie crusts (what's in those?) and I don't particularly care for super-flaky pie crust anyway.  Also, I've noticed that almost every pie crust recipe is awash with dire warnings like "MAKE SURE EVERYTHING IS COLD!!!1!" or "DO NOT OVERHANDLE DOUGH AT RISK OF TURNING IT INTO SOMETHING TERRIBLE", or "Don't use a food processor, the pastry blender is the ONLY way to do it", etc. etc.  So for a while, I would make fruit cobblers, crisps, and other treats that only required a top crust.  But then I received a small food processor for my birthday along with a later suggestion that it could be used to make pie crusts.

Our handy copy of Joy of cooking has a number of pie crust recipes, but they all feature shortening, which we never buy.  So I found a few recipes and techniques for all-butter pie crusts and set about making some dough.

I needed some way to keep the water cold.  Festive, no?

The new food processor is ready for some pie crust action.

Either my food processor was too small for the amount of stuff, or a flour grenade went off in my kitchen.  Nonetheless, this was the dough before it got dumped onto the counter, shaped, and tossed into the fridge.

Recipes say that the dough should be able to form a disk at this point.  I got something more like a crumbly mound o' dough.  Perhaps I hadn't added enough water?

Crumbliness notwithstanding, this stuff rolled out great after a couple days in the fridge and a much-longer-than-recommended time between taking the dough out of the fridge and rolling it out.  Look at that edge!

A pumpkin pie in all its glory.  This is made with a pie pumpkin that I had already baked; I never liked pumpkin pie (no joke) until I started making it with a fresh pumpkin.  This crust turned out tender and not very flaky: perfect for Dom and me, but your conclusion may vary.

Was this as much trouble as I thought it was going to be?  Not really.  Sure, making crust takes a lot longer than going to the store and getting some out of the freezer case, and I'm sure it can be very finicky, but I think the results are worth it.  Based on some of the comments I got for this one, it seems that others thought so too!

TASTY.

Mini madeleines

I'm on a bit of a French kick right now.  A coworker's delicious-looking snack of a madeleine one afternoon got me to thinking about making these, and thanks to my mom, a mini madeleine pan was procured almost immediately!

I used a recipe from Joy of Baking, mostly because they gave a baking time specifically for mini madeleines.  I think it turned out great, except that all told, it was a little over two hours from gathering ingredients to taking the last madeleines out of the pan.  Not generally a problem, unless you start after 9 PM on a Monday evening and you have to go to work the next day.

My notes:

• Because of time constraints, I took the eggs out of the fridge about 15 minutes before using them; the end product came out fine, but next time I'll try to plan to have everything at room temperature.  The results could be even better!
• Once again, I used less sugar than called for in the recipe; I scooped out 2/3 c. sugar, but I filled each 1/3 spoon about 7/8 full.  I don't feel like calculating what fraction of a cup of sugar actually got used.
• Our sole remaining, and much-maligned hand mixer (great for whipped cream, not so much for cookie dough) has found another use: beating the eggs for this recipe.  The whisk attachments worked great.

Light 'n frothy eggs.

The batter after coming out of the fridge.

• The madeleine molds should only be filled to maybe 50%, maybe a 1/2-3/4 teaspoon's worth of dough for each one.  My first batch came out way too huge!  I think by the end I got the size right.
• The silicone baking sheet was great; I sprayed nonstick spray twice, once before the first batch and once after the second, and it probably didn't need the second spray.  And none of the madeleines stuck!

Madeleines made easy.  Also, from the looks of these molds, gigantic.

• The recipe says to bake 7-9 minutes at 375°F; I found 8 minutes to be ideal for our oven.
• The recipe made 75 mini madeleines, but the first tray used significantly more dough than subsequent trays, so I could probably have gotten 85 or so out of this batch.  May it be said, though, that not all 75 made it into the storage containers...

Verdict: this will not be the last time I make madeleines!  Now that I know roughly how long to bake the mini ones, I'd like to adapt different recipes.  Nothing wrong with this one, but I want to try the one in our French cookbook!

The madeleines on the left probably came out of that batch you see in the molds above; the ones on the right came after I'd figured out that each mold didn't need so much dough.

Mousse au chocolat

Among its many great photos, our fabulous French cookbook has a recipe for chocolate mousse or, as it says, "mousse au chocolat".  It didn't look too difficult, and I even got to try out a new cooking technique.  The results were tasty (chocolate and whipped cream: where could you go wrong?), but the texture was a little airier than I usually associate with chocolate mousse.

Our notes:

• Not owning a double boiler, I used the standard substitute of a small mixing bowl set on top of a saucepan of simmering water.  This was the first time I'd tried using any kind of double boiler technique, and it worked great; the chocolate melted nice and smooth.  In terms of the recipe, I'd melt the butter along with the chocolate next time; adding the butter after taking the melted chocolate off the heat (as the recipe instructed) seemed to lower the chocolate's temperature too quickly.  Next time I'd probably add the butter when the chocolate is almost completely melted but still on the heat.

Worked great.

• The recipe called for the egg whites to be beaten until "firm and glossy".  Unfortunately for me, this led to a much foamier mousse than I'd been expecting (I've never been a big fan of meringue anything), and the overall texture was not that smooth--too much air in the structure.  So next time, I'd probably experiment to see if beating the egg whites to soft peaks would offer a smoother texture to the finished product than stiff peaks.

Almost meringue.

• Despite using bittersweet chocolate (Ghirardelli), the mousse still tasted oversweet.  It seems like the added sugar in the recipe acts partly as a stabilizer, so next time I'll try using something more than 60% cocoa!

Chocolate mousse, before refrigeration.

• The recipe said to transfer the mousse into molds before refrigerating, but I don't think the mousse, prepared as the recipe directs, would be able to set in what I think of as a mold, even if the molds were bigger than the ice cube trays that we tried using.  Perhaps it meant to just divide it into individual serving cups, or perhaps I just didn't make it right!

Festive. Sadly, the mousse as produced by this recipe doesn't hold a shape at all, so we were not able to get Block M servings of chocolate mousse.

• Interestingly, this mousse had a richer taste and smoother texture after a few days in the refrigerator.  I don't know if this is good practice or not, to make something on one day to eat a few days later.

Verdict: a recipe to try again, but with a few modifications, and maybe after trying other chocolate mousse recipes.

Chocolate mousse, after refrigeration. The presentation would probably have been a little better had we owned a pastry bag and related kitchen gear.

Le Cordon Bleu's Pâtisserie & baking foundations: classic recipes (2012), p. 176-177
Writeup background music: Muse, The 2nd Law (2012); we saw them in concert in Detroit this past Saturday and now I can't stop listening to their music.

Cake citron (lemon cake)

This came from our awesome new French cookbook.  Originally I'd wanted to make something to take in for work the next day, so I had to find a recipe that wouldn't make us go out and buy anything.  This recipe used standard kitchen supplies along with some lemons, which we seem to have a lot of right now; I think it's because I can never correctly estimate how much lemon juice is in one lemon, so I tend to buy too many at a time.

I didn't end up taking this to work, mostly because I didn't want to have to transport it across icy sidewalks.

Our notes:

• This is basically a pound cake.  That loaf pan was pretty hefty after I put all the batter in!
• The amount of flour should be adjusted for the ambient humidity; 300g of flour is a little too much for a Michigan winter.

The cake before it went into the oven.

• I used the lemon juice option for the glaze: much more flavourful than just water!
• The recipe called for the knife test of doneness; accordingly, I ended up baking this for somewhere between 35 and 40 minutes rather than the 30 listed in the recipe, but I still ended up with an underbaked center (a common problem when I bake cakes in loaf pans).  However, this would lead to some delicious consequences.
• The recipe said to put the glaze on the cake while the cake was still hot, contrary to my normal tendency of waiting until a cake is cool before glazing it.  I was a little skeptical, but I like to follow recipes to the letter the first time I make them, so I duly made the glaze when the cake came out of the oven and glazed it right then.  It seemed that most of the glaze was absorbed into the cake on account of the cake's temperature, rather than staying on the outside which is what happens when I use my usual method.
• Since the center didn't get completely baked, it collapsed a bit, leaving a small hollow between the top of the cake and the center.  I kept pouring glaze through the knife cuts from when I tested the cake; the crumb absorbed all of this glaze, so the center of the cake had an even more pronounced lemon flavour.  This, to be honest, was by far the tastiest part of the cake!

Glazed cake.  Photo credit goes to Dom for this one.

Verdict: a recipe to keep!  Though I might want to get better at baking cakes in loaf pans before I make this for anyone else; I suppose not everyone appreciates underbaked baked goods like we do...

A shot of the crumb just after I had sliced off the end.  By the time we got to the center areas where the glaze had absorbed into the crumb, we were too eager to enjoy the cake to take photos!

Le Cordon Bleu's Pâtisserie & baking foundations: classic recipes (2012), p. 75-76
Writeup background music: Kylie Minogue, Enjoy yourself (1989 U.S. version); thank you, Penn State University, for lending me your copy of the album!

Glazed lemon cookies

A while back (as in, before the holiday season), I was on a big cookie kick.  When I realized I couldn't go to Dom's department's holiday party, I still wanted to make some treats to send with him, so I chose a glazed lemon cookie recipe from Real Simple.  These turned out pretty well, to say the least.

My notes:

• While gathering all the ingredients together, I realized that the only lemon flavour came from the glaze; there was neither lemon juice nor zest in the dough itself.  I ended up using the zest of one lemon and the juice of about 1/2 a lemon in the dough, added with the egg yolks, salt, and vanilla.  A bit of raw dough was nicely flavoured before baking, but if anything, I should have use more juice or zest to get a stronger flavour in the baked cookies.
• The extra lemon juice helped pull the dough together; perhaps because our apartment is frightfully dry, the dough was really crumbly after adding the flour.  Adding enough lemon juice helped smooth everything out and imparted some lemon flavour to the dough itself.
• The recipe claims to produce 48 cookies.  I don't know if I did something wrong or what, but I came out with 32 cookies (two sheets of 18).  It's not even like I made them gigantic--they came out to a perfect two-bite cookie.  So I'm not sure what that was about, but it didn't seem to be any kind of a problem.
• Each sheet of 18 got about 13 minutes in the oven--neither brown nor very underbaked, but perfect for us.
• I drizzled the glaze over the cookies rather than dipping the cookies in the glaze.  This had the double effect of using less sugar (probably about half of what the recipe called for, but I just added sugar to the lemon juice until I got glaze, so I have no idea how much I actually used) and making the cookies look all fancy.
• From a subsequent trial of the cookies in which I didn't add any lemon zest to the glaze for aesthetic reasons, I found that the lemon flavour in the glaze was not as strong.  So next time I make these, I'd sacrifice the aesthetics of a totally smooth glaze for the stronger flavour provided by the zest.

I have extremely high standards when it comes to my own baking.  Usually I pronounce what I create as "all right", but I almost always have a "but..." to go along with it.  Not so with these.  As soon as I bit into one of these I knew this was a recipe to keep (with all the modifications, of course).  A bright, clean, intense lemon flavour, not too sweet, not too dry, not under- or over-baked, and just enough cookie to get a good taste without having too much cookie.  What else do you need?

Delicious.

I may have taken one already...

Moscato cupcakes

Among the (admittedly few) wines that I drink is moscato.  Among the (admittedly many) desserts that I think are very tasty are macarons.  So when Kroger has a wine sale and Macaron Moscato is among the discounted varieties, I go for it.  Sadly, the wine was not as good as one might have expected.  There was a very strange and sort of artificial taste that I'd never tasted in a moscato before which led to something hitherto never seen before--us not finishing a bottle of wine we'd bought.  So, what to do with the rest of the bottle?  Make something delicious out of it, right?

Cute label, but the wine was not so good.

The magic of the Interwebs led me to this recipe for moscato wine cake.  Not owning a Bundt pan, I decided to do cupcakes instead, which led me to some ad-filled blog that probably tried to install malware on the University's network (ha! denied!).  But it did have a recipe for moscato cupcakes that I hastily copied and pasted into a comparatively safe Word document.

Reception to these was mixed.  I thought they would have been better with better wine and not using a boxed cake mix.  But when Dom took them to his office, apparently they were a big hit.  Like many of our other culinary experiments, this one could benefit from a bigger sample size!

Our notes:

• I didn't search for too long, but all of the recipes I found used a boxed cake mix.  Now, prior to this, I had not used a boxed cake mix in years.  I discovered that boxed cake mixes have quite a few ingredients that don't sound all that appetizing, and also that there is no inherent difference in the mixes for "yellow" and "butter recipe yellow" cakes; it's the end user that has to add the butter to the mix in the latter case.  Still, to be faithful to the recipe the first time trying it, I bought a boxed cake mix (just regular yellow cake--not yellowcake, mind you).  Next time, I'd just make my own cake batter, and adjust the recipe as needed, which in my case means "until the batter looks about right".
• A better wine would have led to tastier cupcakes, but then I suppose that's the classic case of "you get out of it what you put into it".  I could still taste that weird slightly metallic taste in the cupcakes which means that, amazingly, we still have unconsumed cupcakes in the apartment five days after baking.
• There was no frosting for these things.  We didn't have enough powdered sugar to make frosting; neither did we have enough wine left to flavour it according to the recipe.  By all accounts these didn't really need frosting, and frosting probably would have just decreased the shelf life anyway.
• The photo below shows some cornbread-looking cupcakes.  The recipe produced 17 cupcakes; this came out to one full 12-cup muffin tin and one 6-muffin tin that only had 5 cupcakes.  To save time, I just put both tins in the oven at the same time, with the 12-muffin tin on the top rack and the 6-muffin tin on the bottom rack.  The 12-muffin tin produced the cornbread-looking cupcakes, but the 6-muffin tin produced cupcakes with very smooth tops that were more a beige-y colour rather than the cornbread color.  It didn't really matter too much in this case, but just some interesting tidbit of information that may come in useful sometime in the future.

Verdict: Probably something I'd try again, but with my own cake recipes.  Also, it would mean not drinking all of a bottle of moscato in order to save some for the cupcakes, which would be sort of difficult for me.

Cupcakes with wine in them, not cornbread muffins without wine.

Cranberry orange bread

To be fair, this was originally a cranberry walnut bread, but since I don't really like nuts in breads, we decided to omit those and just go with cranberry orange.  The cranberries just recently showed up at our local Kroger, unless they showed up while I was on vacation...in which case then no, that wasn't so recently that they showed up.

Anyway, our notes:

• Of course, we omitted the walnuts, partly because I don't like using nuts in bread, but also for a reason explained below.
• The recipe calls for 1 cup of sugar.  If you know us at all, then you know that we don't like too much sugar in our recipes.  We used something less than 1 cup and the end result turned out fine; one could probably use about 3/4 cup of sugar and it would still turn out fine.
• I have no idea how much orange zest I actually used.  Since I wasn't about to zest the orange and then determine how close to 1 Tbsp. I was, I just figured that the zest of 1 orange was sufficient.  The end result didn't seem to suffer from any lack of orange zest.
• Perhaps because of the layout of the back of the bag of cranberries (where I got the recipe), I somehow missed that I was to have "coarsely chopped" the cranberries before tossing them into the batter.  This didn't seem to adversely affect things, though it probably would have turned out marginally better had the berries been chopped.
• Also speaking of the cranberries, the recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups of them.  Somehow I assumed that this was the entire package, so not only were they not chopped, there were also way more of them than the recipe had said to use.  Oops.  Only after I'd dumped all of the cranberries into the batter did I notice that the serving size for the package was a 1/2 cup, and that there were 6 servings in the bag.  So apparently I was to have used only half the bag.  But then I realized that it wouldn't have been as easy to use the leftover half of the bag (all the other recipes on the bag used the entire thing), and since the final product was tasty, we figured that this wasn't a bad thing to have thrown all of the cranberries into the batter.  This was a contributing factor in the decision not to use walnuts; there was barely enough room in the bowl for all of those cranberries, so we figured that the batter wouldn't also be able to hold chopped walnuts.

This was definitely a recipe to keep, especially with our modifications.  I'd like to say that next time I'll probably make at least some effort at chopping those cranberries, but most likely I'll chop one or two handfuls, call it good, and then throw the rest in whole.

Whole cranberries.

Slow cooker tapioca pudding

I wanted to make some tapioca pudding.  However, as the minute tapioca at Kroger was selling for an exorbitant price, I decided to get a bag of tapioca pearls for $0.99 at the Chinese grocery store.  I found a good recipe and went to work.

My notes:

• This really could not have been easier: mix ingredients; turn on slow cooker.  Not too difficult.  It didn't even require soaking the tapioca pearls beforehand.
• A few of the reviewers at AllRecipes mentioned that the eggs were more for texture rather than taste.  I'd probably only use one egg next time instead of two.
• The recipe didn't call for vanilla but I threw some in.  It probably ended up being somewhere between 1 1/2 and 2 teaspoons since I just used whatever we had left in the bottle.
• Our slow cooker doesn't have a "medium" setting; it has "high", "low", "simmer", and "warm".  So I set it for 1.5 hours on high, then turned it to low for about 15 minutes, after which I thought that was too much heat and set it to simmer for the last hour of cooking.  This seemed far under the time that recipe said the pudding would take, but it seemed to be nicely thickened at this point, and based on evidence it didn't seem to be getting any thicker with the longer cooking.  Rather than risk it burning, I just turned off the heat.
• If anything, I'd reduce the sugar a bit, maybe to half cup; 2/3 cup seems a bit excessive.
• I used nonstick spray on the liner of the slow cooker.  I don't know if this helped, but I certainly didn't want to find out how fun cleanup would be without it.

Definitely a recipe I'd try again.

Delicious!

Blueberry Cornbread

Hello all - this is a guest post is by Dom, so bear with the brevity - I'm but a simple engineer.

Background:

After we first made the delicious flour tortillas previously posted, I really wanted to try making corn tortillas.  However, this turned out to be much more difficult than the flour tortillas, and not as tasty (in our opinion).  Thus began a quest to find other recipes that use some of the 5 lbs. of masa corn flour we bought for the corn tortillas.

The recipe for the blueberry cornbread is from food.com.

Note:

We did not have buttermilk, so I used 1 Tbsp. of lemon juice with enough milk to make a cup.  I was supposed to let them sit together 5-10 minutes and then stir before using, but forgot - oops...  However, this did not seem to matter as I let the wet ingredients sit mixed while I got the dry ingredients ready.

Result:

Tasty cornbread that is gritty but not dry, with blueberry deliciousness in every bite!  We would definitely make this again.

Final Product - with a couple of pieces taken out.

22 July 2012: Addendum from Caroline!  After about three days this started to go bad, so we would recommend making this only if you intend to finish it quickly.

Almond pudding redux

After our failed attempt at making almond pudding some months ago, I wanted to try it again seeing as how we still had a few envelopes of gelatin left.  Accordingly I found another easy recipe for almond pudding; it only required a few ingredients and some quick calculations to scale it down.  This turned out much better than our first try, and we had a nice refreshing dessert.

Our notes:

• The prep time for this is pretty minimal.  I decided for sure to make this at 5.30, and by 6 PM we were out the door for Dom's hockey game, with the dessert reposing in the fridge.
• The finished product was not overly sweet.  Sugar content is a recurring theme for our recipes since neither of us likes super-sweet desserts.  This recipes qualifies as-is but I might reduce the sugar even more next time (probably closer to 1/4 cup rather than the 1/3 called for).
• We used an 8"x8" dish for the pudding; this translated to about a 1/2" of dessert.  While this doesn't affect the taste at all, I'd probably try to use a smaller dish next time to get thicker cubes of dessert; alternatively, I might double the recipe since there's no such thing as too much almond pudding.

This recipe worked out much better than that last one we'd tried, and it was a fabulous dessert for a 100°F day.  You'd have to ask Dom as to whether this was a good after-hockey snack though...

Almond pudding: always good with fruit cocktail.  Sadly, our can of Del Monte had roughly 4 halves of cherries--and way too many pears.

Strawberry icebox cake

I first saw this recipe for a no-bake strawberry icebox cake in summer 2010 and wanted to try it out immediately.  Peak strawberry season and the vicissitudes of life being what they are, I didn't get a chance to make one until this spring.  It's an easy recipe, the results are just scrumptious (it really is like a strawberry shortcake), and it makes for an excellent dessert choice for informal spring or early-summer dinners.

Our notes:

• You can't get away with throwing subpar, underripe, pale strawberries in this; we had a couple of these, and I'd thought that they might be hidden under the flavours of all the other strawberries.  This was not the case and there was a big taste difference between areas of each slice that contained visibly ripe strawberries versus areas that had the underripe ones.
• Going strictly by the recipe, I couldn't tell whether I was supposed to put the graham crackers directly on top of the strawberries (implied in the recipe but not as structurally stable), or to put whipped cream and then the crackers on the berries (more stable).  I ended up putting the crackers directly on the fruit, partly because I prefer to follow the recipe as much as possible the first time through, and partly because the whipped cream was the limiting factor in this endeavour.  It seemed to work well, though I'll try the other method next time to see how that goes.
• I have yet to make a good ganache in all the times I've tried.  Maybe I'm not patient enough to keep stirring something for the time needed for all the chocolate to melt.
• We found it best to go conservative on the powdered sugar to put in the whipped cream, even though the recipe calls for a relatively low amount as it is.  We didn't want to the berries to be overpowered by any more sugar than was absolutely necessary to get the cream to not taste like Vitamin D milk.
• I didn't want to over-whip the cream and end up with butter, so I erred in the opposite direction and came out with more of a "Cool Whip lite" consistency.  I don't know if this is ideal or not, but since thicker cream seems like it would lend a better aesthetic to the finished product (by looking slightly less messy), I'd probably whip the cream for a little longer next time.
• The recipe said to let this chill in the icebox...refrigerator for about 4 hours before consuming.  Because I'd made this late in the evening on a Wednesday we didn't get a chance to sample it until Thursday dinner; the graham crackers still had a little body to them.  By Friday and Saturday we thought the flavour and texture had gotten even better, but on Sunday I noticed a small decrease in quality, though nonetheless still good.  The following days showed a continuing (but shallow) downward trend in quality, with the graham crackers becoming more and more insubstantial in both texture and taste.

I took this before the ganache went on because I had a suspicion that the chocolate would make this less photogenic.  That may have been correct, but the finished icebox cake was only enhanced by the addition of the chocolate.

12 July 2012: Addendum!  We made this for an Independence Day celebration and it turned out very well to whip the cream a little longer.  Dom did up the decoration on top:

Festive, no?