Maida Heatter Bake-Off

One last post

2012-02-05T11:51:00.001+01:00

This is just to say so long and it's been fun. Two and a half years, give or take, and 195 recipes. I've made all the recipes you see here, and none of them looked as good. Six different kitchens, not counting "guest star" kitchens. Forty-three pounds of butter--yes, I counted. A few dismal failures, a few recipes that were on the "meh" side, and a lot of really delicious recipes.

I learned a lot about baking and about myself as I went through this blog experience:

I could bake twice a week and not gain weight. However, it took iron will in terms of portion control, not eating dough, and moving baked goods out the door. Also, moving to France and walking everywhere probably didn't hurt.
Baking made me a more social person. Let's just say I'll never be an extrovert. I think I'm introverted and shy. But sharing all these baked goods helped me tell people I liked them without having to tell them. And I probably attended and created more food-sharing events because of the blog.
I will never win a photography award. See below for the overwhelming evidence. I use a better camera now, and I've done some messing around with the "food" setting and photo editing, but I'm a bit too impatient to fiddle with lights and settings.
Baking for this blog has made me stretch and learn as a baker. There were some recipes that I would not otherwise have made because they were too fussy or sounded disgusting or involved a pound of butter. But I gritted my teeth and made them, and generally I was glad I did.
Baking for this blog has shown me that I don't know it all. I like to think I know better than Maida because I have done a lot of baking and reading about baking. And sometimes I'm able to get away with some tweaks in method or ingredients. But often the recipes I've deemed "failures" are ones in which I've made changes or not followed the directions. If I were a real food blogging professional, I'd make several versions to test whether Maida was really right. But then I'd have even more baked goods sitting around staring me in the face. No, thank you.
Baking on this blog has, on balance, been good for my sanity. These last 2.5 years have had their share of upheaval, what with our many moves and changes and culture shock. Telling myself and my family that I "need" to bake twice a week has given me that calming space in the kitchen, where the butter and sugar and flour do their thing no matter where the kitchen is.

My daughter Julia suggested I throw a party to celebrate the end of the blog and bake all our family favorites from the cookbook. I'm not sure that's in the cards, but if I could invite all of you and my friends who have supported me in this endeavor, these are some of the recipes I'd make for you, by section of the book:

Pies: Date Pecan Pie. It's sweet and chewy and nutty, topped with boozy whipped cream. And it's one of Julia's very favorite things to eat.

Cakes with Fruits and Vegetables: Prune and Apricot Pound Cake. Buttery cake, sweet-tart fruit, crunchy nuts. Easy and good.

Chocolate Cakes: Williams-Sonoma Chocolate Cake. This is one of the top five recipes on the blog in terms of hits, and there's a good reason why: it's everything a plain (moist, chocolaty, rich) chocolate cake should be.

Other Cakes: Miami Beach Sour Cream Cake. A classic pound cake with an almond twist. The first cake I baked in France. I still want to try it again with my Kitchenaid.

All the yeast pastries in the book, but especially the Cream Cheese Coffee Cake (Claire's favorite) and Carol's Crescents. But really, all of them. Maida has a particular genius for yeast-based goodies--she even mentions that this cookbook was originally conceived as a "yeast book". Her doughs are always so easy to work with, and always succeeded for me, whether in my giant Mississippi kitchen or in the tiniest, most rickety kitchen in Pontlevoy.

Muffins, Cupcakes, and Tassies: The Pecan Tassies, hands down. I wish I had a plate of these right now. Like the yeast pastry chapter, this was a really strong chapter.

Shortcake, Cobbler, etc: This was hard to choose: I liked but didn't love all of these recipes. But I'm going to give it to the Blueberry Crumble because I love streusel.

Mousse, Flan, Puddings, etc: This was a chapter I struggled with, from overly rich chocolate pudding to overcooked flan. However, the Apricot Bread Pudding was an unqualified success. The Bread Pudding with Peaches, not surprisingly, was equally popular.

Cheesecakes: I loved all the cheesecakes, but my favorite was the Chocolate-Brownie Cheesecake. Of all the American desserts I made from the book, this one seemed the most deliciously over-the-top American.

Brownies: Again, I loved every single recipe, but I'm going to narrow it down to two: Cristina's Brownies (top) (giant, thick cocoa brownies) and Hershey's Brownies (bottom) (triple-chocolate icing. Need I say more?).

Chocolate Cookies: Another tough call, but I'm going to say Chocolate Whoppers, or the Cookies that Made me Famous at Work.

Other Cookies: the Eight-Layer Cookies. Never before have I made something that looked that professional and tasted that fabulous at the same time.

Fresh Fruit: Not my favorite chapter. Lots of fruit coated in raspberry sauce, which is fine in its way, but... We all really loved the Blueberries and Cream, though.

Ice Cream: This was before I had the picture-taking thing down (don't laugh), so no photo, but I loved the Spago Caramel Ice Cream.

Candy: The Texas Truffles were awfully popular, but I preferred the Brownie Truffles. Brownies, dried apricots, more chocolate, nuts. Wow.

And finally, Sauces: we all loved the Goldrush Sauce. I know at least two family members who ate it with a spoon, by itself.

Of course, if my blog readers came to the party, I'd want to bake a few of their favorites. Thanks to Google Analytics, I could easily determine the top five recipes people have looked at, and some ideas why:

#5: Williams-Sonoma Chocolate Cake (see above) This is a great cake, and I'm hoping that's why so many people have found their way to it. I think it's also possible that Google throws this one up when people type in "Heatter" and "chocolate cake"

#4: Emilio's Cheesecake. This is just a popular recipe. Not a week goes by when someone doesn't come looking for this recipe. It is a really great cheesecake that feeds a crowd.

#3: Kentucky Cake. This is also a great recipe, but the reason most people seem to look at this post is for the above picture: "cake one candle". Not sure why, but people are out there looking for (better) pictures like this.

#2: Cowtown Chocolate Cake. This is another one that pops up in the search terms a lot (also, see Williams-Sonoma Chocolate Cake). It's a really good chocolate cake (and even better frosting). Maybe someday I'll actually make it as a layer cake.

#1 Chocolate Sponge Cake. The Internet can't seem to get enough of my failed attempt at rigging a tube pan. While this is some very good cake, the fact that this recipe gets twice as many hits as any other can only be explained by my very lame engineering. You're welcome, people out there.

So now I shelve my Maida Heatter book. I'll miss seeing her smiling face every week, but I'm looking forward to baking from a variety of sources and moving back into the 21st century in terms of baking trends and technology. And I have a new cookbook blogging project, once again to force myself to stretch a bit and maybe also, by some miracle, improve my photography. A group of friends and friends-of-friends is cooking through Cook This Now! by Melissa Clark, so my butter consumption may be going down, and it looks as if I'll be eating a lot of greens, which is probably a good thing. So goodbye, enjoy the recipes, and hope to see you at the new place. It's been fun.

Cinnamon Crisps

2012-02-03T08:11:00.000+01:00

Here it is: the last recipe in the Maida Heatter book. Sniff, sigh. It's kind of a strange recipe, too, but at least the outcome was good, unlike the last recipe. As you see, it's kind of a cinnamon-raisin snail and reminds me of the little pie crust cookies my mother used to make whenever she made pie. However, these are much more work and involve some rather unusual ingredients and techniques.

The unusual ingredient is vanilla ice cream, which I suppose is there to provide liquid and sweetener and even some egg. It's mixed with butter and flour to make a kind of pâte à choux or cream puff dough, but it then gets rolled out and rolled up and baked.

The recipe, while fairly simple, takes a long time: there's a lot of chilling involved: make dough and chill a bit. Wrap dough and chill quite a while longer. Roll out and wrap up dough and chill a few hours more. It really could spread out over a few days. However, I was impatient and used my freezer to get same-day results.

The result is a crisp but not flaky, slightly sweet pastry with cinnamon, walnut, and raisin highlights. I enjoyed the sample cookie I had, but it didn't send me into spasms of ecstasy either. It's a good cookie. In a way, it encapsulated many of my Maida experiences over the past few years: "What?? Why?? No!! Oh, OK...Hey, this is not bad!"
I'll do a summary post of the cookbook blog experience later: for now, let me give you this one last recipe to enjoy.

Cinnamon Crisps

1/2 c. (4 oz.) butter
1/2 c. (4 oz.) vanilla ice cream (I would try to do this by weight as volume/weight will vary drastically according to the ice cream brand you use)
Pinch of salt
1 c. (5 oz.) unsifted flour

Put the butter in a heavy medium saucepan over medium heat until it is melted (this is not a good time for the microwave). Remove from the heat and add the ice cream; stir with a wooden spoon until melted. Add the flour and salt and stir briskly until the dough forms a ball that comes away from the sides of the pan.

It will look a bit like this. Put it in a bowl and then refrigerate it for 20 minutes or freeze it for 10 minutes. Give it a bit of a stir--some of the butter may have separated out--and divide the dough in two. Put each piece of dough on a piece of plastic wrap or waxed paper and press into a square. Wrap up and refrigerate for a few hours or overnight. I gave mine about 4 hours in the fridge, and I had no problems rolling it out.
When you're ready to roll, get your filling ingredients ready:

2 T. (1 oz.) butter, melted (you probably won't use it all: I didn't)
1/4 c. (1.75 oz.) sugar
2 t. cinnamon
Scant 1/2 c. (1.5 oz.) currants or chopped raisins
1 c. (4 oz.) walnuts, chopped fine

Mix the cinnamon and sugar together in a small bowl and have the other ingredients handy. Now get one package of dough out of the fridge. Put it on a lightly floured surface and start rolling. Your goal is to get the dough into a paper-thin 12-inch square.

Well, I almost succeeded. I could see the pattern on the surface beneath, and I had about a 10-inch "square". It took a lot of rolling and patching: the dough likes to crack. I would say I spent at least 10-15 minutes rolling each piece of dough out. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but it is good exercise.

Now brush the dough with half the butter, leaving a 1/2-inch margin around the edges. Sprinkle with half the cinnamon sugar, half the raisins, and half the walnuts. Roll up the dough into a tight cylinder (again, the dough will probably do some cracking, but at the end it should hold together). Wrap up the cylinder and refrigerate a few more hours or freeze for an hour or so. Repeat with the other package of dough.

When you're ready to bake, heat the oven to 350 (I went below that a bit--175C--because Maida says these burn easily) and get out your dough cylinders. Slice each into 1/2-inch slices. I'm starting to enjoy using my ruler for this purpose!

Place the dough slices on "unbuttered" cookie sheets (you can line them as you wish; these don't stick, but the sugar may run and caramelize a bit) and bake for 20-25 minutes, or until golden brown. Maida emphasizes that these need to be crisp all the way through, so I let mine go to a darker shade of golden. Cool on racks and devour. I imagine they'd be good with a bowl of the remaining ice cream.

Bow Ties

2012-01-30T17:55:00.000+01:00

Sigh...it's not so great to come across a recipe like this when I'm almost at the end of the book. But here we are, one cookie recipe from the end, with a clunker like these Bow Ties.

Why am I so down on these cookies? Well, here's Exhibit A: the ammonium carbonate (Hirschhornsalz) that I had to import at great expense from Germany (thank you, Amazon!). It made everything smell terrible--a public restroom is probably the best metaphor--and the off taste never went away, to my mind. At the same time, maybe the failure is all my fault: Maida wanted me to treat this just like baking powder, adding with the dry ingredients, but the package told me I should dissolve the carbonate in water, which I did. That might have contributed to the texture, which was not "airy, crisp...especially light", as Maida promises.

Another factor that made me (rightfully) suspicious: oil instead of butter. This is perhaps in the interest of making the recipe kosher, since Maida says these were a speciality of Jewish bakeries. But I don't like the texture of oil-based baked goods. And the anise: normally I like it, but here it was awfully strong. Whine, whine.

Anyway, here's the recipe. If you happen to have some ammonium carbonate in the house (according to Wikipedia, you can also use it as smelling salts if anyone's feeling faint), give it a try--you may be luckier than I.

Bow Ties

1 t. anise seeds
2-1/2 c. (10 oz.) sifted flour
1/2 t. salt
1 t. powdered ammonium carbonate
2 T. sugar (plus extra for rolling the dough in)
4-5 large eggs
1/2 c. (4 oz.) tasteless oil (grape seed, canola)
1/2 t. vanilla
1/4 t. almond extract

Use a mortar and pestle or a spice/coffee grinder to grind the anise seeds. Whisk them together with the flour, salt, ammonium carbonate, and sugar and set aside.

Break 3-4 eggs into a glass measuring cup and see how much you have. Separate another egg and add the yolk. If you need to, top up with some of the white. What you see here is 3 "medium" French eggs plus a yolk; I added a bit of white to it after the picture was taken.
Put the eggs in a mixing bowl, beat to mix a bit, then add the oil, vanilla, and almond extracts and beat again to mix. Gradually, on low speed, mix in about half the dry ingredients.

Beat at high speed for 5 minutes. Maida says the mixture will crawl up the beaters, but mine just sat there, as you see. Maybe that indicates a problem. In any case, stir in the remaining dry ingredients, for a "thick, sticky, and gooey" dough.

Flour a large piece of foil or parchment, pour out the dough onto the flour, then sprinkle the top with more flour. I was probably more generous than I needed to be. Let this sit for 30 minutes.

When the 30 minutes is up, heat the oven to 350 and line two cookie sheets with parchment, foil, or silicon liners. Heavily sugar a surface (clean counter, pastry cloth...) and carefully transfer the dough to it, shaking off as much flour as possible. Sugar the top of the dough. Roll or pat the dough out to an oblong about 12x6. I found that patting was the best I could do--the dough had settled to just about that size anyway.

Using a bench scraper or long, sharp knife (but be careful with knives and silicon!) cut the dough crosswise into 3/4-inch strips, and then cut each strip in half.

Grab each strip with both hands and give it a few twists. It won't be easy because the dough will still be quite sticky. Place the twists on your lined cookie sheets--they can go fairly close together.

Bake for 25-30 minutes (check after 20), until just pale golden (looks like mine went a bit beyond the pale). Transfer the cookies to wire racks to cool, and then store air-tight. Hope for better luck next time.

Apple-Cranberry Pudding

2012-01-24T18:17:00.000+01:00

I'm not sure why this dessert is called a "pudding" and put in the pudding section of Maida's book. To me, it's a cobbler pure and simple. But hey, who am I to complain? This section of the book has had its share of brilliant successes and dismal failures, so it was nice to end it with something everyone liked.

This is a great recipe for a midwinter, mid-week dessert. You start by digging a bag of precious cranberries out of the freezer and supplementing them with chopped apples, equally precious chopped pecans, and sugar.

Then you take 5 minutes to mix together some melted butter (I bet that if you took an extra 5 minutes to brown the butter, that would taste dynamite), eggs, sugar, and flour and pour that on top.

Finally, you give this concoction some time in the oven while you tend to dinner. By the time you've finished dinner, dessert is ready!

The cranberries put the dessert over into the tart side, even though the topping is as sweet and buttery as you could ask, so you'll want to serve this with something sweet and creamy: I chose sweetened crème fraîche, but vanilla ice cream would also be a very good choice.
According to the rest of my family, this also made a very good breakfast the next morning ("It's fruit! It's healthy!"). Maybe with a scoop of Greek yogurt to feel virtuous about the whole thing?

Here's the recipe.

Apple-Cranberry Pudding

1 bag (12 oz.) fresh or frozen cranberries
2 large cooking apples--Maida recommends Granny Smith or Jonathan. I used 4 small Elstar apples.
1/2 c. (2 oz.) chopped toasted pecans
1/2 c. (3/5 oz.) sugar--raw sugar might be a good choice here

Heat the oven to 325. Butter a shallow casserole or baking dish--Maida suggests an 11x8-inch dish if you have one. Rinse and pick over the cranberries. Peel, core, and cut the apples into chunks. Mix the cranberries, apples, pecans, and sugar in the casserole dish. Set aside while you make the topping.

3/4 c. (6 oz.) butter
1 c. (7 oz.) sugar
1/2 t. vanilla--not in the original recipe, but I like vanilla in batters like this
2 large eggs
1 c. (5 oz.) flour--I used about 2 oz. whole wheat pastry flour (110)

In a microwave-safe bowl, melt the butter (or melt/brown it in a small saucepan over medium heat). Add the sugar, then the vanilla, then the eggs one at a time, and finally the flour. It's like making blondies!
Spread this mixture over the cranberries and apples. Bake for 50 minutes, or until the top is golden and the filling is bubbling at the edges. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream or your favorite sweet creamy topping. This should serve about 8.

Bonus recipe: All-American Brownies

2012-01-17T10:40:00.000+01:00

As I finish up the last few recipes in the American Desserts book, I have found myself instead making Maida's All-American Brownies for successive parties. This recipe comes from her Book of Chocolate Desserts, my first dessert cookbook. I got a reputation from this book, making cakes and cookies and Coffee-Toffee Pie. But it's the All-American Brownies and the World's Best Hot Fudge Sauce that I always go back to.

The recipe for All-American Brownies is not so different from the one you might find on the back of the orange packet of unsweetened chocolate: melt chocolate and butter, add vanilla, sugar, eggs, flour, and nuts, bake. One bowl, 10 minutes max.

I also find that this recipe is one of my favorite reasons to have a microwave, though it also comes together quite nicely in a saucepan.

What else can I say? The recipe is simple and yet makes friends wherever you take it. I brought some to my friend Gabrielle's birthday party (thus the fancy presentation), and they were inhaled. "These are not brownies!" one guest proclaimed. "This is a fondant (that warm cake with the soft center)!" We discussed the recipe for a while, and it was determined that it was the proportion of butter that made it so good. Who knew that French people liked to skimp on butter? But of course it is all-American to go nuts with the butter...

In any case, you can't have a site about Maida Heatter's American desserts without this recipe. I read somewhere that American chocolate dessert recipes didn't go into the super-chocolatey realm until Maida Heatter's books came along. With that inspiration in mind, the recipe I present you is even more chocolate than the original, thanks to some additional cocoa and chocolate chips or pieces.

Here's the recipe. Make your friends happy.

Amped-up All-American Brownies

2 oz. unsweetened chocolate (100% chocolate), chopped

1/2 c. (4 oz.) butter

1 heaping tablespoon (0.5 oz.) unsweetened cocoa powder

Large pinch salt

1 t. vanilla

1 c. (7 oz.) sugar

2 eggs

1/2 c. (2 oz.) flour

1/2 c. (2 oz.) coarsely chopped walnuts

1/2 c. (3 oz.) chopped semisweet chocolate or chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350. Line an 8-inch square pan with parchment or foil; if you're using foil, butter or grease it. In a medium microwave-safe bowl (a 4-cup measure is perfect) put the chocolate, butter, cocoa, and salt. Microwave in 30-second bursts, stirring well after each, until the chocolate and butter are melted (you can also melt this together in a small heavy saucepan over low heat). Stir in the vanilla, then the sugar, then the eggs (one at a time, stirring well after each), then the flour, and finally the nuts and chocolate. Pour into the prepared pan and smooth the top. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until just barely set--I find these are best when they're still a bit gooey. Cool in the pan and cut into squares: it's probably easiest to cut them if they've been chilled or even frozen, but I think these taste best room temperature or even slightly warm. It's your call. Enjoy the brownies--and the praise.

Kansas Cookies

2012-01-14T13:49:00.000+01:00

It's January. The days are short and often gray, but I don't have classes to teach for a few weeks. Normally that would be a good thing (time to read! bake! go to Paris!), but I end up frittering away my time on the Web and/or working on what I'll be teaching next semester.

Good thing I made a baking date for myself this week, giving me permission to spend time puttering around the kitchen. And this recipe is a splendid way to putter around.

It seems like many or most of Maida's "other" cookies, at least towards the end, are the project kind. Last week I had the stack of eight layers, and this week I had the roll, fill, and cut recipe.

It's an interesting recipe, one which, like so many of these recipes, I was skeptical of. Cinnamon-molasses dough around a lemon-coconut curd? Lots of flavors going on.

But as with most of these recipes, I'm glad I soldiered on and tried it. There's a reason this recipe won a prize at the Kansas State Fair--they have a great moist, chewy texture, and the lemon flavor really takes over and shines. I don't think I've ever had a cookie quite like this one, and that's really kind of a shame.

They're not the prettiest cookies ever, but they're fun to make and delicious to eat. Here's the recipe with some process photos to make it easier to understand.

Kansas Cookies

1/2 c. (4 oz.) butter, room temperature
1/2 t. baking soda
1/4 t. salt
1 t. cinnamon (I used a bit less)
1 c. (7 oz.) sugar (I went down to 6.5 oz. and these were still quite sweet. 6 oz. is probably plenty)
1 large egg
1/4 c. (2.8 oz.) light molasses
2-1/4 c. (9 oz.) flour (I used about 3 oz. whole wheat)

Cream the butter with the baking soda, salt, and cinnamon. Add the sugar and beat a minute or two longer. Add the egg, beat until well incorporated, and then the molasses. Finally, stir in the flour. You'll end up with a sticky dough as you'll see in the unattractive picture near the top of the page. Scoop the dough out onto a long piece of waxed or parchment paper and form into a log about one foot long. Wrap and refrigerate at least 6 hours or overnight, or if you're impatient like me, freeze for about 15 minutes and then refrigerate for at least an hour. While the dough is chilling, make the lemon curd:

2 large eggs
1/2 c. (3.5 oz.) sugar
1/4 t. salt
Grated rind of 2 (organic) lemons
1/4 c. (2 oz.) lemon juice
1 c. (3.5 oz.) coconut--I used the very fine unsweetened stuff that seems to be standard here

In a small, heavy pot, whisk the eggs until well mixed. Gradually beat in the sugar and then the salt, lemon rind, and lemon juice. Put the coconut in a medium bowl and put a fine sieve over that bowl.
Place the pot with the lemon mixture over very low heat and cook, whisking and scraping the bottom and sides almost constantly, until the mixture thickens "to the consistency of a soft mayonnaise". This will take 5-10 minutes. Note: Before cooking, my mixture looked nasty and curdled, but it smoothed out nicely while cooking.
When the curd is cooked, pour it into the strainer above the coconut and use a rubber spatula to force most of the curd through, leaving behind any congealed egg and lemon rind (Maida doesn't include this step, but I like to strain my custards). Mix the curd well with the coconut--this will be a thick mixture--and set aside to cool and even chill. You can use this mixture room temperature or cold.
OK, now it's time to shape the cookies. Preheat the oven to 350. Have ready a floured surface, rolling pin, ruler, and probably a bench scraper. You'll also want some cookie sheets--Maida says unbuttered, but I used silicone liners.
Cut the log into four equal pieces (you could use the ruler to measure out 3-inch lengths). Take one for right now and put the rest back into the refrigerator.

On your well-floured surface, roll the dough out into a 15-inch snake. It'll be pretty thin, as you see.

Carefully roll out the dough to make it wider (3 inches wide) but no longer. Use your bench scraper to make sure the dough isn't sticking to the surface.

Divide the lemon mixture into quarters. Use a small spoon to distribute a narrow strip of filling down the middle of the dough. (By the way, this is a lot like making the Apricot Strip.) Fold each side of the dough over the filling. It may meet, it may barely meet, it may even overlap a bit. It's all good.

Now use your ruler to measure out 1-1/2-inch lengths of the dough. If you measured correctly, you should get 10 cookies per log of dough.

Place the cookies on your cookie sheets: Maida says 1-1/2 inches apart, but these don't spread much, so you can crowd them a bit more if you like. I baked 3 sheets for the 40 cookies.

Bake the cookies, two sheets at a time, for 15 minutes (check after 10). They'll be a bit darker around the edges, and any gaps on top will have filled in. The dough may crack on top if there isn't a gap.

When the cookies are baked, transfer to a rack to cool. They are at their best when they're warm (not hot) or at room temperature. They seem to keep well--we're on day 2 and they're still delicious. We'll see how many we have left over by tomorrow.

Eight-Layer Cookies

2012-01-08T17:56:00.002+01:00

So what did I do two weeks after I swore I never wanted to see another cookie again, ever? I baked cookies! And you know what? It was totally worth it!

Make no mistake: these cookies are a project. After reading the recipe, I took a look at my calendar and made sure I had a day I could be at home to make dough(s) and chill and roll out and chill and slice and bake. I'm pretty sure that the process could be spread out over days, but I wanted to get these done.

To elaborate: you make a yolk-rich, buttery cookie dough and flavor half with almond extract and the other half with cocoa powder and coffee. After the doughs have chilled for a while, you cut each square of dough into equal squares and roll them out. You put each layer on parchment/waxed paper and chill them.

Then you stack up the layers of dough and wonder if you shouldn't have rolled them out more carefully.

But you continue: you chill the stack and then slice and trim the long cookies.

And they're beautiful (although I suppose they could be straighter)! I don't think I've ever made a cookie that looks quite so fancy and professional.

The best surprise with this cookie is how good it tastes. I had feared that even though making them was fun and satisfying, eating them wouldn't be that fabulous. But I was wrong: these have a great crisp texture and a really nice chocolate/almond flavor. Sami especially loved them and made them his breakfast a couple of mornings in a row. I don't think I actually ate more than four cookies before they were all gone.

Lessons learned: good cookies baked in January are still good cookies. Fancy layered cookies can taste terrific. Maida would not lead me astray. I'm looking forward to my next cookie-baking date.

Here's the recipe. Mark your calendar.

Eight-Layer Cookies

1 c. + 2 T. (9 oz.) butter, room temperature

1/2 t. baking powder

1/2 t. salt

1 t. vanilla

1 c. minus 2 T. (6.13 oz.) sugar

4 large egg yolks

2-1/4 c. (9 oz.) sifted flour

3/4 c. (3 oz.) unsifted cornstarch

1/2 t. almond extract

1/4 c. (0.75 oz.) unsweetened cocoa powder

1/2 t. instant espresso powder

Cream the butter with the baking powder, salt, and vanilla until light and fluffy. Beat in the sugar and beat another 2-3 minutes. Beat in the egg yolks, one at a time. Then stir in the flour and cornstarch by hand or at low speed. The dough will be quite thick. Remove half the dough to a medium-sized bowl. Add the almond extract to the dough remaining in your mixing bowl and beat until mixed. Scrape out onto a piece of waxed paper, shape into a 5-inch square (yes, I used a ruler this time), wrap it up and freeze it (or refrigerate it for 1 hour). Put the reserved dough half into the mixing bowl and add the cocoa powder and coffee powder to it. Beat it until the cocoa is incorporated and form this dough also into a 5-inch square and freeze it. After about 30 minutes, the dough should be firm enough to work with.

You'll need a floured surface to roll out on, a rolling pin, a ruler, and plenty of waxed paper or parchment. Take one dough square and, using your ruler, cut it into four 2-1/2-inch squares. Slowly and carefully roll out each square into a 10x4-inch rectangle. The edges may crack and all, but you'll trim them later, so don't worry too much. Just try to get the rectangle as even as possible, and measure to make sure all the rectangles are about the same size. As each rectangle is rolled out, place it on its own sheet of waxed/parchment paper. You can stack them up.

When you've rolled out all the dough, put all eight layers in the freezer, preferably on a cookie sheet so that they stay flat. Let chill for 15-20 minutes, no more. Take them out of the freezer and then make your stack: start with a white layer and brush it with a bit of cold water. Put a black layer on top of that and press down a bit. Brush that with water and top with a white layer, pressing down. Continue. Wrap the whole stack well in plastic wrap and refrigerate several hours or freeze for about an hour.

OK, you're reaching the finish line. Preheat the oven to 375 and line two cookie sheets with parchment or silicon or aluminum foil. Take out and unwrap your dough stack. Trim one narrow end so that it's all even. Then use a ruler to mark out 1/4-inch slices. Use a big, sharp knife to carefully cut those slices. Trim the ends of each slice separately. You'll have a lot of dough scraps, which you can roll out later to make "marbleized cookies" or simply give to your cookie-dough-obsessed family members (if you're not afraid of raw eggs).

Place the slices carefully on the lined cookie sheets; they don't have to be spaced very far apart. Bake for 15-20 minutes, or until they're golden brown at the edges but still pale in the middle. It's tricky because you want them to bake long enough to be crunchy but not so long that you lose the contrast in color. Check every minute or so when you've gotten close to the 15-minute mark. Carefully transfer the cookies to a wire rack to cool. Feel proud of your beautiful cookies as you devour them.

Devil's Food Chocolate Sauce

2012-01-01T16:11:00.002+01:00

Looking at this picture (note my shiny new cookbook holder!), you'd think I'd reached the end of the book. Well, technically that's true, but actually I still have a few recipes to go. Still, this is the last sauce recipe, and the sauce chapter comes at the end. If you've been following this blog, you know that the sauce chapter had a rocky beginning for me, from Top Secret to White Custard Cream. But this sauce is a winner, though I made some tweaks to it to make sure it really was extra good.

Looking at the ingredients, I saw that this sauce is a lot like Maida's World's Best Hot Fudge Sauce, our family's favorite, and so I decided to change the technique and one of the ingredients: that would be subbing in some brown sugar with the white sugar.

Maida warns several times that this sauce likes to burn, and I could see why: she was cooking the chocolate along with the other ingredients. I decided to sidestep that issue by cooking the butter, sugar, and cream together first, and then adding the chocolate off the heat.

So here you see yummy caramelly butteriness getting ready to meet delicious dark chocolate. It was meant to be.

After a bit of whisking off the heat, it all turns to a lovely, creamy-smooth and very chocolatey sauce, without the worry about the horror that is burned chocolate.

We had this as part of a New Year's Eve dessert extravaganza that involved profiteroles with two kinds of ice cream, salted butter caramel, and toasted almonds. And this sauce won over the (excellent) caramel sauce hands-down. I'm sure that once I recover from the holiday binge, I'll also enjoy it just over ice cream. Actually, yesterday two of my family members had hot fudge sundaes for breakfast. It was, after all, the last day of vacation.

I'm still trying to decide whether I like this sauce, which has more butter and unsweetened chocolate along with the cocoa powder, better than the World's Best sauce. This one has a creamier texture and the other has a chewier texture, but if I don't have them side-by-side (and it would be a terrible thing for me to attempt that!), I don't think the difference is apparent.

Bottom line: you should make this sauce. The 15 minutes it takes are well worth it.

Devil's Food Chocolate Sauce

1/2 c. (4 oz.) cream

1/3 c. (2.3 oz.) sugar

1/3 c. (2/3 oz.) brown sugar

Pinch salt

1/2 c. (4 oz.) butter

1 oz. unsweetened chocolate, chopped

1/4 c. (0.75 oz.) unsweetened cocoa

1 t. vanilla

Put the cream, sugar, brown sugar, salt, and butter in a heavy small saucepan and place over medium heat; cook, stirring often, until the butter and sugar have melted and it's bubbling furiously. If you like a caramel edge to your sauce (I do), let cook another minute or two without stirring. Take off the heat and whisk in the chocolate, cocoa, and vanilla. Let cool for a few minutes and serve over ice cream. You can also pour this into a jar and refrigerate for later--you can either microwave it briefly or put the jar in a saucepan with hot water.

Raspberry Pâté

2011-12-31T12:05:00.002+01:00

At some point during the holiday season, I lose all my will to bake. That's usually after I've baked the 11th or 12th batch of cookies. Family and friends no longer want to look at cookies, much less eat them. In fact, we've often already done our overeating before the actual holidays arrive.

And yet, somehow, this Wednesday between Christmas and New Years, I decided I'd make a feast just for the family. I got a fancy roast from the butcher, made a gratin and sautéed wild mushrooms and cooked green beans. And I made this raspberry pâté.

There are two difficult aspects to this dessert, and you see the first above. You've got almost 2 pounds of raspberries that you need to force through a strainer. That takes a lot of patience and wrist strength.

The second is the gelatin aspect. I still haven't figured out the gelatin/agar-agar thing, and the strange mushiness of this dessert is probably testimony to my lack of skill. Still, I consider it a success since I was able to actually cut slices of this rather than serve it in soup bowls.

So, this is a sort of very rich gelatin dessert, with both cream cheese and whipped cream. It has intense raspberry flavor and isn't too sweet or rich. We all liked it a lot, except that Sami requested we not call it "pâté" since that name is in fact a bit off-putting for a dessert. He suggested "sliceable pudding", which still needs a bit of work, in my opinion. Maybe Bavarian cream cheese?

With the raspberry sauce and whipped cream, it's quite the elegant and festive dessert to serve after an elegant and festive meal--or just if you feel like having something special as you recover from the holidays. Here's to a great 2012!

And here's the recipe:

Raspberry Pâté

30 oz. frozen raspberries in syrup (or 30 oz. raspberries and about 1/2 cup sugar), thawed

1 envelope unflavored gelatin

1 c. (8 oz.) whipping cream

8 oz. cream cheese, room temperature

1/2 c. (3.5 oz.) sugar

Pinch salt

Juice of 1 lemon

Very carefully line a 6-cup loaf pan with aluminum foil (in hindsight, if you have a silicone mold, that might be the way to go here.). Don't let it tear like I did, or you'll have the same mess on your hands that I did. Put a strainer over a large bowl. Pour the raspberries and syrup (if you mix the raspberries and sugar before they thaw, a syrup will form) into the strainer. Before you start pressing down on the raspberries, pour out 1/2 cup (4 oz.) syrup. Pour 1/4 cup of that syrup in a small bowl and sprinkle with gelatin. Let sit while you work to force the raspberries through the strainer. I find a food mill unfortunately lets through far too many seeds to work well, so the strainer it must be. Put an interesting podcast or some good music on and grit your teeth. Make sure you scrape the bottom of the strainer well. Let that sit while you do some more prep: Whip the cream to soft peaks in a smallish bowl and refrigerate that for a bit. In the large bowl of a mixer, beat the cream cheese, sugar, salt, and lemon juice until light and fluffy. Beat in the hard-won raspberry purée. Mine looked kind of curdled, but it turned out OK in the end.

Remember the gelatin you had softening? Time to melt the gelatin. Heat a bit of water in a small saucepan: when you start to see steam and small bubbles, put the (heat-safe) cup with the gelatin in it; stir until it's dissolved. Carefully remove from the hot water and add the remaining 1/4 cup of syrup. Beat this into the cream cheese mixture.

Oops, this is the step I missed but you shouldn't if you want your pâté to set up better than mine: Put the bowl with the cream cheese mixture in a larger bowl of ice water and stir with a rubber scraper until it starts to thicken. It should be about the same consistency as the whipped cream you're about to fold in. When it reaches that consistency, remove from the ice water bath and fold in the whipped cream. Pour this mixture into the prepared pan. Cover with plastic wrap and let chill at least 6 hours or overnight.

While it's chilling, you'll want to prepare the raspberry sauce. Brace yourself: it involves more raspberry straining. In fact, if you're more organized than I am, you could thaw an extra 10 ounces of raspberries (in syrup, or with an added 2-3 T. sugar) along with the 30 ounces for the pâté, strain them, and take out enough so that you have 1-1/2 cups of purée for the pâté and the rest for the sauce. In any case, once you've strained the raspberries, you're home free: just add a bit (1 t.) of kirsch or cassis or framboise if you've got it. Taste to correct sweetness and chill until you're ready to serve.

When you're ready to serve, first whip 1 cup (8 oz.) whipping cream with 1 T. powdered sugar and 1/2 t. vanilla (and/or a bit more of that kirsch/framboise/cassis).

OK, now it's time to unmold the pâté. First get out the plate you want to serve on. Then dip the bottom of the pan in hot water (this is another step I neglected but shouldn't have). Put the serving plate upside-down on top of the loaf pan and then reverse the two so that the serving plate is now on the bottom. With any luck, the pâté should unmold easily. Peel off the foil and breathe a sigh of relief. Now cut the dessert into slices and plate prettily with a spoonful each of raspberry sauce and whipped cream. Feel fancy.

Blueberry Surprise Cake

2011-12-11T21:58:00.001+01:00

So this was the last cake in the book, and it's a good one. We had it for Saturday breakfast, but it would make a really nice afternoon tea kind of cake as well.

As you can perhaps see, the "blueberry surprise" element here comes from the fact that you put in a layer of buttery sour cream cake, then a layer of spiced berries, and then more cake (now with nuts added). You don't see the berries until you cut into the cake.

The cake is perhaps a bit time-consuming for a Saturday morning: the batter and all come together fairly quickly (though it involves turning on the mixer, which I don't love doing so early in the morning), but it needs about an hour in the oven. But then again, given that the rest of the family isn't up until at least an hour after me, that's probably fine.

The cake then gets a lemon-y glaze. I considered leaving it off, since the cake was breakfast and all, but I think I made the right decision to go for it: the tart sweetness adds a nice extra dimension.

When I cut into the cake, I thought, "wow, that kind of looks like a Pop-Tart!" Given that I don't much like Pop-Tarts, I'm glad that it doesn't actually taste like one. It's a nice mix of buttery richness and fruity sweetness. It was a great cake to finish off a long succession of great cakes.

Here's the recipe.

Blueberry Surprise Cake

1 c. (4 oz.) fresh (I used frozen) blueberries

3 T. (I used 2) sugar

1 t. cinnamon

1/4 t. nutmeg

1 t. lemon juice (attention: zest the lemon before you squeeze it; you're going to want that zest for the cake batter)

Mix all these ingredients in a smallish bowl and set aside.

1 c. (8 oz.) butter

2 t. baking powder

1/4 t. salt

Grated zest of 1 lemon

1 t. vanilla

1-1/3 c. (9.3 oz.) sugar

2 large eggs

1 c. (8 oz.) sour cream

2 c. (8 oz.) sifted flour (yes, I used some whole wheat here)

1/3 c. (1.3 oz.) toasted chopped pecans

Heat the oven to 350. Butter a 9-inch springform and dust with breadcrumbs, wheat germ, or ground nuts (I used ground almonds). Cream the butter with the baking powder, salt, lemon zest, and vanilla until light and fluffy. Gradually add the sugar and beat a couple more minutes until even more light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Beat in the sour cream and then mix in the flour at low speed. Carefully spoon half the batter all around the bottom of the prepared springform pan and spread it out as best you can--I had trouble getting the batter all the way out to the edges and it wanted to come up off the bottom of the pan. Then sprinkle on the berries, leaving a 1-inch margin at the edges. Add the pecans to the batter, stir them in, and then spoon the batter onto the berries, again gingerly spreading the batter as evenly as possible. Bake for 1 hour 20 minutes (check after 45 minutes) or until the top of the cake springs back when lightly pressed. The toothpick won't work because of the berries in the middle.

Let the cake stand in the pan while you make the glaze:

1 c. (4 oz.) powdered (icing) sugar

Juice of 1 lemon

boiling water as needed

In a small bowl, mix together the sugar and lemon juice. If the glaze isn't thin enough to barely pour, add a few drops of boiling water.

Cut around the sides of the cake if necessary and remove the sides of the springform pan. Turn the cake over onto a rack and remove the bottom. Then reverse again onto a plate so that the cake is right-side up. Drizzle the glaze over the warm cake and spread it to cover the top--let it drip down the sides if you have enough. Obviously I didn't use the full cup of sugar here.

Enjoy the cake warm or room temperature. If you're not having it for breakfast, whipped cream or ice cream would be nice, but they're definitely not necessary.

Bittersweet Chocolate Sauce

2011-12-10T17:57:00.001+01:00

This was a completely spontaneous dessert: I had planned on taking a break from blog recipes while concentrating fully on cookie baking, but then yesterday evening after a dinner of leftovers, Claire asked if we couldn't make fudge sauce. Now normally that would mean the World's Best Hot Fudge Sauce, but I knew there were some other chocolate sauces left to make, so I made a deal with Claire: she would photograph the process (all we could find was the iPhone; thus the strangely lit pictures) and I would make chocolate sauce.

And so it was that we started chopping chocolate and microwaving it with milk and cream and sugar. The sauce comes together in just a few minutes, but Maida wants you to wait until it comes to room temperature and thickens a bit. No such luck here.

So, as you can see, the sauce was kind of a liquid-y puddle at the bottom of the bowl. It had a nice chocolate taste and was definitely not too sweet, but I think we all missed the fudginess of our favorite chocolate sauce. Still, it made for a satisfyingly sweet end to a long day and was a nice change from all the cookies.

Here's the recipe.

Bittersweet Chocolate Sauce

3 oz. unsweetened chocolate (if you can get fancy unsweetened chocolate like Sharffenberger or Valrhona, this would be a good use for it), chopped

1/2 c. (4 oz.) cream

1/2 c. (4 oz.) milk

2 T. sugar

(optional: 1 t. vanilla)

1 T. (0.5 oz.) butter

In a microwave-safe container, melt the chocolate in the milk and cream; this took me 1 minute 30 seconds in 30-second bursts. When the chocolate is melted, it will look all separated in the milk; don't worry but whisk the heck out of it until it becomes smooth. Stir in the sugar and vanilla; taste to see if it's sweet enough (Maida says you can add up to 1 more tablespoon of sugar). Then add the butter and whisk to melt. Let the sauce stand until it comes to room temperature. Serve over the ice cream of your choice.

East Hampton Chocolate Icebox Cake

2011-12-06T07:48:00.001+01:00

Given the number of cookies I've been baking lately, this dessert can definitely be filed under "completely superfluous desserts". We didn't have any company or any excuse to share this. Good thing I have a cute little miniature springform to make half a recipe in.

So this is basically a classic chocolate mousse, raw eggs and all, with the added complication of gelatin (I tried the agar again, with mixed success. If you don't have a vegetarian in the house, use gelatin). I'm not really sure the gelatin is necessary because the chocolate will firm up nicely. What makes it an icebox cake is the ladyfingers surrounding it, which soften up (the only ladyfingers around here are the crunchy kind; I imagine the kind you can get in the bakery section in the US would work better) and make a nice textural contrast with the mousse.

You're supposed to serve it with whipped cream, but when we were ready to eat it, I was not ready to make whipped cream. It would have been nice, but I don't think it's absolutely necessary.

I'll hand the verdict over to Julia. While she was retreating to her room with a large slice to accompany her through her many hours of homework, she told me, "This is the best thing to happen to me all day." I guess it wasn't superfluous after all.

Here's the recipe.

East Hampton Chocolate Icebox Cake

6 oz. ladyfingers (about 40)

7 oz. semisweet chocolate, chopped

9 oz. milk chocolate, broken up

1/2 t. plain gelatin

1 t. cold water

6 large eggs, separated

1/2 t. vanilla

1/4 c. Grand Marnier or Cointreau

Pinch salt

1/4 c. (1.75 oz.) sugar

Get out a 9-inch springform and line it with ladyfingers. You can do it as I did in the picture above, but I think Maida wants you to line the sides with the ladyfingers lying horizontally. Of course, that would be impossible with the crunchy ladyfingers...

Melt the chocolate: put the semisweet chocolate in a microwave-safe bowl and microwave 30 seconds. Add the milk chocolate and microwave another 30 seconds. Stir and see if it needs a bit more melting: mine needed another 15 seconds, but I have a weak European microwave. When it's all melted, set aside.

In a small bowl or custard cup, sprinkle the gelatin over the water and let sit while you beat the egg yolks.

In a medium bowl, beat the egg yolks at high speed until they are pale and thick. Stir in the vanilla and about one-third of the Grand Marnier; let stand.

Put some hot water in a small saucepan, put the custard cup in the pan, and place over low heat. Stir with a knife until the gelatin has melted. Then add the hot gelatin all at once to the egg yolk mixture, beating at high speed. Now beat in the melted chocolate.

In a large bowl with clean beaters/whisk attachment, whip the egg whites and salt at high speed until they hold a shape. Reduce the speed a bit and gradually beat in the sugar. Increase the speed again and beat until the whites hold a definite shape. Fold about a third of the beaten egg whites into the chocolate mixture, and then fold the lightened chocolate mixture into the egg whites. Pour this mousse into the ladyfinger-lined springform pan. Cover the pan loosely with a paper towel and then tightly with plastic wrap. Let chill at least 6 hours. When cutting into it, have a tall glass of hot water handy to dip the knife in so that the mousse doesn't stick to the knife. Serve with whipped cream if you'd like. This is supposed to serve 8-10, but it's so rich that it would probably serve more.

Peanut Butter Icebox Cookies

2011-12-02T21:31:00.001+01:00

It's early December, which means one thing around here: it's time to bake the cookies. I take that holiday duty very seriously: Christmas cookies are a big tradition. Even if we don't have a tree, we always have cookies in the house.

So the Peanut Butter Icebox Cookies that I was going to make anyway became the first in a series of cookies baked in nonstop succession.

In a nod to my new home country, where peanut butter is rare and exotic and children eat Nutella sandwiches instead, I decided to try doing a half batch of dough with Nutella and a bit of cocoa powder. I think I liked that one even better.

So the verdict on these cookies? Good but not great. Julia says the dough is much better than the cookies themselves, and she may be right. I'm trying to cut down on my cookie dough consumption with all the cookies I'm baking. The cookies taste really good but lacked that really nice sandy texture I wanted them to have. Perhaps I should have sliced them thinner or baked them longer, but they're not quite crisp and not quite soft.

Still, these are icebox cookies, which are always a good thing to have on hand: just slice and bake! Might be worth trying at different thicknesses and baking times.

Peanut Butter Icebox Cookies

1/2 c. (4 oz.) butter, room temperature

1/3 c. (3 oz.) smooth peanut butter (or Nutella)

1/4 t. baking soda

1/4 t. cinnamon (I left this out)

(If you're doing the Nutella version, 1-2 T. cocoa powder)

1 t. vanilla

1/8 t. almond extract (I left this out as well)

1/3 c. (2.3 oz.) sugar

1/3 c. (2.3 oz.) brown sugar

1 large egg

2 c. (10 oz.) unsifted flour (some whole wheat is fine here)

Beat together the butter, peanut butter, baking soda, and cinnamon until fluffy. Add the vanilla, almond extract, and both sugars and beat a few minutes more until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg for another minute, then stir in the flour.

This is where it gets interesting: Maida has you put the dough on a work surface and "push it off": basically, you take it little piece by piece and you squish it down onto the work surface with the heel of your hand. You can see a picture of me doing that with the peanut butter dough above. Do this twice with all the dough, then shape it into a log and wrap it in parchment, plastic, or waxed paper and chill at least a few hours.

When you're ready to bake, heat the oven to 350 and line as many cookie sheets as you think you'll need with parchment, foil, or silicone. Slice the dough into 1/4-inch slices and place fairly close together on the cookie sheets. Bake for 18-20 minutes (check after 15) until they are lightly colored. Remove to a rack to cool. You should get 3-4 dozen cookies.

Cranberry Upside-Down Cake

2011-11-30T07:19:00.001+01:00

Here it is, "Thanksgiving" morning--we celebrated the Saturday after--in my new, improved kitchen. You can tell I've been busy: you can see, from the foreground, Brownie Schrumpf's brownies and Pennsylvania squares, some mango bread we ate for breakfast, some cheese straws ready for the oven, and way in the back on all my counter space, a bowl of toasted bread cubes waiting to become stuffing. Yes, even though I have a lot more counter space, I somehow manage to use it all.

This side of the kitchen is even more of a transformation: lots more counter space around the stove and a new sink. Of course we soon discovered that the wooden countertop doesn't like being near the sink, but I'm sure we'll very soon have a fix for that. Anyway, I am so very grateful to have a husband who's willing to put in the time and talent so that I can have a fabulous kitchen.

But back what I've been cooking in the kitchen. Of course I made pumpkin and pecan pie, but I wanted to do something for the blog as well, and Cranberry Upside-Down Cake seemed like the way to go. It's festive and easy enough to fit in with all the many other holiday dishes.

The fresh cranberries I got at my local supermarket (from Wisconsin) were huge! Underneath them is a thick layer of butter and sugar. Warning: the silicone pan was not the way to go here, as the sugar never caramelized. Use a metal cake pan and perhaps put a cookie sheet under it.

The cake batter comes together quickly, and you just pour and spread it on top.

Here it is fresh from the oven before being reversed on a plate.

And here's the result after being reversed but before being glazed (and set in a corner to wait while other dishes got the spotlight). Note the white patches of unmelted sugar. I was rather disappointed with that.

Of course, I got busy with cooking and guests (12 for dinner, a stretch for our small apartment) and didn't take a picture of the final product, but it was really delicious. It's got a refreshing tartness that was nicely offset by the crème fraîche I served with it. Mind you, like the Cranberry Grunt before it, this cake was the last to be finished, but I enjoyed every piece.

Here's the recipe. It's not pumpkin pie, but maybe that's OK.

Cranberry Upside-Down Cake

10 T. (5 oz.) butter, room temperature, divided

1 c. (7 oz.) sugar, divided

1 12-oz. bag cranberries, rinsed and drained

1-1/2 t. baking powder

1/2 t. salt

Grated rind of one (organic) orange

1 t. vanilla

1 egg

1-1/4 c. (5 oz.) sifted flour (I used some whole wheat, of course)

2/3 c. (5.3 oz.) milk

1/3 c. red currant jelly

Heat the oven to 350. Find a 9-inch cake pan that is at least 1 inch deep, preferably deeper. A pie plate might do the trick if you don't have a deep enough cake pan.

Take 4 T. (2 oz.) of the butter and smear it in a thick layer on the bottom and up the sides of the pan. Sprinkle that with half of the sugar. Put the berries in a single layer over that. Set the pan aside while you make the cake batter.

Beat the rest of the butter (3 oz.) with the baking powder, salt, orange rind, and vanilla until fluffy. Add the remaining sugar and beat another minute or two. Beat in the egg and beat another minute. Add half the flour at low speed, then the milk, then the rest of the flour. Pour the batter over the cranberries and spread it evenly: it should cover them fairly thoroughly, and the pan will be quite full. Bake (on a baking sheet for insurance) for 1 hour (check after as little as 35 minutes: mine was done at that point). The top of the cake will become dark brown. Cool the cake in the pan for 20 minutes. After 10 minutes, cut around the sides of the cake. While the cake is cooling, melt the jelly in a glass bowl in the microwave for about 30 seconds, or until it has melted. When the 20 minutes are up, cut around the sides of the cake again, put a plate on top of the cake pan, and (using potholders) flip the cake upside down on the plate. If you're lucky, the cake will slide right out. If you're not, scrape out the cranberries, put them back on top of the cake, and remember that you're going to be covering them up anyway. Pour the melted jelly on top of the cake, using a spoon to spread it out to the sides. Cool to room temperature. Serve with whipped cream, vanilla ice cream or crème fraîche.

Pennsylvania Squares

2011-11-19T18:22:00.001+01:00

A couple of weeks ago, Julia and I were stocking up on baking supplies at G. Detou, the best little food shop in Paris. I had gotten a "small" (2-lb.) bag of milk chocolate chunks as well as my standard 3-kilo bag of bittersweet chocolate (which should last me about 6-8 months). I reconsidered and grabbed a second bag of milk chocolate--the girls like making their chocolate chip cookies with milk chocolate.

"But Madame, if you buy the large bag, you're paying much less per kilo," the shopkeeper explained. Sold. You don't want to know how much that "low, low" price was, although I'm sure it's less than buying it bar by bar. But this is 40% Valrhrona chocolate--the good stuff. And I know I'll work my way through it--eventually.

So we staggered home on the Metro with our giant chocolate-filled bags. And now you can see one of the many excellent uses for this chocolate--these Pennsylvania Squares.

Words cannot express how much I love these cookies and their ilk: crispy, chewy butter/brown sugar base, chocolate, walnuts. Kind of like matzoh crack, but not as crunchy. Just delicious.

Another good thing about these cookies: they take almost no time to make, and they also make a large panful, which means that if you cut the cookies fairly small, you might have a chance to eat two or three before the marauding herds of teenaged girls make their way through them. And if you don't have a lot of people to bake for, I have successfully halved the recipe to bake in an 8-inch square pan.

In summary: go find some milk chocolate (hint: it doesn't *have* to come from Hershey, Pennsylvania) and make these. You won't regret it.

Pennsylvania Squares

1 c. (8 oz.) butter, room temperature

1/2 t. salt (Maida calls for 1/4 t., but I think a cookie like this calls for more of a hit of salt)

1 t. vanilla

1 c. (7 oz.) brown sugar

1 egg yolk

2 c. (8 oz.) sifted flour

About 8 oz. milk chocolate, in thin bar form: chips might work as well

1-1/4 c. (5 oz.) walnuts, chopped fairly fine

Heat the oven to 350; grease a 9x13-inch pan. Beat the butter, salt, and vanilla with an electric mixer until soft and fluffy. Add the brown sugar and beat for a minute or two. Beat in the egg yolk until mixed, then gradually beat in the flour at low speed. Make sure to scrape the bowl well in between beatings so that you don't have the pockets of pure sugar I seem to have in my cookies (see photo). Drop spoonfuls of dough all around the prepared pan, then cover with a sheet of waxed paper and use your fingers or the bottom of a measuring cup to pat the dough into a fairly even layer that covers the bottom of the pan. Remove the waxed paper. Bake the cookies 23 minutes, until the dough is evenly golden--it will puff up and then settle down. While the cookies are baking, unwrap the chocolate so that it is ready to go on top of the cookie layer as soon as it comes out of the oven. You can use the time to chop the walnuts as well.

As soon as the cookies come out of the oven, cover the cookie layer with a layer of chocolate. You may need to break up some of the bars to make them all fit. If the chocolate bars are thin enough, they should melt within a minute or so, and you can spread the chocolate evenly with the back of a spoon. If the chocolate doesn't want to melt, put the bars back in the oven for just a minute. Sprinkle the walnuts over the chocolate and press them lightly so that they stick to the chocolate. Let the bars cool to room temperature and then chill them for an hour or so for the chocolate to harden. Cut the cookies into at least 32 rectangles.

East Blue Hill Blueberry Coffee Cake

2011-11-15T15:20:00.001+01:00

Last weekend was a three-day weekend (Armistice Day), and a well-deserved one at that: since I would be missing my four classes on Friday, my school's administration in all its wisdom spread the courses out over three days, two of which I normally have off. So I was ready for the holiday to roll around.

The Saturday morning of a three-day weekend is awesome because it feels like it's already Sunday, but it's not! It's that feeling you get when your alarm goes off but you don't actually have to get up. And so getting up and making coffee cake was not a chore (well, it never is) but a pleasure.

And this is a good one: a simple butter cake topped with blueberries and sugar. Julia wondered what had happened to "the crunchy stuff" (I guess I like to put streusel on my coffee cake), but really, the cake was good without it.

The only downside to this cake was that I found it to have a bitter aftertaste. I had just read David Lebovitz's article about baking powder and saw that he buys aluminum-free baking powder to avoid that bitterness. I'm pretty sure my Target-brand baking powder has aluminum, but I'm just as sure that the Wal-mart baking powder I had before (can you tell I'm a cheapskate?) also contained aluminum. So I'm guessing the problem may be either that I just opened a fresh, new can or that this recipe calls for 2 teaspoons of baking powder for 1-1/2 cups (sifted) flour. I'm pretty sure that you're not supposed to exceed 1 teaspoon baking powder per cup of flour, and Maida likes you to use light (4 ounces, rather than the standard unsifted 5) cups of flour, so that may be the problem. If I were making this again, I'd use 1-1/2 t. baking powder at most.

But otherwise, this is a fruity, buttery, not-too-sweet cake that tastes great warm from the oven on a lazy Saturday morning. Give it a try!

Here's the recipe.

East Blue Hill Blueberry Coffee Cake

1/4 c. (2 oz.) butter, room temperature

2 t. baking powder (see note above)

1/2 t. cinnamon

1/4 t. nutmeg

1/4 t. salt

1 t. vanilla

Grated zest of 1 (organic) lemon

3/4 c. (5.25 oz.) sugar (I used a little less than 5 oz.)

1 egg

1-1/2 c. (6 oz.) sifted flour (I used 2 oz. whole wheat)

2/3 c. (5.3 oz.) milk

1-1/2 c. (6 oz.) fresh or frozen blueberries

Additional sugar (raw or crystal sugar is nice here)

Heat the oven to 350. Butter an 8-inch square pan and dust it with wheat germ or bread crumbs. Beat the butter with the baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, vanilla, and lemon zest until soft and fluffy. Add the sugar and beat 2-3 minutes longer. Scrape down and add the egg, beating until well mixed. Stir (or beat at low speed) in half the flour, then the milk, then the rest of the flour. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan. If your blueberries tend to be on the tart side, toss them with a couple of tablespoons of sugar, and then spread them over the batter (I didn't add any sugar to mine, and I thought the sweetness level was perfect). Sprinkle another tablespoonful of sugar over the berries and put the cake in the oven for 45-50 minutes (check after 30 minutes or so). Maida wants you to put the cake under the broiler for a minute to caramelize the berries and sugar, but I thought the cake was fine without that step. Serve warm with coffee for breakfast or with ice cream for dinner.

Old-Fashioned Spiced Pecan Cookies

2011-11-11T08:55:00.001+01:00

Wednesday afternoon Julia came home from school to find her favorite thing, cookie dough, waiting for her.

"You always bake on Wednesdays, don't you?" she asked. Well, yes, usually by then whatever I've baked on the weekend is gone. And the blog, not to mention the family, must be fed.

I explained this to her, with the caveat that I probably wouldn't bake quite so much once I had finished with the cookbook.

That announcement led to mixed feelings for both of us: less baking will probably be better for the waistline but worse for the tastebuds.

But let me talk about these cookies: this is a standard molasses/spice cookie, on the chewy/cakey side, with crunch provided by lots and lots of pecans. Mine would have been better had my Trader Joe's pecans actually been fresh (expiration date is in 2012 and they've been in the freezer since I returned from California, but they're somewhat on the rancid side. Grrr...). But still, they're good cookies, and apparently the dough is good enough for me to have received a text in the middle of the day: "Please don't bake all of the cookies!"

Here's the recipe.

Old-Fashioned Spiced Pecan Cookies

1/2 c. (4 oz.) butter, room temperature

1 t. baking soda

1 t. cinnamon

1-1/2 t. ginger

1 t. finely ground white pepper

3/4 t. cloves

1/2 t. salt

1/2 t. nutmeg

1 c. (7 oz.) dark brown sugar

2 eggs

1/4 c. (2.75 oz.) molasses

1/4 c. (2 oz.) cold or lukewarm coffee (1/4 c. water + 2 t. instant coffee)

1 c. (4 oz.) sifted flour

1-1/2 c. (6.75 oz.) sifted whole wheat flour

1-1/2 c. (6 oz.) toasted chopped pecans

About 36 pecan halves, toasted

Beat the butter with the baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, cloves, salt, and nutmeg until soft and fluffy. Gradually beat in the sugar and beat for 2-3 minutes at medium-high speed. Scrape down and beat in the eggs one at a time. Beat in the molasses and coffee. Stir in the flours and then the chopped pecans. Transfer the dough to a smaller bowl or a Tupperware and refrigerate overnight. Hope that there will still be dough in the morning.

When you're ready to bake, preheat the oven to 350. Line 3 cookie sheets with foil, parchment, or silicone. Scoop out 36 balls of dough and place them on the cookie sheets, then use wet hands to roll them into nice round balls. Top each with a pecan half. Bake for about 15 minutes or until the top springs back when lightly pressed. Cool on racks. These keep well and go nicely with a cup of tea.

Date-Nut Extra

2011-11-08T07:55:00.000+01:00

There is something so American about this cake. It has that down-home, sensible-shoe aesthetic that makes French people recoil in horror. It wants to be all that it can be: it's a banana bread! It's an applesauce cake! It's a date-nut bread! It's pretending to be healthy while sneaking in a stick of butter.

Of course, I was pondering the over-the-top Americanness of this cake as I was baking mini corn muffins for a party. The muffins included bacon, hot peppers, onions, corn, and cheese. Do I cook for attention? Oh yes, I do. I guess I'm a proud American when it comes to my baked goods.

And you know what? I like banana bread, and applesauce cake, and date-nut bread. And as I've mentioned before with another recipe suspiciously like this one, I love making cakes with a ton of different ingredients. So I was very happy with this cake.

I brought a hunk of this cake to tea with some French friends (who did not, in fact, recoil in horror!) and sent some with my in-laws to fortify them on an anniversary trip to Tunisia. And the rest just kind of...melted away. Probably went to someone pretending to be healthy.

Here's the recipe.

Date-Nut Extra

2 c. (7 oz.) walnuts

1/2 c. (4 oz.) butter, room temperature

1 t. baking powder

3/4 t. baking soda

1 t. cinnamon

1/2 t. nutmeg

1/2 t. ginger

1/4 t. allspice

1/4 t. cloves

1/4 t. mace (note on the spices: I just used about 2 t. of "quatre épices", a mix of cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and nutmeg. I love measuring out lots of spices, but the blend was there, so I used it.)

1/4 t. salt

1 c. (7 oz.) brown sugar

2 large eggs

1 c. (8 oz.) unsweetened applesauce

3/4 c. (6 oz.) mashed bananas (this was about 1-1/2 bananas for me)

1 c. (4 oz.) sifted flour

1 c. (4.5 oz.) sifted whole-wheat flour

1 packed cup (8 oz.) pitted dates, cut into quarters (I weighed mine before pitting, and there was still plenty)

Heat the oven to 350. Get out a loaf pan or other pan that holds about 10 cups (if you're not sure, measure out 10 cups of water and see if it fits in the pan.). Butter the pan. Take about 1/2 cup (1.25 oz.) of the walnuts and chop them finely by hand or with a food processor. Use the walnuts to coat the pan, leaving any that don't stick to the sides on the bottom of the pan. Chop the remaining walnuts coarsely.

Cream the butter with the baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, cloves, mace, and salt until fluffy. Gradually beat in the sugar and beat another 2-3 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. On low speed, beat in the applesauce and the banana. Add the flour, also on low speed or by hand. Take the bowl off the mixer and stir in the dates and remaining walnuts by hand.

Pour into the prepared pan and use a spoon to make a 1-inch trough in the center of the batter. Bake for 1-1/4 hours or until a toothpick comes out clean. Let cool in the pan for 10-15 minutes, and then unmold onto a rack to cool. As Maida writes, the cake slices best when it's completely cooled, but it tastes really good when it's still warm, so we both recommend very carefully slicing off a bit while it's warm.

Goldrush Sauce

2011-11-07T17:34:00.000+01:00

I don't have much to say about this recipe except that it's yummy and you should make it soon.

It's basically a simple chocolate sauce--extra chocolaty from the unsweetened chocolate--with crunchy add-ins: pecans and toffee. No Heath bars or Almond Roca here, so I used Daims, a Swedish import.
They're really good but kind of pricey, which makes this a special-occasion sauce.

So if you like toffee, and hot fudge, and nuts over ice cream (or from a spoon), you should make this. It'll take you 15 minutes (plus time to cool before you add the candy). Just be aware that the sauce will be gone way before you want to stop eating it.

Here's the recipe. Make sure you have some good ice cream in the freezer.

Goldrush Sauce

2-1/2 oz. unsweetened chocolate

1 T. (0.5 oz.) butter

1/3 c. (2.7 oz.) boiling water

2 T. (1.7 oz.) corn or golden syrup

1 c. (7 oz.) sugar

1 t. vanilla

1 c. (about 5 oz.) Heath bars or Almond Roca, chopped coarsely

1/2 c. (2 oz.) chopped toasted pecans

Put the chocolate and butter in a small heavy saucepan. Pour the boiling water over and stir until everything is mostly melted. Whisk in the sugar and syrup and set over medium heat, stirring until the mixture comes to a boil. Then stop stirring, turn down the heat a bit, and let cook at a moderate boil exactly 8 minutes. When the time is up, take the pan off the heat and if possible, dip the bottom of the pan in cold water to make sure the boiling stops in time. Let the sauce sit until it's cooled to room temperature. Stir in the vanilla, toffee pieces, and pecans. Enjoy over ice cream: I bet coffee ice cream would be dynamite with this sauce.

Cottage Cheese and Jelly Tart

2011-11-06T20:21:00.001+01:00

It has become Family Ritual to eat with my in-laws every weekend. There's always a certain amount of grumbling about this, as we're expected to stay well past the actual meal, but it's generally a good opportunity to get caught up (and to dry our towels in their dryer).

Generally my mother-in-law does the cooking because my father-in-law is extremely suspicious about new foods. But occasionally we'll bring some food over--especially when there's a recipe I want to make that involves grilling--our grill lives at their house because it's about the size of our whole kitchen.

So this past weekend, I had Sami do a wood-smoked salmon thing from a back issue of Cook's Country (yummy), and I made potato salad and green beans and this cheese pie--the last cheesecake in the book.

This recipe was especially easy for me to make here in France because I could use fromage blanc, which is pretty much what the puréed cottage cheese Maida calls for is. Only better. It's smooth and creamy--kind of like a combination of yogurt and cream cheese. They serve it here for dessert with honey or jam, and it's quite good.

So as you see, this is kind of a pie/cheesecake hybrid: you make a pie crust and hope it turns out better than the one I made here--pie crust is always a crapshoot for me. You bake it blind and brush it with egg white and then with your favorite jelly (I used currant).

You then whisk together your creamy cheese with eggs and sugar and such, pour that in, and sprinkle it with cinnamon sugar (or vanilla sugar if you have cinnamon-suspicious eaters). You bake it and it puffs up all over the place. Then you chill it and eat it.

I would have liked this even better if my crust had turned out and also if it had had more time to chill, but even so, it was delicious--lighter than standard cheesecake but with lots of flavor and a welcome fruity burst from the jelly. It's not my very favorite Maida cheesecake (I'll need to reflect on that one), but I'm glad I made it, and I hope you'll make it, too.

Here's the recipe.

Cottage Cheese and Jelly Tart

Pastry:

2 c. (8 oz.) sifted flour (some whole wheat is good here)

1 T. sugar

1/2 t. salt

3/4 c. (6 oz.) cold butter

1 t. cider vinegar

2-3 T. cold water

1 egg white (you'll need a yolk for the filling below)

Put the flour, sugar, and salt in the bowl of a food processor and give it a spin to mix. Cut up the butter in cubes and scatter them over the flour. Pulse until the butter is in pieces no larger than a pea. Sprinkle the vinegar and about 2 T. of the water over and pulse until the dough just begins to come together (you may need to add a bit more). Turn the dough out onto a piece of parchment or waxed paper and refrigerate for at least an hour.

Roll the dough out and use it to line a 9-inch pie pan. Chill again at least 30 minutes. Heat the oven to 450. Line the crust with foil or parchment and weigh it down with dried beans or pie weights or even, my new favorite, a vegetable steamer. Bake for 13 minutes (consider making the filling while the crust bakes). Take the liner out and bake another 2-3 minutes or until golden brown. Beat the egg white with a fork until it's frothy and brush some onto the crust. Put it back in the oven for a minute, then take it out and brush more egg white on it. Set aside or fill right away (keep the oven at 450 if you're going to bake the pie soon).

1-1/2 c. (12 oz.) full-fat cottage cheese (or fromage blanc or quark, if you can get that)

1/8 t. salt

1/2 c. (3.5 oz.) sugar

1 t. vanilla

Finely grated zest of 1 lemon

1 t. lemon juice

2 eggs PLUS 2 egg yolks

1-1/2 T. (0.75 oz.) butter, melted

1/2 c. (4 oz.) sour cream

1/2 c. (about 4.5 oz; you can eyeball this) raspberry or currant jelly

1 t. cinnamon

1 t. sugar

If you have cottage cheese, you'll need a food processor. Put the cheese in the food processor and let it run, stopping a couple of times to scrape down the sides, for a full minute, or until it is absolutely smooth. To the smooth cheese add the salt, sugar, vanilla, lemon zest, lemon juice, eggs, egg yolks, melted butter, and sour cream. Pulse a few times just until mixed.

Now it's time to layer the pie: spread the jelly in a thick layer over the pie crust. Pour the cheese filling over that, and then sprinkle with the cinnamon mixed with the sugar. Put that carefully in the preheated oven and bake for 10 minutes. Then turn the oven temperature down to 375 and bake another 20 minutes. The filling will puff up quite dramatically but will settle down again upon cooling. Let cool to room temperature, then chill for at least 4 hours. Serve in large slices because it's "low fat".

Chocolate Fudge Candy-Cookies

2011-11-03T20:48:00.000+01:00

One of our good friends was in town briefly for a sad occasion and said she'd drop by. As seems to be general instinct in these cases, I felt the need to provide food, and thus I baked these cookies in such a rush that I didn't have a chance to take photos.

These cookies come together quickly and live up to their name: they're very chocolatey and have a fudgy texture. I was a bit peeved that the recipe is very much like the one for chocolate miracles, but I liked it better: the butter and vanilla soften the chocolate, and the flour gives the cookies a more brownie-like texture.

As it turns out, our friend wasn't able to come by until long after the cookies had mysteriously disappeared (when kids are on holiday, it turns out, they eat and share more cookies) and all she wanted was tea anyway. But it was good to spend time together and good to have made this cookie recipe, which I would definitely make again.

Here's the recipe.

Chocolate Fudge Candy-Cookies

2 c. (12 oz.) chocolate chips or other semisweet chocolate, chopped

1/4 c. (2 oz.) butter

1 14-oz. can sweetened condensed milk

1 t. vanilla

1 c. (4 oz.) sifted flour

2-1/4 c. (8 oz.) toasted chopped pecans (I used about half this amount, and as you can see, there are plenty)

Heat the oven to 350. Line some cookie sheets with foil, parchment, or silicon liners. In a large microwave-safe bowl melt the chocolate and butter in 30-second pulses--mine took a minute and a half to melt completely. Stir in the condensed milk, vanilla, flour, and pecans.

Choose your scooping spoon according to whether you want 55 fairly tiny cookies (as Maida suggests) or 36 somewhat larger cookies (as I did). I used normal-sized teaspoons and did not round them too much. In any case, scoop out balls of dough and put them 12 to a sheet on the prepared cookie sheets. These don't spread, so if you want to put them fairly close together, that's OK. Bake for "exactly 7 minutes". There's no way to tell if these are done, but you certainly don't want to bake them too long, or the chocolate will burn and turn bitter. Six minutes worked for my hot oven. The cookies will seem soft but will become firm as they stand. Slide the foil/parchment/silicon off the cookie sheet and let the cookies cool on the liner before transferring to racks. Enjoy with an espresso.

White Pepper and Ginger Lemon Cake

2011-10-29T11:40:00.000+02:00

This recipe is the last in the category "other cakes". I am really down to just a few categories in the book: cakes with fruit, cheesecakes (one more), puddings, chocolate cookies, other cookies, and sauces.

I'm kind of sad about that because I liked the "other cakes" category, which mostly included buttery Bundt-type cakes (often with booze). I have to say I'm a Bundt-cake person because I'm the kind of person who scrapes off her frosting. Give me a nice glaze and I'm happy, though.

All this to say that I really liked this cake. Lots of butter, lots of lemon, and lots of peppery heat from the ginger and the pepper. When I tasted the batter, I thought, "Whoa, this is really spicy!" But once the cake baked and was glazed, the flavors really balanced out.

This cake was Maida's idea of taking an Early American buttermilk cake and updating it to 80s tastes: white pepper and ginger being "hot", as she cleverly puts it. There are indeed lots of recipes with fresh ginger in the book, but to me that's just delicious, not trendy. The white pepper...well, it didn't bother me, but I'm guessing the recipe would also be good with additional ginger and no pepper. If you don't have white pepper and don't feel like buying it, I would suggest that route--black pepper is just going to make the cake look weird.

Here's the recipe.

White Pepper and Ginger Lemon Cake

1 cup (8 oz.) butter, room temperature

Finely grated rind of 2 (organic) lemons

A 1/2-inch by 1-inch piece of fresh ginger (0.5 oz.), finely grated

3/4 t. baking soda

3/4 t. baking powder

1/2 t. salt

1-2 t. (I used 1-1/2 t.) finely ground white pepper (about 1/2 t. peppercorns--I ground them in a coffee/spice grinder)

1-3/4 c. (12.25 oz.) sugar

3 large eggs

3 c. (12 oz.) sifted flour (I used 1 c. whole-wheat pastry flour)

1 c. (8 oz.) buttermilk--low fat is fine

2 T. (1 oz.) lemon juice

Heat the oven to 325. Butter a Bundt pan and coat it with bread crumbs or wheat germ or ground almonds (I used almonds). Set aside. Beat together the butter, lemon rind, ginger, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and white pepper until fluffy. Gradually add the sugar and beat another 2-3 minutes. Beat in the eggs one at a time, beating until well incorporated after each addition. On low speed, gradually add the flour in three additions alternating with the buttermilk and lemon juice in two additions. Pour into the prepared pan and bake for 1 hour 15 minutes (check after an hour) until a cake tester comes out clean and dry.

While the cake is baking, make the glaze:

1/3 c. (2.7 oz.) lemon juice--you'll need at least 3 lemons

1/2 c. (3.5 oz.) sugar

Mix well to dissolve. Let stand.

When the cake comes out of the oven, let it cool in the pan for 5-10 minutes. Unmold the cake onto a rack over a piece of foil, waxed paper, or parchment. Give the glaze a good stir and then generously brush all of it over the cake. At first it will seem like it's too much glaze, but the cake will soak it up.

Let stand until cool and then serve in thin slices. Maida says this improves as it ages, but sadly it was all gone within two days.

Raisin Pillows

2011-10-26T12:52:00.000+02:00

I quit my editing job the other day. My teaching and volunteer work were taking so much time that I felt anxious about the thought of having one more thing to do. The French rhythm of "work really hard, then do absolutely nothing" is starting to rub off on me, though I feel it might just take it out of me instead.

So yes, this is another one of those posts in which I bake even though rationally I should be doing something else. Just because I promised to bring cookies to a meeting of parent volunteers didn't necessarily mean I had to choose a recipe that was a giant project. Or even bake at all, for that matter.

But you know me: I have to go by the book. And the book said Raisin Pillows. And lo, I made them, even though I had to finish them at 6 AM. And lo, they were good.

OK, the name "raisin pillows" is not terribly promising. And Maida's claim that this was an Early American treat was also a bit eyebrow-raising. But never fear: these are not the quickest cookies ever to make, but they're really good--if you happen to like butter and vanilla and rum raisins.

Although the process takes a while, it's quite simple: you chop up some raisins and other ingredients and cook it down to a filling and let it sit. Then you make a quick little sweet dough in the food processor and refrigerate that.

Then you go and teach a night class and come home too tired to think about rolling out and baking cookies. So you get up early and roll out dough.

Then, because you don't really have time to cut out rounds and do a bunch of re-rolling, you cut squares and fold little triangles. And when that turns out to be too messy (this dough is quite spongy and crumbly), you cut the squares in half and make little sandwiches.

Then you send your daughter to school with a large ball of raw cookie dough and pack most of the baked cookies in a Tupperware before you run off for the 9AM meeting. And bask in the compliments as the moms who aren't on diets enjoy a cookie or two "and one for the road." Once again, it's all paid off and Maida has proven that humble little raisin-filled sugar cookies can be a real treat.

Here's the recipe. Make these when you have the time...or not.

Raisin Pillows

1/4 c. (1.25 oz.) sugar

1 c. (5 oz.) raisins

Grated zest of 1/2 large (organic) orange

1/3 c. (2.7 oz.) orange juice and/or water (I mostly used water because I don't like the taste of cooked orange juice)

2 t. lemon juice

1 T. rum (Maida says this is optional, but I disagree)

1-1/2 t. (0.25 oz.) butter

(Note: this is half of the recipe in the book. I had way more filling than I needed, and unlike Maida, I don't like raisin filling on toast.)

Put the sugar, raisins, orange zest, and orange juice/water in the bowl of a food processor and pulse 5-10 times until the raisins are coarsely chopped. Maida says they should look like "large egg caviar". Put the mixture in a small saucepan over medium-high heat and bring it to a low boil. Turn down the heat to medium-low and simmer for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until thickened. Take off the heat and add the lemon juice, rum, and butter. Cool to room temperature and chill until ready to use. Now make the dough:

3 c. (12 oz) sifted flour--I used 1 c. whole-wheat pastry flour

1 T. baking powder

1/4 t. salt

1 c. (7 oz.) sugar

1 c. (8 oz.) butter, room temp is best

2 t. vanilla

1 large egg

1/3 c. (2.7 oz.) milk

In the bowl of the food processor, put the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar. Pulse until mixed. Add the butter (cut it into pieces first) and pulse that until well incorporated. Throw in the vanilla, egg, and milk and process until it holds together in a smooth dough. Scrape the dough out onto a large piece of waxed or parchment paper and refrigerate at least 3 hours (or freeze for 30-60 minutes).

When you're ready to bake, heat the oven to 350. Get out a mat, a rolling pin, and a little custard cup of flour: if you're like me, you'll need to flour rather heavily. Also line some cookie sheets with foil or parchment. Work with the dough one third at a time: roll it out to 1/8 inch, if you can--this dough is rather wet and stubborn. If you're a patient person, use a 2-inch round cookie cutter and cut circles as close together as possible. Refrigerate dough scraps for later. If you're not patient, cut into squares that are as even as possible. I'm just going to assume you're patient: put a teaspoonful of raisin filling on half of the circles and cover each with a "plain" round; crimp the edges with a fork and put on the lined cookie sheets. Repeat with the remaining dough. Bake for about 20 minutes, until golden brown. Let cool, and serve with pride.

Hot Chocolate Mousse

2011-10-23T18:22:00.000+02:00

Last weekend gave me the perfect opportunity to make this cake/pudding: we were having Sami's cousin and her son over for Saturday lunch. Sami's cousin is a high school teacher with a lot of personality; her son is her perfect comic foil, with deadpan delivery. We had a lovely long meal with interesting conversations about trade in 19th century Britain and how Tunisians would react to vegetarianism, for example.

I knew this would be a perfect dessert to make for this woman because she loves chocolate. She had hunted down the best chocolatier in Saint-Germain-en-Laye before we moved here, and when we brought her a box of my favorite chocolate, she got excited like a child at Christmas. My kind of dinner guest.

There are a lot of aspects of this recipe that make it great. For one, it's quite simple: once you've separated your eggs, you're home free. You can also make most of the recipe a few hours ahead of time and then finish it and put it in the oven right before you start your dinner. It doesn't fall like a soufflé, so it doesn't matter that you've barely gotten to the cheese course when the cake is ready to come out of the oven.

And let me just say that this is the perfect kind of dessert for a silicon pan like this: I'm not sure whether the cake would have unmolded from a regular Bundt pan.

And the verdict? It was light, fluffy, and very chocolate. It was more a cake than a mousse, really, but with whipped cream, it was a really excellent end to a fun meal.

Here's the recipe. Make it for chocolate-loving friends.

Hot Chocolate Mousse

5 oz. unsweetened chocolate, chopped relatively fine

1/2 c. (4 oz.) butter, room temperature

1 c. (8 oz.) boiling water

8 eggs, separated

3/4 c. (5.25 oz.) sugar

(optional: about 1/2 t. vanilla)

Pinch salt

If you're going to bake the cake right away, heat the oven to 350. Get out a Bundt pan and a baking pan (probably a 9x13 pan) that can hold the Bundt pan and some water. Butter the Bundt pan, even if it's nonstick, and sprinkle it with sugar.

In a medium bowl or glass measuring cup put the butter and chocolate. Add the boiling water and let stand for a minute or two. Stir until smooth. If it's not quite smooth, give it 30 seconds or so in the microwave. Let cool and then freeze for 15 minutes until quite thick. Whisk well and set aside.

In another medium-large bowl put the egg yolks and beat then just until mixed. Gradually add 1/2 cup (3.5 oz.) of the sugar (and the vanilla, if you want) and beat at high speed until thick and pale, 10 minutes (mine didn't take quite that long to reach that stage). Gradually fold the chocolate mixture into the egg yolks. You can let this sit for a couple of hours now if you need to.

Add the salt to the egg whites in the big bowl of a mixer (with a whisk attachment) and beat until they start holding a soft shape. Turn down the mixer and gradually add the remaining sugar. Turn the speed up and beat until the whites hold a stiff peak. Gradually fold the egg whites into the chocolate mixture.

Pour the mousse into the prepared pan--pour into one side and then into the other. Carefully smooth it out. Put the Bundt pan in the larger pan. Put the pan in the oven and then carefully pour hot water into the large pan until it's about 1 inch up the side of the Bundt pan. Bake for 45 minutes (check after 30 minutes and cover with foil if the cake seems too dark).

Remove cake from the oven and then the water-filled pan; let stand 5 minutes. Then reverse onto the serving platter but do not remove the cake pan. Let stand for 15 minutes, then remove the pan. While the cake is standing, make some whipped cream:

1 c. whipping cream

2 T. powdered sugar

1 T. each Cognac and rum (or Grand Marnier), or 1/2 t. vanilla

(The quantities given here are half those Maida gives. She probably likes whipped cream more than I do--there's always way too much.)

Put all the ingredients in a mixing bowl and whip until the cream holds a soft shape. I put the cream in the center of the Bundt ring, and it looked pretty. Eat soon and with gusto.

Down East Chocolate Cookies

2011-10-22T10:08:00.001+02:00

"Do you have any almond paste that isn't colored?" I asked my fruit and nut (and grain and olive...) seller. "Just for you, sweetie," he leered. This is the guy who, when I protested that I was far too lazy to crack my own walnuts, offered to come over and crack them for me. Smooth. Just to say that in France, almond paste often comes in little packs of pink, green, and natural color. I have no idea what happens with the pink and green--maybe people make little flowers and such?

Almond paste/marzipan is kind of a controversial ingredient in my family: right up with raisins, in fact. And it's the same people who hate marzipan who also hate raisins. Go figure. So I figured that at least 3/4 of the family would enjoy this cookie.

The technique and ingredients are a bit strange: no flour (I guess the almond paste takes that role) and the batter needs time in the freezer. Like the peanut sauce, it's also a "sleeper recipe" that I probably would have ignored. But that would have been a mistake.

Just as Maida promised, these seem crisp until you bite into them, when they become chewy and delightful: kind of like a Tootsie roll, only with more and better chocolate flavor. The almond paste does not shout out its presence, so even Claire loved them. In fact, the only problem with this recipe is that it doesn't make enough: I only got to eat two before they were all gone.

Here's the recipe. Consider doubling it if you want to have enough to share (or to have some for yourself).

Down East Chocolate Cookies

1-1/2 oz. unsweetened chocolate

6 T. (3 oz.) butter

3/4 c. (5.25 oz.) sugar

1/8 t. salt

1/3 c. (3.5 oz.) almond paste* (in the US, this comes in a tube from Odense. Don't buy marzipan or the almond filling in a can.)

1 large egg

1/2 t. almond extract

Put the chocolate and butter in a microwave-safe bowl and microwave at 30-second intervals, stirring in between, until the mixture is melted and smooth. Mix in the sugar and salt, and then crumble in the almond paste. Give the mixture another 30-second burst, and whisk until smooth. Add the egg and almond extract and whisk until smooth again. Put the mixture in the freezer for about 30 minutes, or until quite thick.

When you're ready to bake, heat the oven to 300 and get out a couple of flat cookie sheets and some parchment paper or silicon mats (which seemed to me ideal for this purpose). Scoop out rounded teaspoonfuls of the dough onto the mats/parchment sheets--I found 6 to a sheet was just right because these spread a lot. (Maida wants you to carefully form these into round balls. You can see how well I followed her advice. Don't be like me.) Bake for 21-22 minutes, rotating in the oven unless you're using the convection setting. Let cool completely on the parchment or silicon. Fight for the last cookie.

*If you want to use up your leftover almond paste, this cake is a nice way to do it. Or just make more cookies--you'll want to.

Peanut Butter Sauce

2011-10-18T07:25:00.000+02:00

I don't really have an angle or story about this recipe. I made peanut butter sauce, and it was good.

This is one of the Maida recipes I would normally have overlooked because it's so simple and comes with so few headnotes.

But I'm really glad I made it: it's easy and delicious. Claire says it tastes like peanut brittle in sauce form. She's right: it's a lot like caramel sauce (especially since I used golden syrup instead of corn syrup) with the extra kick of peanut butter. Two great tastes that taste great together...

Here I'm serving it as Maida suggests: over (homemade) vanilla ice cream with sliced bananas. Yum. But Julia and I found another excellent use for this sauce: as a dip for sliced apples. If you like caramel apples and apples with peanut butter, then look no further.

So here's the recipe. Go get some good apples and/or ice cream and get ready for some simple deliciousness.

Peanut Butter Sauce

3/4 c. (8.25 oz.) corn syrup or golden syrup

1/4 c. (2 oz.) water

Pinch salt (I left this out because I think peanut butter is salty enough)

1/3 c. (3 oz.) smooth peanut butter

1 T. (0.5 oz.) butter

1 egg

1 t. vanilla

1/3 c. (2.7 oz.) whipping cream

Bring the syrup, water, and salt to a boil in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Reduce the heat a bit and let simmer for 5 minutes. Add the peanut butter and whisk until smooth (although Maida says it might look curdled). Remove from the heat and add the butter, whisking until it's melted. Beat the egg in a small bowl to mix, then add a bit of the warm peanut butter mixture, beating constantly. Then whisk the egg mixture into the peanut butter sauce. Put back on the stove over low heat and cook for 1-1/2 minutes, stirring and scraping with a rubber scraper, to cook the egg--the sauce does not thicken noticeably. Remove from the heat and let cool to room temperature. Stir in the vanilla and cream. Chill until very cold and serve over ice cream and/or with sliced apples.

Banana Black Cake

2011-10-11T20:23:00.001+02:00

One of my favorite things about baking is using lots of ingredients. This probably goes back to my childhood baking experiences, but there's nothing I love more than putting half my spice drawer and a bunch of other stuff in a cake or a batch of cookies. Therefore, this recipe was right up my alley. See how all the ingredients barely fit into the picture?

I suppose it's also an American trait to have a lot of different flavors going on in one dessert. French desserts tend to go in for one or two dominant flavors, but American desserts tend to either have one over-the-top flavor (chocolate-chocolate-chocolate) or many mixed.

But for this cake, almost all the flavors totally worked. The banana shone through, but so did all the dried fruits and nuts. The spices and cocoa held their own in the background. The only thing that I wasn't so sure of was the blackberry jam. I didn't really taste it, and the seeds were somewhat annoyingly crunchy (because I had overlooked the "seedless" part in the recipe and bought very seedy jam from a lady at the market). I recommend buying seedless blackberry jam for this. I'm sure it adds a nice moisture and obviously some sweetness.

Since this is a big, dense cake with a lot going on, I made half the recipe, which filled a loaf pan plus two mini-loaf pans (with no dried fruit or nuts for Claire). The recipe below is the half recipe, which I think is the perfect amount unless you have a ton of people to bake for or want to eat cake for weeks.

Our friend Bob was visiting us when I made this cake. He got to try the lemon cheesecake and this, and he seemed to prefer this cake because of the big flavors and all the fruit and nuts. It's a tough comparison because they're such different dessert items, but this is just to say that this cake is really delicious and worth making.

Here's the recipe. Empty out your cabinets and get to it!

Banana Black Cake

1-1/2 c. (5 oz.) walnuts

1/2 c. (4 oz.) butter, room temperature

2 T. cocoa powder

1/2 t. nutmeg

1/2 t. allspice

1/2 t. cinnamon

1/4 t. salt

1/4 t. cloves

1/4 t. ground ginger

1 t. baking soda

1 t. vanilla

1/2 c. (3.5 oz.) sugar

1/2 c. (3.5 oz.) brown sugar

2 large eggs

3/4 c. (8 oz.) seedless blackberry jam

2-1/2 bananas (8 oz., peeled), mashed with a fork

2-1/2 T. (1.3 oz.) buttermilk or plain yogurt

1 cup +2 T. (4.5 oz.) sifted flour

1/2 c. (2.75 oz.) whole wheat flour

3/4 c. (5 oz.) pitted dates, cut into quarters

1/2 c. (2.5 oz.) raisins

Heat the oven to 300. Butter a large loaf pan (you may need some extra muffin tins or such). You'll also want a shallow pan to put water in (a broiler or 9x13 pan). Grind 1/3 c. (about 1 oz.) of the walnuts in a food processor; use those to coat the pan. If there are extra, let them stay at the bottom of the pan. Chop the remaining walnuts into medium-sized pieces and set aside for later.

Cream the butter with the cocoa, nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon, salt, cloves, ginger, baking soda, and vanilla in a large bowl with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add the sugars and beat for another minute or two. Beat in the eggs one at a time until well incorporated. Beat in the jam and then the banana. Isn't this fun? Beat in the buttermilk or yogurt, and then on low speed, beat in the flours. Take the bowl off the mixer stand and stir in the dates, raisins, and walnuts. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and cover with foil. Put about an inch of hot water in the shallow pan and put it on the bottom shelf of the oven. Put the covered cake on a rack above the hot water pan and bake for about 45 minutes. Take off the foil (some cake batter may have stuck to it) and bake another 45 minutes or so, or until a toothpick comes out clean (these were the times that worked for me: Maida recommends 1 hour covered and 1-1/2 uncovered). Let cool about 20 minutes and then unmold onto a rack to cool completely. Maida recommends chilling this and serving it cold with ice cream, but I kind of like it at room temperature, just plain--but not really plain.

Lemon Cream Cheese Pie

2011-10-09T13:10:00.001+02:00

This weekend we bought a car. Sami had done all kinds of research and finally chose just the right car: in Germany. So he took the train on Saturday morning, picked up the car, visited friends in a city nearby, and came home Sunday. I stayed home and graded papers--and made cheesecake to celebrate with.

And while this cheesecake is really easy to make, like most cheesecakes, it tastes so good that it seems special. This one has a "light" touch in that it includes some cottage cheese (I used fromage blanc, which is really what the cottage cheese is standing in for)--but then the whipped cream on top negates all that.

I have a note in my cookbook from when I made this dessert years ago, probably in graduate school: "'Sheer bliss'--Alex and Karen". And as we sat at the dinner table the other night enjoying our cheesecake in silence, Julia asked, "So, is it sheer bliss?" I don't know, but it was pretty darned good and a great way to end a weekend.

Here's the recipe. Make it when you have something to celebrate.

Lemon Cream Cheese Pie

1-1/4 c. (5 oz. or 1 cello pack) graham cracker crumbs (I used digestive biscuits)

1 T. sugar

1 t. cinnamon (consider using less)

1/2 t. nutmeg

1/2 t. ginger

Pinch allspice

6 T. (3 oz.) butter, melted

(alternatively: 1 pkg. zwieback

1/4 c. (1 oz.) powdered sugar

6 T (3 oz.) butter)

Heat the oven to 375. Line a 9-inch pie plate with foil. Stir together the graham cracker crumbs, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, and butter (if you're using a food processor to make the crumbs, just mix it all in the processor). Pat the crumbs in the foil-lined pan to form an even layer on the bottom and as far up the sides as you can go. Bake for 7 minutes. Let cool to room temperature, then freeze at least 1 hour. When the crust is frozen solid, pull it carefully out of the pan by the foil and then carefully peel the foil off. Return the crust to the pan. Keep it at room temperature while you make the filling (especially if you have a glass pan--you don't want it to crack going from frozen to hot!).

3/4 c. (6 oz.) cottage cheese or ricotta

8 oz. cream cheese, room temperature

Grated rind of 1 (organic) lemon

3/4 c. (5.25 oz.) sugar

1/2 t. vanilla

2 large eggs

3 T. (1.5 oz.) lemon juice

Heat the oven to 350. Put the cottage cheese or ricotta in the food processor and blend for a full minute or until the cheese is completely smooth. Add the cream cheese and process until that's completely smooth. Then add the lemon rind, sugar, and vanilla and pulse until thoroughly incorporated. Add the eggs one at a time, pulsing until incorporated after each. Add the lemon juice and pulse until incorporated.

Pour the filling into the crust and bake for 30 minutes, or until no longer jiggly. Let cool, then chill. When you're ready for your blissful cheesecake experience, make the topping:

1/2 c. (4 oz.) sour cream

1/2 c. (4 oz.) whipping cream

1 T. granulated or powdered sugar

1/2 t. vanilla

Note: I have cut the cream in half from the original recipe: I think that more would overwhelm the cheesecake.

Anyway, put all the ingredients in a cold bowl and whip with cold beaters until stiff. Spread this atop the cheesecake. Let chill for a few hours, then devour.

Mrs. LBJ's Moonrocks

2011-10-06T16:03:00.000+02:00

I can remember a time before First Lady candidates had to produce a cookie recipe for an election-season bake-off. And yet it would seem from this recipe that there were still First Lady cookie recipes back in the day.

I guess this is a good cookie to represent the late 60's: it has some back-to-earth, crunchy-granola elements with all the coconut, dates, raisins, and nuts, and yet it's got that down-home spice cookie feeling. And it's the kind of cookie that would keep in a care package, like the "hermits" my parents used to send me. Very Lady Bird, I'm guessing. I wonder if Maida edited the recipe to substitute butter for "oleo".

This is certainly a love-it-or-hate-it kind of cookie: it's got cinnamon and raisins, which both seem to inspire strong emotions. Oh, and coconut, too. I actually made a few with no "goodies" for Claire, and she loved them. But I happen to love all those divisive ingredients, and so does Julia, so we have been powering through them. Good cookies are good cookies, politics or no.

Here's the recipe.

Mrs. LBJ's Moonrocks

1 cup (8 oz.) butter, room temperature

1 t. baking soda

1/8 t. salt

1 t. cloves (these are strong--I cut this to 1/2 t.)

1 t. cinnamon

1 t. allspice (I used 1/2 t.)

1 t. nutmeg

1-1/2 c. (10.5 oz.) sugar (I used about 9 oz.)

3 large eggs

1/2 c. (5.5 oz.) dark corn syrup (I used a German cane syrup called Rübensaft)

4 c. (16 oz.) sifted flour (yep, I used about 5 oz. whole wheat)

1 c. (3.5 oz.) shredded coconut

1 c. (5 oz.) raisins

1 c. (8 oz with pits) dates, pitted and quartered (use scissors)

2 c. (7 oz.) walnuts, in large pieces (I used about 5 oz. and that was plenty)

Heat the oven to 350; have ready some cookie sheets and parchment or foil. In the large bowl of a mixer, beat the butter with the baking soda, salt, cloves, cinnamon, allspice, and nutmeg until fluffy. Add the sugar and beat for 2-3 minutes. Beat in the eggs one at a time until each one is incorporated. Beat in the corn syrup, and then on low speed gradually add the flour. Take the bowl out of the mixer and stir in the coconut, raisins, chopped dates, and walnuts. This is a lot of stiff and chunky dough. Use two spoons to scoop out large dough balls (one spoon to scoop; the other to scrape the dough off the first spoon) onto parchment or foil sheets--Maida says you should get 48 cookies (four sheets of 12), but I barely got 36 (four sheets of 9). You decide how big you want the cookies to be. Bake for 18-20 minutes (the cooking time will vary depending on how big you made your cookies) until the cookies are golden all over. Transfer to racks to cool. Enjoy with a glass of milk or a cup of tea.

Prune and Apricot Turnovers

2011-09-30T18:18:00.000+02:00

I seem to have hit a sort of phase as I reach the end of this cookbook: the pastry filled with dried fruit phase. There was the apricot strip, there's these turnovers, and I have some raisin-filled cookies coming up. I guess there is an American slant to all these pastries: I'm guessing that the pioneers and such subsisted on dried fruit most of the year. But I'm not convinced they had lovely dried apricots and prunes like these.

No, this seems to be more an Eastern European import--it has a lot in common with hamentaschen and other pastry pockets.

Above all, it's a fun little project (Maida spends more time reminiscing about decorating turnovers with her mother than to actually describing how these taste) that gives you really good results, assuming you like sweet-tart dried fruit conserve in a flaky pastry.

Look at this pastry, people. I almost never get it right, so I'm really proud. Do you see the little pieces of butter showing through? That's what makes the pastry flaky and delicious.
A note: As with the apricot strip, the filling recipe made twice as much as I needed. Given the cost of dried fruit, I have halved the filling recipe here. Otherwise, you're going to have to make some more pastry.

Here's the recipe.

Prune and Apricot Turnovers

You'll need to make the dough and filling well in advance of when you'd like to bake and serve these. Before that, you'll want to soak the fruit--preferably overnight.

Filling:

3 oz. dried apricots

3 oz. prunes

3/4 c. (6 oz.) water

1/4 c. (1.75 oz.) sugar

Pinch salt

1/2 t. vanilla (not in the additional recipe, but I like it)

(2 T. brandy/rum)

(1/4 c. chopped walnuts)

Soak the dried apricots and prunes in the water overnight. Then put the fruit and the water in a small saucepan over medium-high heat and bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. Turn down the heat to medium-low and cook, stirring, until most of the liquid has evaporated. Take off the heat and add the sugar, salt, and vanilla. Let cool completely, then add, if you so choose (and I recommend it!), the booze and the walnuts. While the filling is cooling, make the pastry:

Pastry:

2 c. (8 oz.) sifted flour (some whole wheat is good here)

1 T. sugar

1/2 t. salt

3/4 c. (6 oz.) cold butter (I used 5 oz. and it was perfect. Then again, French butter tends to have a higher fat content than American butter)

1 t. cider vinegar

2-3 T. cold water

Put the flour, sugar, and salt in the bowl of a food processor and give it a spin to mix. Cut up the butter in cubes and scatter them over the flour. Pulse until the butter is in pieces no larger than a pea. Sprinkle the vinegar and about 2 T. of the water over and pulse until the dough just begins to come together (you may need to add a bit more)--see the picture above. Turn the dough out onto a piece of parchment or waxed paper and refrigerate for at least an hour.

When you're ready to bake, heat the oven to 425. Work with half the dough at a time. Roll it out into a fairly large square--it should be thin, but not paper thin: it's got to hold some fairly substantial filling. Trim the edges to make a "perfect" square and then cut the square into 4 squares. Put some water in a small bowl, wet your fingertips, and wet two perpendicular edges of the square. Put just a teaspoon or two of filling in the center of the pastry square and then fold the dry corner of the pastry over the wet corner. Crimp with a fork. Repeat. If you want, you can cut out fancy shapes with your pastry trimmings and apply them with more water. Or you can use them to make cinnamon swirls, as you see I did (roll up pastry with cinnamon sugar, cut, bake). Prick holes in the pastry with the same fork you used for crimping.

Maida says to brush these with an egg wash (1 egg yolk, 1 T. water) before you bake them. I didn't.

Put the turnovers on a piece of parchment on a cookie sheet and bake for 30 minutes, or until golden brown. These are especially good when they're still warm. Maida says they can be frozen unbaked or baked and then re-baked or reheated. I believe it, but I haven't tried it--tiny freezer.

California Lemon Pudding

2011-09-28T15:51:00.000+02:00

It would seem that after a nice long summer vacation, real life has finally kicked in--just in time for fall. This week involved a full day of volunteer work, a certain amount of editing, my full 15-hour teaching schedule, and a cold that started right around my second class of the day. Oh yes, and I baked.

I have a rather intense teaching schedule that involves two days of teaching six hours straight, plus a night class. It's pretty tiring while it lasts, but it does give me about 3 days off to do other things. And so I've determined I'll bake on one of those days.

This week I made the California Lemon Pudding, touted as being quick and easy as well as light and creamy and lemony. And indeed, it did come together in less than half an hour, right before I had to leave for a parent-teacher meeting.

So when we got back home, there was pudding (thanks to children who know how to take food from the oven, etc.)! That's definitely a nice weeknight bonus.

The verdict? I liked this but didn't love it. The top layer is nice, like a light cake, but the pudding on the bottom was a bit too floury for my taste. Maybe it didn't chill enough. I also found it to be a bit too sweet. However, no one actually complained about it, and all 5 little cups disappeared rapidly. So I would recommend it, with less sugar, if you want something just a little special that comes together quickly.

Here's the recipe.

California Lemon Pudding

1 T. (0.5 oz.) soft butter

3/4 c. (5.25 oz.) sugar, divided (consider going down to about 1/2 c. or 3.5 oz.)

2 large eggs, separated

Grated zest of 1 lemon

1/4 c. (2 oz.) lemon juice (consider using more lemon juice in place of some of the milk)

2 T. flour

1 c. (8 oz.) milk

Heat the oven to 350. Get out about 5 custard cups and a large pan that can hold them and some water. Butter the custard cups and go ahead and put them in the pan. In a small bowl, use a hand mixer to beat the butter with 1/2 of the sugar (it will remain grainy, given the proportion of butter to sugar) until mixed. Beat in the egg yolks, then the lemon zest, lemon juice, flour, and then the milk, gradually. Wash the beaters and put the egg whites in a clean bowl with a pinch of salt; beat until they hold a soft shape. Add the remaining 1/4 c. sugar gradually, beating until the whites hold a fairly stiff shape. Gradually and carefully fold the egg whites into the lemon mixture. Pour the mixture into the buttered custard cups.

If you have an electric kettle, this is a great use for it. While you're making the lemon batter, heat up a kettleful of water. When all is ready and the water is hot, put the pan with the custard cups in the oven and then pour the water in from the kettle to about 1 inch up the pan. If you don't have a kettle, well, pour hot water into the large pan using your favorite technique. Bake for about 35 minutes (check after 25) until they are puffy and golden (see picture). Remove the cups from the water and let cool (they'll settle quite a bit). When they have cooled to room temperature, refrigerate them. Maida says they're best 3 hours after you bake them, if you can plan your day like that. You can either invert the custard cups onto plates and unmold these, or you can be less fancy and spoon them out of the cups. Guess which one we did? Celebrate that you have a little something for dessert.

Ginger Ginger Cake

2011-09-26T07:49:00.003+02:00

It would seem from all the ginger recipes in this book that the 80's were a prime time for desserts with fresh and candied ginger. Since my mother took Chinese cooking classes in the 70s, those ingredients had become a staple in our house, but they were still pretty exotic and "nouvelle cuisine" in the 80s--so much so that I believe we had to go to the Asian food store to buy them. Now when I go to the market stand and ask for candied ginger, the vendor asks me to choose from three different kinds! Times have changed. But this remains an outstanding recipe.

Like the Apricot Strip a couple of weeks ago, I took this cake to a gathering of new expat parents where they could gather important information and share experiences. And drink coffee and eat cake. There were lots of delicious goodies on hand. But I have to brag that I was unable to bring any cake back home with me.

In fact, the cake disappeared so fast I was unable to get a good photograph of it! As it was cooling on the table, little gremlin hands started picking at it. Children emerged from their rooms to ask if they could have "just one slice". And that one slice became a quarter, then a third, then half a cake. Finally, I had to slice it up and put it away so that there would be something to take to the gathering!

So to describe the cake: it's definitely not gingerbread, and although there's an insane amount of ginger in it, it doesn't hit you over the head. Many of the tasters commented on its subtlety. In fact, one woman insisted that the recipe could not possibly be American--I'm not sure if that was because of the subtlety or because there was no cinnamon in it. No matter--the cake is moist and buttery and delicious. Claire, the resident ginger fan, has claimed it as her birthday cake. If you love ginger, or even like it, you should make this cake.

Here's the recipe.

Ginger Ginger Cake

1 cup (8 oz.) butter, room temperature

1/4 t. baking soda

3-4 oz. fresh ginger (3-4 x 1 inch), finely grated

2-3/4 c. (19.25 oz) sugar, divided (I used 1 pound, which seemed to be plenty)

6 large eggs, SEPARATED (I almost forgot)

3 c. (12 oz.) sifted flour (I threw in a cup of whole wheat)

1 c. (8 oz.) sour cream

3/4 c. (6 oz.) candied ginger, snipped with scissors into 1/4-inch pieces

Pinch salt

Heat the oven to 350. Butter a large tube or angel food cake pan (I don't see why a Bundt pan wouldn't work here) and coat it with breadcrumbs or wheat germ or ground almonds. Cream the butter with the baking soda until fluffy. Add the ginger and all but 1/2 cup of the sugar and beat for 2-3 minutes or until light. Beat in the egg yolks. On low speed gradually add the flour in three additions, alternating with the sour cream in two additions. Stir in HALF the candied ginger (I forgot about this and added it all. The cake was still delicious.).

In a clean bowl with clean beaters, beat the egg whites with a pinch of salt until they hold a soft shape. Gradually beat in the reserved 1/2 cup sugar and beat until the egg whites hold a fairly stiff shape--don't overbeat.

Fold the egg whites into the ginger-filled batter in three additions. The batter is pretty heavy, so don't try to hard to incorporate the egg whites well the first two additions. When all the egg whites have been folded in, pour the batter in the prepared pan and sprinkle the reserved candied ginger on top. Bake in the preheated oven for 1-1/2 hours (mine took a little more than an hour) or until a tester comes out clean.

Let the cake cool in the pan for 10-15 minutes before unmolding it and cooling completely on a rack. Cut into slices and stash away if you want a piece.

Blueberry Custard Tart

2011-09-17T14:34:00.000+02:00

As things have gotten busy around here, my baking has worked its way into two categories: baking with a deadline (for some event or another) and baking as a reward. This tart was my reward for getting through three crazy days of school meetings and work.

Now, French meetings (at least the ones I've been to) can be quite pleasant. No one is in a hurry, and everyone talks a lot. There is often food or at least coffee involved. People are civil to one another even in disagreement.

And yet, I found myself sitting in meeting after meeting, tuning out and thinking, "OK, just two more meetings and then I can go home and bake something!"

So this is what I baked. Because I had made my piecrust dough ahead of time, it went together really quickly, but it was still a satisfying baking experience. I was especially pleased with my crust, which for a change didn't shrink on the edges (I baked it blind with a vegetable steamer!).

When the girls got home, they asked, "What kind of quiche is this?" And they were right--this is an awful lot like a sweet quiche (ooh--breakfast quiche!). It's fruity and creamy, and the crust has a nice crispness. And it was gone in under 24 hours.

Here's the recipe. Treat yourself.

Blueberry Custard Tart

1 c. (5 oz.) unsifted flour (some whole wheat is nice here)

2 T. (0.9 oz.) sugar

1/4 t. salt

1/2 c. (4 oz.) cold butter, cut into pieces

1 large egg

I made the crust in a food processor, though you could also do it in a mixer or by hand. Put the flour, sugar, and salt in a food processor and pulse until mixed. Pulse in the butter until you have coarse crumbs. Then add the egg and process until it holds together. Turn out onto a piece of waxed/parchment paper (if you're going to store the dough for a while) or a rolling surface (if you're going to work with it now--you don't have to chill this dough). Knead it a bit until it holds together, then either store it for later or roll it out now.

Roll out the dough to fit an 11-inch tart/quiche pan, if you have one; I used a regular old 9-inch pie pan. Crimp the edges better than I did, prick the bottom and sides, and put the crust in the freezer for at least 15 minutes (while you preheat the oven).

Heat the oven to 400. Put a piece of foil or parchment over the crust, and then put in pie weights or beans or spare change or another, smaller pie pan or vegetable steamer--just something that's going to keep the crust from puffing on the bottom and shrinking on the sides. Bake for 10-15 minutes. Then remove the foil/parchment and the weights and bake another 5-10 minutes until golden. Turn the oven down to 325 and set the crust aside while you make the filling.

(Optional: 1/2 cup ground almonds or hazelnuts)

2 cups (8 oz.) fresh or frozen blueberries

2 large eggs + 2 egg yolks (in all honesty, I just now see the additional egg yolks. The tart was fine without them. Use your judgement.)

1/4 c. (1.75 oz.) sugar

1/4 t. cinnamon

1/4 t. nutmeg

1 t. vanilla

1 c. (8 oz.) cream

If you'd like, sprinkle the ground nuts on the bottom of the crust. This was my idea, and I liked it. Spread the blueberries over the nuts. Then whisk together the eggs, sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Whisk in the vanilla and cream. Pour that over the blueberries and put in that 325 oven for about 35 minutes; the custard will no longer jiggle. Serve at room temperature or cold (I liked it better room temperature).

Apricot Strip

2011-09-16T08:59:00.003+02:00

There are days when I ask myself, "Why are you baking? You really have other things to do that may just be more important!" And then I bake anyway. I never have an answer to that particular question.

This weekend I had a long editing project to work on. I was getting what seemed to be an email every 10 minutes about a volunteer event on Monday (that I was ostensibly baking for). I needed to plan a new class I would be teaching during the week. And we won't even talk about what the apartment looked like.

I was in a state of stress. I snapped at everyone. And yet I baked. Something complicated, even. And you know what? I don't regret it. Everything got done, and there was some delicious cake at the end of the tunnel.

As you can see, this is a very Maida Heatter recipe in that it involves lots of dried fruit and nuts. The idea behind this recipe is that it's a spin on a Fig Newton, but with an apricot-pineapple-walnut filling within a whole-wheat-honey dough.

The recipe is a bit fussy in that you're supposed to make the dough and the filling the day before you make the actual cake. I didn't have all the ingredients for the filling the night before (which stressed me out no end), so I made it a few hours before, and it was fine.

I was so out of time that I brought the dough and filling over to my in-laws' house and fixed it on the outside table (great light for photography, though!)

But you see how it goes: Roll out the dough, pile on some filling (you could make a half recipe and it would be enough, honestly), fold it over, move carefully to a cookie sheet, repeat.

The result? It was really good. The filling is something I could (and did) eat with a spoon, though I would put in the orange rind at the end so it doesn't get that cooked taste. The dough really does taste like a Fig Newton, in a good way. And these were popular! My friends Cécile and Gabrielle could pick my cake out of a line-up of desserts other moms made (I think it's the dried fruits and whole wheat flour), and Gabrielle mercilessly promoted the cake and my "magic baking". People seemed to like it a lot, or at least they were polite, and almost all of it disappeared. And when I brought the cake home, Julia pronounced it "so freaking delicious". Can't go wrong with that!

Have I learned anything? I should probably manage my time better. But still, given the situation again (and I probably will be this weekend), I would totally bake. All that other stuff can (probably) wait.

Here's the recipe. Make it when you have time.

Apricot Strip

First, soak your apricots as long as possible, preferably overnight:

12 oz. dried apricots

1-1/2 c. (12 oz.) water (if this is last minute, boiling water may be called for)

Let sit (in a saucepan if you have one you can spare for a while), keeping the apricots under water. Now get to work on the dough.

1/2 c. (4 oz.) butter, room temperature

1 t. baking powder

1/2 t. baking soda

1/2 t. salt

1/2 c. (3.5 oz.) brown sugar

1/2 c. (5.5 oz.) honey

1 large egg

1 c. (4 oz.) sifted flour

2 c. (11 oz.) unsifted whole wheat flour

I did this with a food processor, but you could also do it with a mixer. Beat the butter with the baking powder, baking soda, and salt until fluffy. Beat in the brown sugar and honey, and then the egg. Pulse in the two flours (or beat in at low speed). Wrap the dough in waxed or parchment paper and put in the fridge, preferably overnight. Now it's time for the filling.

1 large organic orange

2/3 c. (3 oz.) golden raisins

1 c. (7 oz.) sugar

1 15-16 oz. can crushed pineapple in juice

1 c. (3.5 oz.) walnuts in medium-sized pieces

Take the apricots you soaked last night, and if they're not already in a heavy medium saucepan, put them in one (don't drain them). Finely grate the zest of the orange into a small bowl and set aside. Now peel the orange and cut it into segments. Put the segments and squeeze the juice in with the apricots. Add the raisins, sugar, and pineapple (if you can only find rings, like me, just give them a rough chop) with its juice. Put on the stove over medium heat and bring to a low boil. Then turn down the heat and simmer, uncovered, until all the liquid has evaporated. This takes a long time but only requires occasional stirring, so you can do other things while you wait. When it's thick and jam-like, take it off the stove and let it cool down to room temperature. Then add the walnuts and the reserved grated orange rind. You can either refrigerate the filling for later or use it now. You are ready to assemble the cakes.

Heat the oven to 400. Lightly flour a pastry cloth or other rolling surface. Get the dough out of the fridge and cut it in half (put one half back in the fridge). Roll out half the dough into a rectangle that should theoretically be 15x6 and perfectly straight. If you see the pictures above, you'll know that didn't happen to me--mine was too short and too wide--and it worked fine. As pictured above, spoon some filling down the center of the dough. Remember that if you made the full recipe for filling, you're not going to get even close to using it all, so don't go overboard. Fold one long side over the filling, then the other one. Press shut at the ends. Using a big spatula or a bench scraper, carefully flip the roll onto a sheet of parchment paper (it's helpful to have an extra pair of hands for this). Repeat the process. Maida wants you to shape and bake these one at a time, but I found that two fit easily onto a baking sheet and baked just fine.

Bake these for 15-18 minutes, or until light golden and firm. Carefully transfer to racks to cool. When you're ready to serve these, use a serrated knife to slice them (at a diagonal is nice) at the thickness you like. Maida says each roll should give you 6-9 slices, but I'm pretty sure I got at least 12 from each. Enjoy with a nice cup of tea and some new acquaintances.

Chocolate Miracles

2011-09-11T18:39:00.000+02:00

On their last free day before school started this week, Julia and her friend Alice came home and wanted to bake. "Is there a Marie K. Hardy recipe we can make?" asked Alice. There was.

I had to send the girls out to the corner store for condensed milk, and then they were in the kitchen stirring and baking and arguing with "Marie K. Hardy"(Alice's nickname for Maida Heatter) about the correct directions--was a double boiler necessary(no--well, maybe not)? Could they use the microwave (no)?

I have to agree with the girls that a page and a half recipe for three ingredients was a bit extreme.

At the same time, had they paid a bit more attention to what they were doing (and to turning down the heat), they wouldn't have slightly burned the chocolate. That issue plus some pecans that weren't really quite fresh anymore made these cookies a little less than miraculous.

That being said, I still recommend these cookies if you like chewy, chocolaty, nutty goodness. Just be careful when you're melting the chocolate.

Here's the recipe.

Chocolate Miracles

2 oz. unsweetened chocolate

14 oz. can sweetened condensed milk

1 cup (4 oz.) chopped toasted pecans

In a small heavy saucepan over low heat, melt the chocolate. Add the condensed milk, turn up the heat just a bit, and cook, stirring and scraping constantly with a rubber scraper, for about 5 minutes or until slightly thickened. Remove from the heat and whisk until very smooth. Let cool about 10-15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until quite thick.

In the meantime, heat the oven to 350. Stir the nuts into the chocolate mixture and line a couple of cookie sheets with parchment. Apparently, foil will not do here. Place spoonfuls of dough onto the lined cookie sheets and bake for 15 minutes (10 minutes was plenty in our oven). Don't let these get dark brown.

Transfer to wire racks and let cool. Apparently, the texture of these is best within the first 12 hours. I thought they were still quite good a couple of days later.

Peach Cream Cheese Pie

2011-09-09T18:05:00.000+02:00

This weekend we fixed a sort of end-of-summer dinner for Sami's parents at their house. We used our grill to cook some lamb, there was yummy potato salad, and I made this cream cheese pie.

Observant readers will note that this recipe is exactly the same as the blueberry cream cheese pie that I made earlier this summer, only with peaches. I kind of planned it this way, knowing there would still be peaches here in September, but no blueberries.

It's interesting, though--despite being the same recipe, the different ingredients (even the Philadelphia cream cheese that I can now buy here seems different!) makes it seem like a new dessert. The cinnamon in the crust kind of dominated, to the point where my mother-in-law commented, "Wow, Americans sure like cinnamon in their desserts, don't they?"

Still, the pie was a big hit and had disappeared without a trace by the next morning. I recommend you make it soon, before the peaches of summer are gone.

Here's the recipe.

Peach Cream Cheese Pie

1-1/4 c. (5 oz. or 1 cello pack) graham cracker crumbs (I used digestive biscuits)

1 T. sugar

1 t. cinnamon (consider using less)

1/2 t. nutmeg

1/2 t. ginger

Pinch allspice

6 T. (3 oz.) butter, melted

(alternatively: 1 pkg. zwieback

1/4 c. (1 oz.) powdered sugar

6 T (3 oz.) butter)

12 oz. cream cheese, room temperature

1 t. vanilla

1/2 c. (3.5 oz.) sugar

1/3 c. (2.7 oz.) cream, sour cream, or crème fraîche

2 large eggs

Heat the oven to 350. In a mixer, or in the food processor you just used, beat the cream cheese until smooth. Add the vanilla and sugar and again beat until smooth. Add the cream and then the eggs, one at a time, beating just until smooth but not going for fluffy/airy. Pour the filling in the crust and bake 25 minutes. Let cool to room temperature and then chill at least an hour.

3 large peaches, peeled and thick-sliced

About 1/2 c. (5 oz.) apricot jam

1/4 t. almond extract (I didn't use this because the French put a bit of apricot pit in their jam)

Put the jam in a microwave-safe cup and zap it for about a minute: it should come to a full boil. Strain the jam and add the almond extract. Immediately brush a thin layer on top of the cheese filling. Arrange the peach slices in a decorative spiral (hopefully more decorative than mine) atop the jam, and then brush the peaches with the rest of the jam. Chill at least a few hours or overnight.

Johnny Appleseed Squares

2011-09-08T09:47:00.000+02:00

Ah, la rentrée. Because everyone in France takes a summer vacation, returning from vacation and going back to school/work is as much of a ritual as is going on vacation. There's the ritual traffic jams, the stores opening up, the asking about the other's vacation, the buying of school supplies. And there are back-to-school events.

Since I like to feel involved and all, I volunteered to help with a back-to-school event, answering questions from new parents. I also recruited volunteers to help out, and to say thank you, I of course baked cookies.

This is a great back-to-school kind of recipe. It feels healthy because of all the oats. It's got apples "for the teacher." It's soft and cinnamon-y and comforting.

It's also a very American dessert, because of the heartiness and the cinnamon. The French people at the event distinguished themselves very quickly from the foreigners in reacting to being offered a cookie: my Spanish and Portuguese and American friends (and French friends who had just come back from the States) gobbled them up; the French looked askance and went back to their store-bought madeleines. À chacun son gout (to each his own), I suppose.

I had made this recipe before (I'm pretty sure it's when I lived in Germany, because I had scribbled gram measurements in the margins) and had noted to myself that it was "more like a cake than a cookie." Maybe more like a granola bar than a cookie. But I really recommend it if you want to reward yourself and/or others for making the transition back into the real world--of for having stayed there.

Here's the recipe.

Johnny Appleseed Squares

1 c. (4 oz.) sifted flour (some whole wheat would work well here, I'm sure)

1/2 t. baking soda

1/2 t. salt

1 t. cinnamon

1/4 t. nutmeg

1-1/2 c. (4.5 oz.) rolled or quick-cooking oats

2/3 c. (4.6 oz.) brown sugar

1/2 c. (4 oz.) melted butter

1 large egg

1 t. vanilla

2-3 tart apples that will hold their shape, like Granny Smith or Pink Lady

1/2 c. (2 oz.) chopped toasted pecans

Let me tell you now that I'm giving you my simplified technique for making this, which does not involve rolling the top crust between two pieces of waxed paper and chilling that. My less elegant technique worked for me in the 80s, and it worked for me this weekend.

OK, heat the oven to 350. Line a 9-inch square pan with foil or parchment and butter it (put the butter in the pan, put the pan in the oven for a minute, and then brush the butter around).

In a medium-large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Whisk in the brown sugar (you may want to smooth out the lumps with your fingers) and oats. Then stir in the melted butter, egg, and vanilla. Drop half the dough by spoonfuls onto the lined, buttered pan and use your fingers to press it in a more or less even layer. Peel, core, and slice the apples and layer them on top. Sprinkle the pecans over the apples. Then drop the rest of the dough on top of the apples and again carefully smooth the dough over the apples with your fingers or the back of a spoon.

Bake for 25-30 minutes or until golden brown. Let cool in the pan. Remove from the pan and peel off the foil/paper before cutting into 16-24 squares (Maida suggests these are easier to cut if chilled). Put in a Tupperware and share with your friends who like cinnamon.

Rancho Santa Fe Lemon Tart

2011-09-05T10:58:00.001+02:00

A few months ago, I was talking with my friends Gabrielle and Gabriela about the blog--I'm sure it's because I brought some goodie or other to a party. Gabrielle told me about a poem she and her writing group in Prague had once written on the subject of food and wondered if I'd like to use it for the blog. I believe now is the perfect occasion:

Tarte au citron

(Gabrielle Grieb, Angeliki Freckman, Helen Pletts, Romit Berger, Ariane Synovitz, Clare Wigfall, Emma Whitton, and Jackie Chicknas)

The blade approaches the golden lunar landscapeand with its sharp tip penetrates the virgin surface, free falling through theyolk-yellow succulence until it hits the crisp layer of crust.

A firework of sinful flavour explodes, zesty, fresh,tangy and bright, like the bite of a clear winter’s day.

A silky, celestial smoothness slips slowly,leaving a satisfaction that only such pure intensity of taste can offer.

All that remains is an empty plate, a memory andthe lingering taste of heaven on the tongue.

Who wouldn't want to eat lemon tart after that? Here's the recipe:

Rancho Santa Fe Lemon Tart

1 egg yolk

1 T. ice water

1 T. + 1 t. whipping cream

1/2 t. vanilla

1/4 t. almond extract

1-1/2 c. (6 oz.) sifted flour

1/4 t. salt

1-1/2 T. sugar

1/2 c. (4 oz.) butter, cold

You'll want to make the pastry a few hours or even the day before. Whisk together in a measuring cup or other container with a spout the egg yolk, water, cream, vanilla, and almond extract. Refrigerate while you get your dry ingredients together. In a food processor (or in a bowl with a pastry cutter), whisk together the flour, salt, and sugar. Cut the butter into 8-10 pieces and then cut the butter into the flour, processing or cutting until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Get the liquids out of the fridge and gradually add them while processing until the mixture holds together (I needed just a bit more liquid). Gather the mixture into a ball on a piece of waxed or parchment paper and refrigerate 2-24 hours.

When you're ready to roll out the crust, get out a tart pan. (Maida wants you to have an 11-inch black metal quiche pan. I had an 8-inch glass pan and didn't feel like shopping for a new one, so I had leftover filling, which I baked in custard cups along with the tart. Yum.) Anyway, on a floured surface, roll out the pie pastry as thin as you can, carefully transfer it to the tart pan, and trim and flute to shape the edges. Prick holes in the bottom and in the sides. If you have leftover dough, you can bake it as cookies (I had "pastry dough gremlins" come eat the dough in my kitchen). Chill the crust for at least 30 minutes.

When the crust has chilled, heat the oven to 400. Line the crust with foil and weight it with pie weights or dried beans or (my favorite) loose change. Bake 20 minutes (10 were enough for me), remove the foil and weights (careful!), and bake another 5 minutes or until the crust starts to turn golden. Take out the crust and turn the oven down to 250 (that would be 120 Celsius). Now go ahead and make the filling.

1-1/2 c. (12 oz.) whipping cream

7 egg yolks (you're now about 4 egg whites shy of an angel food cake!)

1 T. cornstarch

3/4 c. (5.25 oz.) sugar

2/3-3/4 c. (5.28-6 oz.) lemon juice (I used about 5 lemons. Your mileage may vary.)

Measure the cream into a glass measuring cup or other microwave-safe container and zap until it's just ready to boil--probably around 2 minutes. In the meantime, whisk the egg yolks in a somewhat larger glass measuring cup (a 4-cup was fine for me--you want to be able to pour the filling into the crust); add the cornstarch and sugar and whisk some more just until it's incorporated. Gradually whisk in the lemon juice, and then gradually add the hot cream. Strain the mixture into the baked crust. Maida suggests pouring some of it into the crust, then putting the pie in the oven and pouring as much more as possible in at that point. That's probably a good idea. If you have extra filling, you can bake it in custard cups, as I mentioned above. Bake for 1 hour: the filling will no longer jiggle. Let stand until completely cool, and then glaze the tart:

1/2 c. (5 oz.) apricot jam
1 T. (0.5 oz.) Cognac

Heat the jam (30 seconds in the microwave is usually plenty) and strain it. Add the Cognac and brush this all over the tart. Refrigerate the tart and serve cold, with berries or not, with whipped cream or not (we did berries and no cream and it was indeed a taste of heaven). Feel satisfied.

Raisin Blueberry Sauce

2011-08-31T17:28:00.006+02:00

I like dessert. I guess it's a family thing. When we were in Hawaii this summer, my brother-in-law was blown away by all the sweets we got--pies, cakes, ice cream, you name it. He's not a dessert person. But Alicia told him, "When we were growing up, there was always dessert. Always." I guess I just thought that was normal.

Which brings us to this recipe, which I made because I felt I wanted something for dessert. I don't necessarily feel comfortable making a cake or a whole batch of brownies just for us, but raisin blueberry sauce sounded like a nice homey dessert that would pair well with one of our other favorite homey desserts, riz au lait (rice pudding). And I was right--it's sweet, tart, fruity, refreshing--a really nice counterpoint to the creamy, bland rice pudding.

But when I tasted it, I also thought, "Hmmm...it really seems like I've made this before." And in a way, I have. The big differences here would be that this recipe involves raisins, a touch of cinnamon, and cornstarch right from the beginning. And of course less cornstarch because this is a sauce, not a dessert. I felt a bit like this was a rip-off--the same recipe in two different guises? But no matter: they're both worth making and I suppose they serve different purposes. I would definitely recommend taking 5 minutes and some blueberries (fresh or frozen) to make this sauce, which would be great not just over rice pudding but also with yogurt for breakfast, or pancakes, or pound cake...anything bland and creamy, I would say.

Here's the recipe. Make it in the morning and you'll have dessert in the evening.

Raisin Blueberry Sauce

1/4 c. (1.25 oz.) raisins

1/3 c. (2.3 oz.) sugar

1 T. cornstarch

1/8 t. cinnamon

Pinch salt

2 T. (1 oz.) water

1-1/2 t. (0.25 oz.) lemon juice

2 c. (8 oz.) blueberries

First you want to cook the raisins to soften them a bit. You can either steam them for 10-15 minutes, or you can put them in a microwave-safe bowl, add about an inch of water, and microwave about 2 minutes. Let cool while you make the rest of the sauce.

In a medium saucepan, whisk together the sugar, cornstarch, cinnamon, and salt. Whisk in the water and lemon juice, and then add the blueberries. Put over medium heat and cook, stirring occasionally with a rubber spatula, until the mixture comes to a boil. Turn down the heat to medium-low and let simmer another 2 minutes, again stirring just occasionally so as not to disturb the cornstarch too much. Drain the raisins if necessary and add them. Pour the mixture into a bowl and cool to room temperature; chill. Serve cold over something delicious.

The Farmer's Daughter's Cake

2011-08-29T16:58:00.007+02:00

Now that I'm back home but school hasn't started (and the weather is cold and gloomy), I could bake any time I wanted to, but I usually feel I need an excuse--or at the very least, no other baked goods lying around.

This weekend I didn't really have an excuse but wanted to bake, so I was in the kitchen whipping up cake batter when my friend Gabrielle called, fresh from her holiday in southern France. "So what are you doing?" she asked me. I told her, and she laughed, "for a change..." I immediately invited her to come for tea. Now I had an excuse to bake and to clean house--a much bigger task!

This cake is another in a series of cakes whose frosting is twice as complicated to make as the cake. But then again, the cake takes maybe five minutes to put together, so who am I to complain? The frosting is not difficult, but takes time.

I read too late that you could/should make the frosting while the cake bakes because the frosting needs to cool before you can beat and spread it. I imagine that the cake and frosting would come out at the right temperature at the same time if you did it that way. As it is, we had to wait what was for the girls an eternity.

The cake is light and delicate--of course, it lacks some buttery richness (since it contains no butter), but we all liked it. The frosting compliments it really well, being dark and thick and rich. All together, this made a teatime treat that had disappeared completely by the time our guests had left. I guess I'm going to need to bake again soon!

Here's the recipe. Make it for friends, "for a change".

The Farmer's Daughter's Cake

2 large eggs

1 t. vanilla

1/4 t. almond extract

2 t. baking powder

1/4 t. salt

1 c. (7 oz.) sugar--I used about 6.5 oz.

1 c. (8 oz.) heavy whipping cream

2 c. (8 oz.) sifted flour (I used a bit of whole wheat and it was, surprisingly enough, fine)

Heat the oven to 350. Grease an 8-inch square pan and coat it with breadcrumbs, wheat germ (that's what I did), or even finely ground almonds.

In a medium bowl with a mixer or hand mixer or even just a whisk, beat the eggs to mix, then beat in the vanilla, almond extract, baking powder, and salt to mix. Beat in the sugar and then the cream--each time you don't have to beat it much, just until everything is well mixed. On low speed beat in the flour just until smooth.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 35-40 minutes or until the cake starts to come away from the sides and a toothpick comes out clean. Let cool for 5 minutes, cut around the sides, let cool another 5 minutes, and unmold onto a rack.

While the cake is baking and/or cooling, make the frosting:

4 oz. unsweetened chocolate (it will melt faster if you chop it)

1/2 c. (4 oz.) milk

1-1/3 c. (9.3 oz.) sugar

2 egg yolks

1 T. + 1 t. (0.7 oz.) butter

1 t. vanilla

In a small saucepan over medium heat, melt the chocolate with the milk and sugar. Remove from the heat and let stand for a minute. Beat the egg yolks a bit and add some of the warm chocolate mixture to it to temper it. Add the egg yolk-chocolate mixture back to the chocolate in the pot; return to low heat and cook, stirring, for one minute. Pour into a small bowl and add the butter and vanilla. Let cool to room temperature.

When you're just about ready to frost the cake, get out your hand mixer and beat the frosting for a good long time--Maida says 10-15 minutes. The girls did this, so I can't verify how long it actually took. The mixture should become smooth and shiny and a bit paler and have the consistency of thick syrup. Pour half of it over the cake, smooth, wait a few minutes for it to set, and then pour the rest over. It makes a rather thick layer. Julia recommends then sprinkling the frosting with coconut. It's really up to you. Let the cake sit for a few hours to fully set the frosting, then dig in.

Grand Marnier Strawberry Soufflé

2011-07-15T09:48:00.000+02:00

We're back home in France, and there's so much to catch up on--the mail, the shopping, the unpacking, the blog.

This recipe is a little something that I baked up the day before we left for London and then California. I figured that strawberries wouldn't be in season anymore when we got back, so I had better go ahead and make this strawberry dessert. And I had nothing more important to do, like, say, pack or clean the apartment.

The challenge with this recipe was the little aluminum foil collars. I couldn't figure out how they worked, but fortunately, Sami came to my rescue and made them for me after studying Maida's descriptions. As you can see from the lighting, we made these pretty late at night. Really late, since it gets dark around 10:30 in July.

The soufflé itself is really quite simple--just whipped egg whites with strawberry purée folded in. You're also supposed to put a piece of cake or something in each soufflé dish to soak up the extra juices (and Grand Marnier). I used a croissant that I happened to have sitting in the freezer, and that worked fine.

This was a light, pretty pink dessert--not my very favorite because I don't much like cooked strawberries, but still very elegant for the amount of effort it takes. It's also almost not sweet enough--kind of amazing for a Maida dessert.

Here's the recipe. Make it when the strawberries are delicious and you're feeling crafty.

Grand Marnier Strawberry Soufflé

2 lbs. strawberries, washed and hulled (you won't need all of them)

1/2 c. (3.5 oz.) + 1 T. sugar

Grand Marnier or Cointreau

1-1/2 t. lemon juice

Ladyfingers, cake, sweet bread, or croissant

7 egg whites

1/8 t. salt

Butter six 5-oz. soufflé dishes (mine were more like 7-8 oz, and they were fine). To make collars for them, call your husband. Or if that fails, tear off six 6-inch lengths of aluminum foil. Fold in half the long way, shiny side out. Butter one half of the foil so that the part that is above the soufflé dish is buttered. Carefully wrap the pieces of foil, buttered side up and in, around the dishes; wrap a piece of twine around each dish and tie it carefully and tightly to make the foil secure (this is best done as a team effort). Sprinkle each dish with about a teaspoon of sugar and do your best to distribute that sugar evenly around the dishes/foil. Set the prepared dishes on a jelly roll or sheet pan and take a deep breath. That was the hardest part of the recipe.

Heat the oven to 400.

Take about 7 of the strawberries and slice them into a small bowl. Add 1 T. sugar and 2 T. Grand Marnier and set aside to macerate.

From the remaining strawberries, measure out about 1-1/2 cups (about 6 oz., I'm guessing). Purée them in a blender or food processor, or mash them with a fork. Then pour them through a strainer. You'll want 1 cup of strawberry purée. Add the lemon juice to that. (If you have leftover strawberries, and you probably will, consider slicing them and macerating them like the ones above. They'll make a nice flavor/temperature contrast to the hot strawberries in the soufflé.)

Cut up your cake or what have you into six cubes "about the size of a domino". Basically, it should easily fit into the bottom of the cup. It's there to soak up extra juice/liquor. Spoon

some strawberries and juice into the cups with the cake. Add a bit of extra liqueur to each cup if you'd like. It's kind of hard to work with the foil collars, but do what you can.

Now put the egg whites and the salt in a large mixing bowl. Put the whisk attachment on the mixer and let it go. When the egg whites have become foamy, start gradually pouring in the 1/2 cup of sugar. Then continue beating until the egg whites hold a stiff peak. Take the bowl out of the mixer and gradually and carefully fold the strawberry purée into the egg whites. When you have a nice pink, fluffy mixture, carefully spoon it into the soufflé dishes. Again, it'll be kind of hard to get it in with the collars and such, but if I could do it, so can you. Put the soufflés in the oven (make sure it's on a low enough rack that the collars don't scrape up against the top of the oven) and bake for 18-20 minutes (mine were done after 16). When 15 minutes have gone by, make sure everyone is waiting for dessert. As soon as the timer rings, spring into action. Take the soufflés out of the oven, cut the string, remove the collars, and carefully transfer the soufflés to plates. Rush them to the table and dig in, perhaps with the leftover sliced strawberries. Enjoy the elegant and guilt-free goodness.

Texas Chocolate Muffins

2011-07-14T09:26:00.001+02:00

Ah, home again. Back to French butter and French chocolate and good light in the kitchen. Despite what the date on the blog entry might tell you, I made these in late August, just about first thing upon returning home.

Let's just start with the name of this particular treat: "chocolate" I can definitely agree with: unsweetened + semisweet + cocoa. That's a given. "Texas"? I don't know. Maybe because of the pecans? Maybe because only a Texan could eat one of these babies in one sitting?

"Muffins"? Well, they are baked in muffin form. One of my favorite bloggers has written a very clear differentiation of the muffin and the cupcake for a rather similar recipe, but these aren't either. Basically, they're brownies. Big old muffin-sized brownies.

Not that I'm complaining. I was kind of worried I'd go through brownie withdrawal after finishing the section, and here I am making brownies again! These are really easy to make. And the muffin shape means they stay moist and are easily transportable.

Of course, Sami decided these would be perfect breakfast food, but for me, half of one is a perfect afternoon snack--moist dark chocolate crunchy goodness. I bet they'd be great with ice cream.

Here's the recipe. You really ought to make these now.

Texas Muffins

1 c. (8 oz.) butter

3 T. (0.6 oz.) cocoa

2 oz. unsweetened chocolate

2 oz. semisweet chocolate

Pinch salt

1-1/2 c. (10.5 oz.) sugar (I went for more like 9.5 oz.)

4 large eggs

1 t. vanilla

1/4 t. almond extract

1 c. (4 oz.) sifted flour

2 c. (7 oz.) toasted pecans, broken into pieces (I used about 5 oz. Pecans are precious around here.)

Heat the oven to 350. Line or butter 12 muffin cups, even if they're nonstick.

In a large microwave-safe bowl, preferably one with a spout, melt the butter, cocoa, and chocolates in 30-second intervals, stirring between each. Then stir in the salt, sugar, the eggs one at a time, vanilla, almond, flour, and pecans. Pour this brownie-like mixture into the muffin cups, using a spoon to push and guide it. The batter will fill the cups all the way up, but that's OK.

Bake for 33-35 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out just barely clean. Let them cool, preferably out of the pan, on a rack. Try to justify as a breakfast item.

Chocolate Chip-Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies

2011-07-13T22:32:00.000+02:00

Like the Colonial Blueberries, I made these cookies late at night (and photographed them with the iPhone) while waiting for Julia and her cousins to come back from Outside Lands. I thought they'd make good road-trip cookies for the cousins returning to San Diego and for us driving down to LA. I was right on both counts.

These cookies were quite popular: they're chocolate-y but not overpoweringly so, and they have a healthy feel from all that oatmeal. You'll notice I tweaked the walnut-to-chocolate ratio, which seemed a bit overpowering to me.

Here's the recipe. Make these when you have a reason to snack.

Chocolate Chip-Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies

1 c. (8 oz.) butter, room temperature

1/2 t. baking soda

1/2 t. salt

1/3 c. (1 oz.) cocoa

1 t. vanilla

1/4 t. almond extract

1-1/2 c. (10.5 oz.) sugar

1 large egg

2 t. instant coffee

1/4 c. hot water (I used 1/4 c. hot coffee for the coffee + water)

1-1/4 c. (5 oz.) sifted flour

1 c. (6 oz.) chocolate chips (I used 8 oz.)

3 c. (9 oz.) quick oats

2-1/2 c. (10 oz.) walnuts, broken into medium pieces (I used 5 oz.)

Heat the oven to 350. Line some cookie sheets with parchment or aluminum foil.

Cream the butter with the baking soda, salt, cocoa, vanilla, and almond extract until it is smooth and fluffy. Gradually beat in the sugar and beat for 2 more minutes. Add the egg and beat another minute. Dissolve the coffee in the water and stir that in, then add the flour, stirring just until incorporated. Remove the dough from the mixer and stir in the chocolate chips, oats, and walnuts by hand.

Drop tablespoonsful of dough onto a long piece of foil or waxed paper. Wet your hands and roll each piece of dough into a ball; put it on a lined cookie sheet and flatten it a bit.

Bake 14-16 minutes; they will come out of the oven soft but will become crisp. Let them cool a bit on the foil before transferring them to a rack.

Colonial Blueberries

2011-07-13T19:46:00.000+02:00

This is the recipe that Would Not Be Made. I had planned to make this after two different trips to the fabulous Livermore Farmer's Market, but each time after I got home and started making dinner, I realized that I wouldn't have time to make it. So most of the berries I bought for this recipe were eaten as is, which was fine. For the rest, I got a giant value-pack of non-local blueberries at Safeway.

But finally I told myself, "I need to just go ahead and make this recipe. After all, there are five teenage girls in the house! Someone's going to eat it!"

Having teenagers around is, I find, an excellent reason to bake. Also, when said teenagers are out at a giant outdoor music festival and you're not sure when they'll get home or if they're OK, baking is a soothing activity. Not that I worry about my child and her cousins.

I'm not sure exactly how to classify this dessert. It has the cake and buttery richness of an upside-down cake but is served right-side-up.

I liked the orange-y, boozy cake layer, but I found the fruit part to be too sweet and buttery. I think a tarter fruit like blackberries would be nice, or just the addition of lemon juice to the blueberries. Or you could just cut down on the added sugar after tasting the fruit. And I might cut the butter in half.

This is a terrible iPhone-in-bad-light photo, but it does show how thick the cake layer is compared to the fruit layer. To me that makes it more a cake than a cobbler. Despite all the caveats, I do recommend making this and serving it warm with ice cream.

Here's the recipe. Make it when you get the chance.

Colonial Blueberries

5 cups (1 lb. 4 oz.) blueberries (or blackberries or mixed berries), washed and drained

1 c. (7 oz.) brown sugar (I would use less, depending on how sweet the fruit is)

6 T. (3 oz.) butter (recommend less: maybe 3-4 T.)

1/2 t. cinnamon

Put 3 cups of the blueberries in a heavy 3-quart saucepan with the sugar and butter over low heat. Stir occasionally until the mixture comes to a low boil. Let simmer gently for 3 minutes. Let the mixture cool down for about 10 minutes, then add the remaining 2 cups berries. Pour the mixture into a 3-quart baking dish and sprinkle it with the cinnamon. Set aside while you make the topping.

2/3 c. (5.3 oz) butter, room temperature

2 t. baking powder

1/4 t. salt

1/2 t. vanilla

Finely grated rind of one orange

3/4 c. (5.25 oz.) sugar

2 large eggs

2/3 c. (5.3 oz.) fresh orange juice (grate the rind before you squeeze)

Cognac, bourbon, or more orange juice

1-1/2 c. (6 oz.) flour

Heat the oven to 350. Cream the butter with the baking powder, salt, vanilla, and orange rind until fluffy. Add the sugar and beat another minute or two. Beat in the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add enough booze or orange juice to the 2/3 c. orange juice to make 3/4 c. (6 oz.) liquid. On low speed add the flour to the creamed mixture in three additions, alternating with the orange juice/booze mixture. Maida says the mixture will probably looked curdled and that that's OK.

Slowly pour the batter over the berries. Maida says it's OK if the batter doesn't cover the berries completely, even though it probably should. Bake for 45 minutes, or until "richly browned" and the batter springs back when gently touched.

Serve warm with ice cream or whipped cream.

Savannah Fig Cake

2011-07-13T13:58:00.000+02:00

Spending time at my parents' house in the Bay Area means lots of things: fabulous weather, beautiful surroundings, and great company on the one hand; on the other, a big garage for Sami to tinker in (he's spent the week under his VW bus) and a big kitchen for me to cook and bake in. Fortunately, Dad and Sharmyn don't seem to mind my messes too much, especially when they turn out to be delicious. Like this cake, surprisingly enough.

This cake had some serious strikes against it. For one, the recipe calls for a can of figs in syrup. I suppose I could have driven all around town looking for those Oregon cans, but instead, when Safeway didn't have them, I dropped a wad on a 12-ounce package of fresh figs and decided I would poach them (about 3 cups of water, 1/2 cup sugar, a used vanilla bean, simmer for about 15 minutes). Since the figs weren't uniformly ripe, this meant a bit more texture than the original recipe had.

Once I had the figs done, the cake was a breeze: it's a pretty standard quick cake recipe involving oil (like a carrot or applesauce cake). I used half melted butter because I don't really like the texture of cakes with oil, but the oil keeps the cake moist longer.

You have nuts on the outside of the cake...

...and plenty on the inside as well. Another great thing about being in California: lots of nuts available. At least there are in the freezer here.

So the cake was a breeze, even with the little fig hiccup. The frosting, however, was a bit of a challenge. It requires a candy thermometer because the mixture needs to be taken to exactly 238, and Maida takes pains to note that there's no other way to gauge the proper temperature. Unfortunately, this thermometer, new as it was, does not show fine enough gradations for me to be able to see 238. This was a problem. Bottom line: don't buy this thermometer. Shell out for a good one.

The frosting is a bit odd in several ways: it involves buttermilk and baking soda, so it's very frothy.

Sorry about the overexposed night shots of the frosting. I wanted to get this cake frosted so we could have dessert. So these are the ingredients awaiting their stove time.

About 5 minutes in, the mixture is bubbling quite steadily. But it's not nearly close to temperature.
I should have taken the frosting off the heat BEFORE I took this picture: the frosting overcooked. We called it "hard-ball frosting", and you'll see in the first picture that it's lumpy and hard and funny-looking. So if you attempt this frosting, I highly recommend an accurate, easy-to-read thermometer, and I recommend taking it off the heat just before it actually reaches 238.

After you read all this, you may be wondering, "Should I bother making this cake?" I would say yes, if you like a spicy, moist fruit cake and a yummy caramel icing. It keeps forever even just sitting out on the counter, which it is right now. You just need to hunt down a can of figs and a candy thermometer.

Here's the recipe. Please report in if you have better luck than I did!

Savannah Fig Cake

1 17-oz. can kadota figs in syrup

2 c. (7 oz.) walnuts

2 c. (8 oz.) sifted flour

1 t. baking soda

1/2 t. salt

1 t. cinnamon

1 t. allspice

3 large eggs

1 t. vanilla

1 c. (8 oz.) buttermilk

1 c. (8 oz.) neutral oil

1 c. (7 oz.) sugar

1/2 c. (3.5 oz.) brown sugar

Put the figs in a strainer to drain--you won't need the syrup.

Heat the oven to 350. Butter a bundt pan that holds 11 cups. Grind very fine 3/4 c. (2.6 oz.) of the walnuts; use those to coat the buttered pan. Leave any extra nuts in the bottom of the pan. Chop the remaining walnuts coarsely and set aside.

Sift together the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and allspice. In the large bowl of an electric mixer (or in a bowl with a whisk), beat the eggs to mix, and then beat in the vanilla, buttermilk, oil, and sugars until well mixed. On low speed add the dry ingredients just until mixed.

Use a knife or scissors to cut the figs into quarters; add them and the remaining walnuts to the batter. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 50-60 minutes or until a cake tester comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 10-15 minutes, then unmold and cool completely. That was the easy part. Now you'll need to make the icing.

1/2 c. (4 oz.) buttermilk

1 c. (7 oz.) sugar

3/4 c. (6 oz.) butter

1/2 t. baking soda

1 T. light corn syrup

1 t. vanilla

Get out a heavy 2-quart saucepan and butter the sides. Now put the buttermilk, sugar, butter, baking soda, and corn syrup in that pan. Set it over medium-low heat and stir it occasionally with a wooden spoon (brushing off any crystals that form with a wet brush). When it comes to a boil, turn down the heat to low, put in your candy thermometer, and be prepared to be very patient, stirring the mixture occasionally. The mixture will first foam up a lot but will then settle down. Keep waiting and stirring occasionally until the thermometer reaches 238 (after 220, it will turn brown; just keep stirring and be patient). While you're waiting, get out a small to medium-sized bowl, a larger bowl filled with ice and water, and a hand mixer.

As soon as the mixture reaches 238, pour it into the smaller bowl and add the vanilla. Put the bowl inside the larger bowl filled with ice and water and use the hand mixer to beat the mixture at high speed for several minutes until it gets thicker and lighter in color. For me this just took a minute, but my frosting was also overcooked.

Very slowly and evenly pour the icing over the cake--don't let it run off the sides of the cake and onto the plate. Enjoy with perhaps a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Lattice-Topped Brownies

2011-07-13T12:27:00.000+02:00

There's a lot of Potter-mania going on around our place these days. The last movie comes out today, but in the lead-up, of course, the girls and their friends had to watch all seven preceding movies to get in the mood. Julia had a Potter party yesterday with some of her friends--it started here but then moved elsewhere when we had dinner guests arrive.

And of course, whenever there are teenagers in the house, I immediately think, "Great! I can bake something, and they'll eat it!" Thus the Lattice-Topped Brownies.

These were fun to make and easy to eat. Maida warns that "they are not quick and easy," and they certainly do take more time than, say, her All-American brownies.

But they're not a huge project either. It's not like there's marzipan carrots or Swiss buttercream involved, after all. I cheated a bit on cooling times, and these were done within an hour of when I started.

And the end result is totally worth the bit of extra work. You have the buttery crispness of the shortbread playing off against the gooey brownies. And then there's the extra chocolate layer, and the walnuts...

Have I mentioned that this is the last brownie recipe in the book? I'm very sad about that. Maida is the queen of brownies. But I know that there's plenty of chocolate ahead, so I'm not too worried.

Here's the recipe. Make it when you're up for a bit of a project with a fabulous result.

Lattice-Topped Brownies

1-1/2 c. (6 oz.) + 2 T. (0.5 oz.) sifted flour (you'll use these at different times)

2/3 c. (4.6 oz.) sugar

Pinch salt

10 T. (5 oz.) cold butter

1 egg yolk

3 oz. semisweet chocolate, chopped or broken into fairly small pieces

Heat the oven to 400. Line an 8-inch square pan with aluminum foil. Put a bit of butter in it and put the pan in the preheating oven for a minute. Take it out and brush the foil with the butter.

Put the 1-1/2 c. flour, sugar, and salt in a food processor and pulse to mix. Cut the butter into slices or cubes and add to the workbowl. Process until the mixture starts to hold together--this will probably take longer than you expect. Take half the mixture out and knead a bit until it really holds together. Put the dough between sheets of waxed paper and do your best to roll it into an 8-inch square. Mine was not perfect and it didn't matter. Line the foil-lined pan with this dough--make it fit as best you can--and bake for 13 minutes (mine was done after 9) or until beginning to turn brown.

While the bottom crust bakes, make the lattice. To the remaining dough in the food processor add the remaining 2 T. flour and the egg yolk; process until it holds together. Hopefully, you've saved the waxed paper from the bottom crust. Roll the lattice dough out between those two sheets into the best approximation of an 8-inch square you can do. Put the dough, still between the waxed paper sheets, on a plate or cookie sheet and put that in the refrigerator to wait.

As soon as the bottom crust comes out of the oven, sprinkle on the chopped chocolate. Wait a minute or two for it to melt, then use the back of a spoon to spread it evenly over the crust. Let that sit while you make the brownie batter.

1/2 c. (4 oz.) butter

2 oz. unsweetened chocolate

2 t. instant coffee powder

1/4 t. salt

1/2 t. vanilla

1 c. (7 oz.) sugar (I dialed this down to about 6.3 oz.)

2 large eggs

1/3 c. (1.3 oz.) sifted flour

1 c. (4 oz.) walnuts--Maida says to chop them, but I left them in largish pieces and liked them that way

If you still have the oven on, turn it down to 350. Or turn it back on again to 350. In a large microwave-safe bowl, melt together the butter and chocolate. This took me about 1 minute 30 seconds. Stir in the coffee, salt, and vanilla, then the sugar, then the eggs one at a time, then the flour, and then the walnuts. Set the mixture aside for a minute.

Get out your rolled-out dough and cut it with a knife or pizza cutter into 1/2-inch strips. You can use a ruler like Maida or you can be lame like me and do it "by guess and by golly".

Now pour the brownie batter over the chocolate-covered shortbread. Lay half of the lattice strips over the brownies, about 1/2 inch apart, going one way, and then lay the other half going the other way. You don't have to weave these, just lay them perpendicular to each other. It will look pretty good even if you're lame like me.

Put the cake in the oven ("on a high rack") and bake for 35-40 minutes (mine were done at about 25 minutes) or until the lattice strips are golden and a toothpick comes out barely dry (don't stick it down too far; the chocolate layer in the middle might fool you into thinking your brownies aren't done). Let cool completely in the pan. Then unwrap from the foil and cut the brownies into "16 outrageous monsters or 32 more respectable bars". I did the latter. Enjoy these with a friend or two.

Chocolate Mousse Pie

2011-07-13T11:45:00.000+02:00

In preparation for vacation, I have been powering through some Maida Heatter recipes, and we seem to be eating our fair share of yummy stuff. This week I've already made this pie and the last (sniff!) brownie on the rotation, and I have everything ready to go to make a soufflé. Apparently I've gone over the edge.

But let's talk about this pie. This one is kind of a first for me, since I almost never make the same thing twice. I have notes in my book that I have made this pie before, probably in college. Chocolate mousse pie was huge in the 80s. And Natalie made this pie for Thanksgiving dinner a couple of years ago, but we never got around to writing about it. So I felt, er, compelled to make this again, just so I could have pictures.

But since this is, after all, chocolate mousse pie, I decided that I should be reasonable and make just a half recipe. And the portions in that recipe seem so much more reasonable: 3 ounces of chocolate, 1 egg, half a cup of cream...OK, chocolate mousse is never reasonable. But it's good, especially with a crunchy crumb crust. And boozy whipped cream.

Let's just say that there were five of us (Julia's friend Alice, who has become a die-hard "Marie K. Hardy" (Maida Heatter) fan, was over) and that this reasonably sized pie disappeared in an unreasonably short span of time.

Here's the recipe. Make half a recipe or make the whole recipe, but make it. And remember to make it the day before you want to eat it!

Chocolate Mousse Pie

1-1/2 c. (6 oz.) chocolate wafer or Oreo crumbs

1 t. instant coffee powder

6 T. (3 oz.) melted butter

Heat the oven to 375. Line a 9-inch pie plate with aluminum foil. Mix together the cookie crumbs, coffee, and butter. Dump into the pie plate and use a measuring cup or your knuckles to press the crumbs on the bottom and part way up the sides of the pie plate. Bake for 10 minutes. Cool, then freeze for at least an hour until completely firm. Take the crust out by the foil, peel off the foil, and then return the crust to the pan. You can now store the crust in the refrigerator or freezer while you make the filling (or until you're ready to use it).

6 oz. good semisweet chocolate (it's the main flavor here--quality matters)

3 large eggs, 2 of which are separated (if you want to halve the recipe, I think one egg is enough--use a bit more cream to compensate if you like)

3 T. (1.5 oz.) dark rum

1 c. (8 oz.) cream

Break up the chocolate and melt it your favorite way--one minute in the microwave does it for me. Let cool a bit. In a large bowl, whisk together the one whole egg and the two egg yolks. In a medium bowl, beat the egg whites until they hold a firm shape. Now whisk the chocolate and the rum into the egg yolk mixture. Pour the beaten egg whites on top of that mixture (ideally to one side) but don't mix it yet. In the same bowl you beat the egg whites in, whip the cream, also until firm but not too stiff. Pour the whipped cream in next to the egg whites on top of the chocolate. Now carefully fold that all together. (This technique is not Maida-approved, but it worked well for me and saved me a lot of dishes.) Pour the mousse over the crust and let it chill overnight. When you're ready to eat some chocolate pie, you'll first want to whip some cream:

1-1/2 c. (12 oz.) whipping cream

3 T. (0.75 oz.) powdered sugar

2 T. (1 oz.) rum

1/2 t. vanilla

Grated or shaved chocolate

Pour the whipping cream, sugar, rum, and vanilla into a chilled bowl and whip it with chilled beaters until firm but not too stiff. Get the pie out of the refrigerator and top it with the cream. You can make it flat or swirly, however you'd like. Top with the shaved chocolate and serve. Enjoy the moment.

Blueberry Cream Cheese Pie

2011-07-11T18:15:00.000+02:00

We've been traveling a lot lately, which would explain the dearth of posts. It's not always easy to get into a kitchen and bake when you're in a vacation rental, or even in someone else's house. Still, I managed to get in one dessert in Livermore before we flew to Hawaii.

We had friends and relatives over for potluck involving grilled chicken and cheesy potatoes and salad, and this cream cheese pie--it's really cheesecake, despite the name--perhaps a less impressive cheesecake, but yummy nonetheless.

I had been to the farmer's market to pick up berries and other goodies the day before, and I wanted to use up as many berries as possible. Therefore, this became Blueberry Cream Cheese Pie with Blackberries and Raspberries. Also, I didn't want to buy currant jelly just for this purpose, so I used seedless marionberry jam, and it worked out great.

The pie was much appreciated and quickly devoured. Sami took a picture of "his" piece of pie, which he wasn't able to eat because he was down with a stomach bug.

I like this recipe a lot--though it needs a lot of down time for cooling and chilling, the actual preparation is really easy, and the results are spectacular.

Here's the recipe. Make it now, while berries are still in season.

Blueberry Cream Cheese Pie

1-1/4 c. (5 oz.) graham cracker crumbs (this turns out to be 1 package of crackers)

1 T. sugar

1 t. cinnamon

1/2 t. nutmeg

1/2 t. ginger

Pinch allspice

6 T. (3 oz.) butter, melted

(alternatively: 1 pkg. zwieback

1/4 c. (1 oz.) powdered sugar

6 T (3 oz.) butter)

12 oz. cream cheese, room temperature

1 t. vanilla

1/2 c. (3.5 oz.) sugar

1/3 c. (2.7 oz.) cream, sour cream, or crème fraîche

2 large eggs

Heat the oven to 350. Beat the cream cheese until smooth. Add the vanilla and sugar and again beat until smooth. Add the cream and then the eggs, one at a time, beating just until smooth but not going for fluffy/airy. Pour the filling in the crust and bake 25 minutes. Let cool to room temperature and then chill at least an hour.

3 cups (12 oz.) fresh blueberries (and/or other berries), washed and picked over (and dry)

About 1/2 c. (5 oz.) red currant (or other red fruit) jelly

Put the jelly in a microwave-safe cup and zap it for about a minute: it should come to a full boil. Immediately brush a thin layer on top of the cheese filling. Put the rest in a large bowl to cool and thicken a bit. When the jelly has begun to set a bit, add the blueberries and fold together carefully until the berries are coated. Spread the berries over the pie. If the jelly doesn't cover the pie between the berries, melt some more and coat the pie. Then chill at least a few hours or overnight.

Surprise Cakes

2011-07-10T13:33:00.000+02:00

This recipe was third in a series of a baking frenzy. I'm sure my family was wondering what was wrong with me (though they didn't complain), but I had good reasons for all the baking. The reason to make this recipe was a tea party at my aunt's house.

My aunt is in her 80s but doesn't look a day over 70 and is the most charming and gracious person you'll meet. We were lucky enough to get to see her and my three cousins and their children at an impromptu tea party that turned into a cocktail party out on her patio. Her house was once my grandmother's house, so we all share a lot of great memories of family gatherings there.

Maida says that these little cakes are perfect for a tea party, and she's right. They're kind of fussy to make, with a crust and a filling and a topping, but they're not difficult.

I had fun with the fillings: I tried two different kinds of jam, and also tried candied ginger and chocolate chips. I think everyone at the party enjoyed the surprise of not knowing what filling they'd get, and since these are small, many were sampled.

There were scones and cake and finger sandwiches and many delicious things at the tea party, but these cakes were the first to completely disappear. My cousin's husband, Bob, was especially fond of them: "What's in these? Butter, right?" That should not be a surprise.

Here's the recipe. Make them for a tea party or just if you want to create something surprisingly delicious.

Surprise Cakes

3/4 c. (3.75 oz.) unsifted flour (I used some whole wheat)

Pinch salt

1/2 t. baking powder

1/4 c. (1.75 oz.) sugar

1/4 c. (2 oz.) cold butter

1 egg yolk

1/4 t. vanilla

2 T. (1 oz.) milk

[Note: I cut the ingredients here in half because I had more than twice the dough I needed.] In a medium to large mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, baking powder, and sugar. Cut in the butter until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs, then stir in the egg, vanilla, and milk. Mix just until the mixture holds together. Wrap in plastic or waxed paper and refrigerate at least an hour.

When you're ready to bake, heat the oven to 425 and butter 24 mini-muffin cups. Cut the dough in half and work with one half at a time, letting the other half wait in the fridge. Roll out the dough to 1/3 inch thick, then cut into 1-1/2 inch circles. You should get 12 circles from each half of the dough. Place a round of dough in each muffin cup, pressing to make a little cup. Maida says not to worry if they're not perfect. (Because she said this, I just rolled the dough into little balls and pressed them into the cups. Worked like a charm.) Now you can fill them:

1/3 c. (about 3.5 oz.) jam or jelly of your choice--Maida recommends currant jelly or orange marmalade; I used blackberry and apricot jam, candied ginger, and chocolate chips

24 walnut halves or a few spoons of finely chopped walnuts

On each round of dough place about 1/2 t. of jam/jelly and a sprinkling of walnuts or a walnut half. Let that wait while you make the top layer.

1/4 c. (2 oz.) butter, room temperature

1/2 t. baking powder

1/4 c. (1.75 oz.) sugar

Scant 1/4 t. almond extract

1 large egg

2 T. (0.6 oz.) flour

In the small bowl of an electric mixer (a hand mixer is probably fine for this), beat the butter and baking powder until fluffy. Add the sugar and almond extract and beat another minute. Add the egg and beat for another minute. Add the flour and beat at low speed until smooth.

Put a teaspoonful of batter in each muffin cup. Be conservative--Maida says there's just enough for all 24 cakes.

Bake the pans side by side for 13-15 minutes. They will be golden with darker rims and the tops will spring back when pressed.

Cool in the pans for 5 minutes, then carefully unmold the cakes onto a rack and turn them right side up.

Mocha Chip Chiffon Cake

2011-07-08T17:38:00.001+02:00

Things around here are definitely starting to have a winding-down, vacation-is-coming feel to them. Sure, Sami has to go to work every day and I have editing clients with no understanding of academic integrity, but the girls are out of school, the weather is warm at least one out of two days, and I seem to have time to bake.

This cake followed directly on the heels of the ginger cakes, since they disappeared quickly and without a trace. I've had my eye on this recipe for a while--I love the light richness of chiffon cakes, and I love the combination of chocolate and coffee.

So I chopped some chocolate and separated a bunch of eggs and got right to work. Besides the egg separation, chiffon cakes are a breeze. You just mix egg yolks and oil with the dry ingredients...

...until you have a thick, smooth batter, and then you whip the egg whites and fold the whole mess together.

Note my not-very thorough folding together of whites and batter. It didn't seem to be a problem.

Then you hang the cake upside-down on a wine bottle, hoping to heck that it doesn't tip over (note the new kitchen counter!)

And you dig in! Most of this cake went to a graduation event at the girls' school--the parents put on a big soirée with a giant buffet, music, flowers, etc. The cake was not served at the event, but was there to help fuel all the many volunteers who decorated, cut up fruit, cleaned, hauled, etc. Apparently it was well appreciated--at least the container I sent it in came home empty.

But I got to eat a slice or two and definitely recommend this cake. The coffee flavor isn't as pronounced as I would have liked (I might up the instant coffee a bit), but the texture is divine--like angel food but with a bit more oomph. It does go stale kind of fast, so I recommend serving it soon after making it, or at least keeping it well wrapped.

Here's the recipe. Make it when you have time and many mouths to feed.

Mocha Chip Chiffon Cake

2 c. (8 oz.) sifted flour

1-3/4 c. (12.25 oz.) sugar

1 T. powdered instant espresso (maybe a bit more)

1 T. baking powder

1/2 t. salt

1/2 c. (4 oz.) neutral oil (I used grape seed oil; canola is another good choice)

7 large eggs, separated

1/2 c. (4 oz.) Kahlúa or other coffee liqueur

1/4 c. (2 oz.) cold water

2 t. vanilla

3 oz. semisweet chocolate, cut up into small (1/4-inch) pieces (minichips might work here)

1/2 t. cream of tartar

Heat the oven to 325. Get out an angelfood cake pan--that would be a tube pan with a removable bottom, not nonstick. (If you don't have one, you could see my post about improvising one, although I don't necessarily recommend it...)

You'll need two large mixing bowls: one for your mixer and another one. Put the egg whites in the bowl for the mixer and set aside. Into the other large bowl, sift (I don't normally sift, except for these kinds of cakes) the flour, 1-1/4 cups (8.75 oz.) sugar, coffee, baking powder, and salt. Make a well in these dry ingredients and pour into it, in this order, the oil, the egg yolks, the Kahlúa, the water, and the vanilla. Get out a whisk or rubber scraper and mix together the ingredients until smooth. Stir in the chocolate pieces.

Now it's time to deal with the egg whites: add the cream of tartar to them and beat with the whisk attachment until they get quite foamy. Keep the mixer going while you gradually add the remaining 1/2 cup sugar. You want to beat them until quite stiff--Maida says to beat them a minute longer after they become firm. I just got mine to a stiff peak and that seemed to work fine.

Now you need to fold the egg yolk mixture into the egg whites. Do it about a quarter at a time, folding with your biggest rubber scraper and trying not to be too thorough at each addition. When all is mixed, pour into the tube pan and bake for 1 hour 10 minutes (mine was done after 55 minutes) or until the top springs back when lightly pressed. The cake will rise a lot and will probably crack. As soon as the cake comes out of the oven, invert it onto a (preferably empty) bottle to cool completely. When it has cooled, use a long knife or spatula to cut around the sides. When you've freed the cake from the sides of the cake pan, you'll then need to cut it out of the bottom of the pan as well. There will probably be a lot of "cook's portion" left on the cake pan.

Slice the cake with a serrated knife and serve.