I don't even remember where I left off

I wish I had more time to bake -- or to blog about what I have baked. I have been very annoyed at my inability to get anything made. And even more annoyed at the fact that when I do get something made, I don't get time to write about it until I've forgotten every detail.

Since I last found a spare moment to write about what I've baked, I'm pretty sure I've made the following items: Bulls-Eye Cheesecake, Truffles, and Sour Cream Apple Tart. I think I even took pictures of the cheesecake, which are somewhere. I'm sure there are no photos of the truffles or tart.

I made the cheesecake weeks ago. So many weeks ago that I don't even remember when it was -- but it was sometime after we went camping at Agua Caliente. I clearly recall that when I bought Maida's book so many years ago, it was relatively easy to find a one-piece commercial cheesecake pan -- the kind she wants you to use for this recipe. I'm not sure what has changed since the 1980's, but it is IMPOSSIBLE to find a one-piece commercial cheesecake pan now. I searched for hours on-line for one and went to two different cookware stores. No luck. But I was able to find an 8-inch x 3-inch regular cake pan, and figured that was essentially the same thing.
The cheesecake was really fun to make, but I don't think I got the batter smooth enough. And I left out a very critical step of making the chocolate batter, which is to actually sift or strain the cocoa. I figured that with the small amount of cocoa I was using, I could just dump it in and mix it around and everything would be fine. That was an incorrect assumption. The cocoa just sat in little lumps in the cheesecake batter, taunting me for my laziness. I used a whisk to try to beat them in. I used a spoon to try to smash them into submission. And I'm pretty sure they were still lumped up in the batter.
I was disappointed by the lack of drama in the chocolate batter. I'm wondering if it was because of my unsifted cocoa, but the chocolate batter just wasn't as significantly different in color from the almond flavor batter to make it really stand out in a bulls-eye type manner. Despite the lack of strong contrast between the batters, I had so much fun pouring the batter out into rings that I ended up making 6 stripes of each rather than 4. It really is cool to watch the batters spread out into perfect circles.
I do remember that I was able to take the cat to the vet for a checkup and vaccinations and still get back before the timer went off for the cheesecake. When the timer did go off, the cheesecake was all high and dramatic looking -- and I'm pretty sure Cassandra took a picture of it at that moment. It was really very spectacular looking -- but not as a Bull's Eye Cheesecake. The contrast was even weaker after the cake was baked. After sitting for a little bit, the cake sunk back down into a far less dramatic pose. It just looked ordinary.
We didn't cut into the cheesecake until the following morning, because it needed to cool and refrigerate and such. And it is a good cheesecake. But not a great cheesecake. It had a very nice texture -- similar to a New York Cheesecake but not quite as heavy. But I thought the almond taste was a little strong in the white portion, and the chocolate taste a little weak in the dark-ish portion. Pete liked it though. Which is important, because he "doesn't like desserts." Except cheesecake. We ended up eating about half. Considering that the only members of the family who will even touch cheesecake are Pete, Maddy and I, I guess half is pretty good.

And with the best intentions of whipping out the easy truffles, brownies and apple tart so I could at least sort of catch up with Maria, Halloween reared its ugly head. I already have a busy schedule. I'm pretty sure I already posted how long my days are between work, working out, and extra-curricular driving. But beginning on October 1, a new dimension is added to my days -- the development and construction of Halloween costumes. I made the huge error, starting when Maddy was only a month old, of planning and constructing elaborate Halloween costumes. You want to be a Princess for Halloween -- I will buy 17 yards of satin and lace and ribbon and make a three-piece princess dress with cloak and petticoat. And even though these girls are 11, 15, and 17, they still want great Halloween costumes. That's fine because I love it when they look awesome on Halloween. It just adds to my stress.

Natalie's costume was the easiest -- she wanted to be Rex from Napolean Dynamite. This costume just required a bit of creative on-line shopping to procure the various components of the costume. Maddy's costume was also fairly easy after we figured out the concept -- she wanted to be a raven or a crow. Once the development process was completed, her costume also required the acquisition of a few items from various on-line and commercial retailers, as well as a little hot-glue here and there. But Cassandra wanted to be corn on the cob. There are no corn on the cob costumes. There aren't even good ideas for making corn on the cob costumes. This costume consumed my waking hours. How the heck was I going to pull this one off?

The corn-on-the-cob made it impossible for me to do ANY baking. Especially with everything else being thrown in front of my path. I got the costume done -- and I think it looked pretty amazing. And so Halloween day found me making the truffles.

My thought was that I could give them out to special trick-or-treaters. But the only special kids in the neighborhood decided not to trick-or treat this year. So I have a freezer full of truffles. These really are very tasty truffles -- smooth and creamy and rich and chocolatey with just a hint of rum. And they are super easy to make. I made them while on the telephone booking an appointment for our home security system to be installed. Maybe I can give some to the installer when he comes out. Otherwise, Maida said that they last forever in the freezer. That's nice. Anytime we just want something sweet -- there are truffles in the freezer.

Since I was on a roll, the day after Halloween I made the Sour Cream Apple Tart. As Maria said -- this is quite a production. Nothing is really difficult, but it is a lot of pieces to put together. I didn't seem to have any of the problems she noted on her post about the tart. The crust fit nicely into my 13-inch tart pan (2 inches bigger than called for in the recipe, but it's what I had). My Granny Smith apples, which I sliced, then peeled and cored (which is my favored way of getting all the peel off of apples), held up nicely during the sauteeing in butter and sugar. My pan was another story. I probably spent 20 minutes cleaning that stupid pan. The caramel came out like perfect caramel ice-cream sauce, and drizzled nicely over the apples. And maybe it's because I used a 13-inch pan, but my sour cream layer didn't even completely cover the apples.

Pete's opinion of this tart -- it's tart. He first said sour, then bitter, but decided on tart. Maddy agreed with him. Natalie and Cassandra are sour-cream despisers, so wouldn't even look at the tart. I guess I would agree with Pete and Maddy. It is a pretty tart tart. The crust is not very good. It holds up well to the filling, but it is relatively tasteless and cardboardy in texture. The caramel was not enough to sweeten the Granny Smith apples. And while the sour cream layer on my tart was not particularly thick, it just added to the tartness of the tart. Given how long it takes to construct this tart, the payoff was not worth it.

I'm not even going to look at how many recipes ahead Maria is because I know it's a lot. I was hoping to make Brownies for our Murder Mystery party last night -- but that didn't happen. Maybe this weekend. Maybe not. Time will tell.

Yummy Chocolate Gingersnaps

I love ginger desserts. Gingersnaps, gingerbread...you name it. One of my favorite cookies to buy is Carr's Ginger Lemon Cremes. Yum. And this weekend at Whole Foods I discovered ginger lemon gumdrops, which made my drive back home much happier. So I was delighted that this recipe came up. It's not a fussy recipe, though it involves three kinds of ginger. And the results are fabulous, I think.


Here are my dough balls, on my incredibly messy kitchen counter. Know what I love about this blog? It keeps me too busy to clean!

Here are the baked cookies. See how they spread out all nice and round and perfect? Love that!
The chocolate just kind of rounds out the ginger flavor but definitely doesn't overpower it. You should make these.

Here's the recipe:
Chocolate Gingersnaps

2 c. (8 oz.) sifted flour (I used half whole wheat pastry flour)
1/4 c. (.75 oz.) cocoa powder
1 oz. fresh ginger (Maida says that's a 2-inch by 1-inch piece), peeled and finely grated
6 oz. (1-1/2 sticks) butter, room temperature
1-1/2 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
1/2 t. ground ginger
1/2 t. cinnamon
1 scant c. (6.5 oz.) brown sugar
1 egg
1/4 c. (2.8 oz.) molasses (I used cane syrup, because I live in the South)
1/4 c. (1 oz.) finely diced candied ginger

Heat the oven to 350; line cookie sheets with parchment. Also get out a jelly roll pan and line it with waxed paper. Sift together the cocoa and flour. You can grate the fresh ginger right into the mixing bowl; add the butter, baking soda, salt, ginger, and cinnamon, and beat that until fluffy. Gradually add the brown sugar and beat that 2-3 more minutes. Add the egg and molasses and give it another minute or two. On low heat, beat in the flour. When it's incorporated, stir in the candied ginger. Make sure you taste the dough--it's divine.
Now get your paper-lined jelly roll pan and drop teaspoonfuls of dough on it. They can sit right next to each other for now. Maida says you'll get 50 spoonsful; I got about 30. Guess my spoons are bigger than hers; I don't think I ate *that* much cookie dough. Anyway, freeze those for about 10-15 minutes or until they've firmed up a bit. (I bet that you could keep some of the mounds in the freezer if you don't want to bake them all right away--just put them in a Ziploc and don't forget about them. Love having ready-made cookie dough in the freezer!) OK, roll the dough mounds into nice round balls and put them on the cookie sheets, 12 to a sheet. Bake them, two sheets at a time, for about 14 minutes. Let them cool on a rack and store airtight. They do get pretty soft if you don't keep them from humidity, but they're still delicious. Share them or hide them from yourself quickly.

Chocolate Pudding FAIL

I love chocolate pudding. I really do. I especially love German chocolate pudding. That is, the mix that you cook.

Yes, sadly enough, this is my favorite kind of chocolate pudding. I looked at the list of ingredients, and it's pretty much just cocoa, chocolate, carageenen, and some other flavorings and stabilizers. Not all-natural, but not that scary, either. You add your own sugar and milk (and I usually throw in a square or two of chocolate) and cook it up. I made this several times in the camper this summer, and it was delightful--chocolatey without making you feel like your arteries needed a Roto-rooter.
Now Maida's pudding, on the other hand, involves two kinds of chocolate, cocoa, cornstarch *and* eggs/yolks for thickening, and butter. It's pudding that's moving into pots de crème territory. And for me (and for Claire), that's just a bit too much.
As I write this, I know that when Alicia finally makes this recipe in December or something, she will swoon over it and tell us it's the best pudding ever. Whatever--I'll probably still have some sitting in my fridge. It's been two days now and I haven't been able to eat my way through one custard cup of it.
I'm equally sure that Alicia will tell me that I did something wrong to get the results I got. And I will admit to two issues--well, maybe two and a half. The first was that the semisweet chocolate I used was too strong--that 72% Trader Joe's bar that will not be used up. I upped the sugar a bit to compensate, but it really wasn't enough. The half problem may be that I didn't chop the chocolate well enough before I put it with the milk. The chocolate never really incorporated into the milk, and I now have tiny chocolate chips in my pudding.
The next problem was that after I had done the cornstarch and the eggs and all, I forgot about adding the butter and vanilla until after I'd already poured the pudding into cups.

Never fear--I just put little lumps of butter and a splash of vanilla into each cup and stirred it until melted. Except that there's now congealed butter on the side of each cup. Yuck.

Here's Claire's pudding, with powdered sugar on top. Still, she took two bites and put it back. "Too rich" was her verdict. Now Claire is not a big lover of rich desserts--she'd rather eat ice cream. But I agree with her. The awesome homemade applesauce I also made yesterday--that's something we both can't get enough of!

But if you love super-rich pudding and doing lots of dishes, here's a recipe for you:

American Chocolate Pudding

1 egg plus 2 egg yolks
Pinch salt
2 T. cornstarch
3 T. cocoa
4 oz. (1/2 c. + 1 T.) sugar
2 oz. unsweetened chocolate, chopped
3 oz. semisweet chocolate (I would stay at 60% cacao or under for this)
2-1/4 c. milk (I used whole; 2% would probably also be fine)
2 T. butter, cut into pieces
1 t. vanilla
(1 T. rum--this might be a nice addition to cut the sweetness. I forgot about this in my flustered state of mind)

Get out a saucepan, two medium sized mixing bowls, and an assortment of custard cups or whatever you're going to serve this in. I used 5 Pyrex custard cups because that's what was clean and available. Put your eggs in one mixing bowl and beat them to mix. Strain the cornstarch, cocoa, salt, and 2 oz. sugar into another mixing bowl, and whisk that together with 1/4 c. milk. Put the chocolate, 2 c. milk, and 2 oz. sugar in the saucepan, and heat to a boil over medium heat, whisking constantly. Maida says the flecks of chocolate will disappear as the milk heats, but this never happened to me. Maybe I was too afraid of the chocolate burning. When the milk has reached this stage, pour some of it into the cornstarch mixture, whisking as you pour. Then pour the cornstarch mixture back into the saucepan. Place back over medium heat and bring to a low boil, stirring and scraping with a heatproof rubber spatula. Turn down the heat and let it cook for about 2 minutes. Then get your bowl with the eggs and basically do the same thing with that: add some hot chocolate mixture to the eggs, whisk that, then add back to the saucepan and cook over low heat for another couple of minutes, stirring and scraping and being sure to keep it from boiling and scrambling. Now take it off the heat and ADD THE BUTTER AND VANILLA (and rum, if you want) before spooning it into the cups. Cover each cup with plastic or waxed paper, to avoid skin, and refrigerate. (There seems to be a movement for skin on pudding. David Lebovitz says there's no point in making pudding if you don't like the skin. Whatever.) After you've returned from a 2-hour hike, you may be ready for this.
Or see if you can find some nice Dr. Oetker pudding mix.

Cherry Cobbler--imperfect but popular

Somehow we've been having trouble getting it together to have people over lately. Lots of travel, lots of "stuff" going on, other people's schedules...But we finally had a nice group over on Saturday, so I made the Washington State Cherry Cobbler.
I always give myself way too many tasks and way too little time whenever there's a dinner party involved. Even the other night, we were just having a barbecue, but I had to fix two salads and fancy fixin's for the burgers and clean the house and oops! here come a couple of little editing projects that I could probably do on the side...well, I didn't have a lot of time to throw together this cobbler.
Fortunately, it's really quite easy, especially the half-assed way I put it together. It calls for canned cherries since, as Maida correctly points out, the cherry season in the South lasts for about two days. So no cherry pitting--hooray for that. I wonder if frozen cherries might have been better, though. The syrup from the cherries is thickened with flour on the stove to make the cobbler base, which was a bit fussy but had the advantage of cooking the biscuits as soon as they hit the hot filling.

Here's my overexposed cherry mixture in the pan.
The biscuit dough comes together in about a minute in the food processor. I had guests coming in about 20 minutes at this point, and there was no way I was going to roll out and cut the dough, even into squares. So I went for the drop biscuit approach. This is what that looked like.

Of course after I had sprinkled the biscuits with some raw sugar and put the whole thing in the oven I saw the part about glazing the biscuits. I was not about to pull the dish out of the oven for that, and I think they looked and tasted just fine.
In fact, the guests were delighted. One asked me how I'd gotten the biscuits to be so crumbly, and one didn't say much, just abruptly pulled the dish toward herself to ensure that she would get seconds. Success! Now I just need to find more dinner guests, with that big banana cake coming up...

Here's what I made:
Washington State Cherry Cobbler

2 cans dark sweet cherries in syrup
Orange juice or other liquid, if necessary
1/4 c. (1.25 oz.) flour
1/8 t. salt
1/4 t. allspice
1/4 t. cinnamon
1/3 c. (2 oz.) sugar
1 T. butter
2 T. lemon juice

Get out a baking dish that holds at least 2 quarts. You don't have to butter it, but I sprayed mine. Drain the cherries over a measuring cup. If you don't get 2 cups of liquid, top it off with orange juice (that's what I did--I needed about 1/2 cup more). Put the flour, salt, allspice, cinnamon, and sugar in a saucepan. Slowly whisk in the cherry juice--try to get out the lumps as you go. I actually ended capturing some lumps in a strainer and straining them back out again, but that's just who I am. Put that over medium heat and cook, stirring with the whisk or a heatproof rubber scraper, until the mixture comes to a gentle boil. Let it cook, stirring, another minute, then take it off the heat. Add the butter and lemon juice (maybe a drop or two of almond extract would be good as well) and stir until melted. Then add the cherries and pour that into your baking dish. Heat the oven to 450 and get out your food processor: it's time to make biscuits.

1 cup minus 2 T. (4.4 oz.) flour (I used half whole wheat pastry flour)
1 t. baking powder
1/4 t. salt
1/4 t. baking soda
2 t. sugar
2-1/2 T. butter, cold and cut into pieces
6 T. (3 oz.) buttermilk
1 T. raw sugar (or regular, if you don't have raw sugar)

Put all the dry ingredients in the food processor and whiz for a couple of seconds until blended. Then add the butter and pulse a few times until the butter is pea sized. Then pour in the buttermilk and pulse until it's just come together. Scoop out the dough with a teaspoon and put little balls of dough all over the cherry mixture. Sprinkle them with the sugar.
Put the dish in the oven and bake it for 15 minutes, or until the biscuits are nice and brown and the cherries are bubbly. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream.
This just barely served 7, which is pretty good since it's only supposed to serve 6.

Eating an elephant

One of the quirky features of our local public radio station is a call-in show called the Gestalt Gardener. The host, a good-old-boy hippie, cajoles listeners to "just chill" about their gardens. Do you have spots on your roses? Take off your glasses! And when someone calls moaning about all the kudzu or mimosas or other weeds in their garden, he tells them, "Do you know how to eat an elephant? Just take one bite at a time."
So why do I bring this up? Well, mostly because Maida prefaces her recipe for Peanut Banana Bread with a story about how she developed a recipe for an elephant meat omelet (involving peanuts and bananas) as a publicity stunt during a GOP convention. Well, double yuck to that. Fortunately, the banana bread is yummy.
I also thought of it because this blog and keeping up with it can seem like eating an elephant. Except one with a lot of chocolate frosting. I don't have Alicia's insane schedule and still it seems like a lot to do sometimes. But at least each bite of this elephant have been delicious so far (except for that nasty chocolate cake).
I can't find my pictures of my banana bread, so you'll have to take my word for it. I made this for breakfast Saturday morning, and I first had to go to the store for peanuts, so I really didn't feel like waiting around for 1 hour and 15 minutes for a loaf to bake. Therefore, I made six mini-loafs and six muffins, and that worked out perfectly. The muffins still took a good half hour, though.
This is a nice banana bread--the peanuts give it an extra zing. I bet it would be really good with some coconut added. And Alicia will be happy to note that the raisins don't have much of a pronounced presence. So don't be afraid to take another bite...

Here's the recipe I made.
Banana Peanut Bread

1 stick (4 oz.) butter, room temp
1 t. baking powder
1 t. baking soda
1 scant cup (6.5 oz.) brown sugar
1/2 t. vanilla
3 large eggs
3 large ripe bananas (12 oz. peeled), mashed
1/3 c. (2.6 oz.) sour cream (I used light)
1-3/4 c. (7 oz.) sifted flour (I used half whole wheat)
1 c. (4 oz.) salted peanuts, coarse chopped (honey roasted might be nice here)
(1/2 c.[1.4 oz.] coconut)
1/2 c. (2.5 oz.) golden raisins

Heat the oven to 325. Grease 6 mini loaf pans and put papers in six muffin cups (you could probably get about 18 muffins at least out of this instead). Beat together the butter, baking powder, and baking soda until it's light and creamy, then gradually beat in the brown sugar and beat that for 1-2 minutes. Add the vanilla and then the eggs, one at a time, scraping the bowl as needed. Then add the bananas and sour cream and beat until just barely mixed. Add the flour and mix that in until it's just incorporated. Finally mix in the peanuts and raisins (and coconut, if you want). Scoop the batter into the pans you have prepared and bake the muffins about 25-30 minutes; the loaves will take 40-45 minutes. Let cool on a rack for about 5 minutes before popping out and enjoying with a nice cup of tea.

EZ Truffles

This is such an easy recipe--little work, big impact. It's basically just ganache, which is chocolate melted with cream and/or butter. This recipe has both. It was the perfect recipe for me to make this weekend, since between jetlag and a trip to Tuscaloosa and the beginning of a new session at the ELI, I had very little time to spend in the kitchen. I think it involved about 20 minutes of hands-on time, with lots of wait time in between. Perfect.


This Valrhona chocolate had been waiting patiently in my stash for a chance to really shine in a recipe. Since it wasn't enough for even a quarter recipe, though, I augmented with the Trader Joe's. It made for a very bittersweet truffle. Claire said it needed sugar.

Here's the chocolate, melted down with cream and butter to luscious smoothness. That sat in the fridge for a good 36 hours.

Here are some unlovely (but delicious) mounds of truffle. They went back in the freezer for a couple of hours.

Here are the finished truffles, rolled in ground toasted hazelnuts and placed in cute candy cups. The recipe has you roll them in unsweetened cocoa powder but offers this as an alternative. I think that with the very bittersweet chocolate I chose, cocoa powder would have taken them over the edge into bitterness territory. Besides, chocolate and hazelnut--what's not to like? Maybe subbing Frangelico for the rum would make the combination even more pronounced. Either way, it's lovely to have an elegant little snack stashed in the freezer. And it's a good thing that I only made a quarter recipe!

Here's the recipe I made. It made about a dozen little truffles.

Joan and Judy's Truffles

3.5 oz. semisweet or bittersweet chocolate
4-1/2 T. cream
1-1/2 T. butter, room temperature, cut into about 6 pieces
1 T. dark rum (or any other liquor you like)
About 1/4 c. (1 oz.) hazelnuts, toasted and ground

Microwave the chocolate and cream about 45 seconds (stop and stir after 30 seconds) and stir until smooth and melted. Stir in the butter until it's melted, then add the rum. Refrigerate or freeze this until firm (or until you're ready to make truffles). Get out a baking sheet and line it with waxed paper, then spoon out mounds of chocolate about the size you would like to eat. Put that back in the freezer for a while. You can toast (don't forget to rub off the skins) and grind the hazelnuts while you're waiting for the truffles to freeze. Get some candy cups ready. Then take the truffle mounds out of the freezer. Roll each one into a ball, and then roll the ball in hazelnuts and nestle the truffles in the candy cups. Pack them into a Tupperware and put them back in the freezer. Get them out to serve with coffee after dinner or any time you need chocolate therapy.

Barron's Brownies: Baking brownies in Paris

OK, the pressure was on. I was invited to a cocktail party for other American parents of 8th graders attending the international school near Paris that Julia's going to. There are three American classes, and the parents in Julia's class were asked to bring desserts. So I decided that Barron's Brownies would be perfect.
The Barron's part is especially relevant here, since many of the parents there work for posh multinational firms, and I felt that I needed to provide something especially American but also special and delicious. These brownies really did the job.
To ensure success, I brought supplies from home:


It was kind of a mistake to buy/bring the Sam's Club vanilla, but it was cheap and came in a plastic bottle. I put a vanilla bean in the bottle before I left, so hopefully when I get back to France, it'll smell better.

This is my mother-in-law's oven. We (the oven and I) don't get along. You may be able to notice that there are no temperatures on the dials--just cryptic numbers and settings. The booklet that comes with the oven has vague directions like "if you're making cake, set it on regular at 4-6." Whatever. I went for 5 and it seems to have worked, though the brownies were done about 10 minutes early. Next time I'm bringing an oven thermometer.

Look at those lovely giant lumps of French butter melting with the chocolate. I got all traditional: I melted the chocolate on the stove and buttered the pan with real butter.


Here are the blurry brownies, with teapot. I chilled and cut them into small squares so as to be more elegant, and I kept them chilled until the party. They were fudgy and chocolatey and delicious, and the walnuts really added a lot to the overall experience, I found--without that crunchy, slightly bitter edge, they might have been too sweet.
The brownies went over well--I noticed the hostess put aside a plate for herself, which is always a good sign. I probably didn't need to double the recipe as I did, but I think a lot of people enjoyed that sweet taste of home.

Here's what I made:
Barron's Brownies

4 oz. unsweetened chocolate
8 oz. semisweet chocolate
8 oz. (2 sticks) unsalted butter
1/2 t. salt
1 t. vanilla
Scant 2 c. (12 oz.) sugar
4 eggs

1/4 c. (1 oz.) sifted flour
8 oz. (2 c.) walnuts--halves and/or large pieces

Heat the oven to 325 and butter/spray a 9x13 inch pan. Melt the chocolate and butter together, either in a pan over medium-low heat or in the microwave (remember to stir every 30 seconds). Then add the salt, vanilla, and sugar and mix that well with a wooden spoon. Add the eggs one at a time, making sure each is beaten in well. Then add the flour--Maida says to beat it for about a minute or until it is "smooth and shiny and comes away from the side of the pan." I just beat it until incorporated. Then add the nuts. Turn the mixture into the prepared pan and bake for 40 minutes, though I highly recommend checking on them after 35 minutes. A toothpick should come out clean. Cool the brownies completely at room temperature, then freeze or chill them until cold. Cut the brownies into quarters, and then you should be able to cut 12 small squares from each quarter. Pack into a Tupperware and get ready to party!