TWD Savory Corn & Pepper Muffins

Rebecca of Ezra Pound Cake picked this week's TWD recipe; Savory Corn and Pepper Muffins. Rebecca's blog is one that I often look at, so I was happy to see it was her turn to choose a recipe. Extra awesome is the fact that we're not baking something sweet this week (at least not in the typical sense).

This recipe could not have been easier to put together. Simply put your dry ingredients in a bowl mix in your wet and then add the chunky stuff.


I like many other TWD'rs, made chili alongside the cornbread. While making the chili I got a little overzealous and I accidently put all my chopped red pepper into the pot! Good news is that I checked the recipe before I added the whole hot pepper to the chili as well. Though I live in a big city (Boston), I couldn't find a jalapeño to save my life (okay! I only went to one store, but it was a big one!). I ended up with this:


It looks like a jalapeño, but it's red. Regardless of my peppers heritage; it was spicy and delicious in the cornbread.

I can't believe how good this recipe was. There are so many BAD cornbread recipes out there; I'm happy to add this recipe to my good cornbread file! I baked the muffins in mini muffin pans for 11 minutes (5 minutes; rotate; 6 minutes) at 400 degrees.


They came out perfect. So perfect in fact, that I'm sure we ended up eating more cornbread for dinner than chili. Also, as a side note, these seem to keep pretty well. In a moment of desperation, I ate one that was two days old, and you know what? I ate another, it was still that good.

TWD French Pear Tart

Dorie Greenspan picked this week's TWD recipe. For those of you who don't know; Dorie wrote the book Baking: From my home to yours and has written several other great cookbooks both on her own and with the likes of Pierre Hermé and Julia Child.

The recipe for the French pear tart was very simple. Dorie actually okayed using canned pears (gasp!) in this recipe. I chose the alternate option which was poaching pears. No offense to the canned pear industry, but as a pastry chef I prefer to poach my own. My Bartlett pears took about 25 minutes to poach.



For the base I made the sweet tart dough with pistachios. I decided to cut back on a tablespoon of butter because I thought the fat in the pistachios would make up for it. The rusting dough was a little crumbly. it wasn’t too difficult to deal with though because I have a lot of experience putting nut doughs in tart shells from my time at Bouchon. I simply took the dough and pressed it into the pan.



My time was limited, so I didn’t freeze the dough as Dorie suggests. Luckily it didn’t shrink while it was blind baking, and it came out lovely.



I bought a food processor for myself as a Christmas gift in December, and I’m so happy I did. Making the almond cream was so easy (as was the tart dough). Instead of grinding my own almonds, I used the almond meal you can buy at Trader Joe’s. It’s a nice time saver, and it has worked well in everything I’ve used it in so far.

The tart was easy to assemble. My pears were a bit on the huge size, so I had to use less of them. Even cutting back on the amount of pear, their width was so big I had to squeeze them in into the tart shell.



Luckily, after baking the tight fit wasn’t noticeable. The almond cream neatly puffed up around the pears.




This tart is certainly a crowd pleaser. It looks beautiful, and many people love the almond cream/pear combination. It’s très French. Joe loved this tart, however I found it to be way too sweet for my liking. While eating it, I realized I would like it much more if I had a strong cup of tea to counteract the sweetness. Since Joe liked this tart so much, I’m sure I’ll be making it again. Next time, I’ll be sure to try my piece earlier in the day with a strong cup of black tea.

09 Already!

Amazing. It seems like we just moved to Boston yesterday, but we've been here a full year. This year ended similarly to last; with a move. Joe and I have the worst timing, and once again we found ourselves moving between Christmas and New Years. We decided to go in with a bang this year and throw a dinner party two weeks after the move. It was hectic, but worth it. We had a great evening.

Dinner began with help from our friends. Cheese, crackers, potato latkes and 3 types of Stromboli started the evening. Next we had French onion soup paired with Ayinger Jahrhundert beer.





The main course was braised shortribs served on top of baked polenta. For dessert I found a really interesting recipe in Baking with Julia for a creme bruleed chocolate bundt cake. Essentially you make a chocolate chiffon cake and a custard. Right before serving you fill the middle of the cake with fruit mascerated in sugar and alcohol. The recipe suggested fresh raspberries with chambord, but I used fresh cherries and pomegranate seeds with a little vanilla sugar. Once you fill the middle of the cake with fruit, you pour the custard over the cake, sprinkle sugar all over it; and then brulee.

No blogging for two weeks

I'm sending my computer back to HP to be fixed. Hopefully I will be blogging again in two weeks.

Thanks for checking in.

Michelle

TWD Rugelach

Rugelach is a cookie that took me by surprise a few years ago. It was December 2005, and I was working as a manager at a busy bakery in St. Helena, CA. The pastry chef started baking a ton of new cookies for the holiday, and one in particular caught my attention. It was flaky, cut into a jelly roll shape and had dried apricots; it was rugelach. The cookie looked beautiful, so I asked about it; only to be disappointed to hear it contained walnuts. I have never enjoyed nuts in my baked goods, so I wrote them off until one day when I smelled them right out of the oven. The smell was intoxicating and I decided to give them a go. Well, wouldn't you know it; I liked walnuts in this cookie. It was by far the best cookie she made that holiday season.

I've been lucky enough to eat Dorie's rugelach cookies before. My friend Sharon made them when the original concept of my blog was to have my friends bake from a specific cookbook, and then we would all get together, sample the goodies; and I would blog about it later. It was a great idea except for the fact that all my California friends moved out of state; including myself! When Sharon made these cookies we loved them though, so I was excited to try this recipe out myself.

I spent most of today running errands and waiting in line to vote. An hour and a half after getting in line to vote; I was relieved to put my ballot into the machine and walk out with a feeling of hope, and a fun project in front of me. On the way home I stopped by Starbucks for my free voter coffee; big mistake! I am still over caffeinated 2 hours after drinking the coffee (or maybe it has something to do with all the sugar I consumed after making these J).

I doubled the recipe because we have a big family party to go to on Sunday.




After processing the doughs and letting them chill for a few hours; I started the process. I made four different types of rugelach. The first was Dorie's chocolate filling except I subbed cranberries for currants. The second batch was Dorie's filling sans walnuts. For the third batch, I decided to play around with Nutella. My cookie contained Nutella, hazelnuts and espresso sugar.



Lastly, I made a cookie that contained caramel pear butter, cardamom sugar and almonds. Here they are before going in the oven.

They were all fantastic, but if I had to choose I would say the Nutella, espresso sugar and hazelnut rugelach was my favorite. Many thanks to Piggy of Piggy's Cooking Journal for picking this recipe.