Craft of Baking Sour Cherry Scones

The Craft of Baking by Karen Demasco is a lovely new baking book. I highly suggest these little sour cherry scones.  They take seconds to make and are truly delicious.  Cherries aren't in season YET, so I used frozen cherries which worked wonderfully.

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TWD Apple Turnovers

I had high hopes for these turnovers, but I never fell in love with them. The dough was too sweet and the apple filling not nearly enough. I hoped the sour cream would make the dough tangy, but the cloying sweetness overpowered it.





The upside is that this is a dessert I didn't go back for seconds on. There's something nice about that.

Julie of Someone’s in the Kitchen picked this recipe as this week's TWD pick of the week. You can find the recipe at her website.

TWD Creamiest Lime Cream Meringue Pie

Linda of Tender Crumb decided on Dorie's Creamiest Lime Cream Meringue Pie as this weeks TWD recipe. You can find the recipe at here at her website.

Love isn't a word I use often, but when a recipe for a 9" pie calls for 2 1/2 sticks of butter in the filling ALONE, I feel cupids arrow honing in on my heart.

I followed the recipe for the filling exactly as Dorie described except I added candied ginger instead of fresh. The custard came together very quickly on the stove top, under 6 minutes. After letting the hot mixture cool in the blender for 8 minutes, I slowly incorporated the butter, letting it blend for a full 3 minutes once it was all in there. The liquid was pourable once done blending, but after chilling for 4 hours it became very thick and ultra smooth.

For the crust, I baked extra cookie dough I had in the freezer. I used the vanilla pepper dough I made a while back. Once the cookie dough had cooled, I pulsed it in the blender with 3 pieces of candied ginger. Once that was finely ground, I added a touch of orange juice to bind the dough a bit. Then I patted the crumbs into my buttered tart shells and froze them for about an hour. After the hour, I baked them in a 400 degree oven for 9 minutes.



The very second I deemed the shells cool enough, I made a swiss meringue. For the meringue I used 4 egg whites, 1 cup of sugar, a pinch of cream of tartar and a little vanilla extract. I love making swiss meringues because it's easy, doesn't required a thermometer and always looks beautiful.






This tart/pie is love. The contrast between the sweet light meringue and the dense creamy lime filling is the stuff poets write of. Also nice was the additional spice/heat from the candied ginger in the tart shell. The ginger wasn't that pronounced, but it brought a beautiful brightness to the overall flavor of the tart.

TWD Classic Banana Bundt Cake

Mary of The food librarian chose banana bundt cake as this week's TWD recipe.

There's not to much to say about this cake other than, make it. Make it now. I loved it. The aromatics of it as it bakes are reason enough to pick up bananas and sour cream at the grocery store. If I could capture the smell of this cake in a candle, I would be a millionaire.

Making the cake is very easy. I halved the recipe and it made 6 mini bundt cakes. They baked for 23 minutes, and looked picture perfect right out of the oven.



How you like them apples? I mean, banana cakes:



(Forgive me, clearly Boston is starting to effect me in a negative way... quoting a movie from 1997. Wow, Good Will Hunting is 12 years old; that makes me...)

For fun, I made three different glazes; chocolate, rum and caramel. Caramel was my favorite because I liked the crunch against the soft cake.

Chocolate Cake with Mocha Icing

At Sofra we make a cake that I like to call a mayo cake. We whip eggs and sugar together then we whip in olive oil very slowly creating an emulsion very similar to an aioli. The resulting cake is amazing. It's moist with a beautiful crumb structure.

The emulsion in that recipe reminded me of some of the older cookbooks I have which contain recipes for cakes with Mayonnaise. Never one to fear mayo, I decided to try out a chocolate cake recipe fromThe Wooden Spoon Dessert book. I tweaked the recipe a bit, but mainly stayed true to it. It's a great recipe to make if you're in a pinch and need to whip up something fast (as is the following icing recipe from the same book). The cake tastes lovely and you would never know the "secret" ingredient.



Chocolate Cake adapted from The Wooden Spoon Dessert Book by Marilyn Moore
Preheat oven 350F
Grease a 9x12" pan (I used mini bundt pans)

Sift together:
2 cups AP flour
4 Tablespoons cocoa powder (I used Vahlrona)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda

In another bowl mix together:
1 cup mayonnaise
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup granulated sugar

Add alternately (3 dry:2 coffee), blending after each addition
reserved dry ingredeints
1 cup cold coffee (I had instant espresso, so I made 1 1/2 cups of hot espresso; chilling one cup and reserving the other half for the icing)

Fold in:
3 oz 70% chocolate (I used Lindt)

Bake in a 9x12 pan fro about 30 minutes or in mini bundt pans for 23.

Quick mocha frosting
again adapted from The Wooden Spoon
Sift into mixing bowl:
1 1/2 cups confectioner's sugar
1 tablespoon cocoa powder

whisk together, then add

4 tablespoons soft butter
pinch salt
3/4 teaspoon vanilla
4 tablespoons of warm espresso (from extra brewed for cake)

I wanted this icing to be runny, so I increased her recipe from 2T coffee to 4T espresso.

Guiness Bread

I love Guinness, and had some left over after making my Guinness mustard. After a quick search on the internet, I found an interesting Guinness quick bread to make.

Bread making doesn't get much easier then the recipe I came up with. Here it is:

3 cups minus 2 tablespoons AP Flour
1 1/4 tablespoons baking powder
3/4 cup evaporated cane sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vietnamese cinnamon
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
12 oz Guinness Stout

Mix your flour through cinnamon in a bowl. Add guiness mix about half way. Add cranberries and walnuts fold into batter mixing till incorporated, but taking care not to overmix. Bake at 350 for 45 minutes or till a skewer inserted in the bread comes out clean.



This bread is great. It's nice to eat on it's own, with some butter. It's also nice to toast and top with some cheese. Next time I make it I will bake it in tiny loaf pans. Once baked and fully cooled I'll slice the bread and dry it out in the oven creating little melba toasts. Then I'll use it as an appetizer with some blue cheese, hopefully my favorite Point Reyes Blue.

Olive Oil Madeleines

Pretty? Yes

Easy? Yes

Best Ingredients? Yes

Tasty? Not so much



I really want to like everything I bake, but sometimes there's no love to be found. I found a recipe in this month's Gourmet for Olive Oil Madeleines. The recipe came from Eleven Madison, so I was pretty sure I would love it. They baked off perfectly. Beautiful bubble on the bottom and just the slightest color on the "shell." They looked perfect. Flavor wise they were bland, bland, bland; which was shocking because I used an amazing olive oil from Lebanon and the zest of two lemons. I think this recipe could work if I wanted to make a "spiced-up" madeleine, but for the time being; I use my stand-by madeleine recipe.

TWD Katherine Hepburn Brownies

Lisa of Surviving Oz chose Katherine Hepburn brownies as this week's TWD recipe. I had made these once before using the optional cinnamon and wasn't thrilled. Today I decided to make them without the cinnamon, and kept my fingers crossed that I would like them.

Shockingly enough, I'm a bit chocolated out. After the brownies I made for my dad, and the grandmother's cookies from Martha… I'm ready for some vanilla or fruit.

The recipe was very easy to make. You melt your butter then add cocoa powder and espresso powder. Next beat in your eggs and vanilla; followed by dry ingredients and chocolate chunks. I love that this recipe is done by hand so quickly. The resulting batter is dark, dark, dark studded with bits of lovely bittersweet chocolate.





I left the brownies in the oven for an additional 5 minutes because they were still liquid after 30 minutes of baking. After reading a bit online, it seems like I should have used a metal pan instead of a glass for them to bake in the 30 minute zone. Regardless, these brownies are good. Their intense fudginess almost screams for vanilla ice cream. Luckily, I didn't have any on hand...these are so fudgy that you can't eat too many. As far as brownies go, I still prefer the Scharfenberger recipe to this one. That being said, I would be proud to serve these to company.

 

Strawberry Sandwich Cookies

Martha Stewart's Cookies is my latest cookbook obsession. I bought it last week at TJ Maxx (yes, I did get the max for the minimum), and have been obsessing over most of the recipes ever since. Each recipe has a picture, which I love. They are not just pictures either; they're pictures from Martha Stewart's talented staff, so they look amazing. I hope to one day take pictures as good as theirs.

I wanted to make macaroons for the 4^th of July, but it wasn't in the cards. Instead, I made Martha's cookie dough recipe for her raspberry cream sandwiches. The dough is full of vanilla flavor. The recipe calls for a whole vanilla bean and 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract. I was afraid the vanilla would overpower my jam, so I used half a vanilla bean and only 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract. I also added a heaping ¼ teaspoon of freshly ground black pepper to bring out the pepper in the jam. The dough was delicious and I had high hopes for the finished baked cookie.

While baking, the dough spread more than I thought it would. I ended up cutting the baked cookies with a cutter to get the shape I wanted. The flavor of the dough was good, but very sweet. Once I added the strawberry jam they were sugar bombs, and I was running for my toothbrush after eating one. I wouldn't combine this cookie dough and jam together again. The dough is delicious on its own though, and I bet it would be great with some bittersweet chocolate. I have lots of left over dough to play with, so I think I might try to use it as a flat tart base later in the week. If I do I'll be sure to post my results.

 

(Not my) Grammy’s Chocolate Cookies

Martha strikes again. Grammy's chocolate cookies are addicting, chewy, crunchy (from the turbinado) and insanely chocolaty. They spread a lot while baking and become very flat; making them the perfect cookie for sandwiching with some vanilla ice cream.

For the recipe, please reference Martha Stewart's Cookies or visit Martha's website here.

The only difference I saw between the two recipes is the book calls for an additional 2 tablespoons of AP flour; and it calls for rolling the cookies in sanding sugar (not granulated). I highly suggest rolling the cookies in either turbinado or sanding sugar. Sanding and turbinado sugars add a nice crunch to baked items because they typically don't dissolve in the oven.



Another suggestion I have is use the best cocoa powder you can get your hands on. The cocoa flavor dominates this cookie, so the better the cocoa powder the better the cookie.

Sour Cream Coffee Cake

Nancy Silverton's recipe for coffee cake is by far the best I have come across. Made with crème fraiche, it is light with a beautiful crumb structure. Our 4^th of July started early this year because my bocce partner Kady and I were playing at 10:00 AM in a bocce tournament. Knowing we would need a solid food foundation to start off our day of merriment; I decided to make the coffee cake for breakfast.

Lesson learned on this cake, use crème fraiche. I decided to make this cake last minute, so I didn't have time to make crème fraiche. Nancy says you can use sour cream, which I did. The resulting cake was much heavier and chewier than its crème fraiche variation. Everyone at the party loved it, but knowing how great it is with crème fraiche I couldn't help but be a bit disappointed.

Here's my adaptation of the recipe from Nancy Silverton's Pastries from La Brea Bakery

Crumb filling:

1 cup chopped walnuts (toasted)

¼ cup plus 2 Tb light brown sugar

2 tsp ground cinnamon

Mix above ingredients together, set aside.

Batter:

2 large eggs

2 cups crème fraiche (or sour cream)

1 tbsp vanilla

8 oz cold butter cubed

2 cups sugar

3 cups AP flour

1 Tb baking powder

1 tsp salt

Butter a 14-cup capacity bundt pan.

Preheat oven to 325.

In a bowl, mix dry ingredients. In another bowl whisk crème fraiche, eggs and vanilla together. In a mixing bowl paddle butter and sugar together till light and fluffy. Add the crème fraiche mixture to the creamed butter a little at a time till fully incorporated. Add the dry ingredients in 3 batches till fully incorporated. Put half the batter into the bundt pan using your fingers to smooth it out (wet fingers with water first, it makes it easy to spread). Scatter the brown sugar walnut crumbs all over the batter. Put the remaining batter on top of the crumbs, using wet fingers again to smooth it out. Bake for about an hour till firm to the touch.

 

 

My Dad’s Brownies

I take after my mom for my never ending desire to bake; and my dad for my never ending desire to eat baked goods. Growing up, we used to hide boxes of cookies under a basket turned upside down on top of the fridge, so that he couldn't find them. The funny thing is for all the cookies he ate back then, he was still in great shape (why didn't I take after him for that!). Now, my dad is over 50 and eats much healthier than back then. No more sweets for him, he's taking care of his heart. Every now and then though, he will indulge; and the following brownies are the perfect reason. They are dense, chewy and chocolaty.

A little over two years ago, I made 16 batches of these brownies for my wedding reception. That's when my dad fell in love with them. I can't tell you have many times during the wedding weekend he said how good they were, or better yet; how many times he's brought them up since the wedding. He LOVES these brownies. So, for Father's day this year, I decided to send him something he would actually like (I bet you can guess what).

The brownie recipe comes from The Essence of Chocolate by John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg. It is a beautiful cookbook full of great chocolate recipes and really interesting information on chocolate. I highly recommend it. The recipe can also be found here.

Sour Cherry Vanilla Jam with Salty Almond Cookies

Cherries are my mom's favorite fruit, so this past Mother's day I decided to make her sour cherry jam. Growing up, we had a big sour cherry tree in our backyard. Once we fought past the birds we would pick buckets of cherries during the height of the season. Then off to the kitchen we went for the messy task of pitting the cherries. Covered in cherry juice we would spend the next hour wiping down ourselves and sometimes the kitchen walls. They were juicy.

The following recipe yields a sweet tart jam with a hint of complexity due to (I think) the vanilla and sourness of the cherries. The jam is lovely sandwiched between salty almond cookies (recipe follows).

Sour Cherry Vanilla Jam from Madelaine Bullwinkel's Gourmet Preserves

2 pounds pitted sour cherries

1 pound granny smith apples (2 ½ cups peeled and chopped)

1 vanilla bean

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

2 ¼ cups sugar

Place the cherries in a good processor and pulse for 15 seconds to chop them medium fine. Peel, core and quarter the apples. Chop them to a medium-fine texture in the processor. Combine the cherries and apples in a 5 quart pan.

Scrape the seeds from the vanilla bean, and add the seeds and pod to the fruit. Cover the pan and bring to a boil. Uncover and simmer for 15 minutes to reduce the juices, stirring regularly. The mixture will thicken, but should not stick.

Stir in the lemon juice, and then add the sugar in 4 equal batches, waiting for the liquid to return to the simmer before adding more. Stir frequently. Let the jam actively cook 10 minutes more. It will noticeably thicken and reach a temperature of 210 to 212 F.

Pour the jam into a heat resistant 1-quart measure. Remove the vanilla pod. Fill hot, sterilized jars to within ¼" of lips. Wipe the rims clean; attach new lids and screw caps on tightly. Process in boiling water for 10 minutes.

Salty Almond Cookies (or JV Snacks-Croq-Télé) from Dorie Greenspan's Paris Sweets

These cookies are extremely easy to make if you have a food processor. Once the dough was made, I tried 3 different shape cookies. The first as described by Dorie was the easiest, but a little too rustic for me. I formed the rest of the dough into logs and tried to make slice and bake cookies with the dough. It worked, but not very well. The last method I tried was I shaped tiny cookies by pressing the dough into my ¼ tsp and slid them out. They were extremely cute, but time consuming.

¾ cup (100g) blanched almonds

½ cup (100g) sugar

¼ tsp to ¾ tsp salt (I used ¾ tsp of Kosher salt)

1 cup (140g) AP Flour

7 tablespoons (100g) cold unsalted butter cut in 7 pieces

Preheat oven to 350.

In a food processor fitted with a metal blade, process the sugar, nuts and salt till finely ground. Make sure to scrape the bowl frequently. Once processed turn the mixture out of the bowl.

Put the flour in the food processor and with the motor running drop in the cold butter pieces. As soon as the butter is in; switch to pulse mode. Pulse till the mixture looks sandy. Add the sugar-nut mixture and pulse until the dough forms small clumps and curds. Scrape the dough out onto a piece of parchment or wax paper.

To shape the cookies take small pieces (about the size of a cherry) in your hand and form irregular sized chunks. Place the pieces on a lined baking sheet leaving ½" space between them. Bake for 9-11 minutes rotating the pans after 5 minutes. You want the baked cookie to set, but not brown.

TWD Parisian Apple Tartlettes

Jessica of My Baking Heart picked Parisian Apple Tartlettes as this week's TWD "recipe". It's hard to call it a recipe because you're supposed to buy puff pastry, cut it into a 4" round, and top it with half an apple and a bit of butter and sugar and bake. For a Dorie Greenspan recipe, this is as "semi-homemade" as she gets.

Instead of buying puff pastry, I decided to make a dough that acts like a quick puff pastry. Essentially mix equal parts butter, cream cheese, flour and a pinch of salt in a mixer till a dough forms. Chill then roll and use in place of puff pastry. I like making this dough because it's so easy, gets nice layering and I usually have all the ingredients on hand to make it. The dough works best with an overnight rest, but due to time constraints I had to make mine an hour and a half before baking. Even so, I was a little nervous that it would grow out of control, so I docked each tart shell and then topped with the apples.

Once they came out of the oven, I realized that docking them was a bit overzealous. They didn't rise as much as I expected them to, but the dough was still lovely.

The resulting tartelettes were okay. I baked them for an extra 5 minutes because the apples were still leaning towards raw, but that still wasn't enough time. Technically there was no way I could have baked the apples through and not overcooked the dough. Due to its simplicity, I think this recipe has a lot of potential. However, the apples should be sliced thinner, or the chunks should be par cooked before baking. This was so easy to make though, I'll definitely play around with it again.

TWD Cinnamon Squares

Tracey of Tracey’s Culinary Adventures chose Cinnamon Squares as this weeks TWD recipe. Visit her blog to find the recipe.




I've spent the last two days traveling back and forth from Boston to Vermont, so I thought there was no way I could fit this recipe in. Well, after a quick look at just how easy it was to make I decided there was no way I couldn't make this recipe. Essentially, you mix your dries together, then add your wet ingredients, then follow by folding in some cooled melted butter. I think all together it took me about 10 minutes to assemble my ingredients, make the batter and get the cake in the oven. That was fast.

Since this cake is all about cinnamon, I decided to head over to my local Penzeys store in Arlington, MA and pick up some special cinnamon. I bought their Extra Fancy Vietnamese Cassia Cinnamon ($7.65 for 4 oz). It has a lovely aroma, and a powerful cinnamon flavor. It was the perfect spice for this cake.

I followed the recipe as written except I halved it, and baked it in a 4" round cake pan. It took 40 minutes to bake at 350.





Instead of making the chocolate frosting, I decided to make a simple cinnamon glaze. For the glaze I put confectioners sugar, a dash of milk and a big pinch of cinnamon in the bowl and whisked together till smooth.

TWD Chipster Brownies

Beth of Supplicious decided on Chipster-Topped Brownies as this weeks TWD recipe. What exactly are chipster-topped brownies you ask? Only a brownie with a chocolate chip cookie layer on top! If it sounds like a dream come true, you should go over to Beth's blog for the recipe.

I was fortunate to have people to serve these extremely rich brownies to. My parents threw a memorial day party at the log cabin they are building in North Hero, VT. Joe and I loaded the dog, all the my baking ingredients and a ton of other stuff into the car on Sunday after work and drove to VT. We were so lucky because the weather was perfect, and most of my mom's side of the family was able to make it. It was fun to see all my relatives, and nice to bake something so appealing for all of them.

Both batters were easy to make and the bar was fast to assemble. First you make the brownie layer and then the chocolate chip cookie topping.






I baked it for about 50 minutes.



The brownie part was a little underdone, but that was intentional. Everyone loved these bars, even my dog, Mason wanted some:


I thought they were okay, but way too sweet for me. I loved the brownie layer, but the cookie topping was lackluster. If someone asked for them, I would make them again; but I think I prefer my cookies and brownies separate.