When I stopped at the sour cherry place last week to place my order (for a somewhat obscene amount of cherries), I couldn’t resist buying a small container of apricots. They were cheap, and so enticing, but when I brought them home I knew that I’d once again been taken by temptation rather than logic - the ‘cots were in no shape to be eaten out of hand. In other words, they were just asking to be baked.

Inspired by Aran’s beautiful Olive Oil Sponge from yesterday, I decided to make my own olive oil cake and incorporate the apricots within. The final recipe was borrowed mostly from Emily Luchetti’s plum cake recipe. I’m on a bit of a Luchetti kick lately as I’ve borrowed a few books from the library, so it seemed a fitting opportunity to see if her recipe was adaptable enough for my purposes. It was indeed. The texture of the cake was light and fluffy, enriched with the mellow, sweet apricots - and great for breakfast. There’s a slight crunch of cornmeal, but it’s more on the cakier side than most cornbreads and cornmeal cakes.

You’ll need about 6 apricots for the cake - I had a few extra, which I sliced and cooked with some sugar, water, and a drop of lemon to make a delightfully sticky compote that helped enhance the apricots in the cake. For the olive oil, I used Zoë, a reasonable all-purpose brand, as I wasn’t sure how much of the oil’s flavor would remain in the cake after baking it. It turned out the flavor was really quite subtle, so it would be worth using a fruitier, more powerfully-flavored extra-virgin oil.

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Baking | 6 Comments »

More birthdays at work means more baked goods for my co-workers. Did I mention how glad I am to have a place that welcomes regular donations of high-calorie food? The only thing that causes an occasional problem is transportation - there are many treats that I’d like to bring but would be too difficult to maneuver in the car or on the bus. Still, cupcakes, cookies, bars, and simple cakes are manageable by any reckoning. I suppose this also helps save me from trying to get overly dramatic. The thought of myself, pre-coffee, trying to spin sugar at 8:00am…man, would that be one scary scene!

For the latest baking occasion, I decided to go a little tropical (and help usher in summer) by making a coconut layer cake with passion fruit curd filling and passion-fruit meringue frosting. It’s no secret that coconut and passion fruit are two of my favorite flavors, so I couldn’t resist the potential for an amazing combination. I’m glad to say that it was very good indeed, and the cake is on its way to being a new favorite.

The original recipe was for a single-layer cake that I split into two 8-inch pans. It was rich, buttery, and delicious; easily good enough to stand on its own with little or no accompaniment. For a simpler presentation, it can be made in one pan and decorated with a sprinkle of freshly grated coconut strips or just some sliced fresh fruit. I’m eager to make it again this way and serve it for casual visitors or just to keep around for nibbling (I suspect it would freeze well, too). It does bear mentioning that since the texture is that of a pound cake, some people may find it slightly on the dense side to use for layering. I’ll also add that my colleagues all enjoyed it immensely and one asked for the recipe, so the layering decision is probably best left to individual preference.

For the passion fruit curd filling, I made a departure from my usual curd recipe (as I had several egg yolks to use up) and used Emily Luchetti’s lemon curd recipe from Classic Stars Desserts, substituting passion fruit purée for the lemon juice. The meringue frosting is just ye olde classic 7-minute frosting but with passion fruit in place of the water. The lightness of the frosting was a good foil to the cake’s richness, and I bet whipped cream would be a tasty, equally lofty, and less sweet option.

The cake was easy to transport in a cake-carrier, and only frosting the top meant there was no worry about unsightly filling leakage or other mishaps. Everyone at work was intrigued by the passion fruit, as many people had never tasted it before, so I was glad to have introduced them to something unconventional yet tasty. And once it was cut, the whole thing was demolished in mere moments. That, of course, is the best compliment of all!

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Baking | 3 Comments »

Have you ever gone strawberry picking? I went to a pick-your-own strawberry farm last weekend, and it was my first time doing so. The weather was incredibly hot, as it’s been for the past two weeks, but three of us were determined to stuff ourselves with local berries, so we dutifully crouched, sun-blocked and hatted, picking steadily in the heat. There were so many strawberries on the bushes that we could hop down the rows pretty quickly, making a game of nudging leaves and stems aside, peering through the foliage, and letting our fingers instinctively scout for half-hidden signals of bright red. Shift the leaves, reach for a berry, inspect, pick, and repeat. It ended up taking less than 45 minutes to fill three hefty boxes with an outrageous amount of strawberries - somewhere on the order of 15 pounds.

The only thing about these wonderful berries is that they don’t last long, so the next game was trying to figure out how to use them all up in the few days we had until they began to turn soft. Eating them out of hand got old rather quickly, but I made some sauce to freeze, and also a strawberry crumble pie, inspired by ones I’d seen on Tigers and Strawberries and Allrecipes. My goal, as it often is, was a dessert both simple and homey, although there’s no good explanation for why it was perfectly reasonable to turn my oven on in 90 degree weather. Sometimes I wonder what a psychologist would say about my “baking rationalizations”!

Making the pie was a breeze, just a regular pie crust bottom (I used a very basic all-shortening one), sliced strawberries, and crowned with an easy crisplike topping. But this pie, good as it was, had a price…the trouble came when I decided to share it with my co-workers.

My first mistake was baking the pie in the morning before work. As I don’t yet own a pie-carrier, I improvised one out of a cardboard box that was just the right size for my pie plate. I gently set the pie in the box and carried it, still-warm, into my car and towards the office. When I reached my destination and stepped out of the car to retrieve the box, I realized that my pie had leaked piping-hot strawberry juice all over the back seat. Looking down, I also noticed a few thick stripes of pink on my white shirt, right on the place I had carefully held the box against my body en route from kitchen to car. I hurried up the elevator to the office kitchen to clean up, and opened the box to find a slick puddle of strawberry carnage sloshing at the bottom of the makeshift carrier. The pie itself looked quite unharmed, however…as though completely oblivious to the destruction it had just caused.

Luckily, once I wiped everything off, my car seat, carrying-box, and even the white shirt could be salvaged. Everyone at work really enjoyed the pie, and we agreed that it could only be made better by the addition of vanilla ice cream. The slightly crisp, buttery topping in particular was lovely with the soft, warm berries. Because the strawberries are so juicy, this pie does not slice into perfect pieces, but this should not deter you. It’s a very good homestyle dessert, and a fast way to use up an excess of berries. Whatever you do, though, just don’t force it to travel while hot!

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Baking, Eating in Pittsburgh | 2 Comments »

It was my birthday this past weekend, and in lieu of a cake, I decided to make some macarons. Little did I know that this venture would ruin me forever in unexpected ways. You might have heard me whinge a few times about my vague disgust for frosting and its slithery, tooth-aching texture. Well, I guess the day of regret was bound to come sooner or later…because as of last weekend, I’m definitely eating those words.

The devilry behind all this arrived in a little batch of something called Espresso-Caramel Frosting. It was a recipe from Tish Boyle’s The Cake Book, and one that I’d had bookmarked for a while now. Let me just cut to the chase and tell you right now: this frosting is Dangerous, with a capital D, in a way I had no idea frosting could be. Perilous in the “I need to get it out of the house immediately before I eat the entire bowl right this second” kind of way. And even though there are a few choice things (hello there romesco sauce) that drive me to superlatives, I’m not a particularly excitable sort of person, if you know what I mean. My socks aren’t easily knocked off.

And yet…just imagine the smooth flavor of brown-sugar caramel embraced by a shot of great espresso and delivered in the smoothest, creamiest, and lightest-tasting vehicle ever. A phenomenon, if you will, that has caused me to leave behind my frosting-hating self forever…at least as long as this stuff is in the room. If you have even the remotest interest in caramel or coffee, you have got to make this stuff as soon as possible. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The original recipe makes a pretty vast quantity - somewhere over 5 cups, and suited for a full-size cake - but I was able to easily divide everything by 4, which makes enough to fill two batches of cardamom-scented macarons, adapted from David Lebovitz’s great recipe. The result was something like a caramelly Arabic coffee in macaron form. Honestly, who needs birthday cake, anyway?

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Baking, Sweet Sauces & Fillings | 14 Comments »

For this month’s Daring Bakers challenge, our hosts Deborah of Taste and Tell and Elle of Feeding My Enthusiasms picked Cheesecake Pops from the book Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey by Jill O’Connor and Leigh Beisch. This was a dessert I’d never seen or heard of before, but when it came down to it, the method was quite straightforward: bake a cheesecake, chill, scoop it into balls, freeze, then dip balls into chocolate and whatever else strikes your fancy. The end result is pretty cute and the recipe makes a tremendous amount of pops - definitely party food. The full recipe was actually said to yield 30-40 pops, but I still got about 30 pops out of only a half recipe! That’s ok, though - I’ll be taking them all to work tomorrow. :)

I baked the cheesecake in an 8-inch square Pyrex pan set inside a larger rectangular Pyrex for the water bath. There was no browning and the cheesecake set smoothly after about 45 minutes. I left it in the oven for about 5 more minutes, though, since others had encountered some issues with it not setting properly. I didn’t have much trouble scooping them out and rolling them into balls, although after rolling the first time, I froze the balls for about 15 minutes and rolled them lightly a second time to get somewhat more uniform spheres…just as one might do for soft truffle centers.

Since I didn’t have time to get to the craft store, I cut “sticks” from colored straws. Although not as strong as lollipop sticks, the straws did a pretty good job of holding up the wee pops (I made the balls about the size of a heaping rounded tablespoon). Also, I went through much more chocolate than suggested in the recipe - about a pound for dipping a half-recipe’s worth of pops. I didn’t make the coating particularly thick - I just think the chocolate estimate was on the conservative side.

I think these cheesecake pops would be something children would like quite a bit; they could easily help with rolling and dipping, and would have fun picking out different toppings to use. My little niece and nephew would probably get a big kick out of them. For me, though…well, they really weren’t to my taste, unfortunately. They’re a little too sweet for me, and I just don’t like the taste of cheesecake and chocolate together (maybe I’m just a freak). That said, I’m not writing these off completely. UPDATE: People at work really liked them, so I think I’ll definitely make them again, and maybe try some flavor variations - raspberry, cheesecake, and chocolate is sounding good right now… I think they’d be a big hit at parties and with kids, and I wouldn’t mind trying to make them look a little more elegant - although maybe I’m missing the point of this messy, sticky, all-American dessert: too much fussing just doesn’t seem right.

Thanks to hosts Deborah of Taste and Tell and Elle of Feeding My Enthusiasms for the challenge!

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Baking, Daring Bakers | 26 Comments »

Could it be true that there are no bad recipes for clafoutis? I’ve tried several, and haven’t managed to strike a dud yet. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, or perhaps its easygoing style is part of why clafoutis is such a beloved dessert. It’s rustic and unfussy, but that’s part of its charm - and hardly ever does it seem to be mentioned without a nod to French grandmothers, who must serve it as often as American grandmothers serve apple cobbler. I love it because, let’s face it - I can’t resist simple and homey desserts like these, especially when they make such excellent use of any sort of fruit that may be lying about the house. Also, in my humble opinion, hot clafoutis from the oven is right up there with cobblers and crisps when it comes to comfort desserts. Although I didn’t have a French grandmother to make it for me, it’s certainly made its way into my home as cozily as if it had been there for generations.

Here’s a clafoutis recipe that uses a little more flour than most of the others I’ve seen. The result is somewhat more cake-like, but still bears that delicious custardy texture of eggs, milk, and soft fruit. It’s also not too sweet, so you may wish to add another few tablespoons of sugar if your blackberries are on the tart side. I used a package of frozen berries, which are far more reliable than fresh ones at this time of year. Also, no need to defrost the blackberries before putting them in the batter - they’ll bleed their pretty juices much less if you pop them in already frozen.

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Baking | 8 Comments »