Alpha Bakers - Lemon CreeMees

These were supposed to be Lemon Jammies, They are butter cookies enhanced with lemon zest, filled with, well...not lemon curd. Instead, I made Dorie Greenspan's (Pierre Herme's) lemon cream. 

Then I called them Lemon Creamies, and then that made me think of these. Now they're Lemon CreeMees. They were creamy (creemee). And delicious.

Alpha Bakers - The Ischler

A trusted authority once assured me that Christmas Eve is for Cookies. If we extend the Christmas Eve framework to encompass the month of December (and as everyone knows, we do), then yesterday was a true expression of the dream (everything is awesome).

EVERYTHING IS AWESOME!!!! (sorry, finally watched the LEGO Movie last night and even though it's a giant commercial, it is pretty good, and that song is insidious in the highest degree)

 

But why is this Jew making Christmas cookies? Well, I'm sure you caught the part about cookies.
And also, why not? And also, some really great people came over to make them with me. The cookie team assembled at 10:30 AM, and by 4:30 PM we were...almost done. If you're tired of me being so frantically cheery, here's where you get your kicks, because we definitely hit cookie burn-out before stuffing all the cute little bags, and if I had to cover myself in relentless holiday cheer on the regular I would be Not Happy. I do love most of the trapping of Christmas, but like any oversold quantity, it's easy to get overloaded, especially the day after the dreaded SantaCon*.

Still, with all that, cookies are wonderful and so is spending time with wonderful people and listening to music I haven't heard in ten years, and so we baked all day. What did we make, oh lucky landlords and co-workers of the world? Biscotti, gingerbread, bergamot caramels, and the glamorous sandwich cookie known in Rose-land as The Ischler. I like a cookie with a title--it has a bit more weight than just 'oatmeal raisin' or 'brandy snap.' You know right off the bat that this cookie is an institution with the full weight of the treasury behind it.

It's also a very classic Rose Levy Beranbaum cookie, with the flavors of Eastern Europe hard by (the original inspiration is Hungarian, I believe). A buttery almond cookie, sandwiched with a layer of thick ganache and a layer of apricot levkar (I used some thick preserves). I had made these before as part of the Beta Testing for this book, and they were a pleasure and a joy both times. The dough is a little sticky but not to the point of absurdity, and the flavor combination is up my street as well (would you ever guess that I too am an Ashkenazi wonder, Rose?). Also, they just look so pretty and stick so well.

Sometimes I'm the lone ranger of baking, putting in long hours with just the oven and the television, but yesterday I was joined by some of the best people in the world. Above is A's first encounter with the stand mixer, and she loved it, especially when she got to give the call on how fast it should spin. In the space of a few weeks she's gone from someone who can say a few words when prompted to someone who can carry on whole conversations with content, and it changes everything. That and the fact that she has one of the all-time best personalities in the history of all-time best people makes her a very welcome guest.


























I like these big people a lot too. So much. I can't give out the recipe for The Ischler (shhh, it's here), but here's the recipe for the biscotti, courtesy of Nicola, A, and Eileen, one of the best bakers I know. It's possible I've posted these before, but they bear repeating. They are a treasure, people. Make them now.

Southern (Brooklyn) Coconut Cake with Silk Meringue Buttercream

Close-up on coconut. On a no-joke coconut cake. I've been making coconut cakes for Jessica's birthday for many years--usually with seven minute frosting, but this time around it went even sweeter and richer, with a gooey, coconut milk buttercream. Rose's Silk Meringue Buttercream continues to terrify me a bit--creme anglaise AND Italian meringue AND butter? As a friend at the birthday party who cooks professionally said:

"Katya, no disrespect, but this frosting is just coconut and butter, right?"  Um...not entirely...

The icing was fluffy, the cake was fluffier...I've gotten pretty good at this. And, even more importantly in my mind, I was able to transport the perfectly frosted cake without a blemish through nearly an hour of bus and walking and street  fairs, etc...

The only modifications that I made to the recipe were in the realm of extract--I subbed almond extract for coconut in both the cake and the creme anglaise. Because there was also coconut in flake and milk form, the almond complemented it instead of standing alone, just kind of deepening the flavors. I also ran out of coconut milk and used a little cream to finish off the creme anglaise.

No reactions from Matt, as he doesn't eat coconut, but the responses from partygoers ages 3-35 were enthusiastic. In fact, the three year old invited me to come sleep over at her house, an invitation that I have to assume was issued more or less on the strength of her piece of cake, or excitement at having a large pink ribbon.

Happy birthday, Jessica.

Tuesdays with Dorie Rewind: Lime Cream Tart

Photo by Matt Korahais.

Come to think of it, I don't know if I've ever posted this tart, though I've certainly posted the graham cracker crust version of it. This buttery citrus cream, a recipe from Pierre Herme, is so good that it appears three times in Baking: From My Home to Yours, in lemon, lime, and orange guises. While I'm eager to try the orange someday, for this Thanksgiving dessert, I gave the shoppers the option of the citrus of their choice, and they picked out lime.

Unlike the classic lime pie, a baked custard with condensed milk, this cream is a stovetop custard that is then blended with an undisclosed amount of butter until it emulsifies into a rich spoon-licker of a cold filling. The filling went into a somewhat sloppy cookie crust (next time we're back to graham cracker, early training can't be contradicted), and seemed to make everyone happy. We also had an apple crisp (somehow not as crispy as hoped), and a vanilla ice cream taste-off between two artisan brands that both had 'Island' somewhere in their names. I guess they have a lot of islands around Seattle here.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Gateau Breton

This week's Heavenly Cake was the quick and buttery Gateau Breton. Ground almonds, butter, flour, and not much more. I actually made this back in March on one of those days when I just got an itch and had to bake something. Matt took it to his writers' lab, where it was largely ignored but lauded by those who tried it, although the general feeling seemed to be that it was 'breakfast-y.' I think it would probably be good anytime, despite the deceptive simplicity.

This weekend's Heavenly Cake baking was actually an advance on the cake coming up in two weeks, and included all kinds of chocolate, shininess, and gold leaf. One week rustic, the next week Bernachon. Thanks, Rose.

This One's For Frances

Fall makes me ravenous. Summer and fall and harvest and suddenly I crave half-bushel bags of apples, piles of tomatoes, plums, corn, quinces, and bathtub-sized piles of grapes. Here in Brooklyn, it gets sunny, smells sweet, and then the leaves turn and the wind picks up and winter comes, but it is never quite summer, never quite fall. The CSA has gone a long way toward countering this, but even with the piles and piles of anything imaginable at the farmers market, something of abundance is missing. Which is another way of saying that I can never really quite get my fix until I have too many, too much of something. Twelve pounds of blueberries was just a warm-up. Next to having the garden myself, I want neighbors, abandoned trees on public land, and, more realistically, farm stands with generous deals on blemished or overabundant produce.

Since I was being (happily) drafted for foraging expeditions from a very young age, I can't pretend ignorance of the origins of my hunger.  This one is squarely in my mother's court. It was she who brought me to strawberry and raspberry pick-your-owns before busybodies thought I'd be able to tell ripe from green,  and she who talked the old woman down the block into letting us clear her sour cherry tree for years. My father was no slouch himself, and we often found ourselves deep in the grounds Northampton's recently defunct State Mental Hospital--not so incidentally his old employer--raiding the neglected orchards for peaches and the rampant brambles for blackberries. Whatever we could come by or grow in quantity was the prize, and in my greedy childhood confidence I came to understand that only too much is enough, and that, when it came to fruit and my family, too much was more of an academic concept than a concrete reality. 

These days, I live in a city--one with wonderful farmers markets--and my fruit budget, even when maxed out, is measured more in pounds or single fruits than in bushels. While I always have some, I rarely have flats and piles, and it's almost never cheap, let alone free. We're working on growing, but we're not quite there yet--total home fruit crop this summer was four sweet and unexpected late-August strawberries. (I'm transplanting the runners, crossing my fingers, and hoping for the best--what's the best way to keep them alive overwinter?) I love nostalgia and longing as much as the next girl, but when it's fruit I can't just wallow, I need action.

I teach myself foraging skills, and hunt mulberries, juneberries, and black locust flowers right in my neighborhood. I also make sourcing trips to Northampton several times a year, cramming the rituals of the seasons into hurried weekend trips. March or April is for sugaring, and carrying home the gallon jug. June and July are for berries, and rhubarb, and August begins the blueberries. In September or October, I turn to my old home again for Yom Kippur and big bags of 'utility' apples from Outlook Farm. It may seem single-minded, but for me it's how I rejoice, and how I connect. And how I eat.

And when I can't find a way to satisfy my need for seasonal abundance completely, I trick myself into satiety by making Frances the badger's favorite--jam.

Preserving, by its very nature, breathes abundance--enough for the next day, and the next, and for the whole winter. I've already written about the wineberry jelly (note that I spent my birthday picking fruit. This is how important it is), my most ambitious project to date. This fall, it's been jams and butters.First, greengage plum jam, tart and squishy, followed by tomato puree, then apple butter, and now pear cardamom butter. Corn kernels from the CSA put up in bags with their milk. I've been freezing, eating, or giving away, rather than really canning, because the batches are too small to make even small batch canning impractical. I doubt we'll be provisioned too deep into the winter, but the long hours of slow simmering, stirring, tasting, and getting everything sticky have started to calm something deep inside of me, some primal agricultural hunger. Now I can begin to let the old year go, and turn toward winter with at least one or two little jars of summer abundance distilled and waiting, sweet and sticky.

The harvest isn't quite over, though...our carrots are sweetening on the roof. The last of the fruit, though, was picked on Friday, over the phone. I called my mother, and asked her about the state of the next door neighbors' quinces, which I've been absconding with for the last few years (like mother, like daughter). She, able co-conspirator that she is, was out the door with the phone still in hand, and long before our conversation was over, had filled a bag with fallen fruit. Yes, I come by it honestly. And sweetly.What you might call a goodly heritage.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Lime Cream Tart

Just a quick stopover on the way to cupcake roundups and campfire cooking, and our return to Brooklyn.

I'm getting odd about my Tuesdays with Dorie--I worry if I don't make it by Tuesday, but don't seem to have any ethic about actually posting it once it's made. Now that we're back from summer vacation, I'll work on that.

Theoretically I was on vacation hiatus, but last week's TWD was irresistible: a graham cracker crust filled with lime cream. Lime cream, like the lemon cream that went into the Mother of the Bride Cake featured a few months ago, is Dorie's challenge to the lemon/lime cream lover. 'Like decadent?' I can imagine her saying. 'Like tart? Well try this one...and add ginger.'

Lime cream is to lime curd what vichyssoise is to potato leek soup. More of everything. It's buttery, puckery, and eye-buggingly good. So, by the way, is the old fashioned graham cracker crust, which Liana could tell was good without even sneaking a taste as it cooled out of the oven. Or, so she said.

The recipe in the book came with meringue, but I think meringue is best in its other uses, and would have used whipped cream instead if the cream and crust weren't quite enough on their own.

Maine Wedding Cake, Part II: The Maine Event

Life has been sweet here the last few weeks. Buttercream, sun, love, and friends, all outdoors as much as possible. Flowers in my hair, lipstick on my teeth.

I'm turning into a wedding connoisseur this summer--I can make the obligatory complaints and assess the finer points with the best of them, with two down and one to go in a 5 week span. I know that's amateur hour for some of you, with three a week during the summer month, but for me, two weddings of people very close to me in two weeks is a marathon.

I have a lot of feelings about weddings, what they are and how they're handled, and I'm still trying to work out exactly what a lot of them are, but there is one thing I do know: Weddings are a production, and can be a disaster when not properly produced and stage managed (and written and performed). Although, in almost any situation, wedding guests do get to squeeze babies. (Role of baby performed by the charming Lucy, below. From her expression it is entirely possible that I am squeezing too hard).To be clear--where there is loving family and a happy couple, any wedding is joyful, but it really is true that production values matter to the experience in many ways. Things that make an 'audience' of guests and a 'company' of the wedding party feel clear, at ease, well used, and well displayed add immeasurably to the satisfaction and contentment of a ritual well performed.
Unsurprisingly, the marriage of a producer and a writer/actor, carefully planned and showcasing many of the talents of their performing and designing friends, is an impressive thing (especially when graced with real feeling and impeccable weather). From the big house, to the good people, to the rosemary on the chairs, and the thoughtful, gorgeous, catering (not to mention the bluegrass band), Stacey and Avi's wedding was the best kind of show--one that helps all concerned to participate and improve the joy at hand, where the basics move smoothly enough to leave room for playful improvisation, where it all seems, well, effortless. Without anything seeming overly slick, everything just went so well and it was so easy to be a celebratory part of the whole.

One of the best talents of a great producer is knowing how and when to delegate, and Stacey and Avi were wise enough to invite their friends and family to join them in ownership of the event. Flowers, lights, cake, and all manner of tasks were given into the hands of people who put all their love into them, with impressive results. Going into the creation of their wedding cake, (my first) I knew that it would never be a professional affair--it would be rustic and slightly messy, but it would taste fantastic. Secure in the knowledge that Stacey and Avi would rather have the work of my hands than all the fondant in the world, I felt free to experiment and to be daring and imperfect, and to learn.
Cake assembly began the Friday night before the wedding. One of my greatest worries was leveling the layers so that the cake didn't list to one side, something I don't have much of an eye for. An iphone level app was generously loaned for the purpose, but it turned out the counters were uneven, and I wound up eyeballing it, but I think it got pretty close.Throughout the process, I had constant help from everyone in the house, in the form of company, moral support, zesting, advice, grocery runs, photography, and encouragement. Matt asked every morning what I needed, and made it happened, and meticulously documented every step of the process, while grilling and making fires in the yard every night as well. Thank you. Thank you all.
The bottom layer, ten inches in diameter, was filled with pastry cream, strawberry jam, lemon curd, and the lemon buttercream that also covered the cake. Because the fillings were a bit liquid and the icing, being just butter and sugar, wasn't very stable, I froze the cake for at least 45 minutes to an hour between every step, between layering and crumb coat, and refrigerated all three tiers for a while before and during the final frosting. The top two tiers, at eight and six inches respectively, had the same fillings but substituted wild blueberries for strawberry jam.

We had gone back and forth about decorations, but in the end, it was very simple. The cake plate provided (Stacey's Grandma Ann(e?)'s), had glass balls all around the edge, and so I just piped similar balls around the bottom of each tier. I had to work fast, as the icing wasn't very strong, and the weather was warm, but in the end, it looked very lovely. The outer coating wasn't completely smooth, and lemon curd almost oozed out in a few places, but the overall effect was lovely. It took my breath away when it was finally piled up. Regarding the piling--the cake was a relatively dense cake, and fairly heavy, so I did reinforce the bottom layer with dowels before piling on the second tier, but didn't bother for the next one.

To decide on the floral decorations, I took a poll--bright black-eyed susans, or tiny blue forget-me-nots. Since everyone but me voted for forget-me-nots (everyone is twee), on they went, in every imperfect part of the icing. We did have a brief moment of wondering whether forget-me-nots were in fact poisonous, but decided to go ahead, and just asked the caterers to remove them all before plating, which they did with masterful skill. All in all, it looked good, tasted better, and for a first effort, was a triumph. Thank you, Stacey and Avi, for a challenging assignment and wonderful week.
Next up, wedding #2, and team cupcake. Thanks to Risa for additional photojournalism. Thanks to Rose Levy Berenbaum, Deb at Smitten Kitchen, and all the rest of the writers, bloggers, and photographers who provided expertise, recipes, and examples.

Bread Baker's Apprentice: Corn Bread

In a brief break from yeast, (it won't be long, tomorrow Dorie brings you Brioche Plum Tart), Peter Reinhardt slips in some corn bread into the BBA lineup. This is northern corn bread, sweet and heavy, loaded with buttermilk and honey and wheat flour, and even a little butter, baked in a pan greased with a little hot turkey fat. I didn't use polenta, just coarse ground local corn meal, so I sped up Reinhardt's method somewhat and skipped the overnight soak, also the bacon.

It was moist, crumbly, and very good, dinner and dessert together.

Bread Baker's Apprentice: Poor Man's Brioche

BBA challenge marches on. There's been some discussion about pacing on this challenge, whether to stick to the schedule, slow up, or just bake at a rapid pace. Some bakers in the group seem to have strong competitive streaks. I have one, but it doesn't really apply to things like this. As a member of several other groups with rigid deadlines, I like baking my BBA whenever I feel like it, or whenever we have no vehicles for peanut butter.
This brioche was one of three variations in the book--from richest to poorest. I went with the poorest, which still has plenty of butter and milk and egg, added some whole wheat flour, and got a soft, billowy, rich bread perfect for toast or eating with milk. Looking forward to some more robust breads, but not anytime too soon. Next up, challah.