Heavenly Cake Bakers: Blizzard Cranberry Crown

Photo by Matt Korahais.

Can you guess what a girl like me does in a post-Christmas blizzard? If you guessed 'bakes herself silly,' you'd be on the right track. The last few days have been a lot of wind, a lot of snow, and a lot of time in the kitchen (and on the couch). Among the things baked was the Cranberry Crown Cheesecake, above. I get a lot of pleasure out of making ladyfingers, and the ones above were no exception, but I am not sure I'm on board with using them to line a cheesecake--it feels like the bottom ones always get awfully soggy.

Here's where I confess: this isn't Rose's Cranberry Crown cheesecake at all, it just looks like it. Blizzard ingredient imperatives forced me to make several substitutions, so while the ladyfingers are as advertised, and the cranberry crown is intact, the cheesecake itself, meant to be composed of cream cheese and sour cream, is actually made of ricotta and buttermilk. Although this made for a wetter mixture (probably a factor in the sogginess of the bottom), the result tasted good. Some of the bottom ladyfingers did float up, giving it an odd 'pond filled with floating logs' appearance, but we're just calling that a creative take on the buche de Noel. I only made a six-inch cake (1/3 of the recipe) but there's plenty left, as Matt and I are over sweets and craving savory. Anyone want some?

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.

Mother of the Bride Cake

Haven't heard about wedding cake for a little while, have we? Just to get up to date, since we last canvassed the subject, I did a cupcake tasting for Becky, flubbed two batches of Rose Levy Berenbaum's Silk Meringue Buttercream because my candy thermometer was broken (I overcooked the sugar and they wound up with little burned caramel pieces in them--not the worst fate), visited New York Cake and Baking Supply, and waffled back and forth about cake shapes, tiering, flavors and all the rest some more.

Sophie and I found beautiful cupcake wrappers that look a little like white tulips. They may, in fact, just be circles of parchment nicely folded up, and in that case are far too expensive, but they are pretty. (Turns out that they are not so much overpriced in general as overpriced at NY Cake and Baking, here they are for much less, and in bulk) They would hide the icing a bit, but imagine them all lined up on tiered stands, or arranged on one of those weird candelabra stands they make now. I think we may have hit on a way to make a beautiful wedding display that doesn't involve concentric circles of different colored cupcakes.
For Stacey and Avi, once I'd tested a bunch of cakes, I decided to emulate Deb at Smitten Kitchen and make a buttermilk cake, using a filling of lemon curd, lemon buttercream from Sugar Sweet Sunshine (that sweet, crunchy, old-fashioned kind), and Dorie Greenspan's Lemon Cream (kind of a tarter, lighter lemon curd), and fresh sliced strawberries. I couldn't go forward, though, until they'd had some tasting and testing to work out the kinks.

For one reason or another, our grand tasting has kept being postponed. The main problem is that we never seem to be able to all gather in the same place at the same time, so this week, with Stacey's mom coming to town for a flying dress fitting and visit, we circumvented that issue with a well-timed delivery. I made a sample cake at my house, chilled it, and dropped it off with Stacey at work, where she put it in the freezer, took it to a play, and then took it home for a tasting.

Here is the sample cake (6 inch-diameter, two layers cut into four), assembled but unfrosted. Looking at it now, I see that I really need to improve my layer cutting skills, these are seriously cattywampus. The filling between the first and second layers is lemon cream, in the middle is a layer of rhubarb jam (yes homemade!) and buttercream, and the top is lemon cream again. Once it was iced, I practiced my piping skills and made vines and leaves all over it. In slightly more thought out and practiced form, I think this is an excellent decorating motif for the real cake--maybe I'll draw a prototype. And I'm getting better at making leaves and vines.
I probably won't write 'Hi Anne' on the finished product, but you never know. I am pretty good at writing on cake.Initial response, in form of text message, was encouraging:

"Success! Amazing! We are taking photos. Yummy! The cream froze and defrosted beautifully. More tmw."

I'll update soon with more detailed comment and possibly some more photos. It's good to know that the initial efforts are at least moving in the right direction. I do worry, but why worry? It's cake! Everyone loves it no matter what it's like, and I always forget that in my perfectionist haze.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Blackberry Crumb Cake

Some weeks, the Blueberry Crumb Cake from Baking would have been a no-brainer. Nuts, crumble, berries...This week, though, I really had to work up to it, and never made it all the way to really enthused, good as it was. First, you see, I'm always a little suspicious of coffeecake--too much butter for too little reward? Why not just skip the cake part, put the berries under the topping, and call it crisp? Or even 'krisp,' as the Moosewood Cookbook insists.

So yes, coffeecake lovers, I'm that girl. The girl who would dare to skip the cake part. But for all of you out there, I didn't. I made it like Dorie said. And it was very good.
First I spun butter and nuts and flour and spice in the blender to become a streusel topping.
Then I tossed frozen blackberries in some flour.A half recipe fit very neatly into my usual custard pan, a little blue oval number from Ikea. I didn't refrigerate the crumbs, nor work all that quickly, so by the time I got to them the crumbs were less crumby than mushy, which may have changed the texture of the topping, but it still made a different layer in taste and texture, and worked well. The berry/cake ratio was more or less as Dorie recommended, but blackberries are messier things than blueberries, so there was more mixing, and the final batter was pleasingly purple.

Nigella-Inspired Potato Vegetable Pies

Hopefully, recession cooking is creative cooking, ways to make what you have on hand delicious and interesting. What I had on hand last night was a large selection of root vegetables, some leftovers, and Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess, an uneven but appealing early addition to my cookbook collection that has been overdue for a revisitation. What Nigella had in mind for me last night was comforting and just classically British-little filled pies.

I adapted her crust by subbing in neufchatel for some of the abundant butter (cream cheese makes every dough better), and then improvised a refrigerator filling: potatoes (yukon gold and purple), turnips, kale, peas, carrot, salt, a little butter, a lot of buttermilk, scallion tips, a little minced garlic, onion powder, leftover braised cabbage, salt pepper. I cooked anything hard until it was less hard, and then mooshed it all together and added a lot of Parmesan cheese, filled little pies, and baked them. The buttermilk was a great substitute for the usual bechamel-like sauce in a pot pie, which this basically was.

They were nothing special, but they were good and simple and easy to take for lunch. Thanks, Nigella. I think this book is still amusing me, so look out for a few more Nigella recipes in the near future.

18-Alarm Roast Chicken

I used to say that I was a baker first. Although I knew how to cook some things, my expertise was generally in areas where butter and sugar get creamed. Over the last few years, though, I've become a more interested, and thus a more confident cook. These days, I still make mistakes, and it's not as intuitive for me as baking, but I'm pretty good at cooking things I like to eat.

Part of this growth has been a piecemeal mastery of basic techniques--stockmaking, bean soaking, braising, and roasting chickens. For a long time, I avoided cooking meat because of the vegetarian roommates. Even when I did cook it it, I opted for pre-cut chicken pieces, usually boneless, for quick cooking. Thinking back, most of my specialties from a few years ago involve stirfrying chicken breast. These days, one of my favorite things to do to build technique is roast a chicken.

I like local, organic chickens, so I can't afford them often, but I get so much fun out of each one. I buy it, I think about it, I smell it cooking, I pick it dry, I make stock...the entertainment rewards equal the eating, which makes the occasional splurge very worth it.

Another recent splurge, the Zuni Cafe Cookbook, just paid off big time as chef-author Judy Rogers doubled my entertainment dividends and helped me to cook the hands-down best roast chicken of my life.

Rogers' mantra is "pre-salt." Everything from fish to vegetables gets a little time to absorb salt and flavor, and to firm up. She goes deep into the science of it, but suffice it to say, I'm hooked. I salted the little chicken 24 hours ahead, and got home at 9:30 Tuesday night looking forward to cooking it. First, though, I had to leave it out for an hour to achieve room temperature. Then I plunked it in a preheated cast-iron pan and stuck in in a 475 degree oven.

It roasted beautifully, crisping up, turning warm caramel brown, shedding clear sweet fat. The method was perfect. So perfect. There was just one problem. All that high heat and spattering fat set off my smoke alarm over and over and over again. By the end of the process, every window in the house was open, a fan had been dug out of the closet, and Matt was positioned under the damn beeper with a broom handle, justifiably worried that the neighbors would hate us forever. (It was 11:30 at that time, and our upstairs neighbor is a classroom teacher.)

But it was all worth it. It was the best chicken I have ever roasted. I'm going to do it again soon.
The only thing I forgot to do was to get a good picture. As you can see from Matt's shots above, photo-taking took second place to tearing off drumsticks like starving wolves and stuffing my face. I even pan-roasted some oyster mushrooms with the drippings. Salty, but so good.
Speaking of simple techniques, the Zuni cookbook also yielded perfect mashed potatoes for a dinner the previous Sunday. Apparently the trick to mashed potatoes is to add fat (like melted butter) in first so that it coats the potatoes and then they don't just absorb all the milk. Also, any additions should be as hot as possible. Judy Rogers says that her mashed potatoes (with buttermilk) are one of the few kinds of potato dish that survive well as leftovers. I tried this out two days later with some chicken breast and the potatoes in the microwave. They were lighter and fluffier than on the first day. Judy Rogers is seriously impressive. And I can't wait to roast another 18-alarm chicken, though I am seriously considering cleaning out the oven first. Or maybe just inviting the neighbors for dinner.

Buttermilk Apricot Wheat Bread

A recent favorite from Bread Alone, a yeast bread with an eight-hour poolish and a bunch of dried fruit mixed in at the last minute. The actual recipe calls for currants, but I keep making it with chopped apricots or dried cherries and it's very good. Never remotely the same twice, though, so I'm going to start keeping detailed notes on methodology to try to figure it out. But there may never be resolution, that's the joy of bread baking.

This one had a particularly long poolish rise, because I got distracted by Bill Clinton, and barely snuck it in before Joe Biden, missing his apparently hot son. It also used all commercial flours, and had a (relatively) short proofing time. Delicious hot (like Joe Biden's son) with blackberry jam and butter.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Blueberry Sour Cream Ice Cream

This one wins hands down for the least time-consuming TWD recipe yet. Simmered a cup of blueberries with some lime juice, zest, and sugar, blended the mix with some sour cream and skim milk, chilled, and there you are. Ice cream that resembles frozen yogurt made with upscale Dannon blueberry. Very simple, very good, no eggs. I haven't been very good about making non-custard ice creams, which are usually better for us, because they don't keep as long in the freezer, but I think this one won't have long to keep. The household approved, despite initial skepticism re: sour cream.

In an overdose of cultured goodness, I also made buttermilk ice cream from the Lee Bros. cookbook, smitten by their idea of layering it with cornbread to make a parfait. The ice cream was a little bit chalky, but the taste was good. More to come from that cookbook, it's taken a real hold on my imagination.

Gâteau au Yaourt

The other night, lost in the morass of craigslist apartment hunting, I was neglecting myself and every task I could think of. I was even unable to come up with something to eat that would make me happy. This is unusual, because more often the process of coming up with something to eat makes me feel happy. I just wanted something simple and plain that could be made with the ingredients on hand and would go reasonably well with slow-roasted turnips.

Voila, yogurt cake, recipe courtesy of Clothilde at Chocolate & Zucchini. The only changes I made were to use buttermilk instead of yogurt (which I think made it even moister) and to drop the rest of the sour cherries that have been waiting in the freezer into the batter at the last minute. I also made it in a slightly smaller, higher, tin than Clothilde recommends, which also added to the moistness and to the cooking time.

I understand from The Amateur Gourmet and others that this recipe has been sweeping the blog world, and justifiably. It's delicious, simple, and comforting. And very good for breakfast.

Yogurt-Buttermilk Panna Cotta with Rhubarb Compote

This is the season of fiending for rhubarb. I've been waiting so long. I probably missed some very early stuff on Saturday, but yesterday I was lucky enough to find the last few pounds of a farmer's first cut at Union Square. Just walked off with everything he had. Now it's properly spring. I stewed it with some cinnamon sticks and sugar in a mix of pomegranate juice and iced tea, and poured it over my impulse creation of the day, greek yogurt and buttermilk panna cotta from Serious Eats. The whole thing took about 15 minutes to make, and was perfect. Sort of like yogurt jello. In the best sense.
Here is the recipe, reprinted directly from the post linked above.

Yogurt Panna Cottas with Honey

As printed on www.seriouseats.com, Adapted from Food & Wine magazine

Ingredients

1 1/2 teaspoons unflavored gelatin
1 tablespoon water
1 cup fat-free milk
1/3 cup sugar
1 cup low-fat buttermilk
1 cup fat-free plain Greek yogurt
2 tablespoons honey
Red grapes, for serving

Procedure

1. In a small bowl, mix the gelatin with the water and let stand about 5 minutes, until softened. In a small saucepan, bring the milk to a simmer with the sugar and cook until the sugar is dissolved, about 1 minute. Remove from heat and stir in the softened gelatin until dissolved.

2. In a medium bowl, whisk the buttermilk with the yogurt until smooth. Whisk in the warm milk mixture. Pour the panna cotta mixture into six 4-ounce ramekins and refrigerate until set, about 3 hours.

3. To serve, drizzle the panna cottas with honey and garnish with the grapes.