Alpha Bakers -- Gooey Gooseberry Crisp

Few things look as cool as a gooseberry. The veined, translucent globules have fascinated me since they were only a name in British novels, and I've made several memorable gooseberry tarts over the last ten years. When it comes to crisp, though, the gooseberries really fell down. Maybe the culprit was the currants!

I made the gooseberry crisp with a mixture of green gooseberries (underripe = more pectin, no?) and red and white currants (a present from my parents). With all that beautiful fruit, I wanted more from the final effort, which was uninspiring. Oversweet, too buttery, and gooey, this crisp just wasn't the finest expression of gooseberry potential. I'm going back to stone fruits and apples for my crisps, and back to featuring gooseberries in custard tarts. 

Alpha Bakers -- Flaky Cream Cheese Scones

Just saw this post lurking in my drafts and thought I should put it out there. I assume the scones, like all scones, were great.

Alpha Bakers - Cookie Strudel

Thanks to my new obsession, The Great British Baking Show, I've really been wanting to step up my game. Home baking is home baking, and I usually am just fine with letting my work look sloppy and skipping the chocolate shapes, but the level of inventiveness and simple excellence the contestants display is working on me. So of course, when I went to make some simple cookie strudel, it stayed true to my true nature and tasted great but looked a mess. 

True strudel is a paperlike multi-layered dough, preferably eaten at the Hungarian Pastry Shop opposite the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, but this here cookie strudel is something closer in nature to rugelach. The dough is delicate, though, and very buttery, so it does get a convincing flake on. It's a simple mixture -- flour and salt with butter and sour cream (in this case bulgarian full-fat yogurt, with some water drained out). 

The dough is chilled, rolled out, and rolled up with jam (Wild Plum Jelly, in point of fact), nuts (pistachio and flaked almond), and currants. We were then instructed to make some small slits for steam to escape.

Pretty sure I made mine too large. 

All the same, the general premise was very successful and the final cookie strudel was significantly delicious. I definitely had at least three large pieces.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Brown Sugar Bundt Cake

Cupcakes are all very nice, but this is really the sort of cake that we like best in my house--moist, bundty, and filled with fruit and nuts (and cacao nibs). I used frozen red currants, almonds, walnuts, and a handful of my new cacao nibs, which are going to go into everything until they're gone, I have 2lbs.

I read an article in The New Yorker yesterday about Pixar, and what a fun work environment it is there, how obsessive it all is, and how much they all love their jobs. I expected some kind of bitter pill at the end, but clearly the journalist had given in and happily drunk the Kool-Aid. It reminded me a bit of watching the hours of special features on the extended Lord of the Rings DVDs. Before you ask, I've actually done this more than once, and not just because I'm a giant geek, which I am, but because it just gives me such a thrill to see hundreds of people going on and on about how much they love their work. In a certain mood, similar to the one I'm in now, it's been known to make me weep. I'm holding my breath on the job scene right now, and it's taking a lot out of me, but it's useful to remember how much joy some people get out of working, and remember that I must find a way to get that joy. For now, I just admire my elegant bundts.

Sticky Sticky Toffee with Lemon Peel, Raisins, Dates, and Delicious

The dessert so nice, I blog about it twice.

The last time I brought up Sticky Toffee Pudding around here was back in 2009, when Miriam (then dubbed the 'reluctant foodie,' made David Lebovitz's recipe as a guest post. Time has passed, Miriam has gone from reluctant to as obsessive as the rest of us (she owns a cake stand and hosts several-course dinners), and Rose Levy Beranbaum is bringing sticky back.

Rose's version of Sticky Toffee Pudding, that extra-Brit dessert, begins by boiling a cup of stout, adding baking soda, and pouring the whole thing over a bunch of dates. When well soaked, everything is pureed. My dates were very old, so I was worried that they would be too dried out. That turned out to be only half the problem, as I only had about 2/3 of the amount that I needed for the recipe. The pantry came to the rescue, and in addition to my dry dates I added a few tablespoons each of lemon peel, orange peel, sultanas, and zante currants. Soft and gooey and lemony.