Archive for the 'dessert' Category
Let me clarify: chocolate-dipped cheesecake pops are not something I would typically make for dessert on a plain old Monday night. I made them for the Eyeopener because tomorrow I’m going to chat about food blogs. Thinking I’d choose a recipe from one of my favorite sites, I hopped around a few and found that Cream Puffs in Venice, Tartelette, and another blog I stumbled through were all posting cheesecake pops. As I was perusing them my friend S emailed from Whistler, where she is apparently hooked on something from the local chocolate shop called cheesecake bombs. I took this as an unmistakable sign that I should make some. What a hero I’m going to be in the studio tomorrow morning!
The pie was to make use of leftover spaghetti; I did a few segments debunking common cooking myths on BT this morning, and as a result had plenty of leftover cooked pasta that was used to demonstrate the myth that adding oil to the cooking water prevents it from sticking together. (It’s a large volume of water, kept at a rolling boil with space for the spaghetti to move around, that keeps it from sticking. In fact, adding oil to your water will result in an oil slick on your pasta once you drain it, and your sauce won’t stick very well.)
Spaghetti Pie.
I’ve seen many versions of spaghetti pie, some in which the pasta is tossed with the sauce and cheese, then baked, others that have the crust par-baked first to crisp it up, and others with layers of cottage cheese between the noodles and sauce.
So I improvised: tossed the leftover spaghetti with some egg white (I had some whose yolks had been used to make lemon curd), a bit of grated Parmesan, a grinding of pepper and a big spoonful of pesto, just because there was some open in the fridge and W is such a fan, then spread the spaghetti into an oiled pie plate, pushing it up the sides a bit.
I had requests for spinach sauce, but had hastily crumbled and cooked a couple lean Italian sausages, a red pepper, a few fresh tomatoes that had gone too wrinkly for anything but cooking with and a can of tomatoes before remembering this, and pureed sausage, I imagine, is not a Good Thing. So I decided to proceed as if it were a lasagna - I crumbled some ricotta and thawed, squeezed-out spinach over the crust,
topped it with the sauce…
and some grated part-skim mozzarella, and baked it at 350F for about half an hour, until all was golden, crsipy-edged and bubbly. Yum.
The cheesecake pops were simple, really, mostly because I didn’t make the cheesecake from scratch like the others did. Some advised making a cheesecake and then scooping up balls of it with your hands, freezing them and then dipping the frozen wads in chocolate. Because I couldn’t envision blaspheming a cheesecake that way, nor attempting to cut one into teeny fancy shapes using a cookie cutter (too thick for any in my collection) I decided to buy one of those small plain frozen Safeway cheeesecakes and cut it into wedges. It worked perfectly.
After inserting the sticks (bamboo skewers, although popsicle sticks or the 4″ lollipop sticks you can buy at Michael’s would work brilliantly), I put them back in the freezer to solidify while I melted some chocolate chips in the microwave, then half dipped, half spread the melted chocolate onto the frozen wedges. Some sprinkles or other decoration would have worked out well, but I didn’t really have anything. That’s the beauty of radio; you don’t really need to accessorize.
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April 28 2008 | cake and dessert and freezable and one dish and pasta and sweet stuff | 6 Comments »
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It occurred to me as I reached the late 90s that I should do something to commemorate my 100th post. 100! It’s astounding how much one can accomplish when one forces oneself to do a little bit every night.
I quickly emailed my family, inviting them all to dinner to celebrate. This is how I “entertain”: invite now, think and clean up later. It’s the old “throw your hat over the fence” analogy: if you throw your hat over the fence, you have to climb over and get it. People always ask how we have time to have parties or people over for brunch or dinner - if you wait until there’s a gap in your schedule, you’ll never have time. Just invite people over, and you’ll find it. Plus if we never had people coming over we’d never be forced to clean the house properly.
But. There were 8 adults coming to dinner, and 5 kids aged 2, 3, 5 and 9. All were arriving at times their schedule would permit. Mike thought I was going to make something ultra-fancy, but when I invite family or friends over for dinner I do it for the company, not to be all gourmet about it. (Although, admittedly, people are often used as guinea pigs around here.)
Solution: ham. (Question: why do they call it baked ham, but roastbeef or turkey, when it’s the same process?) Ham is already cooked, so all you’re doing is glazing and reheating it. It’s impossible to screw up. It isn’t going to be ruined if people are late. Everyone can carve off as much as they like, and it’s just as fine at room temperature than fresh from the oven. Kids love it. Plus it makes the best leftovers. I’ve had my eye on this spinach-potato-ham hash with poached egg on top on the cover of last month’s Canadian Living.
Unfortunately, my plan was not as obstacle-free as I intended, but I did learn something from the experience. I sent Mike to the grocery store and he came back with a smoked pork shoulder (also known as a picnic ham, I imagine because its smaller size makes it more portable for those types who would lug an entire ham along on a picnic), something I hadn’t cooked before. It had a thick layer of fat and skin on top, and was tightly wrapped in mesh. Although it was cured, so presumably the same as any other smoked ham and not a raw pork shoulder that would require lengthy cooking, it had these vague instructions on the package: cook and eat.
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So was it cooked? Uncooked? It was smoked, so that should have answered my question, but this is the sort of thing you want to be sure of when you have 14 people over for dinner. I Googled it, and every site I found seemed to think the thing needed to be braised, but it wasn’t raw. Apparently there are partially cooked smoked shoulders and fully cooked smoked shoulders, but there was no indication which this was. Ultimately I decided to take the advice of one site and cover it with cold water in a large pot, bring it to a boil and dump the water out to draw some of the sodium out, then fill it halfway full again and braise it for an hour (braising is a long slow cooking method with some moisture involved), then pulled it out, scored the skin and popped it in the oven like I would any other ham. The biggest problem seemed to lie with this slab of fat and skin on top - presumably what would turn into those cracklings everyone makes such a fuss about - but with it in the way, where does the glaze go? So I scored it and threw it in the oven, then when it started to turn crackly I cut it off, put it in its own pan to finish cooking, and painted on a glaze made with equal parts brown sugar, grainy mustard and balsamic vinegar. (No one ate the cracklings. They were a little too Hannibal Lecter for me.)
While it roasted (or baked?) I poked 3 big sweet potatoes/yams (depending on how your grocer has decided to label them) with a fork and slid them onto the oven rack around it. I adore sweet potatoes, and often wonder why they aren’t often used for more than oven fries. To mash them, you don’t need to peel and boil them like you might with regular potatoes. Just bake them, which contains any nutrients and gives them even more flavor - like cooking meat on the bone makes it more flavorful, so does cooking potatoes in their skins - they will darken and caramelize a bit just below the surface. When they are soft, pull them out, pull off their skins (this is easy, as the flesh tends to withdraw a bit from its skin, creating an air pocket that makes it simple to pull off wit your fingers) and mash with a bit of butter and a spoonful of orange juice concentrate - I scoop it straight from the freezer; it will melt into the hot potatoes. A bit of salt and pepper, and a drizzle of milk if they are too dry, and they are done. If you like, a drizzle of maple syrup is delicious too. Sweet potatoes tend to not be as starchy as white potatoes, so they are actually moister and easier to mash.
The mac & cheese was actually whole wheat rotini & cheese, since I knew that’s primarily what the kids would end up eating. (Brown rice pasta has an even better mouthfeel, but I didn’t have any.) Don’t hate me for saying so, but I don’t use a recipe when I make mac & cheese. I boil as much pasta as I want to make (just as you would if you were making spaghetti for the family) and while it cooks, make a roux out of roughly equal parts butter and flour. A roux is just butter and flour, whacked into a hot pan and melted, smoothing out all the lumps. Pour some milk in (2 cups or so per 3 Tbsp. of butter-flour - you’ll get a feel for it) and bring it to a gentle boil. You won’t be able to tell how thick it’s going to get until it starts to bubble - once it bubbles for a full minute it will have reached its full thickening potential, and you’ll get rid of any starchy, floury taste. Stir in a few handfuls of grated cheese, and it will melt into the sauce. I discovered a block of Swiss in my fridge that wasn’t going anywhere, and it melted beautifully. Drain the pasta and stir it into the cheese sauce, or vice versa. You could serve it at this point, or scatter it with crumbs (or more cheese) and bake it until it’s bubbly.
Macaroni & Cheese
Mac and cheese that doesn’t come out of a box is something everyone should be able to make. It doesn’t require much more time or effort than KD, and is the ultimate in comfort food. Experiment by adding different cheeses – intensely flavored ones such as Gruyère or blue cheese are best. It’s a great way to get rid of leftover cheese bits you might have lurking in the fridge.
1/2 lb. (250 g) dry macaroni, whole wheat rotini, small shells or other pasta
Salt
3 Tbsp. butter
3 Tbsp. flour
2 1/2 cups milk
2-3 cups grated old cheddar cheese, or any combination of cheeses you have in the fridge
Bread Crumb Topping (optional):
2 slices sandwich bread (preferably whole wheat), torn into pieces
2 Tbsp. canola or olive oil or melted butter
1/4 cup grated Parmesan
In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook the pasta until it’s tender but not mushy. Drain well in a colander and set aside.
Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).
In the empty pot (no need to wash it out), melt the butter over medium heat. Add the flour and stir well with a whisk, cooking for a minute or so until the mixture starts to turn golden. Stir in the milk and bring the sauce to a boil, whisking constantly. The sauce must reach a full boil in order for the flour to reach its full thickening potential. Reduce the heat and simmer for a few minutes, until the mixture is nice and thick.
Remove the sauce from the heat and stir in the cheese until it melts. Add salt to taste, then stir in the drained pasta. If you want a bread crumb topping, pulse the bread, butter and Parmesan in a food processor until the bread turns to crumbs and the mixture is well blended. Pour the macaroni and cheese into an appropriately sized baking dish and top with the bread crumbs or additional cheese. (It can be made up to 24 hours ahead and refrigerated in the baking dish; sprinkle with the crumb mixture or cheese right before you bake it.) Bake for 15-20 minutes, until the topping is golden and it’s bubbly around the edges.
Serves 4-6.
The free 4 pound box of strawberries that came with $150 worth of groceries at Superstore earlier in the week made up my mind about dessert: strawberry shortcakes. Easy, not fancy, kids love it. And what else am I going to do with 4 pounds of strawberries before my rhubarb has begun to sprout?
Strawberry shortcakes are generally made with biscuits sweetened with a little more sugar; since I’ve already posted my whole wheat and olive oil biscuit recipe, I thought I’d use one that I made when I did food styling for Trish Magwood a few months ago; these are apparently her hottest sellers back at Dish in Toronto. (As usual, I changed the recipe a bit.) If you want a more nutritious shortcake, use the whole wheat biscuit recipe and add a couple tablespoons of sugar to the dry ingredients.
Strawberry Shortcakes
3 cups all-purpose flour (or half all-purpose, half whole wheat)
1/3 cup sugar
2 ½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
¾ cup butter, cut into pieces
1 cup buttermilk
coarse sugar for sprinkling (optional)
2 lb strawberries, hulled, sliced and tossed with a little extra sugar if you like (this will coax some of the juice out of the strawberries, which makes everything nicer)
1 cup whipping cream, whipped with a drop of vanilla and a spoonful of sugar
Preheat oven to 425°F.
In a bowl, stir together flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Add butter pieces, using fingertips or pastry blender, work butter into dry ingredients until mixture resembles course cornmeal. Leave a few larger pieces to create flakiness. (I do all this in the food processor, then dump it into a bowl to stir in the buttermilk.)
Add buttermilk and mix with a spatula until ingredients are moistened (do not over mix).
Gather dough into a disk on a cookie sheet that has been sprayed with nonstick spray. Pat into a circle that is about 1″ thick; brush with a little extra buttermilk or milk (you can even use your fingers with this) and if you have some, sprinkle with coarse sugar. Cut into 8 triangles. Bake for 12-15 minutes or until golden.
Split the biscuits and load up with strawberries and whipped cream.
Serves 8.
As it turned out we were celebrating more than Day 100; my brother in law Rory just finished writing his medical exams, Emily made the 1st tier soccer team, my Mom survived their AGM yesterday, my parents bought a house just blocks from us, Willem got up in the middle of the night to pee in the toilet. (And a couple other things I’m not allowed to post for thousands to see, sorry.) And it was Wednesday, and we were all together for dinner.
So much to celebrate.
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April 09 2008 | dessert and pasta and pork and sweet stuff | 8 Comments »
Dinner at C’s house tonight, to celebrate her birthday.
C is a picky eater. She doesn’t like anything weird (like marmalade), or anything containing raisins, or sausage, or any food hiding in another food that shouldn’t be there. (Example: I gave her a zucchini brownie once, and she loved it until I told her halfway through there was grated zucchini in it. She thought it was such a mean thing to do.) She just, in her late 30s, started eating eggs and banana bread, and discovered she adores them.
But the things she loves, she loves passionately - like this orzo salad my Mom and I created on the fly one day with what we could scrounge up out of the pantry and fridge. Sometimes we make it with rice, sometimes with orzo, and it’s a toss-up as to which is better. This is how you make it: cook as much orzo or basmati rice as you want to make - the rice or pasta will take up about half the volume of the finished salad. Rinse it under cool water and drain well. Add a chunk of purple onion, finely chopped; some crumbled feta; about half a bag of baby spinach, torn or sliced; the grated zest and juice of a lemon or two, then drizzle with some rice vinegar, olive or canola oil, salt and pepper. We’ve never measured any of it, just adjusted each to suit our taste. This stuff is great to keep in the fridge to dip into for a few days, and bring to work for lunch.
But I had no idea what kind of cake to make, except that it could not be zucchini with raisins.
I settled on a deconstructed Black Forest cake, so that if there were any offending ingredients, she didn’t have to eat them. When I first pondered a sunken chocolate cake, my motivation was primarily ease of decoration: the great thing about sunken cakes is that you don’t need to frost them, only dollop a big billowy mound of whipped cream in the middle, and it always looks beautiful. It occurred to me that I could sneak some cherries in between the cake and cream, creating a sort of newfangled Black Forest cake without all the layering and decorating muss. Too overwhelmed by the sheer number of cookbooks on my shelves, I poked around Epicurious for a recipe and instantly came across these sunken chocolate-orange cupcakes. It was a birthday miracle: I had forgotten I was out of flour and, by sheer coincidence, down to only 4 eggs.
Still, they were revamped a bit: I took out the orange (potential for weirdness, plus I don’t much like raspberry or orange interrupting my chocolate) and added a bit of espresso, and used my toasted whole unblanched almonds - why use blanched when you can grind them up with their skins?
I have to say: these turned out to be one of my tastiest experiments ever. The edges are light and crispy, the insides soft, dense and fudgy. They are nubbly with nuts, and will make anyone who can’t eat gluten very, very happy. And I can’t think of a more easily transportable cake; brought still in their tins, they aren’t going to slide or sink on you. I stopped at the grocery store on the way over and picked up a can of cherry pie filling (I confess to loving the gelatinous canned stuff; a hangover from my childhood obsession with the Hostess Fruit Pies advertised in the back of Archie comics and unavailable in Canada, no doubt) and, because there was no cream in a carton, a can of whipping cream too.
(Gluten Free) Sunken Black Forest Cakes
1 cup almonds (whole, sliced, slivered or blanched)
8 oz. dark or semi-sweet chocolate, chopped
1/2 cup butter (next time I’ll try using less, but this was no time to experiment)
1 cup sugar, divided
4 large eggs
1 tsp. instant espresso or coffee powder, dissolved in 1 tsp. water (optional)
1 can cherry pie filling, or canned, drained Bing cherries, or pitted fresh cherries
whipped cream or vanilla ice cream
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Place almonds in a food processor and pulse until they are coarsely ground. Line 12 muffin cups with paper liners. In a small bowl, microwave the chocolate and butter on high for 30 seconds; stir, then put it back in for about 30 seconds longer. Stir until it’s melted and smooth. Set aside to cool for a few minutes.
Separate the eggs, putting the whites in a clean glass or stainless steel bowl, and the yolks in another large bowl. Add the sugar and espresso to the yolks and whisk to combine them. Stir in the ground almonds and chocolate.
With an electric mixer, beat the egg whites until soft peaks form; add the remaining 1/4 cup sugar and beat until they are stiff and glossy, and stiff peaks form. Fold the egg whites into chocolate mixture in 3 additions. Divide the batter among the muffin cups (about 1/3 cup batter in each) and bake until edges are firm and tops are cracked all over, about 20-25 minutes. Set on a wire rack to cool (they will sink quite a bit as they cool).
Serve each topped with a spoonful of cherries and whipped cream or ice cream. If you like, shave a few chocolate curls over each using a vegetable peeler. Serves 12.
C made spaghetti, curried squash soup from Best of Bridge (which was supposed to be served over bits of brie, set into the bowl with the hot soup ladled overtop - how great an idea is that?) and apple pies, which were fantastic. She promised me the recipe, but as a full-time doc and mom of 2 toddlers, we’ll see…
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April 06 2008 | dessert and pasta and salads | 2 Comments »
Having discovered that Willem has eaten his way through about a third of two apples and three pears, and I don’t really want to finish them all (again) I needed to find a way to use them before they compost themselves right there in the fruit bowl, on the dresser and on the edge of the bathtub.
Often I chop or grate them into oatmeal or muesli (muesli: oats, dried fruit, nuts, flax and some grated apple stirred into vanilla or plain yogurt with honey, left overnight to soak itself up) but this time we were outnumbered, so since we (miraculously) have a bit of Breyer’s Light vanilla ice cream in the freezer, I made a crisp.
There is no need to measure ingredients for a crisp. Chop, without peeling, as many apples and pears as you’d like to use, and put them in a baking dish. (There is no need to peel them - why would you, when so much of the fiber and nutrients live in their skins? I mean, you don’t peel them before eating them out of hand. Besides, cooking softens them anyway.) Toss with as much white or brown sugar as you like (not too much - according to your taste and the sweetness of the fruit), a sprinkle of cinnamon and if you like, a squeeze of lemon juice.
For the crumble: 1 cup whole wheat flour, 1/2 cup oats, a handful of whole toasted almonds in their skins (I usually have these around to nibble on), 1/4 cup brown sugar and 1/4 cup butter, or thereabouts. There are thousands of formulas for crumble mixtures, with oats and/or nuts and without, so really you can use whatever ratio you like, blending until the mixture holds together when you squeeze it in your hand. Pulse it in a food processor or mix with a fork until well combined and crumbly. (Obviously if you use a fork, you’ll then need to use sliced almonds, or none at all.)
The other great thing about crumble mixtures is that it takes exactly as much effort to make a large batch as it does to make a small batch, so use what you like and keep the rest in a freezer bag in the freezer to scatter over muffins and other impromptu fruit crisps.
Sprinkle over the fruit and bake at 350F for 30-40 minutes, or until golden on top and the fruit is soft.
Between the pears, which are particularly high in fiber for a fruit, the whole wheat flour (you can’t tell the difference with a crumble topping - it works perfectly in place of all-purpose flour), oats and nuts, this is a reasonably high-fiber dessert. A handful of raspberries or cranberries would have been nice thrown in with the pears, or a grating of orange or lemon zest. I can’t wait to have the remains cold for breakfast with a glop of vanilla yogurt.
So dinner was backwards; the crisp was so enticing coming warm from the oven that we ate some right away, and then some antipasto that ended up prematurely thawed because I thought it was Chicken Pesto Stew, and then it seemed silly to put much effort into a full dinner, so I quickly waffled some ham & Swiss cheese sandwiches on grainy bread. What are waffled sandwiches? The same as grilled cheese, but you do them in your waffle maker, which acts sort of like a panini grill, cooking them on both sides while creating cool waffle grooves. If you like, you can put a teeny dab of ketchup into each divot. Kids think this is very cool.
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April 05 2008 | dessert and sandwiches | 6 Comments »
Remember the squash & ricotta ravioli we made out of wonton wrappers and stashed in the freezer? They were called into service tonight. The best thing about them is that you can dump them straight from the freezer bag into boiling water and they’re done faster than dry spaghetti would be.
Emily is still off school this week and so was over again today, and (as per our new routine) wanted to cook something. Having been up since 3:30 (this is why traffic reporters don’t have toddlers) I was too tired to think and so lay like a sandbag on the couch while she looked through my cookbooks. She rightly identified my dog-eared copy of Classic Home Desserts by Richard Sax as a good source for desserty/baking things that 9 year olds tend to like to make, and flipped through, pondering out loud the fruit cobblers and coffee pots de creme. When I realized we were almost out of flour and completely out of all but the brown sugar, E settled on Brown Sugar Shortbread. Lucky me; they were easier than a snap to make.
Brown Sugar Shortbread from Richard Sax
Chop 1/2 cup butter into bits and put it in the food processor with 1/4 cup packed golden brown sugar, a pinch of salt and 1 tsp. vanilla; pulse until creamy.
Add 3/4 cup flour and 2 Tbsp. cornstarch; pulse 6-8 times, until it starts to clump together.
Smear the dough into a 9″ round cake pan; this part was interesting, as the butter-flour ratio was higher than usual (I would have used 1 cup flour, perhaps slightly more), giving it the texture of thick icing. It even looked like icing as we spread it, unable to pat, along the bottom of the pan. I had my doubts. We were supposed to sprinkle it with sugar, but forgot.
Bake at 350F for 20 minutes, until pale golden around the edges. Cut them into wedges while the dough is still warm, and then let them cool somewhat in the pan before taking them out, so that they don’t crumble to bits.
I’ve never seen such a flaky texture in melt-in-your-mouth shortbread; you can see the way it delicately flaked off in the middle as I sliced them. I liked them much better than even the whipped variety, and they took all of 5 minutes of actual effort.
And right, the rice pudding.
Rice pudding is even easier than shortbread. Whenever I make rice, I make extra so I can make fried rice and/or have an excuse to make rice pudding. This time, I had leftover rice even after making chicken fried rice yesterday. It doesn’t need to be short grain, or even white rice; puddings can be made from brown or even wild rice, which goes well with maple syrup and dried cranberries.
There are creamy stovetop rice puddings and baked rice puddings made sturdier with eggs, and then there’s the rice and milk with sugar that Winnie-the-Pooh makes in the small paperback cookbook my Grandma bought for my 7th birthday. The simplest rice pudding is made by pouring milk over the extra rice in the pot (or the rice that turned out too sticky to eat) along with some sugar, honey or maple syrup to taste, and cooking on medium-low heat until the rice absorbs all the milk. Add enough to cover the rice, and then some. Taste it, then add more milk if you like, cooking each time until it soaks it all up. It’s almost impossible to add too much. Stir in a dribble of vanilla and a handful of raisins. As Pooh will attest, rice pudding is perfect eaten cold for breakfast or elevenses.
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April 03 2008 | cookies & squares and dessert and grains and snacks and sweet stuff | 4 Comments »
In Lethbridge, in the dark to honour Earth Hour.
It was fantastic. I was in Lethbridge to cook and eat with the wonderful folks who were the highest bidders on a private dinner/cooking class with me that was auctioned off for the CBC Petro-Canada Food Bank Drive at Christmas. I asked what they would like to make and they were interested in learning to make fresh mozzarella - something I hadn’t done before. The process was simple but we tiptoed through it, skeptical that it was actually going to turn into cheese in the end, and it did! Although we were shocked at how little 2 L of milk produced; one handful-sized ball, which we managed to squeeze enough slices out of to make this salad layered with tomatoes and fresh basil:
Here’s how you do it:
Dissolve 1 tsp. citric acid into 2 L of cold milk (we used homo), briskly stirring it with a whisk in a largish pot. Set it over medium-low heat and warm until it reaches 100F, or just slightly warmer than body temperature. Remove from heat.
Crush 1/8 of a rennet tablet and dissolve into 2 Tbsp. cool water. Add this in a thin stream, whisking constantly, to the warmed milk. Stir for about a minute, then stop. Let it sit for 10 minutes.
Using a slotted spoon, scoop out the curds into a small microwave-safe bowl, pressing out as much of the whey as you can.
Microwave for 1 minute (this will coax out a little more whey; just pour it off) and then plop it out onto a clean countertop and start to fold and stretch it. It will be almost too hot to handle, but will cool to warm quickly. Pull and stretch it until it’s smooth, then shape into a ball and put in a bowl of cold water until firm.
Pavlova
Whether you choose one big Pavlova or individual Pavlovas, they are simpler than you’d think to make, yet elaborate enough to make an impressive dessert, if that’s the reaction you’re going for.
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 tsp. cornstarch
6 large egg whites
1 tsp. white vinegar
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1 cup whipping cream
Fresh raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, and/or sliced strawberries, peaches, plums, apricots, kiwi or whatever fruit you like
Additional sugar for tossing with fruit (optional)
Preheat oven to 250° F and line a large baking sheet with foil or parchment. Set aside about a tablespoon of the sugar, and stir the cornstarch into the rest.
In a large bowl, beat the egg whites with an electric mixer until soft peaks form. Gradually add the sugar mixture, beating until the mixture holds stiff, glossy peaks. Beat in vinegar and vanilla.
To make one large Pavlova, spoon the meringue onto the baking sheet and spread out with the bottom of a spoon to form a 9”-10” circle with a slight indent in the middle and raised edges, like a nest. To make individual Pavlovas, spoon 8-10 mounds of meringue about an inch apart on the baking sheet. Bake for 1 to 1 1/4 hours, until crisp but still soft inside. If the meringues aren’t crisp, turn the oven off and leave them inside for another hour.
Transfer Pavlova(s) to a rack and cool completely. Beat the cream with the remaining tablespoon of sugar until soft peaks form. Mound into the middle of the cooled Pavlova(s) and top with fruit.
Serves 8-10.
Crème brulée has an unshakable reputation as the penultimate fancy dessert, one you can guage the quality of a restaurant based on, and one uncommonly made at home. But truly, it is one of the simplest desserts you can make. All you do is whisk together egg yolks, sugar and cream, pour it into cups, and bake it. At Williams-Sonoma they have 1 L tetra packs of crème brulée for something like $22, and I’m constantly gobsmacked every time I go in there and see people buying them by the basketload. That’s the easy part! If there’s any trick to it, it’s baking the custards in a water bath and bruléeing the surface, but even that part is easy - you don’t need to have a torch (although it is fun), all you need to do is scatter the surface with sugar and run it under the broiler for a minute or two. Because they are chilled before this part, this is the ideal make-ahead dessert if you’re making a special dinner.
Crème Brulée
6 large egg yolks
6 Tbsp. sugar
1 1/2 cups heavy (whipping) cream or 18% coffee cream
1/2 tsp. good-quality vanilla (I used Madagascar vanilla bean paste, in which you can see the teeny seeds from the vanilla pod)
sugar, for sprinkling on top
In a bowl, whisk together the egg yolks and sugar. Whisk in the cream and vanilla.
Divide among 6 small ramekins, and put them into a roasting pan or 9″x13″ pan; pour water in so that the water comes about halfway up the sides of the ramekins. This will sort of insulate them so that they cook gently and evenly.
Bake for about 40 minutes, until the custards are set but still just slightly jiggly in the middle (you’ll get a feel for this!). Take them out, let them cool and then refrigerate for a few hours or overnight, until nice and cold.
Sprinkle an even layer of sugar over each dish and caramelize with a torch or transfer to a cookie sheet and place under the broiler in the oven for about 2 minutes, just until the sugar is caramelized and golden. Turn the sheet around if you need to to help them caremelize evenly. Refrigerate again, or just let them sit on the countertop while you eat dinner or make coffee, just until the sugar is set and crackly.
Serves 6.
The drive home was longer than I anticipated, having blithely missed some turn at Fort McLeod and not realized it until I reached Pincher Creek. After turning around, driving back to F.M. and then finding highway #2 North, a snowstorm hit that lasted the entire drive back (almost 2 hours) to Calgary - it was one of those storms that makes you feel like you’re driving through an asteroid field, making it impossible to tell how fast you’re going or how far away that rig is in front of you.
But totally worth it.
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March 30 2008 | cheese and dessert and lamb and leftovers and sweet stuff | 2 Comments »
My craving for pizza has not been satiated since the disappointing pizza I brought home last week. A few days ago I mixed up a batch of no-knead bread dough with the intention of making a pizza. Yesterday, when the dough had already been sitting patiently on the counter for 24 hours when it became apparent that I wouldn’t be able to use it, I put it in the fridge - this slows the yeast-rising process, so it was fine to use today and hadn’t morphed into some form of sourdough. I sauteed some mushrooms and wilted some spinach, and turned out our usual big rectangular pizza on one of my rimmed cookie sheets.
Happily, I did need to test a recipe for an article on honey I’m working on for City Palate, so we made Chocolate-Honey Cupcakes with Honey Ganache. They turned out incredibly well; not overly sweet despite their name, with a fine, dense texture. Although I’ve never been one to turn down a Crave cupcake, it was refreshing to have one that wasn’t top-heavy with a swirl of fatty frosting. The ganache is easy to make and even easier to apply; the result elegant even when the chocolate escapes in a glob down the side. I scattered a few with multicolored sprinkles and popped them in the freezer for Ben and Emily’s next visit on Monday. Next time I’ll have some fresh raspberries and stick one upright in the middle of each cupcake before the ganache has a chance to set. Maybe for W’s third birthday. I do love ganache.
Except that I remember why I never make it: most of it makes its way into my mouth, instead of onto the cakes.
Honey Chocolate Cupcakes with Honey Ganache
Ganache is just a fancy word for chocolate melted with cream, and in this case, honey. It’s the same mixture you’d use to make truffles, only more liquidy. It’s actually easier to make than frosting.
Cupcakes:
2 1/4 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup cocoa
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1 1/2 cups buttermilk or thin plain yogurt
1/2 cup canola oil
1/2 cup honey
2 large eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
Ganache:
1/2 cup whipping cream or half & half
1/2 cup honey
8 oz. (8 squares) semi-sweet chocolate, chopped
Preheat oven to 350°F. Line a muffin tin with paper liners, or spray it with nonstick spray.
In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt. In a medium bowl, whisk together the buttermilk, canola oil, honey, eggs and vanilla. Add to the dry ingredients and whisk just until combined.
Fill the lined muffin tins 3/4 full and bake for 20-25 minutes, or until tops are springy to the touch. Repeat with remaining batter. Set on a wire rack to cool.
To make ganache, combine whipping cream and honey in a small saucepan and set over medium heat until it begins to simmer around the edges. Remove from heat and stir in the chocolate. Let sit for a few minutes, and then stir until smooth. Set aside to cool for about 5 minutes before pouring over cooled cupcakes. If you like, top each cupcake with sprinkles or a candy or raspberry before the ganache sets.
Makes about 20 cupcakes.
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March 08 2008 | cake and dessert and sweet stuff | 3 Comments »
Ben and Emily are over for dinner and a sleepover tonight. When I picked them up from school, I asked what they wanted to make for dinner. Emily asked for corn dogs and deep-fried marshmallows; Ben asked for gaspetti and meatballs and bananas. Guess who won.
Luckily I bought ground bison yesterday. I am so glad that Sobey’s is carrying it fresh, right beside the ground beef! Bison has more protein than beef, and half the fat. In fact, bison has less fat than skinless turkey or chicken, and (with the exception of a few fattier cuts) even less fat than halibut.
The problem is, because it’s so lean bison dries out if you cook it for as long as you cook beef. Because it looks and tastes like beef, it’s hard not to treat it the same way in the kitchen. As a general rule, you need about 1/3 less time when cooking steaks, roasts and burgers. Using ground bison in chili, spaghetti sauce, meatballs and the like is easy though. Tonight I added an egg and a handful of quick oats to the bison (about a pound and a half), squished it up with my hands and we rolled it into balls and put them all out on a cookie sheet. While the pasta boiled I baked the meatballs in the oven - 350 F for 20 minutes or so - then transferred them to a pot of simmering tomato sauce. (I actually ran out of spaghetti, but used these long curly noodles I found at the Italian market that turned out to be hollow inside, like long, thin, uncut macaroni. They were much more worm-like than spaghetti - perfect for five-year-olds.) The kids adored them - Emily said they were the best meatballs she had ever had. She thought it was even cooler when she heard they had been made out of bison.
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March 06 2008 | bison and dessert and sweet stuff | 3 Comments »
I suppose at least my current crazy schedule is making this project more interesting. Or more dull?
Today I taught a homemade pasta class at the Cookbook Company with Lina deGaeta, master pasta-maker and the wife of the owner of the Italian Supermarket on the corner of Edmonton Trail and 20th Ave NE. (Who makes, by the way, the best pizza in Calgary - Saturday afternoons only they fire up the wood-burning oven and you can order pizza any way you like it, with real Italian ingredients and chewy, bulbous crusts.)
Tonight though, my call time to the set of It’s Just Food is 10:30pm, and we’re going to shoot all night. So I had a bit of a nap, and then, technically, it was dinnertime. Because I was assembling a sort of “lasagna” made out of fresh ravioli as a beauty shot for the show, I assembled another small one for Mike and W. (I got the idea from a cookbook put out by Real Simple magazine.)
I ate a wedge of frozen chocolate zucchini cake. That counts as dinner, right? After all, it does contain a vegetable, and was made with canola oil - a healthy fat.
Ravioli Lasagna
This is as fast and easy as it gets. The ravioli is already filled, so you don’t need to layer your noodles with filling. Also great when cooking for one – you can make individual sized lasagnas, which isn’t possible when using pasta sheets or lasagna noodles.
If you like, use any kind of cooked veg as well as or in place of the spinach – a container of roasted tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and eggplant from the Italian market works especially well.
1 large jar good-quality tomato sauce
2 16-18 oz. bags fresh or frozen large ravioli - any kind
1 pkg. frozen chopped spinach, thawed
1 cup grated part-skim mozzarella (or as much as you like)
½ cup grated Parmesan
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Spray a 9”x13” baking dish with nonstick spray, and spread about a third of the tomato sauce over the bottom. Lay half the ravioli in a single layer overtop. Sprinkle with the spinach and half the cheese, another third of the sauce and then the remaining ravioli, sauce and cheese. Cover with foil and bake for 20 minutes, then uncover and bake another 10 minutes, until golden and bubbly.
Serves 6.
(Low Fat) Chocolate Zucchini Cake
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1 cup cocoa
1 ½ tsp. baking powder
1 ½ tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 ¼ cups buttermilk
1 cup packed brown sugar
2 large eggs
1/4 cup canola oil
2 tsp. vanilla
1 cup strong coffee
1 zucchini, unpeeled & grated
1/2 cup chocolate chips (optional)
Preheat oven to 350°F.
In a large bowl, combine flour, sugar, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
Add buttermilk, brown sugar, eggs, oil and vanilla and beat for 1-2 minutes, until well blended and smooth. Stir in coffee and zucchini. The batter will be fairly thin.
Pour into a bundt pan that has been sprayed with non-stick spray. Bake for 45-50 minutes, until the top is springy to the touch.
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March 02 2008 | cake and dessert and freezable and one dish and pasta | 8 Comments »
Some nights, you just need to go pick up a pizza. And after watching a movie, you need to bake brownies and eat them warm from the pan, with cold milk and hot espresso, on the couch wrapped up in a comforter with your family. Lucky me.
My Grandma used to make brownies that were fudgy on the inside, with an intensely chocolate flavor and crackling top. This is the closest I’ve come without using a cup of butter. Make sure not to overbake them; they should just be starting to pull from the sides of the pan, but still dense and fudgy in the middle. The best brownies are just ever so slightly underdone.
Fudgy Brownies
1/4 cup butter
1 oz. unsweetened chocolate (1 square)
2/3 cup cocoa
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 large egg
2 large egg whites
1 tsp. instant coffee granules, dissolved in 1 tsp. water
2 tsp. vanilla
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
Preheat oven to 350°F.
In a medium saucepan, melt butter and chocolate over medium-low heat, stirring often. Remove from heat and stir in cocoa and sugar. Mix until well blended — it will have the consistency of very wet sand.
In a large bowl, whisk together the egg, egg whites, coffee and vanilla. Add the chocolate mixture and mix until well blended and smooth. In a small bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder and salt; add to the chocolate mixture and stir just until combined.
Pour into an 8” x 8” pan that has been sprayed with nonstick spray. Bake for 25-30 minutes, until set around the edges but still slightly soft in the middle. They will seem to be not quite cooked, but will set a little more as they cool. Do not overbake! Cool in the pan on a wire rack.
Makes 16 brownies.
Per Brownie: 150 calories, 4.5 g fat (2.6 g saturated fat, 1.4 g monounsaturated fat, 0.2 g polyunsaturated fat), 27.4 g carbohydrates, 21.2 mg cholesterol, 2.6 g protein, 2.2 g fiber. 25% calories from fat
Variations:
Oreo Brownies: Chop 6 Oreo cookies into quarters and gently press into the top of the batter before baking. Adds less than 1 g fat per brownie.
Mint Brownies: Coarsely chop 2 small boxes of Junior Mints or 2 Pep mint patties – this is easier if they are frozen first. Stir into the batter before spreading in the pan and bake as directed. Adds 0.5 g fat per brownie.
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February 08 2008 | dessert and snacks and sweet stuff | 3 Comments »
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So I improvised: tossed the leftover spaghetti with some egg white (I had some whose yolks had been used to make lemon curd), a bit of grated Parmesan, a grinding of pepper and a big spoonful of pesto, just because there was some open in the fridge and W is such a fan, then spread the spaghetti into an oiled pie plate, pushing it up the sides a bit.
I had requests for spinach sauce, but had hastily crumbled and cooked a couple lean Italian sausages, a red pepper, a few fresh tomatoes that had gone too wrinkly for anything but cooking with and a can of tomatoes before remembering this, and pureed sausage, I imagine, is not a Good Thing. So I decided to proceed as if it were a lasagna - I crumbled some ricotta and thawed, squeezed-out spinach over the crust,
topped it with the sauce…
and some grated part-skim mozzarella, and baked it at 350F for about half an hour, until all was golden, crsipy-edged and bubbly. Yum.
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