A Long Bakes Knight

You’d think I’d remember that I’m not a huge fan of butter cookies.  They’re ok, but I’ll always choose a good oatmeal scotchie over any kind of butter-based cookie (including shortbread, sorry Andy).  But no, I forget, and those are the recipes I choose to try first.

Well, although this is  a butter-based cookie, it’s still pretty good.  These are mocha coconut butterballs, and I got the recipe out of a book.  Not a cookbook, but an actual novel.  Joanne Fluke writes a series of novels around Hannah Swensen – a baker who solves mysteries.  Her newest book, Apple Turnover Murder, features mocha nut butterballs, which I modified slightly to include coconut (one of her suggestions).

The recipe makes between three and four dozen, so these are good if you need something to take to a party – they’re easy, fun, and pretty tasty, especially if you refrigerate them!  I know, weird, right?  Just out of the oven they had kind of a sandy texture, but when they came out of the fridge (which is how I was setting the chocolate on the top), they were really good and really addictive.  They may have disappeared in just a few days.  Whoops.

One more thing – the original instructions in the book make the cookies sound as if they’ll stay in a ball shape while they bake.  Mine most certainly did not, even though I put the baking sheets in the fridge before I baked them (it was really hot and the dough was getting a bit goopy).  The instructions in the book said to roll them in powdered sugar, but they weren’t rollable, so I made a cornet (fancy word for a parchment paper cone…just use a ziploc bag with the corner cut off) and drizzled some chocolate over the top.  Yum.

Play around with these – instead of using coconut, use chopped nuts.  You don’t need to put the chocolate in the center if you don’t want.  Let me know how you make them and how you like them best.  Bake on!

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I totally have a thing for cherries.  I love them.  They are hands down my favorite fruit (although a cold watermelon on a hot day comes close).  I’d like to try this recipe I saw over at the kitchn, but it calls for cherry brandy or a certain kind of wine, and I don’t drink alcohol.  I wonder if I could use a cherry juice or a nonalcoholic wine to the same effect?

Roasted cherries sounds divine over ice cream, don’t you think?

Recipe: Roasted Cherries | Apartment Therapy The Kitchn.

I have so many baking books that I try to be really selective about what I add to my library. Sure, there are books that I’d enjoy, but now I try to figure out what I will actually use.

This book by Deborah Madison looks really interesting (she also wrote Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, another book on my wish list), especially in light of our CSA starting this week (so excited!).  I think I might make some room on my shelf for this book.  Do you have it?  If so, what do you think?  What cookbooks have you added to your bookshelves lately, or what books are you currently drooling over?

As always (even though this isn’t a recipe post) – Bake on!

Beautiful things happen in the summer…trees get leaves, birds are chirping, and berries start popping up at the grocery stores.  I love pretty much all fruit, but when raspberries, blackberries and cherries are in season I am especially happy.

Just because I love the summer fruits though, doesn’t mean I’ve tried anything as fancy as a tart.  There’s the whole crust thing – seems so easy to screw up.  Plus, I’d have to make PASTRY CREAM.  Which involves a stove.  Also seems easy to screw up.  Even worse, you’re supposed to make the tart look all pretty with the fruit on top.  And me, I’m no artistic visionary.

Well, it turns out it wasn’t that hard.  I had the dough (for the crust) and the pastry cream completed within an hour.  An hour folks…that’s almost no time at all.  Then, when it came to baking the crust I managed to roll it all out and get it into the part pan in under 15 minutes.  Granted, the dough recipe makes enough for two crusts and I ended up using it all because I totally burnt the first crust (wasn’t my fault, I swear), but still…this tart is a lot easier than I thought it would be.  Even the fruit was relatively easy, although I cheated and left the blackberries whole and only cut the strawberries in half.

Bonus: the finished tart totally made people go “Whoa!”, including my husband – a good thing since he ended up eating a good bit of it.  The bad part – tarts are filled with cream, and I’ve been eating a lot of dessert now that I actually work at a bakery (!), which means I’m going to make good use of the one month gym membership I bought on Groupon today.  Try the tart and let me know how it goes.  Bake on!

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Sometimes a cake is so good that I’ll post it, even if the pictures are inferior.  Be aware – this post has inferior pictures.  Also, before we get started – note that this is a triple layer cake.  As in, three layers.  It’s tall.  It calls for three 8 in. cake pans and if you want the cake to turn out really well, I’d make sure you actually have three pans.  Go spend the $6 at the grocery store to get a third pan if you only have two.  It will make your life easier, I promise.

This is a great Lemon-Blueberry Butter Cake from Sky High.  I really enjoy the cake recipes but I haven’t had much luck with the frostings.  I made a Chai cake, which was great, but the frosting they suggested wasn’t stiff enough to hold the cake together.  The three layers literally slid apart and fell over.  I ended up serving the layers separately.  The lemon buttercream they suggest for this lemon-blueberry cake completely failed, so I ended up using a lemon buttercream recipe from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking: From My Home To Yours (which is the recipe I give below).

This is a great summer cake and a perfect celebration cake.  Just think…the BBQ is over and your guests are ready for dessert.  You pull out a lemon-blueberry butter cake you made completely from scratch – including the lemon blueberry preserves!  Everyone will be super impressed (and completely stuffed) after they eat a piece.  This is a cake you can do – bake on!

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Rose Levy Beranbaum is the master of all things cake.  She released The Cake Bible in 1998 and has recently released Rose’s Heavenly Cakes.  I was so happy to finally get my hands on a copy a few weeks ago.  The book is great – most of the recipes are accompanied by absolutely beautiful pictures.  Plus, all the recipes have both volume and weight measurements!  If you’ve read other entries you know that I’m a proponent of the kitchen scale.  A scale is so much more accurate than measuring by the cup – especially with flour, which can be packed, sifted, etc.

Anyway, so I have this beautiful new book, and I decided it was time to finally try it out.  I’m a sucker for a good angel food cake, so I chose the Chocolate Tweed Angel Food Cake.  Sounds good, right?  Oh…it is.  The cake is speckled with unsweetened chocolate, and the frosting has bits of dark chocolate mixed in.

Time for some technical information.  I know, not as fun, but necessary – especially with angel food cakes.  The recipe calls for 16 large egg whites.  Yes, that means you’ll be separating 16 eggs.  The tricky bit is that you can’t get any yolk in the whites, or the cake won’t behave properly.  NO YOLKS, got it?  Not even a little smidgen.  The easiest way is to do this with three bowls.  Crack the egg and separate it over one bowl.  Throw the yolk in a second bowl, and once you’re sure there aren’t any bits of yolk contaminating your egg white, put the clean egg white from the first bowl into a third bowl.  So, bowl one has your white-in-progress, bowl two has the yolks, and bowl three is filling up with your clean and already inspected egg whites.

If I had been smart (or maybe just more awake, I was pretty tired while making this cake) I would have saved the egg yolks and turned them into lemon curd.  I wasn’t that smart and threw away all 16 yolks.  Don’t make the same mistake!  As soon as I realized what I had done my brain started over-producing lemon curd ideas.  Go figure.

Also, a note on angel food cake pans: Angel food cake has to cool upside down.  When the cake is still warm it’s structure isn’t set yet and it will be heavy enough to collapse itself.  Some angel food cake pans have little legs (like mine), which is great because you can just flip it upside down and the legs will hold it in place.  Some pans don’t, and in that case you need to invert it onto a wine bottle, pop bottle, or a metal funnel so that it can hang upside down properly.  Don’t worry about the cake falling out – you don’t grease angel food cake pans (this has to do with how they rise…I love baking science), so there won’t be any sliding happening.  This recipe calls for a 10 in. pan, which is equivalent to 16 cups.  Don’t use a smaller pan, or it could be angel food overload, and that would officially be no fun (and a big mess in your oven).

Have no fear!  I know angel food sounds slightly complicated, but you can do it!  This is a great recipe if you like angel food cake or if you like chocolate but don’t want a chocolate cake.  Have fun, let me know how it goes, and bake on!

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I am a sucker for a smoothie, so when Alton Brown mentioned on his show that he keeps fruit in the freezer for just such a food, I decided that I should do the same thing.  I mean really, what’s better for breakfast (especially during the summer) than a thick smoothie?  They’re super easy to make, way tastier than Slim Fast (if yo’re into that sort of thing) and only a few extra calories – this one comes in around 200, depending on the size of the fruit (according to CalorieKing.com).  Plus, it gives you a couple of fruit servings and a partial milk serving.  This one has no sugar added because I used a ripe banana – it’s sweet enough for the entire smoothie.

When I freeze bananas, I let them ripen until they have some brown spots.  I peel one, then wrap it in cling wrap.  I do that for the entire bunch and then put them in my freezer.  I also added strawberries to this smoothie and for those I just threw some leftover (already washed and tops trimmed) strawberries into a ziplock bag and put them in the  freezer.  This way I have fruit ready whenever I need it.  Also, I’ll get a large container of plain, non-fat yogurt (I like Axelrod because it doesn’t have anything funky in it) and freeze it into 2/3 c. portions.  You can do this by lining a measuring cup with cling wrap (Press’n Seal works even better) and then filling it with the yogurt.  Put the entire thing in the freezer until it’s frozen, then take the yogurt out of the cup and fold the excess cling wrap over the top to seal.

My blender is relatively powerful, but I still pull the yogurt and the strawberries out of the freezer a bit early (10-15 minutes) to give them a chance to thaw a bit.  I pull the bananas out just a few minutes before I’m going to start blending.  They take a lot less time to get soft and you do still want them mostly frozen.

So…for a quick breakfast that is a lot tastier and more healthy for you than many other options, go with the smoothie.  The recipe below will give you a place to start, but I’m sure you will figure out your own favorite.  Have fun.

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I am messy when I bake.  I don’t mean to be, and sometimes everything goes perfectly and by the time I’m done the kitchen is still pretty.  This was not one of those times.

It’s the marshmallow, you see.  There’s marshmallow in this recipe and marshmallow (well, any kind of syrup or sugar really) tends to get everywhere when I use it.  My apron is my best friend – it’s the only way my clothes are still wearable after I’m done when I’m working with any sort of sugar.

I am a big fan of the whoopie pie.  I’ve made pumpkin whoopie pies from the Baked cookbook (check it out!) and they were so good – they will definitely become part of my fall standbys.  Which means you’ll get that recipe in the fall.  I’ve been really wanting to make some sort of a banana whoopie pie that tastes like a banana flip.  Did you ever have banana flips growing up?  My mom used to get them from the carryout.  It’s a banana sponge cake with a light, kind of fluffy cream filling.  So good – even though the banana taste was oh-so-fake.

My goal with these whoopies was to recreate that banana flip goodness in whoopie pie form.  I totally failed in this goal.  However, these are still really good.  Seriously good.  There’s mashed banana in the cookie (so the flavor is real, not fake), and the Golden Syrup I used gives the marshmallow filling a deeper flavor than all corn syrup would – although the marshmallow is pretty heavy, not light like I had hoped for the banana flips.  These are banana whoopie pies for grown ups.  They are very rich.  Seriously though, watch out for that marshmallow – it gets all over everything.  Bake on!

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My husband has a thing for shortbread.  Not just any shortbread though, his Nana’s shortbread.  He’s been requesting that I make her shortbread cookies pretty much ever since we got together almost 3 years ago.  Last week I finally broke down (ok, not so much broke down, but…) and made the cookies.  They turned out really well and were really easy, so I was happy and he was happy.

“Oh-my-gosh-I-have-people-coming-and-nothing-in-my-fridge!”  This is one of those recipes.  It’s 4 ingredients…and this is stuff you should definitely have in your fridge/pantry.  Cornstarch, flour, confectioner’s sugar, and butter.  If you don’t, go out and get them now so that you’ll have cookies the next time you need them.  Plus…that’s stuff you should have in your fridge and pantry anyway.

The secret to shortbread is to not mix it too much when you add the butter to the flour, cornstarch and confectioner’s sugar.  If you mix it too much the shortbread will get tough and that’s just not good eats.  Make sure your butter is soft enough to work it in, and work it just until it turns into a dough.  You might try chilling the dough before you bake it, although I didn’t do that this time and they still turned out well.

Short, sweet, and easy – a great recipe when you need it.  As always, let me know if you try it out and how it goes.  Bake on!

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Challah bread.  I have yet to be able to pronounce it correctly, but it sure is tasty.  I don’t have much experience making breads (although I just made a great loaf of white bread last night, recipe coming soon), but I wanted to attempt a sort of “plain” bread – one that doesn’t have nuts, or swirls, or anything fancy, and could be used for our lunch sandwiches.   It had a side benefit of making excellent french toast.

The challah bread wasn’t hard to make, but required lots of resting time.  Even rolling out the three separate braids required over a half hour total of resting time so that they would stretch enough to be braided.  After braiding I used our brand new pastry brush (yes, the first one I have ever owned) to do the egg wash.

Then, it was time to bake.  When I pulled the bread out of the oven, it was golden brown and delicious (sorry, I couldn’t help myself).  Plus, it was braided, and it all stayed together!  Not bad, right?