Bakewell Tart, Part Deux

The first Bakewell tart worked so well that I decided to make another for a meeting with some fellow teachers.


This time, though, I actually remembered that the recipe only made enough for a 9" tart and multiplied the ingredients by about 1.25. That should be enough for two extra inches, right? Well, no. I forgot the whole geometry thing; it turns out that an 11" pan has about half again as much area as a 9" pan.

*Facepalm.*

Bakewell Tart (The Daring Bakers)

The June Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Jasmine of Confessions of a Cardamom Addict and Annemarie of Ambrosia and Nectar. They chose a Traditional (UK) Bakewell Tart... er... pudding that was inspired by a rich baking history dating back to the 1800's in England.

A month ago, if you had told me that I would soon need to grate a stick of butter, I would have laughed, thought for a minute, then realized: the Daring Bakers. For my non-foodie readers, the Daring Bakers are a group of brilliant bloggers who take on challenging recipes once a month and all blog about them on the same day. I am a member of both the Daring Bakers and its sidekick, the recently created Daring Cooks. Only three challenges in and I've already had recipes call for things I don't normally do, like, say, grate butter.


For the most part, these challenges are thoroughly enjoyable. And this recipe is! Grating butter, though, not so much.

Let me bring you up to speed. This tart (pudding?) is composed of a shortcrust (basically a slightly flaky and very buttery shortbread), a layer of jam, and frangipane, a spongy, "slightly squidgy" (their words, not mine!) almond-flavored cake/topping. First you need a tart pan. The recipe suggests 9", but mine was 11". That would have been an important fact to note ahead of time. Live and learn, live and learn.

To make the crust, you need:

225g (8 oz.) all-purpose flour
30g (1 oz.) sugar
2.5ml (½ tsp.) salt
110g (4 oz.) unsalted butter, frozen
2 egg yolks
2.5ml (½ tsp.) almond extract (optional)
15-30ml (1-2 tbsp.) cold water

Combine the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl and grate the butter over them. Quickly use your hands to mix together the flour mixture and butter until it "resembles bread crumbs."


Next, lightly whisk together the egg yolks and almond extract (if using).


Pour into the dry ingredients and mix together. Add just enough water to form a cohesive dough. Knead it out onto the counter and form it into a disc. Wrap in cling and refrigerate at least 30 minutes (this step can be completed the night before you assemble the tart).


Once the dough has chilled, roll it out to approximately 5mm (¼") thickness. If you can't follow directions and didn't make enough dough for your tart pan, don't worry, it will turn out just fine. Press the dough into the tart pan and trim off any excess, using it to patch any holes in the crust. Toss the finished crust in the freezer for 15 minutes and start preparing the frangipane.

125g (4.5 oz.) unsalted butter, softened
125g (4.5 oz.) powdered sugar
3 eggs
2.5ml (½ tsp.) almond extract
125g (4.5 oz.) ground almonds
30g (1 oz.) all-purpose flour

Feel free to grind your almonds by hand or buy them pre-ground. I chose to use a food processor, and it worked beautifully.

Isn't it cute how my food processor bowl nestles directly onto my scale pad? It's like they were made for each other.
For more fun with butter, cream together the butter and powdered sugar. Using a hand mixer, beat in eggs one at a time. The mixture may appear to curdle, but it will be alright. Pour in the almond extract, scrape down the sides, and add the almonds and flour. Mix well.


As rarely happens in my kitchen, the timing was perfect and I finished the frangipane about the time the crust needed to come out of hibernation.

To assemble the tart, warm some jam or curd (I'm sure homemade would be good, but I used store-bought seedless, sugar-free blackberry preserves) in a pot of boiling water or in the microwave. Spread it out in an even layer on the crust. Top with the finished frangipane and smooth the top.


Pop it in the oven at 400°F for 30 minutes. With 5 minutes remaining, garnish with slivered almonds.


If you can't tell from the picture, my crust does not go all the way up the sides of the pan. It is also a little thinner than I would have liked. All the same, everything worked out. The textures are wonderful and the almond-blackberry flavor is spot-on.


I would have prefered the poofy, slightly rounded look that other, more capable Daring Bakers most certainly achieved, but the flatness of my tart did not affect the taste at all.

That this recipe can withstand my inevitable bunglings and taste no worse for wear speaks volumes. It's a relatively quick recipe to prepare (especially for the Daring Bakers), and it's tons of fun (except, of course, the butter thing). I'm three challenges in, and every single one of them has been fun and tasty.

My rolling pin's just sitting there at the top of the post, waiting. What's next?

From the Daring Kitchen: Dumplings

The June 2009 challenge is hosted by Jen from use real butter. She has chosen Chinese dumplings/potstickers as the challenge.

For various reasons, I missed the inaugural Daring Cooks challenge of ricotta gnocchi. I would not miss the second one for the world, though. If you know my cooking, you know that dumplings (gyoza in Japanese) are right up my alley. My wife absolutely loves Chinese steamed buns, baozi (包子), also extremely popular in Vietnam, and I have tinkered around with some recipes for those. They use a very simple leavened dough and can be filled with virtually anything (my favorite are red bean paste and sesame paste).

I don't have much experience with gyoza, though, so this month's challenge was still a challenge. Unlike steamed buns, the dough for these puppies is unleavened and oh so simple. It is:

2 cups all-purpose flour (250g)
½ cup warm water (113g)

I strongly suggest weighing the ingredients and not trying to halve the dough (the voice of experience speaking). Flour is cheap, right?

Assemble the dough in a large bowl or with the dough blade of a food processor. Jen's blog post has plenty of pictures (hence the dearth of pictures in my post), but the most important part is the consistency of the dough. I did two separate batches and both came out of the food processor firm and the slightest bit sticky. After 2-3 minutes of kneading, thought, they were soft and silky to the touch. That silky texture was perfect for rolling and filling the wrappers.

Making the filling is the easy part, so look at the recipe on Jen's blog post. K. doesn't like most of the ingredients, so I only used:

1 lb. ground pork
7 shitake mushrooms, minced
¼ cup ginger root (55g), minced
3 tbsp. soy sauce
2 tbsp. sesame oil
2 tbsp. cornstarch

The filling cohered beautifully and filled the kitchen with the delightful aroma of sesame oil.


If possible, it tasted even better than it smelled.

Before filling the dumplings, though, you need to make the wrappers. Form the dough into a flattened dome and slice it into several strips. Roll out the strips into cylinders and cut discs ¾" thick and ¾" in diameter. On a floured workspace, press each disc flat with your palm. Roll each disc out to form the wrappers.

Note: the wrappers are supposed to be round. You can always use a biscuit cutter to shape them. Or, just run with the misshapen ones.
Fill the wrappers with about a teaspoon and a half of filling. Follow Jen's instructions for folding and pleating the dumplings.


You can even make wontons for wonton soup from the reject wrappers!


I will also bow to Jen's expertise on cooking the dumplings. You can steam, boil, or panfry (my preferred method) them. I do, however, suggest that you cook them immediately after assembling them. The dough tends to get stickier as it sits, and we let several dozen rest for too long.


We steamed and panfried them, and the results were delicious. Homemade dumplings are much better than anything you can buy elsewhere. The filling for this particular recipe is flavorful. The wrappers are extremely fun to work with (not sure this counts for much, but K. said that assembling the dumplings was the most fun she has ever had helping me in the kitchen) and a great texture.

A great, simple dough + tasty filling = great fun to be had by all. Get thee to the kitchen!

(My apologies for the fact that this post reads contains even less insightful commentary than usual. I really don't have much to say that Jen has not already said in her exhaustive blog post.)

Strawberry Jam-Like Substance

I have a shiny new toy and it looks something like this:


That's right. Counter space. And a brand new stove. And a range hood. And heating elements that are level and don't cause sauce to go sliding around the pan. Did I mention the counter space?

My parents came up to help me move, and they gifted me, among other things, a gallon of strawberries, thus answering, once and for all, the age old question of "who gives someone a gallon of fruit?" with the apropos "my mom."


I really was grateful, but I had no idea what to do with a gallon of strawberries. I cut some up and put them on cereal. I covered some in white and milk chocolate and devoured them greedily. After that, I still had approximately 3.9 quarts left. So, I did the next best thing and made jam.

Well, sort of. Intimidated by the instructions on the back of the pectin box, I opted for the "no cook jam" pectin. It didn't help that I had just seen Mike Rowe attempt to make cranberry jam and burn himself roughly thirty-seven times.

I followed the recipe on the back of the package and crushed enough strawberries to produce 4 cups.


Aren't cut strawberries a thing of beauty? As you can see, the lighting is much better at the new place, even though I still have the same crappy camera.

Except, of course, in this picture.
Most people would have crushed the fruit in the blender, but I (stupidly) crushed it by hand with a meat tenderizer (What? I just moved in and couldn't find my potato masher!).

Crushing the fruit is the hard part. The rest is just stirring. According to the package, 4 cups of fruit should be sweetened with 1.5 cups of sugar (I used Splenda). I was a little leery of that number, since various recipes online suggested anywhere from 2 to 4 cups of sugar. In package recipes I trust, though, so I steamrolled through and it resulted in perfectly sweetened strawberry jam.


Again, sort of. The "no cook" pectin never really fully set, so it's almost like really thick strawberry mush. It's delicious, mind you (the wife, who claims to not like jam, likes it). And, with only three ingredients (fruit, Splenda, and pectin), it tastes exactly like fresh strawberries. But jam it is not, at least in the strictest sense of the word.

I'm still getting used to the kitchen and getting back into the habit of cooking and baking. The craziness of moving meant that I missed the last Daring Bakers challenge, as well as the first Daring Cooks challenge. This month's Daring Cooks challenge is right up my alley, though, so I'll be back with a vengeance in less than a week.

While I find my way around the new kitchen, I'll leave you with a very zen picture of a strawberry floating above it all.

Review: Smitten Kitchen's Russian Black Bread

Chuck Norris doesn't use a bread knife. He uses dental floss.
Chuck Norris doesn't bake bread. He scares it into baking itself.
When Chuck Norris kneads bread, the neighbors feel the tremors.

Smitten Kitchen's Russian black bread is an intensely flavorful pumpernickel. Many adjectives could be used to describe it. "Hardcore" comes immediately to mind. This bread has seventeen ingredients, including unsweetened chocolate and shallots, or double what any normal bread on God's green earth should ever have. Step aside, my friends, because this, this is Chuck Norris bread.


Since this is a recipe review, I won't provide you with a recipe or any other pictures. For those, you can head on over to Smitten Kitchen and marvel at the fancy camera work. Instead, I'm going to give you the low-down on the recipe:

1.) Make it now. It's a messy, complicated dough, but it makes an insane amount of a delicious, aromatic bread. The apartment will smell like pumpernickel for the next few days, and that alone is worth the price of admission.

2.) When Deb at Smitten Kitchen tells you that you can make rounds or loaves, what she really means is that you should make only rounds. The crust on this bread is delightfully cruncy and thick, but it doesn't set up quite right in a loaf pan. It needs to be exposed to air; otherwise, it kind of crumbles and falls apart. So, make rounds, please. They're more aesthetically pleasing anyway. And, as you can see in the picture above, they slice beautifully.

3.) There is no real need to grind up the fennel and caraway seeds. The dough is so large that a few tablespoons of seeds are hardly noticeable.

4.) If you're like me and regularly alter recipes accidentally on purpose, do not fret. This bread (or any yeast bread, really) is resilient and can take pretty much any substitutions or alterations. I, for instance, stupidly added extra chocolate (cocoa powder + shortening for those of you without unsweetened chocolate on hand). It turned out perfectly all the same.

While the dough might kick your ass, the finished product is a pungent and delicious kick in the tastebuds. Unless you want to feel the wrath of a Chuck Norris roundhouse, you might want to get into the kitchen and start baking.

Cooking with Apples, Part Deux (Updated)

I've had some leftover red delicious apples sitting in my fridge for a while now. I baked an amazing apple coffee cake with some, but I needed something else to finish off the rest of them. Thankfully, Rachel came to the rescue and told me how to make applesauce. Just boil some peeled, cored, and sliced apples and toss the results in a blender. Simple, right? Before you answer that question, have you ever seen me cook? Nothing is simple in my kitchen.

I bought a cheap apple corer to commemorate the occasion and promptly peeled the apples and sent them through the gauntlet of blades.

A close-up of the victims.
Since I can't follow anyone's directions (even my own; I've written down some of my recipes, but I never actually follow them), I decided to make flavored applesauce. The only things I had in the house (remember, we're moving soon) was some blueberry pomegranate juice and some frozen Maine blueberries. Blueberry applesauce it is!


I boiled four apples in a thin layer of the juice (around ¼ cup), then covered and simmered for almost half an hour. The smell was kind of bad, so I decided to sweeten them with around ¼ cup brown sugar. That's entirely optional, though.


Once that was done, I tossed the apples and some of the juice (leaving a small amount in the pot) into the blender. I threw some blueberries on top for good measure.


Blended it all together and it turned out beautifully.


If you can't see the texture, enlarge the photo. Trust me: it's perfect. And the taste (even though I've only had it warm) is quite delicious. Most importantly, for once, it actually was simple.

Tonight I'll be trying this ridiculously complicated black bread for a potluck at my wife's work. I've never worked with half the ingredients (shallots? really?), so wish me luck.

Update: after checking the cooled product, it thickened more than I anticipated. Suggestion: double the liquid base (you can use water, fruit juice, apple cider, apple juice, etc.) so you don't have to add apple butter and fruit juice to thin out your applesauce. Just an idea.

Make This Coffee Cake Now

Please? It's the best coffee cake I've ever had.


Adapted from a recipe by Emeril:

Batter
1 stick unsalted butter, softened
1½ cups packed light brown sugar
2 large eggs
2 cups self-rising flour
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 cup sour cream
2 apples, peeled, cored, and chopped

Topping
½ cup packed light brown sugar
½ cup all-purpose flour
½ tsp. ground cinnamon
½ stick unsalted butter, softened

Glaze
½ cup packed light brown sugar
½ tsp. vanilla extract
2 tbsp. water

I came into some apples recently. Unfortunately, they're red delicious apples, which don't hold their shape when baked. Since I'm not all that fond of eating apples straight (especially red delicious), that meant something with chopped or pureed apples.


I stumbled upon Emeril's recipe and am very, very glad I tried it.


Start by placing a stick of butter in a large bowl and half a stick in a medium bowl.


While those are softening, whisk together the self-rising flour and 1 tsp. cinnamon in an even larger bowl.


Once the butter is soft, cream together with the brown sugar. Add eggs, one at a time, incorporating thoroughly. After one egg, the batter will look deliciously peanut-buttery. After the second, it will look runny.


Make a well in the flour and add what you just mixed to the flour. Add the sour cream and vanilla, stirring together. Fold in the chopped apples. The finished batter will be extremely thick (perfect for that crumb texture). Preheat the oven to 350°F and grease a 13x9 baking pan. Pour the batter into the pan.

Prepare the crumb topping by mixing together all four ingredients until the result resembles coarse crumbs. Sprinkle uniformly over the surface of the batter.


Place in the oven. Bake approximately 35 minutes or until golden brown on top.


Let cool on a wire rack for at least 10 minutes. Meanwhile, whisk together the three glaze ingredients. It's okay if the sugar doesn't dissolve fully.


After the cake has cooled for 10 minutes, drizzle the glaze over the top and let harden slightly.


I cannot say enough about the results. The texture is divine, and the apples give it a light fruity taste. I love the taste of brown sugar, too, so truckloads of the stuff can't hurt.


The cleanup's a bitch,


but well worth it. As I said before, this is the best coffee cake I've ever had.

I still have four more apples to use up. I'm thinking about making apple dumplings. Any other ideas for good apple dishes that could stand some red deliciousness?

Pecan Pie and Banana Nut Muffins

I'm moving in less than a month and will be coming into a lot of free time in approximately 48 hours. What to do but bake? I have a lot of stuff in my pantry that needs to be eaten, and baking is the best way I know to use up ingredients pre-move.

I've had some recipes from Simply Recipes waiting, so I decided to take the opportunity to try them. First up is a classic pecan pie, which, for the record, I always seem to screw up.


This recipe is delightful, though, and the added molasses and brown sugar makes for a dark filling that isn't too syrupy sweet.


For the record, I was able to eat a quarter of the pie in one sitting, something I would never be able to do with a regular pecan pie.

Grade: B+
The second recipe I butchered is Elise's take on banana nut muffins. Of course, I only had one banana in the house, so I had to dramatically abbreviate and alter the recipe and combine it with a package of banana nut muffin mix.


Despite all my attempts to the contrary, this recipe turned out quite well.


They're basically your classic banana nut muffin. The mashed banana makes them much more moist than muffins from the package, though.

Grade: A-
I will be reviewing some other recipes in the coming weeks. The fewer non-perishables I move with, the better. I inherited almost a dozen red delicious apples, so expect some awkward apple recipes soon.

Raisin-Walnut Rye Bread

"Don't you know that love / Is stronger than Jesus," Nina Persson croons on A Camp's new album, Colonia. Well, I know something else that is stronger than Jesus: bread.

This recipe, adapted from one on the King Arthur Flour website, is a keeper. It's delightfully soft, and it features both the slightly tangy taste of classic rye bread and the sticky sweetness of raisins, with a bit of crunch in there just to screw things up.


The best part about it is that it is easy to make, and, if you regularly bake bread, you likely have the ingredients already. If not, you can easily go out and get them.

Mix the following ingredients in a bowl (or in your bread machine on the dough setting, if you prefer):

½ cup pumpernickel flour
½ cup rye flour
2 cups bread flour
1¼ cups water (room temperature)
2 tbsp. melted butter
3 tbsp. brown sugar
1½ tsp. salt
2 tsp. instant yeast (room temperature)

Mix to form a shaggy dough. Knead 10 minutes, let sit 10 minutes, then knead some more. Near the end of the kneading process (if you're using a bread machine, when it beeps), add 1 cup raisins and ½ cup chopped walnuts. You can substitute any dried fruit and chopped nuts here.


If you made the dough by hand, let it set in a bowl with a damp cloth over it for about an hour. It should double in size. If you made it in the bread machine, just wait until the dough cycle is complete.

At this point, transfer the dough to a lightly oiled loaf pan and cover it with lightly oiled plastic wrap.


Let sit for another 45 minutes or so until the dough crests over the top of the pan. Preheat the oven to 350°F. The dough should look something like this before it goes into the oven.


Bake for about 25 minutes (or longer if you prefer a thicker crust). Remove it from the oven and tent it with foil to keep the crust from burning. Return to the oven and bake another 15 minutes. It's always difficult to tell when bread is ready. I've found two good ways: you can either use an instant-read thermometer (the inside of a medium-sized loaf should hover around 190°F) or you can thump the outside of the loaf with your fingernail. If it's done, it should resonate slightly and hurt just a bit when you thump it.


When the loaf is done, slide it out of the pan and onto a cutting board. I like to cut my bread soon after it's out of the oven (my wife would disown me if I didn't give her a warm piece of bread).


Since water-based loaves can be rather soft and moist, I usually cut them and let them sit on a wire cooling rack for about an hour. Doing so allows them to cool and draws out some of the excess moisture so they will be easier to package.


While it's not a true rye bread, this recipe yields a loaf that is dark and rich like a traditional rye. And the texture of the bread is so perfect that I couldn't ask for more. It's going to be tough not to eat it all now while the wife is sleeping.