Damp Lemon Almond Cake

This is from one of Nigella Lawson's cookbooks, I don't remember which (either Domestic Goddess or Nigella Express).  I made it the week before I left for England, so it's been a while.  However, I still remember how good it was!  It was incredibly moist, not too sweet, and quite lemony (but not tart) with a subtle but distinct nutty flavor.  It was a big hit, even with my boyfriend who doesn't have as much of a sweet tooth as I do.

P.S. Sorry, I forgot to take a picture...oops!

Artsy Nectarine Tart

    

The fully cooked tart.  Isn't it pretty?

This is not my favorite tart, but it is still darn good! The problem is, as much as I like them, nectarines are not my favorite fruit.

It really was fun to make, if a little tedious.  I made the tart shell from the Williams Sonoma tarts and pies cookbook but the pie itself is from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook.  I would have made her tart shell but it called for heavy cream, which was the only thing I would have needed to get from the store, so I went with the Williams Sonoma one because I had all the ingredients.  It worked very well.  It was an easy recipe and made a very tasty shell.  Plus, I have left over tart dough sitting in my fridge waiting to be made into cookies!

The filling was the tedious part.  I had to slice six nectarines into very thin slices.  Unfortunately, they were slightly bruised so they were mushy enough that I couldn't cut them thin enough to make the really pretty rose decoration that Martha does.  But I still made it really pretty and slightly abstract (which is why I'm calling it an 'artsy' tart).

Just the nectarines in the tart shell.

Then I poured in the filling mixture, which was a really yummy mixture with Chambord, which tasted so good with the nectarines.  What was great is that it sort-of puffed up when it cooked so it was very light tasting with a really nice creamy, custardy, but still slightly fluffy texture.  To put it more simply, yum!

The tart with the filling, but not baked yet.

Molassesy Chocolate Chip Cookies, con't

 

 

Here is the photo of the chocolate chip cookies that I promised.  I don't think it does them justice.  They look like any other chocolate chip cookies, but (as I said) they are much, much better.

I'm not the only person to think these are amazing, by the way.  My mom, pops and next door neighbors all agree that these may just be the best chocolate chip cookies ever!

Stone-Fruit Crostada

This is kind of like a sweet dessert pizza, or perhaps it’s more of a free-form fruit crumble. Either way, it is very good! Basically it is a basic sweet pastry dough crust, which I made and rolled out into a rectangle on a large baking sheet, topped with peaches and plums (which I had sliced thinly and then tossed in a bit of sugar and orange juice and zest.)  Then I just spread them evenly over the crust and folded the edges of the crust over to make a bit of a lip. I topped it with a crumble of butter and sugar and baked it. Yum! I served it with a dollop of almond whipped cream (heavy cream to which I added almond extract, vanilla extract and sugar).

Molassesy Chocolate Chip Cookies

These may be the best chocolate chip cookies ever.  I do not take this statement lightly.  Up until this point I held the firm conviction that my chocolate chip cookies were the best ever, so it is not easy for me to admit that another cookie may be taking the top spot.  I have not baked my cookies in many, many months, therefore it could be that I'm just blinded by the greatness of these cookies and am forgetting just how great mine are and thus unfairly bumping them down to second place.  As such, I will be doing a chocolate chip cookie showdown at some point soon (perhaps over my election day holiday) to compare these and maybe a few other recipes.  Until then, I will have to consider it a tie between these cookies and my own, but darn they are good!

I digress.  The cookies really are excellent.  They have a much stronger brown sugar taste than normal chocolate chip cookies because (as the name suggests) they have molasses in them rather than just brown sugar.  My cookie recipe calls for dark brown sugar (as opposed to light brown sugar, which is used typically) to give them a stronger flavor.  I have to say I was a little hesitant when I added an entire 1/4 of molasses to the cookie dough, but it isn't overpowering.  Instead, it is absolutely amazing!

The recipe called for 1 cup of walnuts.  I'm not a huge fan of nuts in my chocolate chip cookies, so I used an extra cup of chocolate chips instead: that meant 3 cups of chips!  I used half semi-sweet and half bitter-sweet.  Yum!

What puts these over the top is that these cookies don't end up crispy (I prefer soft, gooey cookies) but they don't seem undercooked either.  They are firm and golden on the outside and soft on the inside.  That is a balance I try to get with mine, but have not yet achieved.  The recipe explains that this consistency is achieved by baking them at a higher heat for a shorter time.  I think I will have to try this with my dough and see if it works and improves them enough to put them bake on top!

Oh, I forgot to say, the recipe is from Roland Mesnier's cookbook Dessert University, which is a really good cookbook that I highly recommend (and not just because of this recipe).

P.S. Photo coming soon.

Apple Pie

 

My friend Sophie wanted to try out her new pie cookbook, but she didn't really want to make her first pie alone.  So she came over on Saturday so we could bake it together.  We were going to eat it at the games night she was having that evening.  We were planning on playing the game Apples to Apples (which was very fun, by the way), so we decided on apple pie.  Both of us are huge fans of cinnamon so we wanted a pie with lots of it and I wanted to make a double crust pie.  Only one of the three apple pies in the book fit both requirements, so that's the one we made.  It was very, very good!  And surprisingly easy to make.

The pie crust dough was simple enough.  Although it didn't call for chilling before rolling it out, so we didn't chill it...that was a mistake!  It made it much harder to roll evenly and to transfer to the pie plate.  Ah well, it still turned out really well (all buttery and flakey and buttery).  And we learnt from the issues and chilled the top crust before we rolled it out.

The filling was tedious but easy to make.  It just involved a lot of peeling and chopping. It was very tasty before it went in the pie (we had to test it before we used it!) and even better cooked. Oh, by the way, we doubled the amount of cinnamon in the filling.

We put the top crust on and instead of pleating the overlap, we decided to pinch the edges together for a more traditional, neat look.  Rather than piercing the top to start, the recipe called for it to be left alone until it is firmed up, then you cut it into a checkerboard pattern.  It was a little unusual, but turns out it looked great.  We topped the pie with sugar and shoved it under the broiler until it caramelized.

To sum up: the pie looked and tasted amazing!

Frozen Greek Yogurt~With Recipe!

  

Served on top of an oatmeal coconut cookie

I wanted to make frozen yogurt, but I only had greek yogurt in the house, so I gave that a try.  It is great, relatively healthy (as desserts go) and oh so simple!  It does use an ice cream maker, which I highly recommend investing in.  There are relatively inexpensive and good quality ones out there and they are soooo much fun to have!

A note on the ingredients: make sure you use good quality, natural extracts, if not they aren't as strong and can make it taste a little chemically.

Ingredients:

- 3 cups fat free greek yogurt (you can use higher fat content greek yogurt if you'd prefer)
- scant 3/4 cups sugar
- 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/4 tsp almond extract

Instructions:

1) Mix the ingredients together in a large glass bowl

2) Refrigerate the mixture for at least 30 minutes (an hour is better)

3) Put the mixture in an ice cream maker and freeze according to the ice cream maker's instructions.  Note: it took about 5 minutes less than making regular ice cream.

4) Put frozen yogurt into an air tight container (I use that flimsy grocery store tupperware that is sold next to the ziplocs) and keep in the freezer.  Note: the consistency will thicken up a bit.

Oatmeal Coconut Cookies

 

The non-chocolate batch

These cookies are from on of the Magnolia Bakery cookbooks.  They are very easy to make and very good.  I'm not a huge oatmeal raisin cookie fan, but I really do like oatmeal cookies.  These are great because they have the texture of an oatmeal raisin cookie and a similar taste, but without the raisins.  The coconut replaces the sweetness of the raisins and enhances the already nice, chewy texture of the cookies.  Now I have to say, I did improve on the recipe a little.  After the first few batches (I made the cookies much smaller than they were meant to be, but actually used a bigger scoop than the recipe called for...weird...anyway this is the long way of saying there were a lot of batches), I decided that they were really good, but could be made better with the addition of some chocolate!  (What doesn't chocolate make better?!) So I mixed in mini chocolate chips with the remaining batter and made the last two batches of oatmeal coconut chocolate cookies.  They were very good too!

Strawberries and Cream Puffs

   

I found these lovely wild strawberries at a local farmer’s market and I wanted to come up with a recipe to use them. My first thought was strawberries and cream, but I wanted to do something more complex than whipping some cream with vanilla extract. Then it hit me, cream puffs! I made a batch of choux puffs (choux paste is the pastry that is used to make cream puffs, eclairs, etc). Cut them in half and filled them with vanilla whipped cream. In the center of of the plate is a mound of whipped cream topped with the slightly tart strawberries. The combination of the lightness of choux puffs, the sweetness of the whipped cream and the tartness of the strawberries was just wonderful, if I do say so myself!

Almost Flour-less Chocolate Cake

   

This was meant to be a flour-less chocolate torte.  Unfortunately, it was really humid here today and the 8 egg whites that I was supposed to whip to soft peaks wouldn’t hold their shape at all (that’s why you should never make meringue based baked goods on humid days).  So I whisked the almost completely liquid egg whites into the rest of the batter (made of melted chocolate, butter, egg yokes and sugar).  But I was afraid that because the batter had little air in it (because the egg whites weren’t airy) the torte would be a flat, dense disk.  So I winged it (or as I like to say, wung it), and added in some self rising flour.  I figured that the flour and the baking soda (that is mixed in with the flour) would make the torte rise a little and be slightly lighter.  I was right.  It was still a very, very dense crumb, like a torte.  But it is also distinctively cake like, in that as a whole it is domed on top and dryer than a torte (not dry by any means, just less moist than a torte). Overall, this turned out to be a cross between a cake and a torte...and better for it!

The recipe I was loosely following suggested a glaze to top the cake, but I didn’t like the sound of the glaze that it called for.  So I made a thin-ish chocolate ganache and poured it on top.  Yum!

I'm back!

Ok, so I was gone for six weeks because I was studying at Oxford.  I'm back now.  I had planned on posting while I was gone.  Not that I was making new things--but I admit I'm quite behind on posting desserts I made before I started this blog (and even some I've made since) and I was going to blog about those.  I didn't.  And I asked myself, why?  I had enough free time.  I enjoy reminiscing about past dishes.

Then it hit me like a ton of bricks: I just don't like blogging.

Yes, I know that is a strange thing to write in a blog.  Perhaps I should just give up and stop blogging altogether since I feel that way.  But I don't want to give up.  I like the idea of blogs, you see.  I like the idea that I can keep track of what I've baked, how it comes out, where the recipe was (or what it was if I made it up), etc.  And this seems like a good way of going about that.  I also like the idea that friends and family (and, while I'm sure this is wishful thinking, strangers) can read about what I've made.  The problem is, I don't like blogging itself.  I'm not sure I enjoy writing about something I've just done--I did it, I don't need to spend 30 minutes writing about it.  I find the process of uploading pictures tedious (it isn't blogger's fault, it is a combo of my internet connection being a bit sluggish, my camera taking very high quality photos, and my insane perfectionism that compels me to take 20 photos and then sort through carefully to pick the best pic.)

I think that the reasons I started a blog (which are the reasons I like the idea of blogging) are strong enough to overpower my dislike of blogging in practice.  We shall see if this is true.  So I will keep plugging away at this blog and hopefully blogging will grow on me.