Chocolate Olive Oil Cake

I love olive oil cakes. Using oil, rather than butter, as the primary fat makes them remarkably light and, depending on the oil, smooth. Chiffon cakes are a good example; they use vegetable oil as the fat and, as a result, are light and silky as chiffon. I generally prefer olive oil to vegetable oil as it is healthier and I like the flavor more. But of course it is the flavor of olive oil that makes it hard to use in cakes--often you don't want to taste the fat and vegetable oil is virtually flavorless. Still there are times when the flavor from olive oil is just what you want. The olive oil cakes we made at school (and at the restaurant) are an example. But I like chocolate and none of these olive oil cakes I've learnt to make are chocolate cakes. Happily Nigella Lawson's new Italian-themed cookbook has a recipe for a chocolate olive oil cake!

Two Pies for Pi Day

I'm sure I've mentioned that Pi Day is one of my favorite holidays. If you haven't heard of it, Pi Day is so called because March 14th or 3.14 is, of course, the begining of pi. This year (since it is pi month--March 2014--and we get those so rarely) I made two pies, one savory and one sweet.

Homemade Granola

Alices Tea Cup makes incredible homemade granola and the recipe is in their cookbook. I think there's something funky with the recipe as scaled down to home cook sizes, so I've tweaked it here and there and changed the baking method a bit. Overall though, it captures the spirit of their delicious, honey sweetened, oatty and nutty granola.

Hamantaschen for Purim

There are many different explanations for why we eat hamantaschen on Purim and why it's triangular. I'll always go with the story I heard: the pastries are triangular to symbolize Haman's hat (which had three corners, three corners had his hat--we used to sing that at the Purim carnival at synagogue.) I'm not sure why we would be eating the villian's hat, but I like hamantaschen, so I don't argue.

Glazed Pumpkin Scones

I'm sure I've mentioned these before. They are Alice's Tea Cup's famous pumpkin scones. I've made them before and they didn't work quite right. This time around I paid more attention. They add absurd amounts of spices. I'm sure they taste delicious with a 1/4 cup of each type of spice (cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger, if I remember correctly), but that quantity of spices costs a lot of money. The first time I cut down the spices and the dough was far too moist. This time I used about 1/8 cup of each spice and topped each up with 1/8 cup flour (so there was still the same amout of dry ingredients). I also added about 1/8 cup extra flour since it was a damp day. That was about right and the dough was usable, though still on the wet and sticky side. It was a bit of a pain to work with, but the scones rose and cracked perfectly (they look just like the ones at Alice's) so I wouldn't add any more flour.