Baking – Page 3 – Hobbits In Rivendell

Raspberry chocolate chips

April 24, 2014

5:09 pm

…well, they were supposed to be raspberry chocolate chips. Somehow, they never got to the “chipped” stage. They were nibbled and tasted and outright hoarded, and then, they disappeared into rich, chocolate cookies – there was no “chip” about them. But, they started out life as a ginormous hunk of baking chocolate.

We’ve always tried to eat seasonally, which for us means not splurging and buying strawberries or tomatoes or whatnot in the middle of winter. When a season is over, it’s over — there’s not much sense buying something which is three times as expensive as usual and tastes horrible anyway. There’s always frozen and canned stuff to fall back on, especially with things like berries. T stocked up on frozen, but decided to see if she could do something with freeze dried. Honeyville claims that their freeze dried fruit, hydrated, tastes fresh. Not to do a commercial, but it’s surprisingly close, and these were on sale. T. decided to experiment. (As usual.)

We used our lovely 1940’s double-boiler – and this thing heats up FAST. As soon as the water boils in the lower pot, be wary. These aluminum double boilers have to be taken off of the heat almost IMMEDIATELY, or your chocolate will seize. Word to the wise there!

After adding a third cup of sweetener and some very hasty stirring, our chocolate forgave us for being too warm, and got glossy and pretty – so we dumped in a load of very dry and crunchy, freeze dried fruit. And it confused the chocolate entirely. T. stirred and stirred the mixture, and then we dumped it out to set.

And, it wouldn’t set.

And, even an hour later, it wasn’t even remotely firming up, and T. threw up her hands and said, “So, you think I could just stir this into cookie dough, and it’d be all right?”

And, then, she wandered off to bed, and forgot she’d set it on the dining room table, until the following morning after breakfast… when she went in to put it away…

And it was solid. Lumpy, and not really as well-tempered and shiny and good-looking as store-bought chocolate, but it was done. The flavor was semi-sweet, and the raspberries added a sharp, tart-sweet and tasty note.

They never ended up being used for their original purpose, but it was a good reminder of how easy it is to make one’s own chocolate bars… you can control everything going in – how sweet it is, if it has peppercorns, nuts, or coconut flakes, if it’s got coconut milk, dairy cream, or no milk at all… sometimes, it’s just a lot easier to do it yourself. Meanwhile, we’ll be looking for what other trouble we can get into…

[in just]/spring

by TadMack

March 21, 2014

2:09 pm

1 Comment on [in just]/spring

Baking, California, Food, Life, Recipe

With apologies to e.e., around here, the world is not mud-luscious. It is buzzing, and if you go out the front door, the greedy, tiny, flying pigs will not whistle far and wee, but will divebomb your innocent head and make rude and aggressive “move along” noises at you.

Ah, well. Mud-lusciousness will revisit briefly at the end of the month, according to the long term forecast, as March is almost required to come in like a lion, and then calm the heck down. We’ll see. The last week of the month always throws us a weather curve ball this time of year (and, since Virginia got snow on St. Patrick’s Day, East Coast, we are feeling your pain. Metaphorically, at least.) Meanwhile, while we contemplate perfect sunshine, floods, or thunderstorms, we picked up some super-early strawberries because that chia is still calling us. (And thanks to all the people who have emailed to say they’re trying and liking this mix. It is really good, super quick, and opens itself up to many interpretations.) Imagining making a quick-set jam with it — all those lovely nutrients giving you an additional excuse to spoon it… a jam to which you don’t need to add extra sugar to make it gel… But first, T went off on another experimental tangent.

Our friend L., known to two very short, tiny, opinionated ladies now simply as “Poppy,” has tons of good stories about “back in the day.” We tend to enjoy those “back in the day” tales about food – our Uncle P., may his memory be a blessing, was full of those, and it led to many a happy Sunday recreating recipes from the 1940’s. Last weekend’s “back in the day” tale had to do with teacakes.

Teacakes (variation, “tea cakes”) are A Southern Thang, that is, one of those things which a.) originally didn’t have a recipe (no matter how Ms. P. Deen wants to tell it), and b.) was invented out of necessity – either scarcity, or some useful cause that has been lost to time. T’s father, once upon a time, used to make teacakes, and they were, unlike the sugar cookie varieties that one sees all over the web under the same name, rolled yellow cake, sometimes fragrant with vanilla, leavened with baking soda, and about the size and thickness of a halved English muffin. They were sweet, with a slightly soda-tang, and the tops would sometimes slightly brown and dimple.

T’s father usually made these beauties annually on the 12th of Never, so T. can only recall having them once or twice in her childhood, despite begging … and now, after years of nudges and suggestions for her father to recreate the dish, he can’t remember the recipe. Oh, the wailing! (T. feels it important to point out that she believes his coyness to produce the Super Seekret recipe all those years has returned karmically to bite him in the backside.) Fortunately, there are other less coy members of his generation who do remember.

Though T’s father grew up in the panhandle of Florida, and Poppy was at least a part-time resident of Oklahoma, their variation on tea cakes are close to the same. Poppy’s grandmother’s teacakes were really test cakes for her oven, which was wood-fired and probably didn’t really heat evenly until it got going. She took cake batter – yellow cake batter – and made small, palm-sized test cakes, which an adoring grandbaby was only too happy to test for her.

As others have said, variations abound in the teacake country, not to mention the world. Originally, teacakes were measured with tea cups – actual, bone-china tea cups. Many old recipes use those measurements, which is where our plain old “cup” measure originated. T opted against using her antique (mismatched and beloved) china for this! Of course, any teacake coming from The T&D Test Kitchen will be not “authentic” Southern at all, despite D. having been born and living for ten minutes Murfreesboro as a teeny-tiny infant (apparently “Southern” doesn’t count if you can’t focus or speak). To add further to the “inauthenticity,” we introduced the abomination of chocolate chips!! But the teacakes themselves were tender and tasty and, piled with strawberries, a harbinger of things to come.

Chocolate Chip Teacakes

Preheat oven 350°F/170°F

2/3 C. almond flour

1/3 C vital wheat gluten

1/2 C of shortening, butter, or margarine

1/4 C sweetener – “Fake” or sugar

1/2 Tbsp. vanilla

2 Tbsp. cornstarch

1/8 tsp. salt

1 tsp. baking powder

1/8 tsp. chocolate extract

1/4 C chocolate chips, optional*

2 Tbsp. almond or coconut milk, (opt)

As always, begin by greasing your pan, and turning on the oven. You’ll need a sturdy spatula to blend your ingredients. This dough comes together like a shortbread and/or pie crust – the liquid is only there if you really, really need it – we didn’t, but it’s an option. It’s important to combine your dry ingredients – flours, gluten, salt, sweetener, cornstarch – before you add shortening, or it may combine unevenly. T. started with a spatula, but gave up in the end, and just used her hands.

Add your chocolate chips LAST. We used Barry Callebaut’s Sugar Free 52% semisweet from King Arthur Flour, but it’s really easy to make your own sugar free chocolate morsels, and you SHOULD. These bad boys are expensive. Our only excuse at this point was a lack of time. You’ll also note we used chocolate extract. An extract of chocolate is made the same way vanilla extract is made – alcohol infused through cocoa beans. It’s got a fairly strong alcohol note, and it can be as overwhelming as too much vanilla – moreso, really. BE CAREFUL and MEASURE. Like liquid smoke, too much extract is not one of those things you can take back.

One of the great things about this is if you’re a chocolate chip cookie dough eater – there’s nothing in here you can’t eat raw. Don’t, though, because that’s gross. You can opt out of rolling this cake and bodge the whole thing in a cast iron skillet. Bake it for forty-five minutes, check its progress, and tack on another fifteen minutes, with checks at five minute intervals. You’ll want it a lovely golden brown, but don’t let it go too far! Note that D. wedged it into servings before baking. This really helps in the quest to get it out of the pan!

In case someone wants to argue with us and call these shortbread… Mmmm, okay. Chocolate chip shortbread, whatever. Traditional Scottish shortbread doesn’t contain baking powder, but you can call them what you want. The “cornflour” or cornstarch will help give the nut flour a velvety mouth feel and a richness typical for shortbread, but you can leave it out, if you choose, or substitute the same amount of rice flour, which is what commercial shortbread bakeries use.

The important thing is to imagine how you’ll eat them.

Happy Spring,

D&T

P.S. – We tried that soy whipped cream, which we found at our Raley’s, on a whim – it’s vegan and though it contains sugar, it hadn’t got much. It’s not half bad at all.

The Fine Print

by TadMack

March 3, 2014

4:58 pm

Sausage Inna Bun: Savo(u)ry Pastry

by TadMack

February 10, 2014

4:58 pm

1 Comment on Sausage Inna Bun: Savo(u)ry Pastry

Baking, Food, Recipe

Well, thank the Lord.

We got some rain, which immediately flipped the baking switch back on.

Once upon a time, just about everybody had one of those cookbooks that come from home cooking magazines. Ours is a Wilton’s “Celebrate,” from Wilton’s heyday in the nineties, and it has all sorts of ridiculous recipes in it which one must use for St. Patrick’s Day, Valentine’s Day, the Super Bowl — you know, all the important national holidays. The recipes are kind of like circus acts – you look at them and wince and then think, “But, they’re just people… I should be able to do that”. Um, right. Fiddly, fiddly, fiddly recipes, with tons of steps, and dubious results. Ah, well. The folks have good intentions, anyway.

Many, many, many years ago, we tried Wilton’s Beer Batter Rolls, which were fat and squodgy, and which we were supposed to have hollowed out and served with chili or a cream-of-something soup – for the Super Bowl, no doubt, but they were just too soft. Though otherwise useless except as a vehicle for butter, the beer battered rolls had a very specific, tangy flavor, which we quite enjoyed. The problem with these recipes which call for beer is that they generally call for a cup out of can — and there’s usually much more in the can, especially because we’ve used European beers like Guinness for cakes and such, and they have those great big cans. It’s really not fair to make slug traps out of the rest when we’re not actively trying to garden and the slugs aren’t really bothering us. (But, not gonna lie, beer traps traps catch earwigs, too. It’s not Zen, or kind, but we can call it Early Garden Maintenance, yes?) Either way, our days of carefree make-whatever-rolls are mostly over, though we still eat lots of homemade rye bread (and, oh, the twenty-five pound bag of rye in the entryway is a Whole ‘Nother Story which has much in common with T’s inability to spot the difference between 3 POUNDS and 3 KILOGRAMS, ::sigh::), but T inadvertently found a way to make a tasty pastry that is low carb and flavor reminiscent, to her, anyway, like the tang of a beer-battered dough. The trick is both seasoning – and hydration.

We haven’t previously given much thought to how almond flour is made. I mean, you grind some almonds, and voilà, right? Well, no. Blanched almond flour is made of blanched almonds – and blanching is a high pressure steam/water treatment, yes? So, though the almonds may have been already silo dry, the resulting flour has to be dried, in a kiln. The lesson we learned about British flour – kiln dried – is that it has to be more hydrated than silo-dried American flour – if your flour isn’t fully hydrated, your dough just isn’t what it should be. So, our rule of thumb with almond flour now is to let the dough sit for an additional thirty minutes or so before baking, and, when baked, make sure it is 98% cooled before cutting or moving it. (We rarely manage that last one, but…) These are two simple rules which help to make your low carb baking more satisfying.

One of the classic Glaswegian bakery goods is Sausage Rolls. HR Bradfords bakery on Sauchiehall Street even had vegetarian ones, and you’d see people rushing in and out during the lunch hour and long lines just before tea. People would emerge with grease spotted bags and trot off down the street juggling briefcases, backpacks, cake boxes and the ubiquitous sausage roll. Like the humble Hand pie, the Sausage Roll is prized because it’s something you can eat on the go, and it’s quick, and good hot or cold – if you go to a good bakery which doesn’t use too much shortening and lets the pastry get soggy as it cools. (And, you know how T. is about pastry, She Who Eats The Middles Out Of Pies And Leaves The Crust.)

Our Sausage Inna Bun might have been at home hawked on the fictional streets of Ankh-Morpork, but unlike C.M.O.T. Dibbler’s, you have our solemn promise that ours is actually edible…

Sausage Inna Bun

12 hot dogs – we used Linkettes

2 C. almond flour.

1 C vital wheat gluten

1/4 c. plain yogurt

1/4 c. creamed cheese or 4 Tbsp butter

2 Tbsp. oil

1/4 c. flax or linseeds, mortar and pestle crushed

2 Tbsp. dried thyme, crushed

1 Tbsp. onion powder

1 Tbsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

scant freshly ground pepper

OPTIONAL: 3/4 c. shredded cheese you have sitting around

In your mortar and pestle bowl, place your salt, your pepper, thyme, onion powder and flax seeds. Grind until the thyme is a fine green powder, and add to your medium sized bowl. Combine your additional dry ingredients, including your vital wheat gluten. Make a well in the center of your dry ingredients, and add your wet. This is gonig to be a sticky and thick dough, but don’t despair. If you feel you absolutely need to, you may add two tablespoons of milk, but patience might be a better option. Really: it’s going to be thick, but once you combine your ingredients, it will come together in a ball.

And for me, leaving it alone is the hardest part! However, you can Preheat the oven to about 350°F/175°C, and prep your filling at this point. (We didn’t have to do anything to our hot dogs, as they’re vegetarian, and regular hot dogs from a package don’t have to be cooked either. If you use anything else like an actual sausage or whatnot, pay attention to the cooking instructions, s’il vous plait!) We sliced twelve pieces of cheese to go into our “buns” and prepped the baking sheet with non-stick parchment paper (which is not the same thing as baker’s paper or greaseproof paper!).

After 30 minutes – or longer, it won’t hurt – place your dough ball between two sheets of parchment paper and roll out your dough until it is 1/4″ thick. Using a pizza slicer, we cut our dough into 12 rectangles, added a hot dog and a piece of cheese, and then just rolled them up, making sure to seal them as well as possible. You’ll need to bake these for 20 minutes, or until they appear golden brown and delicious.

While we used dairy products, this is easy enough to make this vegan – Daiya and Tofutti make a reasonable tofu creamed cheese, and Daiya even has some chive or garlic flavored, to spice thigns up. Since there aren’t eggs, you don’t even have to worry about a flax-water ration – you could substitute any nut or seed, be it pepitas or pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds or poppy.

There was some small misadventure in our bakery *cough* and we ended up with only eleven of these for the oven, but even if you run out of dough, these turn out beautifully. The hot dough will seem like it’s a little underdone, but it isn’t. As it cools, it sort of finds its shape. The thyme is key to flavoring this dish – delicate and adding an unexpected tang that is reminiscent of the beer batter. Well hydrated, the dough is tender and rich – and when it’s cooled enough for you to eat it without scalding your mouth, it sets up nicely. D. fortunately took a picture which lets you see the crumb – not exactly flaky pastry layers, but rich and tasty looking.

T’s next project is to adapt this pastry for sweetness. One of the things we noticed about pastry in Europe is that it’s not all that sweet – sometimes the filling is a bit sweet, but it’s mostly rich. We think we can find a happy medium between not-at-all-sweet and ridiculously-sugary. We’re imagining creating a vanilla-bean speckled dough, rich and fragrant, slicing a banana in half and then again horizontally so we’ve got just a little piece, grating a fine shower of dark chocolate atop it, settling it into its doughy bed and sprinkling the top dough casing with a tiny bit of granulated sweetness… Or, maybe a sweetly spiced dough, filled mostly with chopped cinnamon apple and a combination of dried and fresh cranberry filling… or chopped walnuts and maple syrup, dusted with just the tiniest bit of anise, or a fresh and zingy citrus-zested dough, with a gingery pear filling…

Well, we’ll let you know how it goes.

Cheers,

D&T

this-n-that

by TadMack

January 24, 2014

12:28 pm

2 Comments on this-n-that

Baking, California

It’s been a busy month – and a strange one. T. is gathering elastic, dye, and fabric glue, and eying her increasingly baggy wardrobe (-3 stone and counting) closely, as she’s become obsessed with the New Dress A Day website. (Yes, be afraid.) D. is prepping the curriculum to teach his first online course, which requires a lot of time ignoring the computer and a critical reading various 80’s novels which have nothing to do with anything, but which nonetheless make him happier than prepping his curricula. As the rest of the country wallows in snow drifts, the West Coast reprises The Great Dust Bowl Drought of Epic Proportions. No, really. Pretty soon there will be a name for it, like Polar Vortex or something. We would give a lot to have some of the East Coast’s snow melting over our parched lawns here, but as it’s currently snowing in TEXAS, maybe we’d better be careful what we wish for…

At the beginning of the year, there’s often an uptick of “Three Ingredient X,” or “Almost No-Fat Y” recipes that come up on food blogger blogs, as everyone frantically pretends to be virtuous and conventional-wisdom-on-diets compliant. We’ve avoided that trend entirely by making Tri-Sugar Tropical Banana Cake. It’s not just ONE kind of sugar, it’s THREE. Beat that, non-fat people! Of course, it’s three sugars, but three natural sugars, in reasonable small amounts, which makes it lower carb, and a reasonable snack. This was a “dump” recipe that T dreamed up because she wanted banana ~~bread~~ cake and was tired of *cough* waiting for other people to make it for her. And for the people who whined that they, too, had blackened bananas sitting in their fruit bowls at home, and why couldn’t T come over and help them – well. This is why God gave you exchange students and an oven, right? Here we go:

Tropical Spiced Banana Cake

And, note, it’s not banana bread. Like our Scottish friends, we’ve decided to call it as we see it. If there’s more than a couple tablespoons of sugar in there, it’s CAKE.

1 C Whole Wheat Flour

2 C Almond Meal

3/4 C Muesli (we used Bob’s Red Mill)

12 Dates Chopped

4 Very Ripe Bananas, Mashed

2 Tbsp. Honey

2 Tbsp. Truvia

2/4 C pistachios, roughly chopped

3 Eggs (we used chicken, but *flax also works)

1/4 C Coconut oil

1 Tbsp baking powder

1 Tbsp freshly ground cinnamon

1 Tbsp vanilla extract

1 tsp freshly ground nutmeg

Hearty pinch of salt

Preheat oven to 350°F/175°C. Oil or parchment line a 9″ cake pan or two 9×5″ loaf pans, to have one to freeze. This is one of those recipes where you can truly just assemble the ingredients in order, dump them in the bowl, and get on with things. The batter is a muffin batter, meant to be chunky, so while you want your flour to be fully hydrated, don’t worry about mashing your bananas to more than chunks – you don’t have to puree them. Bake your cake for fifty-five minutes, or, in the separate pans, bake for forty minutes ’til golden brown and an inserted bamboo skewer comes out clean. (DO test with a skewer every ten minutes after the first thirty-five – depending on if your flour was kiln-dried or not, your mix may need more or less time.)

The riper your fruit, the sweeter your cake, so be sure they’re really well freckled and fragrant. Be sure of your honey! The stuff that comes in the squeeze-y bear often has sugar added – you want real, plain honey. For your health, make sure it’s from a safe, local source. You can also use maple syrup or agave.

The pistachios were a last-minute addition. They’re so plentiful this time of year, and less expensive than usual, and made a nice change from walnuts. The shocking glimpses of green in the bread also had their own appeal. Small children may turn up their noses at this – which is crucial in the More For You category.

Carb Counters:343 carbs for the whole. 171.5. per 9×5 loaf. 21.4 g carb per slice when said loaf is divided into 8 equal pieces.

Sadly, what with assembling a large piece of Ikea furniture (goodbye weekends, hello *!%$*#& Allen wrenches), getting a new robot vacuum cleaner, and making a jump-start on Spring Cleaning, in deference to T’s allergies, we never got around to staging and photographing this ~~bre~~ — erm, cake. However, we are not immune to your need for food photos. Here now some completely gratuitous pictures of Rhubarb Jam Tarlets from when we received farm boxes of the stuff, and couldn’t eat it fast enough. Please ogle responsibly.

We mentioned back in September, T’s youngest sister was facing kidney failure. Just last week, she jumped to the top of the kidney transplant list, and voila – a new internal organ became available! After a three-hour surgery and a very boring week-long hospital stay, now the hard part begins – making that sucker stick around. This means a six months period in which Bug mourns that she cannot get her ears pierced, dye her hair, or attend school. She is also on major drugs which, while ensuring her body doesn’t reject the new organ outright, also bring her to some fairly intense emotional highs and lows – literally, there’s been hysterical laughter and hysterical sobbing within the same hour. It’s like all your teen years all at once, on Fast Forward! It’s a bit crazy-making for the family so far, but y’know what? Life is worth whatever struggle…

As someone who has had her share of being housebound for illnesses in the (hallelujah, far distant!) past, T’s convinced that our old and pine-tree-dust-prone house can be made into a safe Destination, for when Bug gets sick of her own four walls. To that end, she has gotten deeply involved with cleaning products which will aid in purifying the house, but not offend D’s sensibilities or annoy her sinuses in the process. Enter the Mrs. Meyers Clean Day line of products. Yes, yes, everyone has heard of them by now – we’re always late to the ball game. We’ve gotten fond of their lavender dish soap, which makes the whole kitchen smell nice. But T’s mostly bemused by them because she has been glazing over, staring at gardening catalogs lately, thus was enchanted into ordering Radish All-Purpose Cleanser. Yes. Radish-scented cleanser. We know what they sharply flavored little buggers taste like — but what does radish even smell like??? Tune in next time, inquiring minds will be told…

Chilly Changes

by TadMack

December 8, 2013

1:16 pm

1 Comment on Chilly Changes

Baking, California, Food, Kitchen Favorites, Life, Recipe

This morning, the frost on the deck has stayed… well into afternoon. Freezes and a few snow flurries this past week have been a surprising change from the previous weekend, when errands could still be done on one’s shirtsleeves (if done briskly, anyway). And now, the change of season has brought with it both fewer stresses, and additional ones. 2014 is suddenly bearing down on us, and the tentative thoughts we’d had about changes in the new year will soon be… more than thoughts. D. will be lecturing for an online course for a university this year, and T. has agreed to joining a vision board for a camping and retreat organization. Both D. and T. are taking on this additional jobs against their better judgment, and there will be many adjustments in the new year – and possibly a lot of whining as well. Nevertheless, one always has to try out opportunity like a coat still bearing its tags. Maybe something is meant to fit…

Meanwhile, we’ve begun to amble about the countryside a bit, in search of the unusual, as we gather items for the festive season. At a diner on the 680 industrial corridor outside of Benicia netted us a yummy breakfast at Rosie’s Cafe, and the chance to watch trains – right up close. That was probably the last weekend we could reasonably sit outside in the thin autumn sunshine, but it was well worth it to chow down on zucchini, broccoli, tomatoes and onions stuffed into an omelette and a perfectly toasted English muffin. Cheap and entertaining – can’t beat that.

Our diner luck held, the following weekend, and we were excited to discover a tiny cafe tucked into the edge of a shopping plaza in Pleasant Hill that has regular diner options and vegan ones as well. Real diners – places where requesting a half-caf mocha latte with sprinkles will get you nothing but regular refills of strong black coffee and a bowl of those little vats of cream – are traditionally completely impatient with the high maintenance requirements of foodies. They’re usually cheek-by-jowl with irascible old people, shifty-looking loners, families full of sticky children, and cackling dames gossiping over their tea. Plaza Cafe has all this — plus scrambled tofu among its breakfast offerings, and huge portions – tell the server you won’t need the hash browns or you’ll never finish. A cash-only cafe, full of “regulars,” Little League families, and surprised newbies like us, who just happened to wander in, this place is right in the middle of everything, yet off the beaten path. Those in the area will find it worthwhile to check it out.

A brisk, sunny day, Thanksgiving was a gift of family, new friends, and a plethora of great tastes. Our meal consisted of garlicky roasts and lentil loaf with a surprising bbq sauce, a savory barley risotto, rich mashed sweet potatoes, studded with bits of fried apple and onion, an amazing vegan kugel-style mac-n-cheese, the regular mashed potatoes, green beans with slivered almonds, salad greens with Honeycrisp apples and bright bursts of pomegranate arils, and silky mashed… cauliflower. Which we’re still not sure we believe contained no potato whatsoever. One of the nicest additions to the meal, aside from numerous pies, was T’s resurrecting her vegan cheesecake. Once upon a time, this was the go-to recipe, lemon cheesecake. Since then, it has had a few variations — this year, cranberry apple. Since the last time we blogged this particular recipe was in 2008, we’ll go ahead and repost:

Basic Vegan Cheesecake

1 14 oz pkg. firm silken tofu

1 8 oz. pkg “Cream Cheese” Tofutti, Daiya or, substitute regular creamed cheese if you’d like

2/3 c. sweetener – we used erythritol

1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

2 tbsp cornstarch + ice water

Though a graham cracker crust is traditional, a more flavorful — and less apt to go soggy — alternative is a gingersnap crust. You can make it in the same way — whiz up ten or fifteen dry gingersnaps in your food processor (or, ginger nuts, as they’re also called) and add a tablespoon of butter or margarine to create a crumb the texture of damp sand, and then pack it with your fingertips into the bottom of a spring form pan. Pre-baking the crust is unnecessary.

~ Preheat Oven 350°F ~

Place silken tofu, cream cheese in bowl, and, using an immersion blender or beater, blend until smooth. Add your flavoring. If you’re making a lemon cheesecake base, 1/4 c. of lemon juice at this stage will give you a perfect tang.

In a smaller separate bowl, combine 2 tbsp ice water, your extract and cornstarch with a whisk. Pour mixture into tofu blend and beat until VERY smooth. Pour lemon filling into gingersnap crust, and bake for 45 minutes. Allow to cool for two hours, or for very best firmness, REFRIGERATE OVERNIGHT. We left ours in the oven and just went to bed, and it refrained from cracking in this way, but cooling SLOWLY.

We topped this lovely pie with cranberry applesauce. This may seem a strange choice, but adding apples to cranberry sauce sweetened and took the edge from the fresh cranberries, allowing us to use less sweetener. Also, the pectin from the peels brought the sauce a really smooth mouth feel, complimenting the creaminess of the tofu. This cheesecake with a citrus sauce, chocolate ganache, or a bright berry coulee would also have worked beautifully.

Our next test kitchen project upstairs is attempting to make sourdough rye bread. Rye flour contains little or no gluten, which means that it’s so far lying sullenly in the big silver bowl, staring at us… and yet, the commercial bakeries at Raley’s and Nob Hill bring forth perfectly light, chewy, sour loaves with thick, crisp crusts, on a weekly basis. Their secret has to be, in part, the baking vessels, which must be cast iron, to make that lovely crust, and we have a great pair of cast iron skillets which together will create a Dutch oven. But, only time will tell what else goes into the mix to make a great rye sourdough. Stay tuned!

Everything Goes Better With… A Baker’s Report

by TadMack

October 21, 2013

12:08 pm

1 Comment on Everything Goes Better With… A Baker’s Report

Baking, California, Food, Life

We’re well past a report on the baking experiments, but the goods have been, to say the least, odd. Still, the odds are good that eventually, we’ll get this whole thing right!

The mise en place chefs continue to rise to the top, because they always know what ingredients they have before they start cooking. If you, like T., finds the filling of little bowls with measured and prepped ingredients fiddly, well… too bad. She started these fudge brownies with what she had on hand – insufficient cocoa powder and no eggs. Oh, the fun things you discover as you go along without the little prep bowls! No problem; she’s good with flip-flopping between vegan and not, and we have lots of solid baker’s chocolate. Unfortunately, almond flour is a pickier substance, and isn’t as easy with her choices.

We’ve talked before about how to make a flax “egg” – but you absolutely must account for that three tablespoons of water that you’ve used. It’s VERY EASY for almond flour pastries to become too moist. It’s one of the perks of baking with almond flour – lovely, moist cakes that don’t dry out, but oh, be careful, little bakers. Vegan-izing can so easily lead to disaster.

T. used the “basic” quickbread ratio for almond flour – two cups of almond flour to a half cup of cocoa powder (augmented with grated chocolate), a third cup of vital wheat gluten, 2/3 c. of a combination of Truvia and erythritol, a teaspoon of vanilla, and about a half cup of milk.

Aaand, there’s problem #2 – that pesky word “about.” It’s been really hard for both T. and D. to get through their heads that everything they think they know about baking no longer counts. We’re just not good enough yet to substitute without measuring. Right now, we’re conforming closely to recipes from The Low Carb Baking and Dessert Cookbook by Ursula Solom and Low Carbing Among Friends, by Carolyn Ketchum & Co…. and trying REALLY hard not to give in to the inevitable urge to just substitute… and failing. Repeatedly.

We have lovely in-the-process pictures from baking these fudge brownies. They came together well – baked up well – but I had some questions as soon as we took it out of its springform. The bottom seemed … too moist. We let it cool completely before doing anything with it, having learned out lesson last time about mucking around with almond flour pastries before they’re cool enough to move — but I thought, “hmmm,” as I saw how damp it was. Not a good “hmm,” either.

And yet, they were SO delicious, and so moist, and …so caved in on the top, and ugly, which is something we can lay at the door of overly-moist as well. They were super-ugly, which is a big minus, since we always like to bake to share, but amazingly chocolate-y, with a deep, rich flavor. Too moist, but yummy, like a fudge brownie pudding, maybe. We couldn’t figure out which way we wanted to go for frosting – plain? A cream cheese base? A chocolate frosting? We tried both plain and cream cheese – really, really tasty. We never got to the ganache we were going to make. Unfortunately, a cake so moist does not keep well – you have to refrigerate it, and we didn’t. YES: we ate a chocolate cake so slowly that it went bad. That’s got to be one for the books, but it really WAS good, and next time – well, we’ve got a lot of plans for next time…

Cookie Capers: A Swing and a Miss, But Not An Utter Fail

by TadMack

September 27, 2013

1:30 pm

6 Comments on Cookie Capers: A Swing and a Miss, But Not An Utter Fail

Baking, Food, Recipe

It is a truth universally acknowledged that peanut butter is a quintessentially American food. Isn’t it amazing how those “universal truths” are often utterly wrong? The Aztecs were actually the first to mess about with peanut-mashing, creating a paste that was a proto-peanut butter. Of course, George Washington Carver, an early food scientist, came up with three hundred uses for the humble legume between 1891 and 1927. In 1884 Marcellus Gilmore Edson – a Canadian – patented a peanut paste made from dry roasted peanuts. His work overlaps with the work of John Harvey Kellogg, whose 1895 pureé from raw peanuts was touted as a protein substitute for those without teeth (eek). In 1903 the first grinder for the specific use of grinding peanuts into peanut butter was patented, and the first recorded recipe for peanut butter cookies was in 1916. So far, not specifically American at all. Interestingly enough, the first time the traditional hash-marks appeared on top of the cookies was in a Pillsbury cookbook in 1936.. No explanation was given, so bakers assume it was to flatten them to allow them more thoroughly; others point out that it allowed allergy-sufferers to identify the peanut butter ingredient. (Nerdy “The More You Know!” history lesson sourced via About.com, TIME magazine’s brief history of peanut butter, and The National Peanut Board.)

According to the statistics people, America is the third largest peanut producer worldwide (hi Texas and Georgia!) and Americans eat around 700 million pounds of peanut butter per year (about 3 pounds per person). While we know that no one who reads this blog is by any means average, that does speak to a people who love their peanut butter – and their peanut butter cookies.

Typically, until recently, T. absolutely hated them.

The biggest complaint most people have about peanut butter cookies is that they’re not a low calorie food. T’s complaint? That peanut butter cookies are usually massively, ridiculously too-too-too sweet. D. posits that the sweeter the better, but T. insists that peanut butter cookies are supposed to taste of peanuts, not sugar. The argument came to its usual standstill when T. whipped up a batch of pbj cookies with… almond flour. Just to throw things off completely.

Almondy PB&C’s

Prep a cookie sheet, we used greaseproof paper. REHEAT your oven, 350F°/170°C

2 C blanched almond flour

1/2 C. natural peanut butter, in this case, crunchy

1/4 C. Truvia or 2/4 C. agave

1/4 Tbsp. vanilla extract

2 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

1 large egg or 1/4 C. ground flax, plus 3 Tbsp. water for egg replacement

Peanut butter cookies are simple enough to bring together – cream together your salt, sugar, your fats and your egg, at the last, add the flour and prepare for something ridiculously sticky. It took less than half an hour to roll the dough into simple balls. D. suggested that, since he didn’t want not-very-sweet peanut butter cookies that chocolate might as well be involved, since he doesn’t really like it. Lindt 85% was made into a quick ganache and used in place of the traditional jam thumbprint. Honestly, that was a mistake. Actually, there were a few mistakes:

What We Did Wrong

We forgot to spray PAM on the greaseproof paper. Yes. It’s greaseproof, but the cookies will still stick slightly if they’re not entirely cooled
We forgot to let the cookies entirely cool. ANYTHING made with almond flour MUST be allowed to cool quite a bit; it’s tender and delicate
We should have used a Silpat or something like it. It’s easy to get very brown bottoms to your foods when using sugar subs; Silpat helps it cook easily, cool quickly, and look better
We should have mixed sugars. Truvia is already made up of stevia and erythritol; in our quest to avoid weird aftertastes or the “cleansing” side effect of using many sugar alcohols, we’ve avoided Splenda. A tiny bit of Splenda? Is workable. A couple of tablespoons might have been helpful here, as it seemed to D. like the cookies got less sweet as time went on, and the peanut butter flavor took over.

What We Did Right:

We tried.

The list on the positives here might seem pretty short — it’s not. The attempt is A Big Deal. A lot of people, when faced with a necessary change in a diet, just… can’t. New, weird ingredients with strange names and unpredictable outcomes are really enough to make a person discouraged. It’s easier, in many ways, to retreat to “okay” foods, and try to stick with old favorites, than venture out into something new. Food blogger friends have urged us to get back in the game, but we’ve kind of become the worst kinds of food bloggers, the kinds who don’t blog about food. It’s because, to be blunt, there are a LOT of mistakes in the kitchen these days. Tons. We dump out baked items, bowls of batter, and we kind of hate ourselves just a little each time for the waste. But, waste and flops is how we fuel creation.

The verdict is that this is one tender, tasty and delicious piece of cookie. The chocolate was weird – it lost its temper and became really oddly crumbly – but with a dollop of low sugar Smucker’s, these will be a completely yummy compliment to a mug of Assam tea, or even a glass of milk. The almond flour makes these cookies more tender than the traditional peanut butter cookie, and they don’t have the sandy/shortbready feel of some recipes. (Have you ever had a gritty peanut butter cookie? T. has. It bewildered her.) T. feels this tenderness is an improvement. D. remains ambivalent.

As the days continue to cool and baked goods seem like a better and better idea (along with turning on the furnace – which we’re delaying until October, if we can), we’re going to keep messing with these recipes, working to see what we can do with them, and continue to try and perfect the tender, spongy scone – with just a tiny bit of fresh cranberry and orange zing (that was a success!), fine-tune our carrot cake muffins (still needs work) and present you with some new things to try – mainly because of sheer cussed stubbornness, but also because we love to tinker, and we’ve never met a recipe we couldn’t make better. (Or, our version of better, anyway.)

Cheers, and happy autumn!

Home, Making

by TadMack

September 3, 2013

4:15 pm

4 Comments on Home, Making

Baking, California, Food, Life

Once again, we draw to the close of another California summer. Unlike last year at this time, we’re not moving – yet – but that’s coming. Boxes are half-packed, projects are wrapping up, priorities are shifting, and we’re hopeful about future endeavors. We’re about to hit the road again — and , yes – we’ve been saving toward to a trip to Scotland sometime this autumn. It doesn’t hurt to have something waiting in the wings, to anticipate. Without these things, life tends to be just a little … flat, somehow.

On D’s end of the world, projects have really changed. We’d made a commitment to actually move in the location of one of his work-sites, but felt we’d be better served by waiting for a different project to come along. Finger crossed, we’ll know something more today! It’s been strange for D. to have been on two projects already this year, but he’s hopeful that longer-term positions – with fewer corporate politics – are on the horizon.

Meanwhile, T., who started a novel to give herself a break from revising a different one, has finally finished the replacement novel… and, right now, likes it better. Her agent is both amused and ambivalent. “Okay, then, give me that one,” is his response. Meanwhile, during the polishing of various pages, the beginnings of three other novels have sprouted in her head… so many ideas, so little time, and so much pouting when it comes time for revisions. Typical, typical.

It has been a beautiful summer. Aside from the spike during the first week of July – which we spent in Baltimore, trying to breathe water – the weather has been a lovely thing. The nippy nighttime lows in the 40’s/10’s and the days in the balmy 70’s-80’s/high 10’s-20’s, has made the days roll past pleasantly. We’ve made sure to keep our California Residency Kits nice and updated by both mucking about in the dirt a little bit – our Garden Away From Home has produced tomatoes, lovely cucumbers, and a watermelon is getting to the proper size at last – and tie-dyeing a few things, as one does when one lives here. ☺ (T. was born in San Francisco. Some things just come with the territory.)

We have had fun exploring a new form of dyeing which includes ice. Very correct for summer, indeed! We took soda-ash treated fabric and crumpled the damp fabric on stacked racks in the sink. We piled on crushed ice onto the top layer until the fabric was entirely covered, and then sprinkled powdered dye in various spatterings all over it. It’s not exactly tie-dye, it’s a bit more random, especially with the effect of the dilution/dripping from the melting ice from one layer to the next. The combination of splotches, drips, and the sharper colors from the dye concentrate remind us of Monet’s blurry impressionistic pointillism. We’re looking forward to finding better surfaces and doing a big project like a set of sheets. (The porcelain sink really did not love us for mucking about in it, but oh, well. Onward!)

In the midst of our happy, there is a bit of sad giving us some perspective. T’s kid sister is stuck in the hospital this week with a failing kidney. This latest bump on the road to failure, while imminent for a long, long time, coincided with the first week of her senior year in high school, which is just a big, fat crock of crap. Usually a girl with a penumbra of attitude and energy that extends three feet in any direction, now she’s drained and exhausted — and suddenly looks pretty small, which is a hard dose of reality to her family and friends. We continue to keep our fingers crossed that bed rest and massive antibiotics will let her pull out just one more year of use out of her gimpy kidneys, so she can wave goodbye to high school in style.

While others cheer the return of school rooms or favorite TV shows, for us, autumn is about the house being cool enough to bake! We eyed Smitten Kitchen’s almond crisped peaches, but never managed to make them, as the peaches – so huge and lovely from the Dixon Fruit Market – have simply never lasted long enough in this house! That’s a recipe to come back to, however.

In early March, there was a round of medical visits which gave us some expected – but unwelcome – news – heredity strikes again. Our families on both sides tend toward diabetes, and though we’re largely healthy, our internal organs had been showing some signs of wear. In an effort to prepare for what the doctor’s prognosis of the inevitable, we’ve changed some of our dietary habits for good. What’s been missing from our diets for the last six months? Conspicuous consumption of carbohydrates.

…not fats. Some people are surprised by that, but we were not… we’ve had an inkling all along that it wasn’t the butter or the eggs but the sugar that was going to ding us in the end. It makes us a little grumpy to be right…:sigh:.

As everyone knows, changing any dietary habit is really difficult – but tinkering with one of the building blocks of the food group seemed, at first, pretty dire. The name of this blog, way back in – sheesh, 2004? – was “Wish I Were Baking.” It wasn’t “Wish I Were Steaming Kale,” although that’s a fairly awesome name if you’re not obsessed with getting the perfect rise from a loaf of artisan bread. There was a lot of mental adjustment that had to take place, we knew, if any changes were going to be successful. If you look at a required change in your life as a tragedy… you can forget about it happening. We firmly elected to still find things to enjoy.

With that attitude in hand, we’ve been relieved to discover that it’s not been very hard. (Faced with the choice of your liver and pancreas imploding in flames, or drinking unsweetened iced tea instead of soda, what choice would you make?) Not only that, we’re enjoying the challenge. Cooks and bakers have had hundreds and thousands of years to perfect baking with traditional ingredients – flours, sugars, etc. – but there’s a lot less out there about tasty, healthy low-carb ingredients. (Please note the preface “tasty” before “healthy.” There’s enough out there that does not include either of those two things, trust us.) We’ve been waiting eagerly for the days to cool a bit, before launching ourselves into baking again. We’ve made a few experimental forays – which we haven’t photographed.

We call those things that don’t get on camera “Learning Experiences.” There were The Waffles of Brickyness, when Axel was visiting, which were the heaviest things we’d ever eaten. We learned from that, of course; namely that coconut flour is ALL FIBER and must be used sparingly and with some gluten powder, for goodness sakes. Most recently, the Pear Tart of Awful was a completely unnecessary disaster – fresh pears, lemon zest, vanilla, almond flour… and a sneaky quarter teaspoon of xanthan gum some bright light decided to include. What is xanthan gum for? Not homemade pear tarts, T.. Next time, we’ll stick to adding it to the one recipe we bought it for. Ugh. A shame, when we’d even made it vegan and everything… :sigh: Time to repeat the Test Kitchen Mantra: We cook, we fail, we move on.

Of course, we can’t go on and on about the amusing failures without discussing the successes. The slightly crumbly pigs-in-blankets – we hadn’t quite learned how almond flour worked, but those were tasty, even if they didn’t quite stay together. And, Lemon tea cakes, anyone? Yes, please. Tender and fragrant and a perfect combination of citrus and sweet. Very tasty, and quick, which was fun. A “throw-it-together” banana bread also turned out well, which just proves that you can make banana bread anytime, anywhere, out of pretty much anything. We are pleased with the lift the quick breads have – a really nice crumb, so we’re encouraged to keep trying! Up next will be a made-over recipe for the date slice we loved so well in Scotland – aka a date bar. A short almond crust, chopped pecans, and dates… yum. We’re also eying a lemon poundcake made with coconut and almond flour – dense, moist, and citrussy heaven. And, once they’re almost foolproof, recipes to follow.

Not every dish can have the natural sweetness of dates or bananas – sometimes, you just need rich, bitter chocolate. Our experiments with sweeteners in that vein have been mixed. There are tons of sugar substitutes – sugar alcohols – on the market – but only a very few which do not cause gastric distress in the amounts used in baking. However, we’ve had success in mixing a little bit of this, and a little bit of that – a blend of stevia and erythritol, the sugar substitute popular in Japanese cuisine, has seemed to work well thus far. Interestingly, erythritol isn’t all that sweet – it’s about 70% as sweet as sugar. However! With the addition of vanilla, one can trick the brain into thinking it’s eating something much sweeter. (We got this tip from a recent issue of Nature.) All these experiments and recipe makeovers are a work in progress, and the amount of small successes we’ve had has encouraged us to try bigger things… like that pear tart. :shudder: Well, we’re not fans of the idea of a “test kitchen” for nothing…

Our best “discovery” has been almond flour – it is lovely and nutty – completely gluten free, and very low in carbohydrate. A couple tablespoons of vital wheat gluten helps it lift in quick breads or biscuits, and a little lemon zest gives it interest – it seems to need a little citrus punch to keep it from being too nutty/sweet – but we’ve not managed to figure out how to use it for yeast breads – and that’s okay. Perfection probably shouldn’t be messed with, so we’re looking forward to turning out the perfect, crusty loaf of sourdough rye – and learning to sprout our own grain – and just eating our daily bread sparingly, with gratitude.

Truly: with gratitude. We’re down a few pounds, and feeling healthy. We have options. We have optimism, creativity and stamina, and a lot of garbage bags. We’re going to be just fine.

Nothing but blue skies ahead – and full ovens, soon. Happy autumn.

Anything Upside-Down

by TadMack

May 22, 2013

11:42 am

2 Comments on Anything Upside-Down

Baking, Food, Recipe

People have their misty, water-colored food nostalgia; our Uncle Phil talked frequently about the cakes of his childhood, thus we ended up seeking out dusty bottles of rum, jars of scary-red maraschino cherries, and having myriad cans of pineapple (and we haven’t yet tested the theory that it’s better with fresh) on hand at all times, lest an upside-down mood should strike. Uncle Phil has been gone awhile now, but every once in awhile, we get the urge to upside-down something. Something red, yes, but not artificially so. And we did without the rum. Just a quick trip to the freezer netted us the ingredients for Cardamom-Cranberry Upside-Down Cake.

This was a traditional mishmash of two recipes – one from Kraft, and a borrow from our own brains, not surprisingly. Kraft recipes seem to fear the inclusion of, actual spices, so you know we had to add cardamom. We state the recipe we began with, and include what actually happened during the baking process… The word “whatever” is used a great deal (which probably drives our friend Lorne UP A TREE, but it is what it is, dear friend. You like us anyway, right?) Consistency in a cake of this kind comes from creaming the butter and sugar, not about the weight of the flour. It’s an upside down cake – don’t expect a high-rising bundt, because that’s just not how this cake goes. Okay?

Sleepy, sloe-eyed cardamom pairs beautifully with the piquant burst of wakeful zest that is cranberry, and their happy do-si-do begins in a saucepan, where the tartness is caramelized with lovely brown sugar. Who cares that we used berries that had been in the freezer since Thanksgiving? It’s fine to eat seasonally in terms of shopping, but yay for freezers and dragging out the typical flavors of fall. Plus, since it’s nearly eleven on a fine May morning and it’s a whopping 56°F/13°C, it feels autumnal in the shade, anyway (what IS this wind???).

Cardamom & Cranberry, Upside Down

Preheat oven to 350°F or 175°C

1/2 C margarine or butter PLUS 1/3 cup of margarine or butter

1 C brown sugar, well packed, PLUS one half cup

4 eggs, Flax or Chicken – we used flax*

4 Tbsp grated orange zest – we used about 7, but the Heavy-Handed With Spices among us do that

7 Tbsp OJ – we used Odwalla tangerine, because that’s what was in the fridge

1 Ground Cardamom pod – green hull, black inside bits, and all, We use a coffee grinder. No whole pod? Use 1/2 tsp.

2 C Whole Wheat AP flour. Or, just AP flour. Or, just whole wheat. Or, cake flour. Whatever

2 tsp Baking Powder

1.5 C cranberries, fresh or frozen, whole or chopped

If you’re using Flax Eggs, make them first. Much of the time we just grind our flax seeds, mix them with the required water, and just dump them into the cake with the wet ingredients. Non-dairy foodies probably grind their teeth, but remember that word “whatever?” Um, yeah. Here’s the right way to do Flax Eggs: The ratio is 1 Tbsp of ground flax to 3 Tbsp of water = 1 egg. Make up your eggs in a small bowl, and let them sit, covered, in the fridge for about fifteen minutes until you’re ready to add them. This allows the flax to absorb the water, appropriately thicken and get goopy, and better imitate the chicken egg effect you’re after, in terms of binding and raising. Or, you can be a heathen like us, and just dump them in – but foodies do say this way is better. Up to you.

Next, line the bottom of your springform pan with parchment, and give it a quick spray of some sort of cake release – PAM or otherwise. And yes, this may cause mild swearing and gnashing of teeth. We put the metal circle on the paper and trim it after we get the spring tightened. Because it’s just too annoying the nine other ways we tried it.

FINALLY, you can get to the easy bit – the cooking. In a small saucepan, bring together 1/2 C margarine, 2 Tbsp orange juice and 1/2 c brown sugar over a medium flame, until you’ve achieved a slow lava bubbling. Add 1/2 c. cranberries, and stir constantly. You’re looking for a caramelization effect, so you’ll want to keep this stirring thing going for about fifteen minutes – enough time to create a thickly bubbling, deeply brownish-red sauce that is thickening, but not burnt. Take this bit slowly; it’s annoying to have to start over. If you feel you’re too thick, add a little OJ, or lower the flames and set aside to cool slightly, even if fifteen minutes haven’t passed. When it’s reached perfection, spoon it into the center of your springform, and smooth it in an even circle.

In a small bowl, cream together butter and sugar. Add your eggs, zest, and OJ

Bring your wet mixture together with your flour and baking powder and cardamom grounds a little at a time – since this is the cake method, you can beat the heck out of the stuff if you’d like, but small lumps are okay – you’ll have zest lumps, either way so stop when the batter stiffens

Finally, stir in your cranberries. Ours were still frozen, and stiffened the batter still further, which made it interesting getting it into the springform, but we got there.

SET YOUR SPRINGFORM ON A SILPAT OR OTHER OVEN-PROTECTOR. When you’re working with berries in a springform, that’s just the name of the game – it will leak, almost always. Bake 1 hr. and 10 minutes, until the top (or really, the bottom that you can see) is deep golden brown. We checked our cake with a bamboo skewer at the one hour mark, but you know your oven best.

There is something buttery and lovely about this purely vegan cake, which won approval from the vegan-leery in our group. It’s not “health food” by any means – cake is cake, people – but it provides a healthier choice in that the Smart Balance margarine has less cholesterol, and the flax brings a bit of added fiber. Plus those gorgeous cranberries – yum! Tart-sweet, butter, dense, moist crumb – a really lovely late-Spring treat. Best eaten outdoors, in the company of friends.