I guess I’m a hippie
October 1, 2009 § 6 Comments
After spending the last few days very sick with what I like to claim was swine flu, I’ve finally recovered enough to get back in the kitchen. But only to make one of my absolute least-effort recipes: granola!
My roommate claims that making my own granola puts me squarely in the class of people known as hippies. But I think I’m okay with that.
Now, normally I’m pretty militant about full-fat baking. Lots of people madly switch out butter for applesauce or put Splenda in their cakes, claiming it tastes just as good – they lie! I don’t see the point of eating lots of mediocre food when you could eat smaller portions of delicious food (although I actually still eat lots, so perhaps this logic is flawed.) But this granola is one of the rare recipes that really is still great if you cut some of the oil or sugar, and since one batch feeds me every day for at least a week, I tend to do that. I didn’t this time though. Calories will help fight off the flu.
The recipe is below, but it’s incredibly adaptable and easy to experiment with. I personally hate dried fruit, but if you’re under the mistaken impression that it’s worth eating, then add away! Nuts can be swapped out, coconut added – basically you can make granola exactly the way you like it. It has spoiled store-bought granola for me forever.
So there you have it, granola so easy that you can make it while you have the flu. Which I still maintain was of the swine variety. Makes for a better story.
Vanilla-Scented Granola – adapted from Epicurious
- 4 cups old-fashioned oats
- 1 cup chopped walnuts
- 1/2 cup golden brown sugar
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/3 cup vegetable oil
- 1/4 cup honey
- 2 tablespoons sugar
- 4 teaspoons vanilla extract
Preheat oven to 300°F. Line a large baking sheet with foil.
Mix oats, nuts, brown sugar, salt and cinnamon in large bowl. Combine oil, honey, and sugar in small saucepan; bring to simmer over medium heat. Remove from heat; stir in vanilla. Pour hot liquid over oat mixture; stir well. Using hands (yay!), toss mixture until thoroughly mixed.
Spread granola on prepared baking sheet. Bake until golden brown, stirring occasionally, about 30 minutes. Transfer sheet to rack; cool granola completely.
Note: if you want chunky granola, you do need to let it cool before breaking it up. Personally, I don’t care enough for it to stop me from eating it hot.
my house is warm
September 22, 2009 § 2 Comments
The process of moving into a new apartment is my least favourite thing in the world (with the possible exception of box-mix cakes). Cleaning, painting, and complaining have consumed much of my time recently. But now that things are shaping up, we decided to have a housewarming barbecue! Which provided an excellent opportunity to bake.
Somehow I reined in my normal impulse to make wildly impractical things, and focused on recipes that were simple, delicious, and feed a crowd. I did break the rule of never cooking a new recipe for guests – but it worked out so well! Chocolate stout cake is ridiculously moist, and it’s definitely going to be one of my new standby recipes. It’s a rich but not too rich, very chocolatey bundt cake, covered in puddles of smooth ganache. It stuck horribly to the pan, so be warned. But luckily, when you cover anything in chocolate and cream, it starts to look pretty again.
My blondies also made a repeat appearance, and the other concoction was my favourite cupcakes, in miniature form for added cuteness. A while back, I carried out a search for a simple vanilla cupcake that was moist and rich without being too sweet. Eventually I stumbled across this one from Amy Sedaris, and after a couple adaptations I stopped experimenting. They’re perfect. Make them!
Oh yeah, and my roommates made healthy food… sensible folk.
Honestly, I think all three of these recipes are pretty amazing. The housewarming was great, and all baked goods had vanished by the end of the night. I maybe shouldn’t trust the judgement of dozens of tipsy scientists, but I still chose to take that as a sign that everyone else agreed with my assessment.
Chocolate Stout Cake – adapted from Epicurious via Smitten Kitchen
- 1 cup stout (such as Guinness)
- 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
- 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (preferably Dutch-process)
- 2 cups all purpose flour
- 2 cups sugar
- 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
- 3/4 teaspoon salt
- 2 large eggs
- 2/3 cup sour cream
Ganache – adapted from Smitten Kitchen
- 6 ounces good semisweet chocolate chips
- 6 tablespoons heavy cream
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter or spray a bundt pan very, very well.
Bring 1 cup stout and 1 cup butter to simmer in heavy large saucepan over medium heat. Add cocoa powder and whisk until mixture is smooth. Cool slightly.
Whisk flour, sugar, baking soda, and 3/4 teaspoon salt in large bowl to blend. Using electric mixer, beat eggs and sour cream in another large bowl to blend. Add stout-chocolate mixture to egg mixture and beat just to combine. Add flour mixture and beat briefly on slow speed. Using rubber spatula, fold batter until completely combined. Pour batter into prepared pan. Bake cake until tester inserted into center comes out clean, about 50 minutes. Transfer cake to rack; cool completely in the pan, then turn cake out onto rack for drizzling ganache.
For the ganache, gently microwave the chocolate, heavy cream, and coffee until smooth and warm, stirring occasionally. Drizzle over the top of cooled cake.
Note: despite avid pan-buttering, my cake still stuck horribly. Next time I might try dusting it with cocoa powder as well. But if your cake does break, it’s still delicious!
Vanilla Cupcakes – Adapted from Amy Sedaris
Yield: 18 cupcakes or 45 mini-cupcakes
- 1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 2 eggs
- 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
- 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 2 1/2 cups flour
- 1 1/4 cups milk
Preheat oven to 375°F.
Beat butter until smooth. Pour in sugar and beat well. Add 2 eggs and vanilla and beat well. In a separate bowl, whisk together baking powder, salt, flour. Add dry ingredients and milk to egg mixture and beat until combined. Pour into individual baking cups, until they are about 2/3 full. Bake until a tester comes out clean, about 20 minutes for cupcakes, or around 12-15 for mini-cupcakes. Cool completely before frosting.
Note: Sometimes I burn these because I forget all my prior experience and wait for them to turn golden. Frequently these cupcakes are done before they brown, so a cake tester is the best bet.
Vanilla Buttercream
- 1 cups (2 sticks) salted butter, room temperature
- 3 cups icing sugar
- 2 tablespoons whipping cream
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Using electric mixer, beat butter in large bowl until fluffy. Gradually beat in sugar, then cream and vanilla.
lessons learned from butter pecan ice cream
August 9, 2009 § Leave a comment
Lesson 1: Butter pecan ice cream is incredibly, spectacularly delicious.
Lesson 2: Don’t overfill your ice cream machine.
I’ve been away at my father’s cottage this week, and one upside (beyond the lake, the forest, seeing my family, and all that other minor stuff) is that he owns an ice cream machine! Not having one myself, I jumped at the opportunity to experiment. I wonder how much ice cream I can cram into a single week…
Anyhow, this recipe was absolutely fabulous. If you’re looking for a rich ice cream to make, this is definitely one to try. The ice cream is sweet and creamy and flavoured with brown sugar and vanilla, and it’s perfectly offset by the buttery, salty nuts. I know that sentence had too many adjectives, but they were all well-deserved.
Although it turned out amazing, there definitely were a couple glitches along the way. The first one was pretty minor, and basically just amounted to me being nervous. I cooked the custard at higher and higher heat, waiting for it to thicken. It never really did and I just gave up – next time I won’t worry so much, and just take it to the recommended temperature.
The other issue was that the poor little ice cream machine couldn’t quite cope with the vast quantities of liquid I poured into it, despite what it and Epicurious respectively claimed about the number of quarts involved. The result was that the ice cream never got quite cold enough – I think the photos make it pretty obvious that it ended up pretty liquidy (but you can pretend it’s gelato!). It’s also obvious that I have not mastered the art of photographing ice cream, but that should surprise no one, given that I don’t seem to have mastered the art of photographing anything in particular.
In the end, though, this ice cream really was fantastic (after an overnight freeze it firmed up nicely), and I’d recommend it to anyone, especially with those corrections. Here it is!
Butter Pecan Ice Cream – Adapted from Epicurious
- 1 1/3 cups pecans, finely chopped
- 3 tablespoons salted butter, softened
- scant 1/4 teaspoon salt (go easier on the salt if you don’t like the salty/sweet combination)
- 1 1/2 cups packed light brown sugar
- 2 teaspoons cornstarch
- 4 large eggs
- 2 cups whole milk
- 2 cups heavy cream
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Toast pecans in a shallow baking pan in middle of oven until fragrant and a shade darker, 7 to 8 minutes. Add butter and salt to hot pecans and toss until butter is melted, then cool pecans completely (they will absorb butter).
Whisk together brown sugar and cornstarch, then add eggs, whisking until combined. Bring milk and cream just to a boil in a 3- to 4-quart heavy saucepan over moderately high heat, then add to egg mixture in a stream, whisking constantly, and transfer custard to saucepan.
Cook custard over moderately low heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, until thick enough to coat back of spoon and registers 170 to 175°F on an instant-read thermometer, 2 to 3 minutes (do not let boil). Note: I ended up taking this to 180 and it still didn’t really thicken, so don’t stress too much.
Immediately pour custard through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl and stir in vanilla, then cool, stirring occasionally. Chill custard, its surface covered with wax paper, until cold, at least 3 hours.
Freeze custard in ice cream maker until almost firm. Stir together ice cream and pecans in a bowl, then transfer to an airtight container and put in freezer to harden.
Note: I would freeze the custard in two batches, unless your ice cream maker is superior to ours (which is likely).
on nut-toasting
August 5, 2009 § 1 Comment
I realized that after being somewhat preachy about the importance of toasting nuts, I didn’t actually mention how I do it. Silly me. So, here is an honest rundown of my usual process:
Step 1: Spread nuts on tray and put in preheated oven.
Step 2: Forget there’s anything in the oven, and wonder what that odd burning smell is.
Step 3: Throw out charred remainders of nuts and start over, paying slightly more attention this time.
I encourage you all to start with step 3.
But really, it is easy. Just spread the nuts on a tray – for easy clean-up, use whatever you’ll be baking in next – and stick them in a 350 degree oven. Check from time to time, and you’ll know they’re done when they’re fragrant and have a crisp snap when you break them in pieces. Usually I find that takes around 7 minutes, but it’ll vary depending on your oven and your nuts. So be alert!
blondies
August 4, 2009 § Leave a comment
Wow.
These were wonderful.
They were also kind of ugly. They don’t make for spectacular presentation, as can be seen in the photo. I think blondies are sort of inherently unattractive, because a yellow block with dark chunks just isn’t going to look super appetizing.
I had never made blondies before, having tasted one a couple years ago and written them off as dry and boring. But I’m moving soon, and I wanted to use up my various types of chocolate chips. Ignoring the fact that I would have to buy even more ingredients to bake these, I settled on this blondies recipe that includes them both!
Anyhow, if you like gooey, buttery desserts (this is obviously rhetorical), then these are the absolute perfect things to make. I loved them and couldn’t stop eating them and had to rapidly give them all away. They turn out as slabs of what is basically melty butter cookie, studded with pecans and white and semisweet chocolate chips.
As for the recipe, I honestly wouldn’t change a thing, I’m terrified to mess with something so delicious. My only notes are that the edges have a bit of a gummy texture, so I cut them off before slicing into squares (and then devoured all said edges! MWAHAHA!). I also think that toasting the nuts makes a real difference – I never used to, because I’m lazy, but it turns out it’s super easy and very much worth it.
Voila!
Blondies – from The New Best Recipe
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 scant teaspoon salt
- 1 1/2 sticks salted butter, melted and cooled
- 1 1/2 cups firmly packed light brown sugar
- 2 large eggs
- 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
- 1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips
- 1/2 cup white chocolate chips
- 1 cup pecans, toasted and coarsely chopped
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a 13- by 9-inch baking pan with 2 pieces of foil or parchment paper.
In a medium bowl, whisk the flour, baking powder and salt together. Set aside.
In a medium bowl, whisk the melted butter and brown sugar together until combined. Add the eggs and vanilla and mix well. Using a rubber spatula, fold the dry ingredients into the egg mixture until just combined. Do not overmix.
Fold in the semisweet and white chocolate chips and the nuts, and turn the batter into the prepared pan, smoothing the top with a rubber spatula.
Bake until the top is shiny and cracked and feels firm to the touch, for 22 to 25 minutes. (Don’t overbake!) Place the pan on a rack and let cool completely, then cut into squares (discarding edges if desired).
one cake two cake 