Saying goodbye to the Barefoot Bloggers

Well, it appears that this will be my last post with the Barefoot Bloggers. I was taken off the member list because I didn't participate for two months over the summer, and I respect the decision of the group's mods (though I won't say I'm happy about it). I did make both of September's recipes though, and I think they came out pretty well, so I still wanted to post about them.

Both of the September recipes were cake recipes - apparently a coincidence but sort of a difficult situation given the fact that there's only two of us and we'd never eat that much cake (nor should we!) Luckily, though, I had an out - my office has a dessert party every month to celebrate all of the employee birthdays during that month, so I just offered to provide the cake this time. Everybody won in that situation - I had an appropriate way to offload a metric buttload of cake, and our office administrative staff didn't need to go to spend the money on a store-bought cake and go to the trouble of picking it up.


Please ignore the horrible photos - the lighting in the conference room at work is less than optimal.

The first cake was a white sheet cake with chocolate ganache frosting, and was a particular challenge because A)I don't own a sheet pan of the right size and shape to make it as directed, and B)the recipe was given fairly bad reviews on foodnetwork.com, claiming the cake was dry and too sweet, Luckily, my best friend Cristen happens to be an amazing baker (check out her mail order bakery on Etsy!), so I showed her the recipe and asked her advice on how to fix it. She recommended omitting the cornstarch to fix the dryness issue, and cutting the sugar back to 2 cups. I also followed the recommendations made in the FN reviews to reduce the baking soda by a 1/4 tsp, as the indicated amount is apparently too much for the flour called for, and added lime zest in addition to the requisite lemon because I had a flavor combination of raspberry and citrus in mind for the finished product. These all seemed to be good alterations, because the cake came out reasonably moist and with just the right amount of sweetness and a complex citrus flavor (the extra cup of sugar called for in the recipe definitely would have been too much) though it seemed unusually dense to me and had a weird swiss-cheese-like crumb with big air holes.

Lacking the proper pan, I also opted to make this a layer cake instead of a sheet cake and baked it in two batches in a 9" square cake pan.

For the ganache frosting, I opted for white chocolate instead of semisweet. I don't have a real double boiler and have had awful luck with the standard rig of a bowl over a pan of hot water, so I opted to make the frosting by heating the heavy cream in a pan with the vanilla, corn syrup, butter, and more lemon and lime zest, then poured the hot cream over the white chocolate chips in a bowl and let it sit until the chips were melted and could be stirred evenly into the cream. After a stint in the fridge the frosting thickened to the perfect spreadable consistency.

For filling and additional topping I made a raspberry mousse of sorts by folding seedless raspberry jam into some stiffly whipped cream (plus a drop or two of red food coloring, because the all-natural jam I bought didn't have the lovely red hue of normal jams).

To assemble, I leveled off both cakes and spread the top of the first layer with store-bought lemon curd, then spooned on a generous amount of the mousse and spread it edge to edge. Then I added the second layer of cake and spread it with more lemon curd, then covered the entire cake with the ganache. On the day I served it, I poured the remaining mousse over the top of the cake and spread it so that it would spill over the sides a bit. In retrospect, I wish I'd either put the mousse into a piping bag and piped it neatly around the edge of the cake, or used just plain raspberry jam thinned with a bit of water and drizzled it over the top - the way I did it, I think it was kinda ugly. Ah well, lessons learned.



The second cake was Beatty's Chocolate Cake, a deep chocolate cake with mocha buttercream. The secret ingredient in this cake is brewed coffee, which isn't recognizable as an individual flavor in the finished cake but which enhances the flavor of the chocolate. Aside from turning this cake into a layer cake as well, I pretty much followed the recipe as written, and as far as I'm concerned it was perfect. The cake was exactly what I think of when I think of chocolate cake - soft and moist with a fluffy crumb and a deep, dark chocolate flavor that wasn't too sweet.

The buttercream recipe was perfect too, smooth and rich with an ideal balance of chocolate and coffee. I was actually really proud of my buttercream, because this was the first time I'd ever made one from scratch and I was absolutely convinced that it was going to break on me when I added the melted chocolate. The key, I found, was simply going slowly and not overmixing the frosting - I added the chocolate one large spoonful at a time and mixed it slowly with my handbeater on its lowest setting, and only beat it until the chocolate was evenly worked into the butter and sugar base. It was so much easier than I would have expected, and so much tastier than any store bought or bakery buttercream that I've had. I'll never be afraid to make real frosting again!

With all the coffee and chocolate, my immediate thought was to turn this into a sort of tiramisu, which I did by making a filling of sweetened mascarpone blended with powdered espresso, and lining the sides of the cake with ladyfingers. After creating and filling the cake layers (same technique as witht he first cake, minus the crumb-coat layer of lemon curd - this cake was so moist it didn't need it) and spreading the whole thing with that beautiful buttercream, an extra sprinkle of chocolate chips finished the job. If the first cake was a bit of an ugly duckling, I think this one was much closer to the beautiful swan I envisioned.



Though both cakes were tasty - extremely so, as a matter of fact - and my coworkers seemed to prefer the white cake option, the mocha tiramisu cake was the hands-down winner in my eyes. The cake and frosting were simply superior to the sheet cake recipe, and although I love raspberries and citrus together I am generally hard-pressed to come up with a better dessert flavor combination than coffee and chocolate. The only thing that might have made it better would have been a bit of spice, either a warming sweet spice like cinnamon or a tingly heat from some kind of chili. Perhaps next time.

So with this I wave farewell to the Barefoot Bloggers - its been fun and I've learned a lot, but I suppose its time to move on and seek out other opportunities. I'll be looking for new groups to join, so stay tuned!

Happy Pi Day!

Pie for Pi Day, the geekiest holiday I can think of.

Cheated on this one a bit by buying Pillsbury pie crusts (the kind you unroll and use however you want, not the pre-formed kind), but made the filling from scratch with a mix of fresh granny smith apples and red anjou pears, some of my homemade applesauce from last fall, brown sugar, cinnamon, and a bit of ginger and clove. Baked according to the instructions in my William-Sonoma Essentials of Baking book, it came out perfectly golden brown and bubbly (as you can see). Was reportedly delicious, though I didn't have any myself - my coworkers demolished it before I could get myself a slice.

I was going for simple on this one because I was trying to watch the Rangers win a road game at the same time, and I knew I'd just be bringing it into work the next day. However, J still wants pie, and frankly so do I, and so I'm thinking of challenging myself a bit later to make a lemon coconut meringue pie for our own Pi Day celebration. Guess we'll see how that goes - I'll update this post with Pi Day pie number two should it come out well.

--------------------
EDIT 03/15/09



Ta da! My first ever lemon meringue pie, with coconut-scented meringue and shredded coconut toping both the curd and the meringue. It was perfect, lemony and not too sweet with just the right amount of aromatic coconut, and perfectly firm and sliceable thanks to a tip I picked up from this recipe on allrecipes.com: thicken the curd with cornstarch and flour to help it set up into a stable layer after baking and refrigeration. I never would have thought of that on my own, but in retrospect it makes perfect sense. This technique will save my future attempts at lemon squares, which I've always more-or-less failed at, and may make possible an original recipe which also failed the first time around... once I have a chance to try it, I will be sure to share, but for now its my secret. *wink*

Have you ever made pie for Pi Day?

Barefoot Bloggers: Easy Sticky Buns

I am really not on the ball with my blogging this month, and I'm barely coming in under the wire with this last Barefoot Bloggers challenge. I think that's a pretty good sign that I just wasn't terribly excited for these recipes.

This one in particular - Ina's Easy Sticky Buns, chosen by Melissa of Made by Melissa - was nearly a disaster, because yet again I decided to change up the recipe rather than trusting to Ina's instruction and experience. Lesson learned, folks - sometimes, you just have to follow the recipe, because chances are the person who wrote it knows more about food than you do.

This is probably a great recipe if you follow it, and really is a much easier way to make warm, gooey, sweet sticky buns. I may try it again at some point and actually do it right. Where in a standard sticky bun recipe you would need to make a yeasted dough and let it rise, these only require a package of frozen ready-made puff pastry. They are both easier and faster to make, and yield a lighter, flakier roll.





The mis en place is refreshingly simple: raisins (I used a mix of raisins, dried cherries, and dried cranberries, plumped up in a bit of almost-boiling water for 5 minutes), butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, pecans, and puff pastry. And to prep before assembly, all I needed to do was mix together some of the brown sugar and some cinnamon for the insides of the rolls (I used turbinado sugar here), and cream together some softened butter and brown sugar with a big handful of chopped pecans for the outside (I kinda just wanted to eat this stuff by the spoonful).



That's all there was to it, and then it was time to assemble the rolls.

I laid out one of the puff pastry sheets on a cold, clean board and brushed it all over with melted butter. The pastry then got a generous, even coating of my cinnamon/sugar mixture, followed by half of my plumped and drained dried fruit, arranged as evenly as possible, leaving about a 1" border all around to insure clean rolling.



Time to roll! I folded the long edge up over the filling, then gently but tightly rolled the whole thing up away from me on the board, and carefully sealed the edge with my fingers.



About 1/2" of each end of the roll got trimmed away, and then I sliced it into 6 even pieces. Set these aside, then moved on to the second sheet of pastry for roll number two.

Now, here is where I deviated from the recipe in a way that nearly ruined everything.

See, Ina instructs you to divide the butter/brown sugar/pecan mixture among the 12 cups of a muffin tin and then place the rolls on top to bake. This seemed like a bad idea to me - I was anticipating that the sugar would weld itself to the pan and make the rolls difficult to remove, and probably create a nightmare of a cleaning job afterward. So, in my infinite brilliance, I decided to reverse it and put the rolls on the bottom and TOP them with the butter mix.





This, my friends, was a mistake.

Puff pastry rises, and sugar tends to burn when it's exposed to high heat for long periods of time. And, well, butter melts. So about halfway through the cooking time, the butter and sugar had liquified and was being pushed out all over the pan by the puffing pastry, and the sugar-coated pecans were getting rather too dark. By the time the pastry was cooked all the way, well, I had one heck of a mess. Sugar everywhere and burned nuts on every roll. Blech.

I managed to salvage them by scooping up the runny sugar and spooning it back over the rolls, and picking off the darkest of the nuts. Thankfully, the rolls came out of the pan with relative ease once they'd cooled slightly, so no problems there.

I tried one once they were cool enough to handle, and it really wasn't bad. A little too toasty, perhaps, but not bad. They certainly didn't look very good though, and frankly I would've been embarrassed to show them here. So I did what every improvising baker does who needs to hide an ugly product - I covered them with icing. :)





See, they don't look so bad, do they?

And I guess they must've been alright to eat, too, because they disappeared in record time when I brought them into work the next day.





But yeah, never again. I promise Ina, when it comes to baked goods, I'll never doubt your wisdom again. At least, not when it comes to technique. Flavorings are still fair game. :-p

The easiest way to share a pie...

...is to make multiple pies in miniature!



One of the biggest challenges of cooking for two, for me anyway, has been finding ways to experiment with desserts and baked goods. Most people I know would just bake a cake if they felt so inclined, then just keep it around and gradually eat it over the course of a few days or a week. But, truth be told, neither J nor I have ever had a particularly strong sweet tooth, and although we enjoy having dessert once in awhile we tend to lose interest and let things go to waste if we have a lot of a single thing sitting around. And since we've been making a concerted effort to improve our eating habits over the past year and a half or so, even if I were able to produce some fantastic sweet treat that we could both eat forever without getting sick of it, we wouldn't allow ourselves the indulgence.

Of course this doesn't stop me from baking on a relatively regular basis, and both of our workplaces have gotten rather spoiled from being gifted with our leftovers (apparently I have something of a reputation at J's office, and anything he brings in disappears in half an hour, tops). This is particularly easy to do when it comes to things like muffins, quickbreads, biscuits and scones, and even yeasted breads, as they can all travel well and can be either baked in individual-sized portions or divided with ease. These types of things have made up the vast bulk of my baking experiments for nearly three years.

But, there's so many other things I want to try! I'll always love making muffins but sometimes, I just want to do something different and challenge myself a bit. But the additional challenge is always finding a way for J and I to enjoy something new, without ending up drowning in custard and buttercream for a week.

My favorite solution to this problem is to bake in miniature.

Now, I have a particular fondness for all things tiny, so I don't mind much that miniaturizing regular desserts almost always creates twice as much work. Some folks would balk at that, and understandably so, I think - making these itty-bitty apple pies took me a LONG time last weekend, and there are a lot of other things I could have done with that time. But the finished result was absolutely worth it: buttery, flaky, peppery crust filled with sweetly spiced diced apples and topped with decorative pie-crust cutouts, each one just the right size for a single diner's after-dinner sugar fix. J and I were each able to have one the day I made them, and the rest were packed away in tupperware and carried into the office the next morning, to be devoured by my coworkers before 10am. I consider those hours in the kitchen to be time well spent.

Of course, I ended up making too much apple filling, and had to use it up by (you guessed it) baking muffins. I think I'll just have to accept eventually that my destiny lies in a muffin tin.



Miniature Apple Pies

I made these pies using the excess half-batch of dough made for this weeks Barefoot Bloggers challenge, to which I had added a generous amount of kosher salt and black pepper, so my crust was savory rather than sweet. However, I very much enjoy the interplay of savory and sweet in a dessert, probably because my tolerance for sugar is a little on the low side, so I actually thought the crust was perfect for this. You can, of course, use your favorite pie crust recipe, or use store-bought. I promise to look the other way if you do.

Also, as I said, I had way too much pie filing when I made these, so I'm guesstimating on how much you'll ACTUALLY need. I'd recommend making extra though, just to be safe, because there will always be uses for sugared and spiced apples. Put them on yogurt, or in some oatmeal, or just eat them straight out of the bowl. Or, you know. Make some muffins.

Pie Crust Dough (you'll need about the same amount that you'd use for a single-crust pie, whether its homemade or store-bought)
2 medium-sized baking apples (granny smiths are common, but I used a couple of massive sweet Mutsus that we'd picked ourselves a couple weeks ago)
1 tbsp lemon juice
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
1 tbsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground clove
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1 tsp freshly grated nutmeg

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Spray the cups of a standard 12-cup muffin tin with non-stick baking spray (I'm a big fan of Pam For Baking, myself) or butter and flour them.



Peel and core the apples and cut into a small dice, somewhere between 1/2" and 1/4". Place in a bowl with the lemon juice, brown sugar, and dry spices. Stir to coat every piece of apple with the sugar and spice mixture, then set aside to macerate while you prep the dough.



Roll our your pie dough so that its slightly less than 1/4" thick. Using a round cookie cutter thats slightly bigger in diameter than the muffin cups, cut out 12 rounds of pie dough. Collect the scraps and reroll if necessary.

At this point, if you'd like to decorate your finished pies with crust cutouts, roll out whats left of your scrap and use miniature cookie cutters to make itty bitty crust cookies (or, freehand it with a sharp knife). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and place them an inch or two apart. They can be baked as-is or brushed with an egg wash and sprinkled with sugar for a crunchy sweet topping (this is what I did). I recommend turbinado sugar.

Now here is the slightly tricky part. Carefully lift each round of dough and place into one of the cups of the muffin tin, and use your fingers to very gently press it into the bottom of the cup, making sure its flush to the bottom and sides with no air bubbles but not tearing it. You may need to work the dough further up the sides of the cups by pressing it upwards with your fingers. I won't lie, this is a fiddly bit of work and its very easy to end up with holes. The good news is that its easy enough to patch those holes by tearing off little bits of dough from your inevitable pile of scrap and just pressing them into the crusts to seal. Just be sure that you do patch any holes that appear, or you'll have pie filling running all over the place when the pies are baked.



Once all your little dough rounds are in and you have a tray full of mini pre-pies, take a fork and prick the crusts all over to allow steam to escape - this is called "docking" and will prevent bubbles from forming in the crust when you parbake it. But don't worry, these holes won't be big enough to cause filling-leakage.

Slide the muffin tin (and the baking sheet with your cutouts, if you made them) into the oven and bake for about 10 minutes, until the crusts are just starting to crisp up and take on some golden brown color - this will prevent them from getting soggy bottoms when they're baked with the filling. Remove from the oven and set the baking sheet with the cutouts aside to cool. Spoon a heaping tablespoon of apple filling into each crust (or more, if necessary - you want the filling to be rather mounded, as it will cook down and become more compact after it bakes, so if you need to go back and add a bit more to each one after filling them all, go ahead). Spoon any syrup that's collected at the bottom of the bowl over the pies for a little extra moisture and flavor.



Return to the oven for another 15-20 minutes, until the filling is hot and bubbling and the edges of the crusts are a nice rich golden brown. Remove from the oven and let stand in the muffin tin for a moment to cool - now would be a good time to add the crust cut-outs, so that they'll stick while the filling is still warm and gooey. Then remove the pies to a wire rack to cool completely. Or, eat immediately, if you're so inclined. Mmmmm, warm-from-the-oven apple pie.



Remember, these are designed specifically for sharing, so spread the love! Give some to a neighbor or invite some friends over, or just do what I did and bring them into work. I guarantee, people will love you.

Optional: If the pie-crust cutouts are a little too fussy for you, you could bake the pies "naked" or make a streusel topping from some cold butter, flour, brown sugar, and oats if you like them. Just top the pies with streusel when you fill them, and they'll bake up with a sweet and crunchy topping that everyone will love. I do not, however, recommend actually making these double-crust pies - in their diminutive size, the ratio of crust to filling would be way off.

Barefoot Bloggers: Vegetable Pot Pie

Hey, lookit me posting a Barefoot Bloggers recipe EARLY! I hope my fellow BBs are proud of me, despite the fact that it will probably never happen again. I only managed it this time because I knew this recipe was going to be time-consuming, and since we're getting into crunch time for our annual Halloween party, I didn't want to leave it till next weekend. So, here we are.

The second recipe for October is Ina's Vegetable Pot Pie, chosen by Deb of Kahakai Kitchen.



Now, I love pot pie, and although I tend to make chicken or turkey versions I have been known to make a mean vegetarian version as well. When you live with vegetarians, as I did for 2 years, you learn to be flexible. However, there were a couple of things about the recipe that I had some difficulty with.

First, the sauce/gravy for the filling called for Pernod, which is a licorice/anise-flavored liquor and which I not only would not have in the house, but I wasn't entirely sold on having that flavor in the pie. In my version, I just used chicken stock and a bit of 2% milk to make the sauce, but added some fennel pollen to up the flavor quotient and complement the fresh fennel that, when caramelized along with thinly sliced onions, makes up the base of the sauce.

As an aside, if you've never used fennel pollen, I seriously recommend that you seek some out. It tastes like fennel seed but with floral, almost sweet overtones, and is heavily aromatic - sometimes I like to just open the jar and inhale the smell. It imparts a really unique, complex flavor to anything you add it to - we've used it in simple spice rubs for pork or chicken, added it to soups and stews, and used it to flavor sauces. In this particular application, I have to say that I think it really made the pie. Its not easy to find, and its not cheap, but it is SO worth the money and effort. I got mine from Zingerman's about a year ago, and we've still got a little less than half a jar left - a little goes a long way with this stuff. Seriously, treat yourself and pick up a jar. If you like the flavor of fennel, you will LOVE this spice.

Anyway, back to the pie.

I also omitted the butternut squash in Ina's original recipe, because although J really loved the risotto, he was still "heavily averse" to the idea of squash in the pie. In all honesty, I didn't really mind, because as much as I love butternut squash I wasn't totally in love with the idea of using it in this recipe, either.

J actually ended up taking care of the sauce and veggies for the most part, and he added a bit of worcestershire sauce and red hot to the filling because he felt it needed a little kick - neither addition was recognizable in the finished pie but they definitely added that certain something that was missing before.

Oh, and we totally cheated and added some precooked and shredded chicken breast because we had some leftover from lunches this week that we needed to use up. It was barely enough to be noticeable, honestly.

All that aside, making the filling for the pot pie was easy - pot pie fillings are always easy. I mean, all you're doing is making stew, right? And although the technique here was a little different, it amounted to the same thing.

We sauteed the onion and fennel together with some minced garlic, then used that as the base to make the sauce/gravy by adding the fennel pollen, some flour as a thickener, chicken stock and milk. Cooked together for a few minutes, it became velvety and thick and fragrant.

The vegetables (a mix of carrots, asparagus, and potatoes) were blanched in boiling water for a couple minutes, then shocked in an ice bath to keep them from getting mushy pre-baking. Then they were added to the pan with the gravy, along with a handful of frozen pearl onions, and everything was all mixed up. Ta da! Pie filling. Easy-peasy.

But the crust... now, that's another story.

I have only made pie crust from scratch maybe twice in my life, and I have never felt like I did a really good job with it, but this recipe in particular gave me a LOT of trouble. I mean, to begin with I was at a disadvantage because my food processor only holds about 2 cups, and is nowhere big enough to manage a full batch of pie dough. So, I had to do all the mixing by hand, which is tiring but I feel works a hell of a lot better than using two knifes or even a pastry blender (which I didn't have anyway) as most recipes would advise.

I appreciate the tactile closeness of blending in the cold butter and shortening with the flour and being able to actually feel when the texture is right. I feel like I have more control, and its very easy to see when the mixture starts to resemble small pebbles (as the recipe indicates) and a handful sort of sticks together when you squeeze it.



But I also end up with some rather unpleasant cramps in my wrists and fingers. Is it worth it? Who knows. But I can guarantee that when I can afford (both financially and spacially) to have a real grown-up food processor, I'll probably never do things this way again.

But anyway, the point is, I felt like I had a pretty good handle on things up to this point, but when it came to the adding-ice-water step, I frankly didn't really know what I was doing. I tried to judge by touch when the dough had the right consistency, but I had a really hard time with it. When I felt like the dough had the right moisture content, it was really crumbly and didn't want to stick together in a cohesive whole. But when I tried to add more water, it started to feel more like slimy play doh than pie dough, and I knew that the more I handled it while trying to work in the water, the less tender it would be after cooking. So, I erred on the side of dryness, and ended up with a dough that cracked and broke left and right, but seemed to stay stiff enough to work with. I suspect I did it totally wrong, but I think I did the best that I could under the circumstances.



I divided the dough into two pieces, shaped them into rounds, wrapped them in plastic wrap, and tossed them into the fridge to chill for half an hour. I know this is supposed to give the gluten in the flour time to develop, but I feel like the chilling step just made the dough MORE likely to break when I rolled it out. This may just have been due to my failure to achieve the proper proportion of water to flour in the dough though. I have no idea.



After some rather frustrating rolling, I managed to get an evenly flat piece of pie dough that I could trim into two circles that would fit over the mugs I intended to bake the pies in. Having made a full batch of the dough, rather than halving it as per usual, I used half to make some miniature apple pies (another post, forthcoming) and used the scrap of the second half to cut out some decorative pieces for the top of the pies. Completely unnecessary, but it sure looked nice.



I spooned half the filling into each large mug, then topped each with a round of pie dough, brushed it with an egg-and-milk wash, then stuck on the pie crust decorations (cut in the shape of pumpkins and leaves) and coated the decorations with more egg wash. The crust got sprinkled with coarse sea salt and some fresh-cracked black pepper before being placed on a baking tray and shoved into a 450 degree oven.





About 20 minutes later, the crust was crisp and golden brown round the edges, and the filling was bubbly and leaking just a bit from underneath. Sure looked like pot pie to me.



The finished pies were delicious: savory, comforting, and filling, but not overly rich. With the weather being what its been recently - namely, chilly and windy - it seemed like the perfect Sunday dinner. The crust, for all its difficulties of production, baked up just right: crispy, flaky, and buttery. The filling was aromatic and highly flavorful, and just slightly warm on the tongue from the heavy black pepper and touch of hot sauce in the gravy. I couldn't quite finish mine, but every bite was delightful and satisfying.





All that being said... I doubt I'd ever make this particular pot pie again. It was tasty, but not really what I normally want when I crave pot pie. I guess I'm just a little too married to the basic and beloved chicken/potato/carrot/pea combo to want to mess around much. And, although the pie crust was awesome in favor and texture after it was baked, I just found the dough to be way too difficult to work with and the recipe a bit too vague to ensure that I wouldn't have worse mishaps with it in the future. I think I'll be searching around for a good, reliable pie crust recipe for awhile.