Kitchen Wench

This pie tastes like summer. I made it for a work picnic on Thursday. I was going to make a strawberry rhubarb pie, but Giant was out of rhubarb. Instead, I got some purple plums and Bosc pears, both of which were a bit under ripe. I was a little skeptical of the flavor combination, but it turned out great! The pears and plums were cooked, but not mushy. The texture contrast was great with the soft strawberries. Also, this pie tastes very fruity, but not overly sweet. I think this might be my new favorite pie.

For crust: I swear by this all-butter crust recipe from Bon Appetit

For filling:

• 1 lb ripe strawberries (1 of those plastic flats = 1 lb)
• 6 firm medium purple plums
• 4 firm Bosc pears
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 2 heaping tbsp corn starch
• 1 tsp high quality cinnamon (I use Vietnamese Cassia Cinnamon from Penzey’s and it makes a huge difference in the flavor. If using lesser quality, I would increase the amount.)
• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract (I received a bottle of Haitian vanilla for Christmas and it’s got a wonderful bright flavor that I love with fruit. Mexican vanilla would also work nicely.)

1. Make crust dough per Bon Appetit’s recipe. While dough disks cool in the fridge, make the filling.

2. Hull and quarter strawberries. Cut plums and pears into roughly 2″ sized pieces. You can leave the skins on. Toss cut fruit with the sugar, corn starch, cinnamon, and vanilla. Set aside.

3. Roll out 1 disk of dough for the bottom of the pie. I like to roll my dough between two sheets of plastic wrap. This means I don’t have to worry about my dough sticking to my counter or rolling pin. Once you have rolled your dough out to the desired thickness, carefully peel the plastic off one side of the dough. Lay the dough into your pie plate, plastic side facing up. You can then grip the plastic side and adjust the dough as needed. Once your dough is in place, carefully peel off the other piece of plastic and press into the pan. If there are any holes, you can patch them with excess dough on the edges of the pie.

4. Pour fruit into pie. Roll out the second disk of dough. After you’ve peeled off your first piece of plastic, you can cut little shapes into the crust with a cooking cutter. I use the pointy end of a chopstick to pull the cut outs off the plastic sheet on the backside of the dough. Lay the dough over your fruit, plastic side up. Be extra careful when removing the plastic, as it is easy to tear the shapes. Alternatively, use a knife to cut a few vents for the steam to escape.

5. Use a pair of scissors to trim the excess dough from the edge. Fold edges over and crimp as desired. I am terrible at crimping. If you want to learn how to crimp your pie nicely, Epicurious has a nice instructional video. Otherwise, you can just use the tines of a fork to smush the edges together.

6. For a nice golden crust, lightly beat an egg and brush it over your finished pie. Sprinkle with sugar for extra crunch and flavor. Bake the pie at 375 for 45 minutes - 1 hour.

Makes one 12″ pie. Easily adapted for a 10″ pie–just mound the fruit in the middle.

Every year, Lee’s mother mails him a birthday care package. Aside from presents, it always includes a box of angel food cake mix, as well as candles, balloons, and paper plates and napkins. It’s sort of quaint, because no matter how old he gets, the care package is exactly the same. This is not limited to birthdays. For the last two years, we have received plastic eggs, candy, easter grass, and an egg dying kit for Easter. This package is usually accompanied by a phone call explaining that Lee can open the box early if we want to dye the eggs the night before. I am 24 years old and have not dyed an Easter egg in over a decade.

While I don’t dye the eggs, I do make the cake. (I’m not really sure if the cake mix is really for him so much as me, since I can’t really imagine Lee making himself a cake.) In my early baking days, I attempted angel food cake from scratch, not realizing it was one of those fussy recipes that require precision and good technique.  My cake puffed up nicely in the oven, but quickly deflated into a lumpy mess once I took it out.

The mix, however, is completely idiot-proof. You add water and, through the magic of chemistry, the mixture foams to 3x its original volume. Then you pour it into the pan and bake it. Unlike many box cakes, which have an artificial taste, I think box angel food tastes pretty darn authentic. I like to add some extra vanilla and almond extract, so it tastes like a giant, almond-y marshmallow.

This year, I decided to mix it up with some cupcakes, which are oh-so-trendy right now. I wanted to make mine sparsely beautiful, like Nigella’s fairy cakes. Per her recipe, I whipped up some royal icing and spread it on the tops with the back of a spoon. But, unlike Nigella, I didn’t have any cute little sugar flowers or fondant cut outs to stick on top of my cupcakes. After digging through the pantry, all I came up with were some raw almonds and leftover Christmas sprinkles. So, I did the best I could, given the circumstances. I think they look decently cute, if not ideal.

Let me begin by saying that I really wanted to like Cake Love. Before eating there, I did my research and sort of fell in love with the whole Cake Love story. It describes founder Warren Brown’s climb up the ladder of higher education, all the while secretly nursing his passion for baking. However, after selling his soul to the legal profession, he gave it all up to open a fabulously successful bakery and cafe in the trendy U St. corridor.

Today, Cake Love has two more locations in the DC metro area (Silver Spring, MD and Arlington, VA) and Warren has his own show on the Food Network, called Sugar Rush. It’s the quintessential foodie Cinderella story–who doesn’t dream of quitting their day job and turning a hobby into a successful business? By the end, I had decided that Warren Brown might be my hero and/or my black, male alter ego. Then I actually walked to U St and ate one of his cupcakes. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the first things I ever baked myself was a deep-dish peach pie. I was probably 12 or so, and I think I got some help from my grandma. I was pretty disappointed with the outcome, not because it tasted bad, but because I hadn’t realized deep-dish meant no bottom crust. I know some people eat pie for the fruit, but I’m willing to wager that most of us put up with mushy and/or artificially gooey filling as a vehicle for flaky, buttery pastry crust. However, I blame my real fascination with pie crust on Martha Stewart.

For the past ten years, I have been holding on to a copy of Martha Stewart Living because it contained one of my favorite recipes for a pate brisee or all butter pie crust. In her Pie Crust 101 feature, Martha (or her team of magical food styling elves) crafted some of the most amazing crusts I had ever seen - purple mincemeat peeking through a hundred tiny little holes, apples steaming under a bed of carefully sculpted autumn leaves, and cherries topped with perfectly symmetrical lattice work. It was at that moment that I decided I wanted to be Martha. And, like Martha, I started making pate brisee pie crusts, by hand. Read the rest of this entry »

Some of these are straight up from a magazine; others I have modified heavily over the years. Aside from links to the recipes, I have included comments and suggestions.

Cherry Almond Chocolate Biscotti

I modified this from the original recipe, for chocolate dipped Cherry Hazelnut biscotti. The first time I made these I found the cookie to be overpowered by the flavor of the orange zest. Instead I have replaced hazelnuts with almonds and used 2 teaspoons of almond extract for flavoring. Rather than dink around with dipping the biscotti, I stirred in a cup of chocolate chips.

Chocolate Hazelnut Ginger Biscotti

This dough is a sticky mess when it comes to to shape the biscotti into logs! I’m still experimenting with ways to remedy this. So far, my suggestion is to add a 1/2 stick of butter (cream with the sugar), use 3 instead of 4 eggs, and increase the flour by 1 cup. This leaves you with a dough that is kneadable, but decrease the cooking time by about 10-12 minutes. I also double the crystalized ginger, add a teaspoon ground ginger and cut back on the chocolate chips for a stronger ginger flavor.

Cranberry Pistachio Biscotti

I pretty much follow this recipe to the letter except I like them just fine without the white chocolate.

Some Tips for Biscotti
Biscotti means “twice baked” in Italian (or so I’ve read) because you first bake a log of dough then slice it and bake the pieces again so they become crisp. I consider biscotti to be my signature holiday cookie–it’s the staple I make every year and the one I’ve had the most time to refine. They are great for the holidays because they are a) really hard to screw up, b) keep up to 2 weeks in tupperware, so you can make them ahead, c) sturdy enough to withstand shipping, and d) the flavor combinations are endless. I don’t make them in a particularly traditional manner, prefering instead to see what kind of fruit, nut, and chocolate combinations I can stuff into a little cookie.

While having all these flavors can lead to amazing taste senstations exploding in your mouth, it can make it very difficult to slice your log of hot cookie without a lot of broken cookies. Here are some suggestions for slicing:

• Do not overbake your biscotti log, or it will be like trying to saw through a real wood log.
• Use a very sharp knife. Different recipes produce different types of dough textures, so experiment with using both serrated and straight edge knives. Begin sawing carefully and once you have a good foothold, push straight down.
• Thinner is crispier, but slice too thin and your cookies will break apart. Try to slice as thin as you can without breaking.
• Broken cookies are often the result of your knife cutting through the dough, but not that piece of dried fruit, chocolate, or nut. Even if the recipe does not call for it, finely chop nuts and fruit. Even little dried cranberries can destroy a beautiful biscotti slice.
• In an airtight container, biscotti will keep 2 weeks, easily.

Snowballs

Following the advice of another reviewer, it works great to fill these coconut macaroons with a chocolate disk.

Fig Swirls

I have no idea how they get 48 cookies out of this recipe. I made “half” swirls and still got the same amount of cookies even though I was working with 4 logs of dough instead of 2.

Gingerbread

I like to make tiny gingerbread men–reallly thin, crispy, and small enough to be bite-sized. For a snappier cookie, I doubled the spices and tripled the amount of ginger. For a dough that is a little stiffer and easier to roll out, add a quarter cup flour.

Apricot Shortbread

This recipe is from an old Martha Stewart magazine. I must have missed something because she says you can roll and cut these cookies out, but my dough was so crumbly it was all I could do to press it into the bottom of a pan. Still, the flavor turned out just fine.

• 1 cup butter, softened
• 3/4 cups powdered sugar, sifted
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 cups flour, sifted
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup chopped dried apricots

Combine all ingredients except apricots. Mix until just incorporated but not too creamy. Add apricots. Press dough into the bottom of a greased or parchment-lined 9×9 pan. Bake at 325 degrees F for 60-70 minutes. Makes about 2 dozen cookies.

Amaretti

I am in love with those Italian amaretti cookies that you get in that big red tin. I could eat a giant box in a single sitting, they are so delicious. I keep trying to recreate the crip texture and deep flavor in my own kitchen, but it is to little avail. These almond macaroons are good, if a bit time intensive. Next year, I will probably just satisfy my craving by purchasing one of those Lazaroni tins.

This recipe is from The Italian Baker by Carol Field. It is for Lombardy-style amaretti, meaning the crispy kind. They make soft amaretti in Pietmont; that recipe is also in this cookbook.

• 1 cup + 2 tbsps blanched almonds
• 2 1/2 tbsps bitter apricot kernels or 3/4 tsp almond extract
• 3/4 cup + 3 tbsps powdered sugar
• 1 tsp all purpose flour
• 2 egg whites
• 1/3 cup granulated sugar

Grind almonds and kernels to find powder in nut grinder or food processor. (If using food processor, process with 1/4 cup powdered sugar to avoid almonds from sticking.) Mix with flour and powdered sugar. Beat egg whites until soft peaks form. Gradually add granulated sugar until stiff and shiny. Fold in nuts and extract. Spoon into pastry bag and pipe 1.5″ mounds onto parchment-lined sheets, 1.5″ apart (they will spread and puff).

The original recipe says to bake for 40-45 minutes at 300 degrees, then turn off the heat and let the cookies dry for another 20-30 minutes in the oven. This turned out to be a bad idea–my cookies were burning after 30 minutes! Obviously cooking time varies, so watch your cookies carefully. I only baked them for 20-25 minutes and skipped the drying step for fear they would burn. Makes 30 cookies.