Spiced Cream Cakes with Strawberries

  

  
Strawberry shortcake is the most photogenic food. It's all pink and white and fluffy, and there are these berries, and these poofs of cream, and there is this crunchy sugar top. It just looks yummy. It helps that it really is every bit as good to eat as it is to look at. I love strawberry shortcake, it was the ultimate dessert when I was a kid. This recipe was not brought on by a sense of boredom with the original, I just became enamored of the smell of indian spice mixes.Technically these are not shortcakes, 'shortcake' being an abbreviation of 'shortening cake', meaning a cake made with shortening. There isn't any shortening per se in these things, the recipe calls for a great deal of heavy cream instead, but everybody knows what you mean when you say Strawberry Shortcake: a rich, lightly sweetened, somewhat dense but tender cookie/biscuit thing with gobs of strawberries with some type of cream thing, usually either iced or whipped, if not both.

Masala Spices

Mix 1/2 teaspoon each of:
cumin
coriander
nutmeg
black pepper
cinnamon

and 1/4 teaspoon each of:
cardamom
cloves
star anise or anise seed


Cream Cakes

2 teaspoons masala spice mix
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup cornmeal
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
zest of 1 lemon
1 1/2 cups heavy cream

Pre-heat oven to 350.

Melt about 2 tablespoons of butter in a small bowl, and put about a half cup of sugar in another. Set those aside.

In a small dry saucepan, toast the spices for a minute or two at medium-low heat. They will smoke a bit, but you don't want them to do more than change color very slightly. Dump them into a large mixing bowl and shake them around to stop the cooking, or they will get burnt.

Sift all the dry ingredients together into the mixing bowl. Gently stir in the cream, then knead lightly just until the dough comes together in a ball.  Divide the dough into 12 balls. Dip the top of each ball into the butter, then the sugar. Put the balls on a cookie sheet sugar side up. Bake for 25-30 minutes.

Cool the cakes, then serve with your favorite decorations.

  Notes:

1.The original recipe (from Rustic Fruit Desserts) said to divide the dough into 8 pieces. I think making them smaller would be better. You can always eat 2 small cakes if you want them, but it is somehow much less satisfying to eat part of a larger cake, even if that is all you want.

2. Next time, I might make these in cupcake tins, with cupcake papers and stuff. Besides looking cute, it would keep the cakes more ball shaped. This would allow me to cook the outsides a little crunchier without drying out the insides too much.

3. I might also use a coarser sugar. More texture than regular old table sugar.

4. You have to use salted butter on the outsides! Otherwise they will just be bland.

5. The measurements given for the spice mix assume that the spices are already ground when you measure them. Spices bought ground up are fine, but I like to do my own. Nutmeg in particular is much  more flavorful if it's freshly ground.

These remind me of gingerbread, but are just slightly more exotic. Garam Masala is used in meat dishes usually, but it is largely composed of things western cooking uses for sweets, with the addition of black pepper and coriander which gives gives the flavor a hotter, earthier punch. I would eat these cakes with any berries, or poached pears or apples, or grilled peaches with walnuts and mascapone, or fresh figs, or greek yogurt, or nothing at all. It's all about the crunchy top. That part is really good.

I know, I keep going on about the damn strawberries!

I finished a whole heaping pint of them last Saturday, and wished that I'd bought a heap more. I woke up terribly disappointed the next morning that there weren't any left, and was reminded of this illustrated book of the poem Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti where one of the protagonists eats magical fruit and pines away for it thereafter. I don't plan to do anything so melodramatic, but gosh dangit, I really wish I had some more of those right about now. Here's the salad I had for dinner on Saturday night:

a handful of fresh spinach
some strawberries
half an avocado
some blue cheese- a medium rather than extra sharp kind
balsamic vinegar & olive oil
salt & pepper if you want

#100: carrots in june, just like I said

Very small milestone. This is about a year worth of me, my lunch, and my things growing in pots. Today it's carrots. Plus, it's strawberry season at market. They're very shiny.

Oh my god! I made English Muffins!

There are days when I feel like I have totally lost my mojo. And usually it means that I just have to go to bed and say the hell with it. But sometimes I can't do that, and sometimes, I am rewarded. For no good reason, I decided that I needed to make english muffins. I thought it would get me out of my funk, and boy was I right. I don't have enough superlatives for these little guys.

Rather than write out the recipe, I'll just post the link, which is from food network, and tell you what else I think is useful.

1. Follow the recipe. Duh, right? Well, this is me, remember. But I really did this time!
2. Read the comments. 
3. I did the folded bits of tinfoil thing. No cardboard, just enough foil to stay moderately rigid. Make the rings about 4 inches in diameter and 1/2 inch tall.
4. The recipe says heat the griddle to 300. That means medium-low on a stove top.
5. I used my trusty cast-iron skillet. If I hadn't run out of staples to make rings, I could have fit 3 rings in it. Remember to leave room for flipping them over.
6. After the recipe says to stir in the last 1/2 teaspoon of salt, let the batter rest again for about 5 minutes or the first couple muffins will be significantly heavier than the rest of the batch.
7. If you are only making them 2 at a time as I did, you will need to stir the batter back down a couple times or the muffins at the end will be predominately composed of holes.
8. Do sprinkle a bit of cornmeal on the pan and the tops of the raw muffins.
9. Do take the time to brush the crumbs out of the skillet and re-grease the rings between each batch.
10. A scant 1/3 cup of batter is about right for each muffin. This will make around 8-10 muffins, depending on how thick you like them.

And to those of you who said "What? Muffins! But those are put in bags and left in grocery stores by the Muffin Fairy!" I say: Be the Muffin Fairy.

"God I hope this works!" Shortcakes

So it is totally impossible for me to follow a recipe. I got a perfectly good recipe for biscuits online, because I didn't like the looks of any of the shortcake recipes, and besides, some of them called for stuff I don't have on hand.



These are my notes:

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup whole wheat flour

4 teaspoons baking powder

1 tablespoon sugar

3/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup butter or margarine

1 cup milk

In a medium bowl, combine flours, baking powder, sugar, and salt; mix well. Cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Stir in milk just until moistened. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface; knead gently 8 to 10 times. Roll to 3/4-in. thickness; cut with a 2-1/2-in. biscuit cutter and place on an ungreased baking sheet. Bake at 450 degrees F for 10 to 12 minutes or until lightly browned. Serve warm.


My plan:


2 cups flour= 260g
1 cup ww flour= 125g
5 tsp b.p.
4 T sugar
¾ tsp salt
½ c butter
1 c cream
½ c yogurt

god I hope this works.

bowl + butter = 390 g

several errors in plan: used 2 T bp rather than 5 tsp. Used bread flour not ap. Sigh.

Dude, I didn't even get the oven temp right- I set it at 400. Mercy.