Jam Tart

  

 

The filling is just a layer of store bought jam, so there's nothing amazing about that, but the crust is quite remarkable.

3/4 cups butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups flour (about 200 grams)
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
1/8 teaspoon salt
sliced almonds
jam

optional: 1/3 cup marzipan

Pre heat the oven to 350.

Cream the butter & sugar with the salt & almond extract until the mixture is fluffy and light colored and the sugar grains are dissolved. Gently mix in the flour. Put 1/2 cup of the dough in a bowl in the freezer to stiffen up. Press the rest of the pastry into a tart pan; be sure to make the crust as even a thickness as possible. Spread a thin layer of jam over the crust. Take the reserved crust out of the freezer. If you're using marzipan, use a pastry cutter to combine it slightly with the reserved dough. Break the mixture into crumbs and sprinkle it over the jam, then add a few almond slices. Bake until the crust is lightly browned, 40 to 50 minutes.

1. I over cooked mine. I didn't want it as brown as the picture. It was also a smidge tough.
2. The original recipe says to use a 9" pan. Mine is bigger than that, which is why I decided to use a little marzipan in the topping to spread it out a little.
3. Real butter. Not margarine. Not shortening.
4. Do not skimp during the part about 'cream butter & sugar until fluffy'. This is all-important!
5. I used blackberry jam, but I bet it would be really good with marmalade, or figs, or plum jam.

This crust is both amazing and very strange. Essentially what you do is make a buttercream frosting, then mix in enough flour to make a kind of heavy spackle which you then coat the inside of your pan with. Conventional pastry has a tendency to shrink and toughen when it is cooked, but this stuff does not shrink, and at least when it isn't overcooked, stays tender and shortbready. I suspect that the reason for the lack of shrinkage is the fact that when you cream the butter & sugar, what you're doing is whipping minute bubbles into the fat. It takes quite a long time if you do this by hand, but the result is unlike anything else. The air bubbles expand in the oven, and since there is no added liquid in the recipe to evaporate out and cause shrinking, the crust retains its size and shape as it solidifies.

I used this crust recipe for a quarkkuchen a little later, with a little vanilla and lemon zest, and it was fantastic.

Kouign Aman

  

  
I've been holding onto this set of recipes I clipped out of the paper for over a year now, because they look so delicious, and never had the guts to try it. The instructions are super complicated, and the pictures are all fancy. The article has this sidebar that says stuff like, 'Don't skip the 3 different resting times!' and 'Make sure the dough is cool, but not too cold!' and 'Don't worry if the first 7nty billion times you try it don't turn out right!' Either I have very low standards, or it isn't nearly as complex as the recipe says.

Use 1/2 recipe of the ubiquitous pizza dough. It's fine, or even better, if it has been sitting in the fridge for rather longer than you like to think about.

Let the dough sit on the counter for about an hour, lightly flour the rolling surface, and roll the dough into a mostly rectangular shape about 11" x 14". Take a stick of butter out of the fridge, and cut about 3 tablespoons worth of very thin shavings off it, and sprinkle them on 2/3 of the dough. Sprinkle a couple pinches of sugar over it.

Fold the un-buttered part of the dough over half the buttered part, then fold it again so all the butter is inside. Roll the dough out until it's about 8 x 12 inches, very lightly sprinkle it with flour and sugar, and fold it in 3 parts again.

Roll it out until it's about 5 x 10 inches, and fold it in 3 parts again. Pinch the sides of the folds together tightly, pat it into a ball, and put it on a pie plate. It'll be about the size of a baseball, but flatter. Sprinkle the outside generously with sugar, and put a bowl over it while you pre-heat the oven to 450. Once the oven is hot, cut 3 slashes in an asterisk shape about 1/3 the way through the dough, and sprinkle with sugar again to cover all the exposed insides of the cuts. Sprinkle a tiny pinch of salt on it. Bake for about 35 minutes.

 Notes:

1. I suspect that leaving the dough until it is way over fermented helps it retain its layered structure. It also tastes more interesting.
2. If you aren't sure, be more generous with the butter. The butter is the main thing that keeps the dough from merging back into one big lump.
3. Use salted butter. And go heavy on the sugar on the outside.
4. If you have time, sure, you can let the dough rest between foldings. It will undoubtedly help create layering, but it's ok if you don't.
5. It will be sitting in a pool of melted butter by the time it's done. That's normal.
6. Eat it hot! It is not nearly as good cold, although it is ok if you toast it again later.

That's kinda it. The first time I tried it, my dough was about 10 days old, and it rose a lot less in the oven. On the other hand, the layers were more distinct. The second time, it was more bready, but still quite tasty. I think I squashed the dough a little too hard, and it merged the layers back together. But so what? I gather that these things were invented as a way to use up scraps of dough, so I think that having the process be somewhat approximate stays true to the original intent of just preventing waste. The name is some weird french dialect; it means Queen Anne. The shape of the bread is supposed to resemble a little crown.

Apple Pie

 

mmmmm...pie

 I went to the apple festival at Portland Nursery the other weekend and bought 23 pounds of apples. I made a pie for my birthday. I have never been a big fan of apple pie. I prefer almost any kind of pie better than apple, to tell the truth. But, apples are what I have, and since I don't own a mixer that would enable me to make my favorite apple walnut cake, a pie it was.

My pie turned out so well that I started wondering why I thought I don't like apple pie. I do like apple pie, if it is good pie: the problem is that the world is full of middling-to-bleh apple pies. Store bought pie is almost invariably tough in the crust, which is a major strike against it. They are also horribly sweet, which is strike two. The coup de gras is usually the fact that the 'apples' in said pies are not generally recognizable as such. They are an evil combination of mushy and fibrous. There is neither taste nor aroma to indicate appleness. There is goo, and not in a good way.

This is a better pie.

Use this crust recipe. You can use part whole wheat if you like the texture, or all white if you prefer. I did all white to keep it simple.

Filling

2 lbs mixed apples. I got several kinds, I don't remember what, but they were mostly firm and tart.
about 1/2 cup sugar
a pinch each of freshly grated nutmeg and cinnamon
2 cloves, ground
a dab of butter
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Begin to peel, core and chop the apples. As you are chopping them up, drop them into a medium-hot saucepan with the the butter. Keep adding apples as you peel, and stir in the sugar about halfway through the apples. Add the spices. Stir just enough to prevent the apples from browning very much. When you get to the end of the apples, some of them will be coming apart and some of them will be barely cooked. This is a good thing. Stir in the vanilla. Cover the pan and remove from heat while you roll out the bottom crust and arrange it in a 9" pan. Pour in the filling, top it with the other half of the pastry, and bake at 350 for about an hour or until the crust is as brown as you like it, that is, until you loose your patience and have to eat your pie right NOW.

Notes:

1. Apples are about the perfect pie fruit, apparently.
2. This is because they have a large amount of pectin in them.
3. Which is important, because pectin has the curious property of gelling up when cooked with both sugar and acid.
4. That means that it's important to put at least a little sugar in the filling as you cook it, especially if the apples are tart. Not enough sugar means the pectin won't thicken properly.
5. It also means that you should cook the apples first, because if you just put the raw apples in the crust, the pastry will burn before the apples are cooked on the inside, and the apples have to cook in order to activate the pectin.

What is pectin anyway? The Wikipedia page has way more technical stuff than I want to know, but the gist of it seems to be that pectin is a kind of dietary fiber found in fruits. People use it for a lot of things, most notably in making jam, because soft fruits like berries contain little pectin and will therefore make a very thin, soupy jam without adding some in.

My pie didn't last very long. It was tart and crispy edged when it was hot out of the oven, and it was sweeter and melty crusted for breakfast and lunch the next day. There was no goo. The apples cooked into a pleasant combination of firm fruity bits and sauce, with just enough spice to snazz it up.

  

Skunk Works

  

  
I said I'd bring an experimental cake to family dinner. Pete said "skunk works dessert is fine by me." It had a familiar sound to it, but I still had to look it up, and then I was all tickled by the idea of Skunk Works Cake. No advanced physics knowledge is required, but the original recipe did ask for a pound of quark.

Skunk Works Lemon Yogurt Cake

1 1/2 cup all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp lemon zest, minced
2 T sugar
7 T butter
pinch of salt
1 egg, beaten

Cut the butter into the dry ingredients until it looks like aquarium gravel. Beat the egg well, and gently toss it in with the dry mix, then fold it all together until it forms a cohesive mass. Flatten it into a pancake about an inch thick, wrap it in wax paper and refrigerate it until you do the other parts.

3 egg yolks
3/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
7 T butter (yes! again!), softened
6 oz heavy cream
17 oz (500g) greek style yogurt
1 tsp lemon zest, 
1 1/2 T cornstarch
pinch of salt
3 egg whites

You need a springform pan for this.

Pre-heat the oven to 325

Whisk the yolks, vanilla, and sugar together until they become light colored and creamy looking. Whisk in the butter, then the cream. Mix in the yogurt, salt, cornstarch and lemon zest.

Roll out the crust, and lay it in the pan. Try to make sure the pastry goes all the way down into the corner where the sides meet the bottom.

Whisk the egg whites until they form stiff peaks, then fold them into the batter. Fill the shell and bake for around an hour and a half.

Serve cool. Eat with strawberries, and your favorite people.

Notes:

1. I don't have an electric mixer. I do have an excellent wire whisk, which does a good job on all that fluffing that is necessary for good cake. I also now have a sore triceps. And a sore thing-that-attaches-your-scapula-to-your-ribs-in-the-back.
2. When rolling out that crust, don't worry if it splits into crazy shapes. Just get it evenly flat, then piece it back together in the pan.
3. My oven. Oh my stupid oven. I have no idea if the cooking time I've stated will be correct for you. Start by baking it for an hour, and if the batter still looks quite pale and has not poofed up at all in the middle of the pan, check back in 15 minute intervals. It's done when it has fully inflated and is looking just slightly darkened.
4. When you put it in the crust, the batter will only fill about about 2/3 of the pan. This is fine, the egg whites make it like a souffle; it will expand a lot.
5. Which means that you should make sure that the crust comes up all the way to the top of the pan.

So, it's basically just a cheesecake, right? Yup. I guess in Germany they make a very thick, over-condensed version of yogurt and call it quark. After reading about quark, I figured that I could use that batch of yogurt that I let get too strong in this recipe. 'Quarkkuchen' sounds like a pretty cool thing to eat, huh? But other than as a means of using up unsatisfactory yogurt, is it worth doing again? Yes indeedy.

I love the texture of baked cheesecake, but they are awfully rich. I like the relative lightness of no-bake cheesecake, but the texture is a bit gloppy and the high concentration of lemon juice usually used to set them makes the flavor pretty unsubtle. I wanted something in between, and I think this fits the bill. It seems to be related to the fallen souffle cake I made a long time ago, in that the inflation during cooking is not a feature to be desired in itself so much as it is a way to know if the thing is done or not- this cake deflates rapidly when it's out of the oven. The texture is very light, almost delicate, even when it has gotten completely cold. The lemony flavor is brought out by the tartness of the yogurt, but unlike in a no-bake cake, the lemon doesn't overpower everything else.

This recipe is the perfect size for dessert at family dinner, with a small slice leftover for me to eat for breakfast.

Onion Cake

  

 
  
Which is what Dad called it. It's not a cake, it is a giant savory pastry and is amazingly easy to make. I had bought a bag of green onions to make something else that never happened, so I had to use up the lot before they died.

1/2 recipe of the amazingly versatile pizza dough, at least 2 days old
1 large bunch green onions
salt
olive oil

Let the dough sit, covered, somewhere warm, until it has gotten very relaxed and has developed large gas pockets.

Preheat oven to 425.

Slice the green & white parts of the onions thinly and toss with about a half teaspoon of salt. Set aside.

Flour a surface and roll out the dough until it's paper thin. It will be a good 2 feet across. Drizzle generously with oil. Spread the oil over the dough right up to the edges and sprinkle the sliced onions evenly over it. Roll up the dough tightly, then coil it into a circle. Put it on a greased pan and sort of squish it a little flatter. Turn it over a couple times as you squish, to flatten both sides and to get all the surfaces oily. Bake for 15 minutes, turn it over, and bake for another 20 minutes.




Important:

1. Do not knead the dough before rolling it out! You will make it seize back up and it will be hard to roll. This dough is really quite rugged. You can flip it over without tearing holes in it even when it is extremely thin, which makes it easier to roll a nice, even, circle.
2. Use fresh onions. Mine were acceptable, but had gotten rather sharp with age.
3. The thinner you get the dough, the better. It will be more tender that way.
4. Don't skimp on the oil.
5. Or the flour when you roll the dough. A certain amount of loose flour helps maintain the flaky structure, as well as prevent sticking to the rolling surface.

This is one of my most favorite foods, ever. The onions are sweet and salty, the bread is crispy on the outside and soft inside, and the layers are good for peeling and eating one by one or for biting right though together. Dad used to make it for things like potlucks and picnics. Without fail, it gives me a relaxed, special-occasion feeling every time I have it. It has not lost its magic in 30-odd years, even though I make it myself now. I made it the winter after I moved here. I took the dough over to Pete & Cynthia's house, and Jej and her family came down from St. Johns and we made a gigantic recipe of onion cakes. Which was particularly fortunate, because that was the weekend of the blizzard and everybody got housebound and we would have starved and been uncomfortable without the onion cakes.

Traditionally this is made with unyeasted dough made of all purpose flour. I think dad mixed green and white onions, too. I can't see that it makes a difference, though maybe the pastry would be a little more tender if it was made with a lower protein flour. On the other hand, the fermentation time both develops the dough flavors and makes it roll out easier, so it may be a trade off between flavor and texture.

I am reliably informed that this is like a Bulgarian thing called banitsa. Clearly, this requires more investigation.

There is no excuse for pastry cream

Because well, duh, you should enjoy it without needing an excuse. I revisited my recipe from last July, and found it worth a second shot. Here is version 2, with a few alterations in procedure. If anything, this is even simpler than my last attempt.

1 recipe of pastry crust, your choice. I like a slightly sweet crust. You need to pre-bake the crust and have it cooled and ready to fill with the cream and whatever decorations you want.

1 1/2 cups half and half
1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
1/4 plus 1/3 cups white sugar
4 egg yolks
1/3 cup cornstarch
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon orange extract
2 tablespoons cold butter

Put the cream, half and half, and 1/3 cup of sugar in a saucepan over medium heat. Thoroughly mix everything else except the butter in a bowl. When the milk mix is steaming, slowly dribble about half of it into the bowl with the eggs while stirring to prevent the eggs from curdling by accident. Return the milk to the heat, mix up the warmed eggs pretty well, then dump them in with the milk on the stove. Whisk constantly until the mixture boils very gently. It will get quite thick, so it'll really just spit a few bubbles of steam rather than actually boiling. Take it off the stove, whisk in the butter and then put it in the fridge with a sheet of plastic wrap or waxed paper right on the surface of the pastry cream. When the cream is mostly cool, you can fill your crust with it. I put figs on mine, because that's just what I had.

Something worth noting is that the starch really does have a function in this recipe. It gives the cream its texture and glossy appearance. Because it is a starch, it does have to be brought to a boil in order to do that. Also, because you are relying on starch, not egg protein, for the custardy effect, it is almost impossible to cause the cream to "break". If you've ever overheated a cream sauce, you've seen this happen- you get a grainy textured mass of curds in a thin liquid. Starch actually likes to be boiled. I think what happens is that the starch forms a gel in which the protein and fat molecules are evenly suspended, but I'd have to look it up to make sure.

I bet this would taste really good if you sweetened it with molasses.