Corn and Shiitake Tart

You know, I love the idea of this savory tart but I do not love the reality of this savory tart.  I am a fan of all of the main components (shiitake mushrooms, corn, and the Cornmeal Pâte Brisée) but the ultimate tart itself was lacking a certain je ne sais quoi, I guess, and it just disappointed.  The blandness and heaviness  reminded me a cheap pot pie you buy in the freezer section, the kind that has no identifiable flavor other than “mushy.”

I had to drive to Cheyenne to find shiitake mushrooms. This is dedication, people.

I used my old-school version of the Slap-Chop to make quick work of my onions.  (Yes, I mentioned that just so I could link to that Slap-Chop video. Stop eating boring tuna!)

All the veggies and corn are sauteed and seasoned with salt & pepper.

The prepared veggies, mushrooms, and custard go into a pre-baked Cornmeal Pâte Brisée tart crust.

There’s just way too much corn in this recipe. It’s just too much corn.

Cornmeal Pâte Brisée

This recipe for a cornmeal pie crust is nearly identical to the MSBH’s recipe for regular Pâte Brisée except for the addition of some cornmeal and sugar.  But otherwise, the same.

The food processor cuts the butter into the dry ingredients and then pulses the ice water to form the dough.  One difference is that the Cornmeal Pâte Brisée  smells very sweet, almost like a butter cookie.

Just as with the regular Pâte Brisée, the cornmeal version is incredibly easy to work with.

The dough is halved, yielding two discs that can each be used for a 9-inch round of dough.

Olive-Oil Bread

I’ve been so impressed with all the bread recipes in the MSBH.  This Olive-Oil Bread is no exception – it’s one of those breads the proves how completely inferior store-bought bread is when compared to homemade.  There is an enormity of flavor in this loaf made from just four ingredients; it is so worth the time it takes to make it (a few hours, most of it devoted to the rise). The recipe instructs you to use an electric mixer for the second kneading, but you certainly could get away with doing it by hand.

The recipe lends itself to some simple variations and I can’t wait to try it with flavored olive oil and/or dried herbs.

The final rise is done after forming the loaf into a boule  and setting it atop a baker’s peel dusted with cornmeal.  This seems unneccessary to me and I had some issues with getting the loaf off the peel and transferred onto the baking stone in the oven (I hadn’t used nearly enough cornmeal).  In the future, I think I’ll just try baking it on an oiled piece of parchment and transfer that on to the stone with the loaf.

The boule is scored just before baking to let the dough expand.

You can see I ended up with a triangular-looking loaf.  This is due to my loaf sticking to the peel.  I had to do some fancy maneuvering to get it onto the baking stone and its round shape was destroyed in the process.  C’est la vie.

I think the hardest part about baking bread at home is not slicing in to it immediately after it comes out of the oven. You have to have self-control.

What I love most about this bread is its rich olive oil flavor and its soft, light texture that feels like a cloud on your tongue.  We ate most of it dipped in olive oil with some salt and seasonings before dinner.  It was also fantastic with hummus and tapenade.  And on the third day I made a panini with the remaining two slices and it’s now my all-time favorite panini bread.

A note to those of you who read these posts from my Facebook feed – I’m going to stop automatically having them imported there because it’s causing all kinds of wacky things to happen resulting in my receiving dozens of weird email notifications anytime someone clicks on a link.  So be sure to visit the blog itself if you want to continue reading.

Classic Pound Cake

I can count the number of times I’ve had pound cake on one finger.  It was almost 10 years ago when my southern belle of a roommate baked up her Grannie’s famous pound cake.  I remember it being incredibly moist, with a rich buttery-cream flavor that reminded me of a dense butter shortbread cookie.  That first bite was heaven but I also recall becoming very bored with it after that first bite.  It’s not a very exciting sort of dessert.  In fact, it’s pretty damn plain, even at its best, in my opinion.  It really does need to be dressed up with a glaze or some berry compote.

The butter, sugar, and vanilla smelled delicious as it was mixing.

The MSBH recipe for Classic Pound deviates from the “a pound of everything” proportions of traditional pound cake.  The recipe claims this is all well and good, but I have my doubts after baking and tasting this pound cake.  It had nothing of the initial charm my roommate’s pound cake had and seemed to bring out the worst in each of the main ingredients: it was greasy, far too sweet, and tasted like cooked eggs.

My loaf required an additional 45 minutes of baking beyond what the recipe advised and it was still a little underbaked in the middle.

There are a few more variations of the pound cake  in MSBH that I’ll tackle sometime in the future – just not any time soon!

Chocolate Hazelnut Biscotti

I made a batch of these this past weekend to send back to Seattle for my friend Trella and I know she loves dark chocolate and having made these before, I knew they’d be perfect for her.

This recipe for biscotti is quite different from the MSBH’s recipe for Cranberry Pistachio Biscotti.  The Chocolate Hazelnut Biscotti is made somewhat like a meringue – no butter at all, just eggs beat with sugar.  As a result, they’re much more airy and light and they dry out much more quickly during the second bake.

Here are my hazelnuts after blanching.

All the dry ingredients are pulsed in the food processor, including the hazelnuts and the chocolate chunks.

The sugar and eggs are beat until the mixture holds a ribbon when the whisk is just lifted up.

The resulting dough is very sticky and unmanageable.  I’ve made this recipe dozens of times and the dough always turns out unruly.  I’ve added some additional flour in past attempts and it does help a lot but it takes away from the airy quality of the resulting biscotti.  I guess it’s just whatever you prefer.  The dough is not very attractive at this point, regardless!

The formation and cutting of the individual cookies is the same as for Cranberry Pistachio Biscotti, so refer to that post if you’re curious.

Once baked, I melted a 1:1 combination of semi-sweet and unsweetened chocolate in a double boiler and brushed a thin layer onto the top of each individual biscotti.  I then sprinkled them with finely chopped hazelnuts.  The MSBH simply suggests sprinkling sanding sugar on top before baking, but I wanted to do something a little prettier.

The topping probably renders these too messy for dipping in coffee, but they should be dunked in something as they’re so crunchy on their own.

Classic Apple Pie

So there was this hilarious but short-lived t.v. show called Samantha Who that starred Christina Applegate and if you had a chance to see it before it was canceled last year, you know that as wonderful as Applegate was in it, the real stars were her character’s two best friends, Andrea and Dena, played by Jennifer Esposito and Melissa McCarthy, respectively.

So in the Second Season episode, “The Ex,”  it is revealed that beautiful, gorgeous, fashionable, confident Andrea doesn’t like to have her photo taken because for some reason, she is doomed to look hideously awful in photographs.  There’s this sequence of absurd photos proving her non-photogenicness and then Dena agrees to take a good photo of her come hell or high water, and hilarity ensues and really, why was that show canceled???  I think episodes are still available for download at iTunes and they’re so worth it.

Anyhow, all of that is a very long way of saying that some pies are like the Andrea Belladonna of the baking world.  In real life they are gorgeous and sophisticated and although they may seem shallow, are really quite deep with flavor.  So don’t let the above or any subsequent photos mislead you, this Classic Apple Pie is beautiful.

Granny Smith apples are about the only good baking apples I have access to in Laramie.  I’ve never found any of the Rome, Macoun, Cortland, or Empire apples Martha’s always recommending in her recipes.

The Granny Smiths are just fine, though, and the filling is a literal classic combination of apples, lemon juice, cinnamon & nutmeg, and some of the other usual suspects in fruit pies.

I use Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Pie and Pastry Bible a lot and she always allows her apples to macerate before further prepping for the pie.  When I started doing this and then reducing the resulting liquid on the stovetop before filling the pie, my pie-making improved by leaps and bounds.  So, I was reluctant to just immediately dump the apple mixture into the pie crust.  I envisioned a flood of sugary apple juices ruining the pie and wreaking havoc on my non-self-cleaning oven.  I so wanted to macerate.  But I trusted the MSBH recipe and proceeded without macerating.

I did, however, add a tablespoon of pearl tapioca to assuage my anxiety just a bit.  But that’s the only change I made.

You can see the tapioca in the photo above, along with the small pieces of butter you add before putting on the top crust.

The crust is just the simple pâte brisée.  It’s then brushed with an egg wash, sprinkled with sugar, and vented with some small cuts.  The entire thing goes in the freezer before being baked.

The apples cook down quite a bit and I love how you end up with a pie cavern.  I think pies are my favorite thing to bake, especially fruit pies.  And I definitely love to eat them.

See, that piece of pie is, in actuality, a thing of beauty but it just doesn’t translate in the photo.  Biege food is always hard for me to photograph well.  But believe me, it tastes perfect.  There’s nothing here that’s too different from most other “classic” apple pie recipes, but the MSBH recipe for pâte brisée and the simple ingredients are all you really need.

White Chocolate Butterscotch Cookies

At first I thought the good people at the Martha Stewart Cookbook Institute made a colossal mistake with this recipe because the ingredients include not one mention of butterscotch.  No butterscotch chips, no butterscotch extract, no butterscotch schnapps even.  Whoa-ho said I, MAJOR OVERSIGHT, Martha, forgetting the butterscotch in your butterscotch cookies.  Tsk tsk.

But!  It was I who was mistaken, for once baked, these cookies are imbued with sweet, buttery, boozy butterscotch flavor.  It must be all the butter, vanilla, and dark brown sugar.

In addition to the yummy butterscotchy-ness, they are thin, crisp, and crumby.  The white chocolate chunks make it all the more delightful and all the more likely to rot your teeth. These are very, very sweet cookies!

Rum-Raisin Pie

Well, I really dislike this pie.  I dislike rum-raisin anything, which is puzzling because I’m a fan of rum in most contexts and baking with raisins is one of the reasons I love baking.  But, ugh.  This pie is gross.

I knew I was in for disappointment when I read the name of this pie that this pie was inspired by rum-raisin ice cream.  I’m just one of those people who has never jumped on the liquor-flavored ice cream bandwagon.  Liquor-flavored chocolate truffles?  Sure.  Liquor-flavored cheesecake?  I’m game.  Liquor-flavored lip balm? Don’t even try to hold me back.  But liquor-flavored ice cream has never been my thing, particularly rum-raisin ice cream.

But I earnestly set forth to bake this pie to a standard that would make Martha proud.  Perhaps my subconscious got the better of me, because I just couldn’t put any heart into it.  I think in the back of my mind I knew I’d have to eventually take a bite and I just didn’t want to do it.  I mean I totally phoned in the crust embellishment.  Even at this early stage, I was so over it.

My devil-may-care attitude continued through to the end and I think it’s to this recipe’s credit that it still resulted in a thoroughly edible pie.  So if you like rum-raisin whatnot, I suppose you could do worse.

A basic custard, some golden raisins, a slosh of rum, and 50 minutes in a 350-degree oven later, you get a pie that you could eat if you really like that sort of thing.

Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies

Hands-down, the best peanut butter cookie I’ve ever had and I consider myself something of a connoisseur.  You can forgo the sandwich filling and the cookie part is satisfying all by itself.

I think the key to great peanut butter cookies is using all-natural peanut butter, the kind you have to stir, that contains nothing but peanuts.  Stirring the oil in is a bit of a pain but I find using a single chopstick is much easier than using a spoon.

The cookie dough comes together pretty easily.  Not healthy though, with all that sugar and butter!

The resulting dough is halved and each half is flattened into a disc, wrapped, and chilled.

After chilling, it’s rolled out and cut into small rectangles.

The rectangles are scored with a fork on top and put on lined baking sheets and then the instructions say to chill them again before baking.  What with my stash of diet Coke and case of whatever fruit-flavored beer was on sale this week, real estate in my fridge is at a premium and I certainly didn’t have room for more than one baking sheet in there.  So about half of the cookies went directly into the oven without being chilled first.   You can see they spread out quite a bit and did not retain their rectangular shape, going a little curvy on the long sides.  The chilled cookies (not pictured) kept their shape.

The filling is more natural peanut butter, confectioner’s sugar, butter, and some cream.  It’s beat in the mixer for several minutes and gets very airy and smooth.

I found that less-is-more with regard to how much filling to us.  I also found that chilling the filling a bit in the fridge helps it not all smoosh out the sides when constructing the cookie sandwich.

If you like peanut butter cookies, you can’t do much better than this recipe.  They are SUPERB.  One drawback, however, is that you need to eat them within a few days and because of the filling, they need to be kept chilled.

One idea I had was getting a peanut-shaped cookie cutter and doing crosshatch scoring to make them look like NutterButters.  But the rectangles have their own humble charm.

Fig Walnut Bread

Here’s another recipe I was avoiding because it just didn’t sound like my sort of thing and now that I’ve made it, I can’t wait to make it again.  SO DELICIOUS!

It’s a quick bread and it comes together very easily.  One thing you need is dried figs and I found them in the produce section near the organic ingredients and the fresh herbs.  The recipe calls for a pound of dried figs; I must not have been paying attention and just got a half-pound, but it all worked out fine in the end.   I can only imagine that using the full amount of figs would make the bread all that more flavorful.

The dried figs are re-hydrated a bit in hot water.  Toasted walnuts, sour cream, butter, brown sugar, and eggs make up the rest of the wet ingredients.

The dry ingredients include allspice, cinnamon, and nutmeg.  I love this kind of stuff.

The figs are pureed with some of the hot water.

Mix it all together and put it in two loaf pan to bake.

They smell fantastic while baking but the taste is what’s truly remarkable.  If you are ever having a cold, miserable day when winter seems like it’s never going to end, let me know and I will bake you a loaf of this bread.  I loved it drizzled with honey – so good after an afternoon of skiing!