Challah

This is a very easy recipe and went pretty quickly. If you have a bunch of leftover egg yolks from using whites in another recipe, this bread is a good way to use up those yolks.

All the ingredients go into the mixer at once.

And then that’s all mixed together.  My dough never quite came together cohesively until I added some additional flour.

The mixer does most of the kneading so once that’s done you just bring it together a bit and then fold it a few times to prepare for the first rise.

It goes into an oiled bowl to rise until doubled in size.  This took a couple hours.

The dough is then portioned into three pieces.

These pieces are rolled out and braided together to create the loaf. My dough might have been a little dry, as I ended up with a lot of creases in the “ropes” that I couldn’t work out. I also realized that I should have tried to braid it more tightly from the start – it would have helped with evenness and improved the look of the baked loaf.  Tighter is better!

The braided loaf is placed on a baking sheet to proof. Once it’s done proofing, it’s brushed with an egg wash and I also opted to sprinkle some poppyseeds on top, which the MSBH says is a traditional way to prepare Challah.

Then it’s into the oven for about an hour. You can see how my braids spread apart considerably because I didn’t braid it tightly enough.

The loaf gets quite dark.

I have had Challah before and it’s never been my favorite bread – I find it to be on the bland side. It’s great for strata, however, and I made a big casserole dish full of strata with this loaf of Challah.

 

Spice Sandwich Cookies

[I could not find this recipe on Martha's site to link to. Here's why I don't include the recipes in my posts.]

These are great and pretty quick despite a few of the more tedious steps in the recipe. Seriously, I am sometimes like, What the hell, Martha? with some of these recipes.

Like the first step, which is to take some whole spices (allspice, pepper, cardamom, and so on) and put them in your automatic spice grinder and grind them up. You know, in your spice grinder. That you probably own and use a lot. Because there’s no other way to acquire ground spices.

At the beginning of this bake-through project I would have considered buying a spice grinder and doing just that. But I’m older and wiser now and opted to just take a picture of the whole spices and then I used the ground versions I bought at the store. I just guessed at the amounts and probably used more than the whole spices would have yielded, but in the end things worked out just fine.

The wet ingredients include molasses, which is one of my favorite baking ingredients.

The wet and dry are mixed together with the mixer – it’s a very easy cookie recipe.

This dough is rolled into balls and the balls are rolled in sugar.

Those go onto a baking sheet.

And then you smoosh them a bit.

Next is another one of those “oh geez” steps, but I can see how it might improve your cookie results. You place the unbaked cookies in the freezer (I had to do some rearranging to fit both sheets in the freezer) and let them get firm and then your remove them and let them come to room temperature.  I know, I know.

And then you bake them.

They turn out really pretty and I think the freezing-then-thawing does help with that.

The filling is a simple mixture of cream cheese and apple butter.

This stuff is great and I had a lot left over so you better believe my morning bagel breakfasts just got a lot more exciting.

Next step, assembling the cookies sandwiches.

A little extra apple butter is spread on top of the cream cheese mixture.

These. Are. Fantastic. I think they’d be perfect in October at the first hint of autumn weather. They are divine.  The cookies have a crisp, sugary bite that changes to chewy, with a rich, spicy molasses flavor.  The fillings are perfect – tart apple and creamy cool tang from the cheese. Under-bake the cookies just a teeny bit and keep the cream cheese mixture as thick as you can to make them easier to bite into. Gah, they’re so good!

Fruitcakes

Happy Christmas, everyone!  What better time for me to get back to posting here than with this phenomenal recipe for fruitcake.  Throw all your preconceived notions of disgusting, candied fruit-filled loaf nonsense out the window, because these are actually really, really good.

You start at least a day before by preparing the fruit.  You use a lot of raisins, golden raisins, and currants…

…along with dried apricots, dried tart cherries, and dried cranberries.

To this you add honey and Cognac.

This big bowl of dried fruit, honey, and booze gets stirred together, covered with plastic wrap, and kept at room temperature for at least 24 hours to macerate (I left mine for a little over two days – the recipe says you can leave it for two weeks!).

The cake ingredients themselves are pretty simple, with a few notable twists.  For one, you use bread flour rather than all-purpose.  Martha doesn’t mention why but I imagine it’s because you need the extra gluten to hold all the fruit and nuts together.  The flour is sifted with spices – pretty heavy amounts of ginger, cinnamon, and cloves.

And a whole tablespoon of salt!

Chopped walnuts go in too.

The wet ingredients are butter, sugar, and eggs and go together in the mixer and are folded in with the dry ingredients.  This is all super easy – in fact, this is one of the easiest recipes I’ve done so far from the MSBH.

I used the biggest bowl I own to do all this because I knew I’d have to fold in the giant bowl of fruit.  I didn’t do the math but just from eye-balling it, I’d say the ratio of fruit to dough is about 2-to-1.

It was a cinch to fold together, but would have been messy without a giant bowl.

The dough is split between two 8″ round cake pans (mine might have been 9″) that have been buttered and floured.

They go into a relatively low-temperature oven for about two hours.  After 30 minutes they smelled heavenly – it smelled just like Christmas baking was happening.

Once baked, they cool off and I used this time to make some candied orange slices to decorate the top.  The photo in the MSBH has all these different lovely dried fruits on top; I couldn’t find anything like that but wanted to do something for a garnish.

I boiled each slice in a simple sugar mixture on the stovetop and then tried to form it into pleasing shapes.  The toothpicks helped a lot!

Once the cakes were cooled, I cooked an apricot jam glaze.  I couldn’t find any apricot jam at any stores here in my town, so I used preserves instead.  Probably not ideal, but good enough.  The glaze is simply jam cooked with a little water and then strained.

This is brushed on top of the cakes.  They soak up a lot of the glaze.

Then I arranged the orange slices on top and added some walnut halves.  I wish I had had some whole fresh cranberries to add as well, but alas I did not.

And then I put glaze on the topping too.

And that’s it!  It took some time, and you do have to plan ahead in order to macerate the dried fruit, but overall it goes pretty quickly.  More quick bread than cake, actually.

It tastes a lot like a quick bread too, although unlike any I’ve ever tasted.  The fruit is the star here and it packs a punch.  Dried fruit has an intense sweetness as it is; after steeping in brandy and honey for two days and then baked, the sweetness is exponentially powerful.  The actual “cake” is really good and quite noticeable.  Major clove flavor and a nice contrast to the sticky chewiness of the fruit.  There is absolutely no strong boozy flavor, which I was worried about, but you can get a hint of the brandy after you swallow each bite.  It’s nice.

It is better the next day – much easier to slice and handle than on the first day when it’s super crumbly.

I know there’s an old cliche about fruitcakes making horrible gifts but I would love to get a fruitcake like this.  Granted, I could only eat about two bites for a serving because it’s just so intense, but those two bites are always awesome.  Maybe I’d enjoy getting a quarter of a fruitcake like this.

And it makes a great bread for toasting (although I wouldn’t put it in a slot toaster – use a toaster oven where it can lay flat) with some goat cheese.  I imagine it would freeze beautifully as well.

Happy holidays and happy baking, everyone!  Thank you for sticking with me through my hiatus.  Did you bake anything from the MSBH for the holidays?  If so, tell me about it in the comments.

P.S. – You may be interested in my new other blog, which in a very real way has helped me get back to blogging here.

Hiatus

Hey everyone – I’ve already unofficially been on a hiatus from baking and posting here and now I’m going to make it a little more official.  I have every intention of returning and finishing the MSBH but it won’t be for at least another three or four months.  There’s nothing too dramatic or awful keeping me from it, but real life has definitely intervened in such a way that I know I won’t be able to give this blog the attention it deserves for some time. I’m going to turn off commenting for the time being.

Please do check back from time to time – I sincerely plan on posting again!  Or, subscribe to my RSS feed and new posts will automatically show up in your reader of choice when they go up.

Until then, happy baking!

[It turns out I'm unable to turn off commenting.  If you comment and you are held up in moderation for a time, do not despair!  I will approve it eventually.  If you leave me a lovely comment and I do not respond, please do not take it personally.  Your nice comments always, always bring a smile to my face.]

I’ve Been So Busy Not Baking!

 

Here in southeastern Wyoming summer is very short.  It stays fairly chilly through the first part of June and doesn’t really heat up until July.  Once that happens, however, it’s like living in a frying pan for two months because the SUN DOES NOT STOP SHINING AT FULL POWER FOR 12 HOURS EVERY DAY.  Little cloud cover, high elevation, long hot days, no air conditioning, yadda yadda = absolutely no sane reason to turn on your oven.  On the plus side, we have zero humidity and the hot weather lasts about two months, tops.  I can already feel the crisp, cool autumn-y air on my morning walks so fall is just around the corner.  During August here, days get noticeably shorter, the nights get profoundly cooler, and all the green stuff starts turning brown.  As a cold-weather person at heart, I say amen to that.

So, I’ve been doing a lot of morning hiking in the mountains and this morning as a breeze picked up I just felt it – autumn is definitely on its way!  And that immediately triggered one core desire: baking.  I CANNOT WAIT to get back in the kitchen and bake.  Taking all this time off has been disappointing on the one hand but I think it also resparked my passion for this project.  So thank you for being patient with me!  The weather forecast for next week predicts no days above 80°F so we’re already heading in the right direction… the thought that I could be back in the kitchen full-force in a few weeks makes me pretty happy.

Until then, some non-recipe photos?  These were taken in various hiking destinations around Laramie this summer – Happy Jack Recreation Area, Red Feather Lakes, CO, Medicine Bow National Forest, and Laramie Peak.  Hiking is how I spend most of my free time in the summers and I’ve gotten into geocaching this summer too.  So these are photos from hiking/geocaching outings.

I need to look this up in my field guide - they're everywhere in the range east of Laramie right now and all around Red Feather, CO

It's hard to tell because I was crouching to take this pic but this is at the top of a very steep climb in the path. I love how the roots create natural foot holds.

Roller Coaster Trail is a short connecting trail at the Happy Jack Recreation Area east of Laramie. It's beyond fun on a mountain bike.

Another fantastic plant I need to look up in my guide. I could spend hours and hours photographing and researching plants. I would have loved a career in Botany.

Jäger comes along on all excursions - sometimes we'll hike 10 hours a day and he never gets tired. I always stuff a KONG with kibble and peanut butter, freeze it, then throw it in the cooler so he has a treat on the way home. He usually eats it all within 5 minutes.

I have so many photos from hikes this summer – would you guys like to see more?  I always wanted to keep this blog pretty MSBH-specific but I wonder if it might be nice to have something to fill the dead air until I can get baking again?  Let me know!

Apricot Cherry Upside-Down Cake

[You can find the recipe to this cake right here.]

Okay you guys, it has been HOT.  Way too hot.  As in, way too hot to bake.  I cannot stand the heat and therefore, I have been out of the kitchen.  I made this cake a couple weeks ago and have not made a thing since.  So bear with me these next couple of months, as posting will be light.  But for now, Apricot Cherry Upside-Down Cake.

This cake is supposed to be baked in an 8″ circular cake pan with 3″ sides.  All my circular pans have standard 2″ sides and I didn’t want to special-order a cake pan for this one recipe.  So instead, I used an angel food cake pan that has super high sides, ensuring the cake would not overflow.  Downside, of course, is that it creates a hole in the middle of the cake.  Everything else I did was according to the recipe.

You line the bottom with parchment paper.  I cut out a circle the size of the cake pan and then cut four slits half-way from the inside-out to allow the paper to fit over the center tube of the pan.  I then buttered the pan and paper and evenly pressed a sugar/butter mixture to the bottom.  This will create a sugary coating for the fruit.

Apricots are washed, halved, and pitted.  Same story for the cherries, but you pit them before you halve them.

The fruit is then arranged on the bottom of the cake pan.

A light cake batter is made with cornmeal, of all things, and it’s really wonderful.

Crumbled almond paste also goes in the cake batter.  Lots of unique flavors and textures going on here!

I feel like this blog already has enough shots of cake ingredients in the mixer – I’ll skip that part of the process and get to the final steps.  The batter is poured on top of the fruit and smoothed before going in the oven to bake.

The oven does the rest.  The cake baked up to a really fragrant (almonds), dense, moist, golden finish.  The fruit let off a lot of moisture, but this was almost entirely absorbed by the cake without it getting soggy.

I wasn’t 100% impressed with the look of the final cake – using the called-for circular cake pan instead of an angel food cake pan would have improved the look a lot (see the photo in the link I posted above).  I also wish the fruit would have kept its shape more but there’s no real way around that, I suppose, unless you use fruit that is much less ripe.  It just looks weird and messy to me.

But as for the important part – how it tasted – well, it was pretty much freaking phenomenal.  A great summer dessert – for as dense as the cake is, it is not super sweet and has a light, summery flavor.  The cornmeal adds a great chewiness and the almond paste helps set off the super-concentrated sweetness of the baked apricots and cherries.

Let it cool to the point where it’s still warm enough to just melt ice cream and then slice it up, top it with some vanilla, and dig in.  It’s a lot like bread pudding – so moist and delicious!

White Cupcakes with Strawberry Buttercream

[The recipe for the cupcakes and the frosting can be found right here.]

How’s this for a lovely little summer cupcake?!  I really loved these – but they take some serious effort and a relatively lofty amount of time.  If you want a memorable cupcake for a summer picnic or barbeque, however, these would certainly fit the bill.  Be prepared to have everyone ask you how you got the cake so soft and light, though.  (I just said “magic.”)

It’s not magic, though!  The cupcakes are made with only cake flour – no all-purpose flour at all – and this is what gives them their soft, velvety tender crumb.  They truly do end up with the most amazing texture – unlike any cupcake I’ve had before.

The cake batter is made with whipped egg whites (among other things) so it’s definitely not a simple “throw everything in the mixer and then you’re done” batter.  It takes some time and effort and various bowls and techniques.  Once it’s done, however, it bakes up easily.

The Strawberry Buttercream is a simple variation on the basic Swiss Meringue Buttercream that is used elsewhere in the book.  To make it strawberry-flavored, strawberry jam that has been pureed in a food processor is folded in to the plain buttercream.

 

I had a lot of trouble getting the jam and the frosting to come together into one fluffy cohesive frosting, so I returned the bowl to the mixer with a whisk attachment and whipped it on high speed for just a little while.  This worked!

Then it is just a matter of frosting the individual cupcakes and topping with a strawberry.

I found that cutting a little bit off a side of the strawberry made it looked better as it sat on top of the cupcake.

The frosting is so good – all of the MSBH’s Swiss Meringue Buttercream frostings have been fabulous so far.  It’s light and fluffy and smooth and very subtle.  Not too sweet.  The strawberry flavor is amazing and you could easily change this up to be the flavor of any jam you can find – that’s all that that is used to flavor the frosting, afterall.

These are literally the lightest, tenderest cupcakes I’ve ever tasted.  Both the frosting and the cake are light as air, just the softest, most pillow-y cupcakes EVER!

June 2011 Favorites

Happy June, everyone!  How’s your summer going so far?  Mine feels like it’s finally just starting; I was wearing a sweater through the first two weeks of June!

So, favorites for this month.  I’ll start with a biggie, my newest kitchen addition: my Nespresso machine.

Before the Nespresso, I made my cappuccinos and lattes with strong coffee made in my French press (which I still use to make coffee) and whipped warm milk with this little wand from aerolatte that works amazingly well, almost as well as the Nespresso milk frother, although the wand takes some practice to get it right.

I am nothing but impressed with the Nespresso!  I’ve always wanted an at-home espresso machine but didn’t want to spend the money to plumb one in and was just never impressed with any of the stand-alone models I’d tried.  After hearing more and more people rave about the quality of the Nespresso and finally trying some of the coffee itself, I was sold.  Don’t let the “coffee pods” put you off like they did me for so long – they make excellent espresso.

Check out that crema!

It’s not as good as what you’d find in an upscale shop made by a professional barista, but it’s far, far better than the everyday espresso you get at most shops made by hurried baristas who really don’t care if they pull your espresso correctly.  And the milk frother makes the silkiest milk froth ever.

I don’t have any baking favorites this month, and truth be told I haven’t been doing much baking!  I hope to fix this in July.

I have a few yummy edible recommendations, though.  First, I noticed Silk is making Coconut Milk now.  It’s delicious!  I love using it in smoothies and hope to make some ice cream with it soon.

Speaking of smoothies, Martha Stewart’s Whole Living magazine has a Smoothies app for the iPad which is well, well worth the $1.99 they’re charging.  I love smoothies in the summer when there’s so much great fruit available and it’s too hot to cook.  My favorite one so far from the app is the Blackberry + Wheat Germ, although I cannot wait until pears are back in season to try the Avocado + Pear.

Target has their Archer Farms brand of fancy-pants foods that appeal to yuppies and they make these tortilla chips with the funkiest flavors that are SO GOOD!  I hate Doritos because they are just too overcharged with gross, fake flavor but these Anchor Farm chips are really subdued and nice.  Great with sandwiches and dips.  They change the variety up pretty frequently and I’ve never come across one that I didn’t like.

Recently I picked up Fiesta 7-Layer Dip, Savory Spring Roll, and Grilled Cheese & Tomato.

Finally, I picked up some green tea in Hawai’i from Lupicia and it’s the first green tea I can actually drink iced without getting a severe stomach ache.  The grapefruit one is to die for.

I didn’t try many new recipes this month but I’ve been making a lot of “minimalist” salads inspired by this post from Mark Bittman.  The carrot blueberry one (#7) will knock your socks off.

As for non-kitchen favorites, here’s some other stuff I’ve been loving in June:

Books:  I read The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb and loved it so much.  It was one of those books I hated to have end, I wanted to keep on reading.  Another good read was Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell which was especially interesting given my recent trip to Hawai’i.  An audiobook I liked this month was God’s Harvard by Hanna Rosin which is a fascinating profile of Patrick Henry University and some of the students who attended there (in 2005, I think?).

Television:  The show The Killing.  I don’t watch much t.v. in the summer, but AMC always holds a special place in my heart when Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and now The Killing have new episodes.  Unbelievably good shows.  And I love how the The Killing shows the seedier side of Seattle… it’s a cool, twisty noir type show.  Well worth checking out!

Music:  the band Noah and the Whale.  Their album Last Night On Earth is quickly becoming my summer soundtrack.  Especially the song “Life is Life” which I have played a ridiculous number of times, almost rendering it un-listen-to-able, but not quite because I’ll be listening to it at least 20 times more today, AT LEAST.  And the video is so great:

What did you guys love in June?

Apricot Blackberry Galette

[You can find the recipe for the Cornmeal Pâte Brisée used in this recipe right here.}

Here’s another great summer recipe and not too fussy.  You start with half a recipe for Cornmeal Pâte Brisée rolled out to a big circle.

The recipe says to chill it until you’re ready to form the actual galette but let me tell you something – that did not work for me.  First of all, I don’t have all kinds of room in my refrigerator to be chilling all kinds of big dough rounds.  Second of all, you need the dough to be pliable so you can curve and fold it around the filling.  It breaks when it is cold.  I had to let it warm up first otherwise it would have spelled disaster for this very free-form pastry.

Some apricots and blackberries are mixed with sugar and other typical pie filling ingredients and then poured onto the center of the dough.  I’m loving the deep purple and orange combination – so pretty!

The sides are carefully folded up and overlapped here and there.  I love the rustic, handmade look of galettes.

The galette relaxes a great deal while baking so I wouldn’t be too worried if your sides come up pretty far.  The crust is brushed with egg and sprinkled with sanding sugar before going into the oven.

Parchment paper and a rimmed baking sheet are musts for me – spillage occurred!  Nothing too devastating, though.

Unfortunately, I did not get a good picture of the entire galette and for that I am sorry – it was so cool looking.  It tasted great too; I love the flavor of baked apricots, they’re so intense.  And I cannot say enough good things about the Cornmeal Pâte Brisée.  It is a very easy, very accomodating pie dough and the golden cornmeal is brilliant with this dessert.

Coconut Macadamia Nut Cookies

This is a fairly easy recipe for lovely little summer cookies – coconut and macadamia strike me as very summery flavors.

The dough itself is very simple and all done in a mixer.  Toasted, finely ground macadamia nuts and shredded coconut are added to the dough.

The dough is very soft – downright creamy – and that makes shaping it into the log you need to form the cookies difficult.

What I found worked was to move the “log” onto a big piece of plastic wrap and sort-of roll it with the wrap so it would be contained and not stick to the counter top.  This didn’t result in a perfectly cylindrical log, as the dough was just so soft and fluffy.  It did allow me to get a log of the general shape and size instructed.

I chilled the dough (per the recipe) in the refrigerator overnight.  It was still fairly pliable but much easier to work with and I rolled it a bit further to round out the shape.

Then the individual cookies are sliced from the log.

The dough remains soft and as I sliced it the bottom would flatten.  I tried re-chilling the log but it didn’t help much.  So I had to try to reshape each cookie by hand.

Of course none of them resulted in perfect circles.  I didn’t want to work the dough too much so I left well enough alone.

The unbaked cookies are brushed with egg and sprinkled with shredded coconut.  A single toasted macadamia nut half is placed in the center of each cookie.

And then they bake and then you’re done!

I really, really like these.  The macadamia and coconut are very subtle flavors but the chewy-crunch of the macadamia nuts is noticeable in every bite which is nice.  The cookies baked up soft with a slight sugary-crunch on the bottoms.  I love that in a cookie.  I will definitely make these again.