Cranberry-Pecan Rye Bread

Isn’t rye bread just the best?  It’s so unique.  A lot of people don’t like the caraway flavor of rye -  pumpernickel in particular seems widely hated for it’s carawayness – and frankly, I just don’t understand it.  I love rye bread and I love it when other people love rye bread.

If ever there was a rye bread that could convert those who hate rye, this may be it. This is a free-form dough that is pretty easy to work with and ends up soft, light, and chewy despite all the cranberries and pecans.  I was surprised at how light it was.  It was a snap to make.

The dough after doubling:

Forming into a log that will proof on a baking sheet:

One thing I’ve alway found helpful when forming loaves this was is to roll towards me rather than away.  It keeps everything tight.  The loaf before proofing:

This bread is so good as toast with some cream cheese.  It also made a great sandwich bread.  Per the recipe, you brush the loaf with an egg wash and sprinkle with smoked salt  before baking and I didn’t really like that.  Plus, it made the top crust pucker when I stored it in a bread bag.  But otherwise, a lovely loaf of yummy.  I’m going to make a few loaves to give as Christmas gifts – the cranberries and pecans are really festive.

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Pear Spice Bundt Cake

This is one of my FAVORITE desserts in all of the world and those of you who know my appreciation for dessert know that’s really saying something.  I make this cake a lot through the fall and early-winter when pears are everywhere.  It isn’t the quickest cake to make (especially if you opt to make the candied pear slices for garnish) but it turns out perfectly every time and I’ve never met someone who didn’t love it instantly.

It’s really a basic applesauce cake except made with pears instead of apples.  This means you have to make your own pear sauce, but it’s a cinch.  You chop up a bunch of ripe Bartlett pears and cook them with some browned sugar (you essentially melt some white sugar in the saucepan prior to adding the pears and let it start to turn golden).

The pears soften considerably and release their liquid.  You smash it all up using a potato masher and end up with a chunky pearsauce with a rich burnt sugar flavor.

The rest of the cake ingredients are pretty basic and the pearsauce goes in at the very end.  Sometimes I’ll reserve a cup of the pearsauce (there’s always some leftover) for garnish on the finished cake.

The MSBH recipe for this cake includes instructions for candied pear slices.  Another of Martha’s embellishments that takes a little time and some special kitchen equipment.  You start with fresh Bartlett pear and use a mandolin to slice paper-thin pieces.

I think using a pear with a really colorful peel would have been optimal, as the peel retains its color throughout the process.  In any event, you douse the slices with lemon juice and then boil in simple syrup for 2 minutes.

The slices are then baked in a low oven until completely dry.  I think I over-baked these by about 10 minutes; they are much darker than they should have been.  They taste good though, like a subtle pear Jolly Rancher.

One of the things I love most about a good bundt cake is the thick, sugary crust the cake develops.  It’s not dry or overly crunchy, but it still has some resistance when you bite in to it.  And it also keeps the cake so moist.

I made the recommended Cream Cheese Glaze, although I should have added more milk to the glaze – mine was too thick to drizzle properly, but that’s a small criticism.  It tasted great and the candied pears were a fancy addition.

I cannot think of anything I don’t like about this cake.  It is dense, moist, and the taste of pears, cardamom, and cinnamon well together.

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Coconut Cream Pie

Cream pies are not my first choice in the world of pies.  They really aren’t my second or third choices either.  I’m much more a fruit pie kind of gal.  But if someone puts a piece of cream pie in front of me, I’m going to eat it.  And if Martha puts a bunch of cream pie recipes in her baking handbook, then I’m going to bake them.

A decorative element for this pie are “Coconut Curls.”  These are one of those things Martha is famous for – a relatively minor detail that enhances the sophistication of the pie and takes a heap load of extra work.  First, you find yourself a coconut and poke out two of the eyes.

Then you bake it for 30 minutes (I left it in the oven for an hour and a half).  You smash it with a hammer to get at the coconut flesh.  The process is pretty physical and messy.  You’ve then got to clean off all of the skin and muck that sticks to the coconut flesh.

This cleaning process is not so easy, as the baked coconut excretes a lot of oil as you handle it.  That skin is really stuck on there too, I had to use a sharp knife to kind-of shave it off bit by bit.  And it doesn’t smell very pleasant either – nothing like what you’d expect baked coconut to smell like.  It has a real musky odor.  Eventually you get a clean bit of coconut to work with.

I tasted some of the coconut juice and then some of the flesh and neither was very appetizing.  It makes me feel all the more sorry for people cast away on deserted islands.

The MSBH says to use a vegetable peeler to shave off strips of the coconut but this just was not working for me.  The coconut was way too slippery and oily – I’d just get a lot of oil coating my peeler.  I ended up using my mandoline and my shaved pieces were fairly thick.  Needless to say they didn’t curl at all.  They are toasted in an oven.

The pie is made using half (one disc) of the MSBH recipe for pâte brisée. It’s blind baked and then you coat the crust with melted semi-sweet chocolate. The chocolate is meant to keep the crust from getting soggy once the custard is poured in.

The custard is made entirely with coconut milk – no dairy – which makes me think this recipe could easily be adjusted to be vegan.  You do use eggs, but I imagine tofu could be incorporated to the same end.  I’ll have to try it sometime.

Whipped cream is spread on top of the custard and then on went the coconut “curls” and some chocolate shavings.  Not the prettiest thing in the world, but it tastes wonderful (for a cream pie).

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Pizza Margherita

Back in my early 20s I volunteered for Big Brothers Big Sisters as a big sister.  At first I was nervous about what sort of activities I would do with my “little” because kids have never been my thing.  But I quickly found out that the kid loved to cook and as luck would have it, my apartment had a kitchen with an oven and running water and everything.

At that point in my life I was a strict vegan and my culinary acumen centered on the few vegetables that could be effectively wrapped in a tortilla.   But after a trip down the many grocery aisles I had previously ignored, I quickly discovered that you could “make” a pizza with a few highly processed, elaborately packaged ingredients.  A pre-baked pizza crust from the good people at DiGiorno.  Pre-shredded mozzarella cheese – thank you, KRAFT!  A jar of Ragu, a packet of sliced pepperoni, and shaker of parmesan cheese powder later and my little and I were in business.

What that pizza lacked in nutritional value it made up for in ease and it didn’t taste bad at all.  I am a big proponent of the slow food movement, but there is something to be said for food that gets people in the kitchen together.  My little and I went on to bake cookies from a Pillsbury tube of cookie dough, Rice Krispie treats, Betty Crocker cupcakes with florescent pink frosting, and an endless stream of more ambitious endeavors that always ended in disaster and a trip to Taco Bell.

I didn’t learn to actually bake until I started working at a bona fide bakery, but I learned to love preparing food when I made that first piecemeal pizza with my little.  It was the first time I realized cooking and baking could be recreational and yielded results that went beyond the stuff you eat.

I was thrilled to eventually find a better pizza recipe, however!  The recipe for pizza dough and pizza sauce in the MSBH results in a much tastier, much healthier pizza than any you can buy from a grocery store or pizza joint, in my humble opinion.  (And is even more fun to make with kids because YOU GET TO TOSS YOUR OWN DOUGH.)

The dough is started in the food processor.  I don’t have any pictures of that but good news, it’s not all the visually interesting anyway.  You let it proof and then you form it any old way you want – I’m a fan of tossing and stretching it.  I don’t have any pictures of that either and that’s good news for me, because I’m sure I look absurd while doing it.

The MSBH pizza sauce recipe is basically just canned tomatoes, oregano, salt & pepper, and olive oil simmered together until delicious (about an hour).

It’s great on pasta too.  I never buy jarred pasta sauce anymore, this is just so cheap and easy and good.  You can add other spices to it, mushrooms, onions, cheese, whatever.

I bought a big basil plant at Trader Joe’s before leaving Seattle and let me tell you what, it is the best $2.99 I’ve ever spent in my life.  I repotted it and keep it watered and in a sunny window and it gives me biggest, greenest, sweetest basil leaves ever. I hope it lasts forever and I may very well cry if it ever dies.

Pizza Margherita is tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil and what more do you need?  Of course I love this pizza, it’s the Caprese Salad of pizzas.  I love Caprese Salad.  It is the best thing about summertime.

My pizza formation skills are as underdeveloped as my pie crust forming skills.  I’m really bad at the pizza dough formation. Sometimes I have huge holes in the bottom of crust which is most certainly a pizza fail. But it always tastes good so I just slice it all up really quickly and nobody seems to notice.  Hooray, pizza!

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Pâte Brisée

Pâte brisée is the basic pie dough that the MSBH uses for many of its pie recipes. It’s easy enough, but I have to admit that I’ve never enjoyed making pie dough. I love making pies (and eating them), however, so I’ve always been a big fan of the pre-made pie crusts you buy at the store. I’ve use many a Marie Callandar’s pre-made pie crust for the recipes I’ve made from MSBH in the past, and it’s always worked perfectly.

But I want to get better at baking pies from start to finish and this blog endeavor seems to be as good an opportunity as ever for me to get some practice. So I am going to make every crust from scratch for the recipes featured here and we’ll see if at the end I can finally master it.

So, pâte brisée begins in the food processor.

…and eventually you end up with the dough.  The MSBH recipe makes enough dough for a top and bottom crust.

Form each hunk of dough into a disc, wrap, and chill.

Some people can take a disc of pie dough and roll it out into a perfectly uniform, circular piece of dough that is exactly the size and thickness desired.  I am not one of those people.

I do love this recipe.  In the past I’ve used Rose Levy Beranbaum’s flaky pie dough recipe using cream cheese.  That’s a pretty phenomenal recipe too.  I’ve still got some work do in mastering the crust embellishment.

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Cococut-Pecan-Caramel Sandwich Cookies

These are great.  I’m not kidding, they’re fun and tasty little cookies.  And even though there is definitely a process to making them, they are pretty darn impressive for as easy as they were to make.

I baked the cookies the day before I made the caramel and assembled them into sandwiches.

The cookie itself is a straight forward shortbread made with the addition of finely chopped coconut and pecans.  You chill the dough and then roll it out, freeze it, and then cut out the cookie shapes. You could feasibly span the process over three days – make the dough and chill it on day one; roll it out, freeze, cut, and bake on day two; make caramel and assemble on day three.

I had some trouble with cutting out the tops – getting the circle cut out of the middle broke almost all the cookies, even using a small circular cutter.  But I was able to mold them back together with my fingers before baking.  Some ended up a little worse for the wear, but most baked together just fine.  I found letting the dough thaw a little before cutting out the circles helped most with keeping the cookies intact.

You let the water/sugar mixture boil down to a dark amber color; stirring in the cream and butter at the end lightens it considerably.

I made the caramel on the second day.  The Martha Stewart Baking Handbook uses a basic caramel recipe for lots of the recipes and I’m getting pretty good at it! I used to hate making homemade caramel, especially using white sugar (rather than brown).  But I have found that using a good-quality non-stick saucepan makes all the difference.  No burning, no smoking, just perfect caramel sauce every time!

The caramel becomes quite thick upon cooling, so although you let it cool before assembling the sandwiches, you don’t want to let it cool too much.  The recipe says to pipe it onto the cookie bottoms with a pastry bag, but I just poured it from a spouted bowl and it worked well enough.

My caramel was too cool to drizzle properly over the finished sandwiches, but it still worked out okay.  When I make this recipe again (and I certainly will) I’ll work more quickly on this part of the process.

So fancy!

The cookies are super sweet and I almost wonder if adding a little salt to the caramel would cut the sweetness a bit.  One sandwich cookie is almost too much – so sugary!  But also really buttery with a soft, satisfying crumble.  Overall, a winner.

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Parker House Rolls

According to my investigations (which amount to nothing more than looking it up on Wikipedia), Parker House Rolls are named after the Parker House Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts.

This is a basic soft, white bread recipe – flour, milk, yeast, eggs, butter, salt, sugar.  Knead.  Rise.  Form.  Proof.  Bake.

Half of the dough, rolled out and cut into rectangles.

The recipes in MSBH are very concise, almost to a fault.  The size of the rolls is one area where I wish they would have elaborated a bit more.  I used a ruler to make sure my measurements were precise, but as you’ll see, I still had too much dough and too little pan.

Half of the dough rectangle is brushed with melted butter and then folded over.

There are a couple of photos of the Parker House Rolls in the MSBH, one of the formed rolls in the pan and another of finished product.  In forming my rolls, I tried to follow the minimalist instructions and the visual aid the photos provided.

Formed rolls in the pan.

Clearly, I had too many rolls for the size of pan, as the photo above is before proofing!  In hindsight, I should have eliminated an entire row of rolls, but I can never bear to throw out dough and didn’t want to bother with another pan.

Rolls after proofing about 45 minutes.

Poofy and ready for the oven!

After baking about 18 minutes and brushed with melted butter.

Well, needless to say, they look like the poor man’s version of the Parker House Rolls featured in MSBH.  But!  I learned a lot about what not to do the second time around.  I tend to be that kind of baker – the kind that needs a test-run – especially with the minimalist approach in MSBH.  With these rolls, I know I need to give the rolls more room in the pan.  I also learned I need to use more butter when forming the rolls, making sure there is enough to let the rolls keep their fold.

The taste and texture were great – a very soft, silky white dinner roll with a firm golden crust.

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