A cake of holiday cheer

It felt like a pretty good baking weekend--two recipes made and photographed, as well as some cookie dough made to bake during the week.  I really meant to have a post written yesterday, but I decided it was a better idea to go to bed early.  I stayed up entirely too late on Saturday night (after midnight!) so I could finish the book I was reading.  And to be honest, because I was enjoying the solitude.  I haven't had nearly enough time to myself lately, and it's been making me cranky and unfocused.  Sadly today wasn't much help as far as that goes, since I was at work later than expected.  But I still hope to get the girls to bed early so I can have some quiet time.  Quiet time with a mug of tea and another piece of this cake. =)  

I made this Eggnog Bundt Cake for our annual holiday potluck with the Italian genealogy group.  I can always count on them to help me eat cake (so I don't eat it all myself).  To be honest, I'm not a fan of eggnog.  But when I read the recipe, I realized that it doesn't actually have any eggnog in it.  Instead, it incorporates the flavors associated with eggnog.  There's a full teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg in it, along with a bit of dark rum.  While I don't like eggnog, I'm a fan of nutmeg, and rum. =)  To make the flavors stand out, they're mixed into a cup of the cake batter which is then used to make a swirl in the cake.  The cake is topped with a simple powdered sugar glaze that includes a little more rum.

The verdict?  Well, most of the cake disappeared pretty quickly, so I think it's safe to say that it was a success.  The taste was good, and so was the texture--the cake had a good level of moistness.  The only thing that didn't work as well as I'd hoped was the swirl.  Mine ended up mostly at the bottom of the cake.  I'm not sure if that's because of the pan I used (my Fleur de Lis pan) or something else.  I'll have to try it again in my Classic Bundt pan to see what happens.  I also cut back on the rum in the glaze (using about a teaspoon) because I knew my girls wanted to try the cake.  I'll have to make it again with more when I'm just serving adults.  

If you'd like to try this recipe for yourself, you can find it in this year's Cook's Illustrated Holiday Baking newsstand issue.  It's also available to subscribers of the Cook's Country website.  

Spice is nice

Well, I'm more than ten days in now, and so far the posting every day thing is going pretty well.  I'm not entirely happy with all the posts, but none are really bad.  And I feel like I'm making progress toward my goal of just getting the words out.  Today's post is a bit more extensive than the past few, since I had the time to take some better pictures.  I'm playing around with different spots in my house to find some good lighting, and this spot was pretty successful.

As you may be able to tell, today's featured ingredients are nutmeg and rum.  One of my favorite blogs is the one written by the folks at King Arthur Flour.  The posts are always entertaining and informative, even if the recipe isn't something that I plan to make.  But sometimes I read a post, like this one last Monday, and know I have to make the recipe as soon as possible.  Nutmeg Bites sounded fabulous, especially once I got to the part about the rum icing. 

The great thing about these cookies is that they're really easy to make.  No particular mixing order--you pretty much just dump everything in the mixer.  It's a straightforward ingredient list, with flour, sugar, butter, egg, salt, vanilla, and a full teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg.  Once the dough comes together, you stick it in the fridge for an hour to firm up.  I actually left mine longer than that without any problems.  I used my #70 disher to scoop the cookies.  My bake time was a little longer than the 8-10 minutes stated in the recipe; I let them go until they were clearly starting to brown on the bottoms.  While the cookies cooled, I mixed up the icing, which consisted of powdered sugar, a little butter, and some dark rum.  

The verdict?  Mmm, these are wonderful.  I love cookies like these--almost like shortbread, but easier.  The rum in the frosting was very strong right after I mixed it up, but mellowed a bit after a day or two.  In fact, I think that overall, the cookies were better after a day or two.  Nutmeg has become a favorite spice of mine, and I enjoyed the fact that there aren't any other spices in these cookies to distract from the nutmeg flavor.  

If you'd like to give these a try for yourself, you can find the recipe here at King Arthur Flour.  I will definitely be making these again, and probably putting some in my holiday gifts.  

Handmade Loaves - Bourbon & Nutmeg Pound Cake

The only problem with picking loaves as the theme for my autumn blogging event was that I had a really hard time deciding what to make myself!  My first thought was to make a yeast bread.  I usually do non-pan loaves when I bake bread, since I'm not that excited by typical sandwich loaves.  However, I seriously considered Dan Lepard's Simple Milk Loaf (posted here by my friend Nancy), since somehow I haven't blogged it even though I've made it many times.  This week ended up being kind of crazy, though, and I spent my day off on Thursday making a fancy birthday cake for a certain young lady who turned 5 on Friday.  Thursday evening I decided to try to throw something together quickly so I wouldn't end up baking at the very last minute.  The other thing I had been considering was pound cake.  I ended up turning to my copy of Alice Medrich's Pure Dessert.  I made several of the variations of her Kamut Pound Cake a couple years ago, but again, never got them posted.  I didn't have an kamut flour in my pantry, so I decided to go with one of the variations.

The version that caught my eye was the Bourbon and Nutmeg Pound Cake.  As I mentioned in another recent post, nutmeg is one of my favorite spices, and this recipe sounded like a good one for fall.  The kamut flour from the original recipe is replaced with either spelt flour (nope, out of that too) or whole wheat flour (yes! I have that!).  I actually used white whole wheat flour.  I also got to use some of my unbleached cake flour blend for the cake flour in the recipe.  

My favorite pound cake recipes are usually the ones that fold melted butter into the batter at the end.  I haven't had much luck with pound cakes using the creaming method.  This recipe doesn't really do either.  Medrich mentions that she adapted the recipe from The Cake Bible, so if you've made cakes from that book, the mixing method will be familiar.  First you whisk together the wet ingredients--milk, bourbon, eggs and vanilla, and set that mixture aside.  Next, you mix together the dry ingredients--flours, sugar, baking powder, salt and nutmeg.  Chunks of butter are added to the dry ingredients, along with a third of the liquids, and the mixture is beaten together for about a minute to develop the structure of the cake.  Then the remaining liquid is added in two additions, beating for about 20 seconds after each addition.  

The recipe calls for an 8" by 4" loaf pan lined with parchment paper, and a bake time of 55 to 65 minutes at 350ºF.  I decided to use the vintage loaf pan that I received from my friend Nancy, which is about 3.5" by 10" and only 2.5" deep.  For others who have similar pans, the bake time is about 40 minutes.  Once the cake was baked, I let it cool in the pan for about 10 minutes, then lifted it out (I let the parchment overhang the sides a bit so I'd have handles) and let it cool completely on a rack.  The next morning I cut it into thick slices and took it to work.  (I did take a few pictures, but it was early in the morning and still dark outside, so they weren't very good.) 

The verdict?  Well, I had to bake a second loaf today to take decent pictures.  I thought I'd have some left from the first loaf that I took to work, but it was pretty well devoured.  I'll take that as a positive review. =)  I really liked it myself--the cake is delicious, with a subtle spice from the nutmeg.  I've made some dry pound cakes in the past, but this one definitely is not.  I really like the slight nuttiness from the whole wheat flour, too.  But don't take my word for it, try it for yourself!  

I highly recommend getting your hands on a copy of the book (maybe your local library will have it!)--there are lots of other enticing recipes besides this one.  I was also able to find the recipe on Google Books here.  (The link shows the variations page; the full recipe is on the previous page.)  For those who like to use metric weights, here are the ingredients I used:

30 grams(2 tablespoons) whole milk, at room temperature

15 grams (1 tablespoon) bourbon

3 extra large eggs (what I had--the recipe calls for large)

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla

100 grams unbleached cake flour blend (KAF)

50 grams white whole wheat flour (KAF)

150 grams granulated sugar

3/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon table salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

185 grams (13 tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened

For lots of other delicious loaves of many varieties (including some savory ones!), check back later this week for the round-up!

Apple of my eye

I had the following conversation with Gillian last night as she and Brianna were finishing up dinner:

Gillian: "May I please have some ice cream for dessert?"
Me: "No, because we don't have any."
Gillian: "Well, make some!!"
Me: *laughing so hard I can't respond*


In just about any other house, the kids would be asking their mom to buy more ice cream.  But not here, no.  My kids just naturally assume that I can and will make just about anything they want.  I suppose that's a good thing. =)  But I wasn't about to start making ice cream, so I offered her a piece of this wonderful homemade apple pie instead.  She was happy. =)

Pie is one of those things that I definitely prefer to make myself.  Especially with fruit pies, I just don't like the ones you can buy in the grocery store--too much crust, not enough fruit, and way too much gloppy goo around what little fruit there is.  With homemade, you can customize things to be the way you like, and it tastes so much better as well.  The only downside to homemade pie is that I like it way too much, and am likely to eat most of the pie myself.  That's why it seldom makes an appearance outside of Thanksgiving.  But for Tuesdays with Dorie, I'll make an exception.  I missed last week's pie (though it will probably show up here the week of Thanksgiving, I think), but there was no way I was going to skip the All-American, All-Delicious Apple Pie that Emily picked.  

Apple pie is my favorite.  Without question.  I love apples, so I've been happy with all of the apple desserts we've been making for the past month or so.  What made me really happy was having my favorite apple show up at Central Market a couple weeks ago.  I love tart apples, and will happily eat pretty much anything related to a Macintosh apple.  But my favorite of these is definitely the Macoun apple.  (Thanks to Nancy for recommending them to me a couple years ago.)  And they arrived just in time for me to use them in this pie!  

Do any of the rest of you try to get the apple peel off all in one long strip?  I used 5 apples for this pie, and wasn't being that careful, so I only managed it with one apple. =)  My girls think it's cool that I can do that.  Nice that they like something that I do once in a while...

For pie, I like to slice my apples thin and pile lots of them into the pie shell.  I somewhat followed Dorie's recipe for the filling--I used the sugar, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg as listed.  (I love freshly grated nutmeg--I use my microplane to grate it.)  I used flour instead of tapioca for the thickener, since I can't stand tapioca.  (I stood in front of it in the grocery store, but just couldn't bring myself to buy it.)  I also left out the lemon zest--I used it in the apple torte a couple weeks ago, and thought it overpowered the other flavors too much.

I skipped the crumbs to put in the bottom of the pie shell, too.  I have another method for avoiding soggy apple pie--dried fruit.  When I was growing up, my mom always put raisins in apple pie.  I love raisins, so that was fine with me.  It wasn't until I was baking on my own and tried making apple pie without them that I realized that they actually suck up a lot of the extra juice, keeping the pie filling from being too runny.  Cool.  I mostly use raisins, but dried cranberries are also tasty, and I'm sure dried cherries would be good if you like cherries.

I was already deviating a lot from the original recipe, so I did use Dorie's pie crust recipe.  I was only going to make a single crust, but started measuring out the ingredients for the double crust recipe (since it's listed first on the page).  I figured I'd go ahead and make the double version since I was getting out the food processor anyway, and freeze half for later.  Yes, the recipe does call for a double crust.  But besides adding raisins, the other thing my mom always did was put crumbs on top of the pie.  I thought about trying crust on top, but since I make pie so seldom, I wanted to go with my favorite. =)  I've tried different toppings over time, but my current favorite can be found in this recipe from Bon Appetit.  

Once last thing that I do that wasn't in the recipe...  To bake the pie, I first put it on a parchment lined baking sheet (to catch the juices that will inevitably bubble over).  Then I put the sheet directly on the baking stone in the bottom of my oven.  Baking on the stone ensures a nice browned bottom crust.  If you do this, you should make sure that the oven and stone are preheated for quite a while.  (I had good timing--I had the oven on for dinner before baking the pie, so the stone was already pretty hot. I just had to turn the oven up to 425ºF.)  I'm not used to turning the oven down partway through, and ended up baking my pie for 50 minutes at 425ºF.  That isn't a problem with my usual pie crust, which doesn't have any sugar in it.  For Dorie's, which does, I'll make sure to lower the temperature next time, since the edges of the crust got a little dark.  It was late when the pie finished, and I prefer to let it cool to just warm before serving, so I didn't get to try any until the next morning.

The verdict?  Well, if you don't already know, pie for breakfast is the best. =)  I'd much rather eat it for breakfast than for dessert, really.  (My husband thinks I'm a bit crazy. No, not just for that, either.)  As expected, I loved this pie.  I'm still a bit undecided on the crust.  Dorie's crust is definitely more tender than my usual, but mine is more flaky, I think.  Both are good.  And hers makes better pie crust "cookies."  Everyone else here loved the pie, too, even Brianna.  She loves crust, and was even willing to eat some of the raisins.  

For the original recipe, head over to Emily's blog.  And be sure to check out this week's Links to see what everyone else did with their apple pies.  As for me, I'm going to go eat another piece of pie for today's breakfast. =)

A peachy start to the month

I was awake entirely too early this morning. 6:20am, which is just wrong for a day when I don't have to go anywhere. But I decided to make the best of it and just get up.  At least it's nice and quiet at that time of day (and Gillian didn't make an appearance until about 7:15).  I sat in the recliner with my laptop, reading stuff online and trying to decide what to bake for breakfast.

I was pretty sure I wanted to make scones.  They're always a big hit around here.  But I'm a bit tired of my usual recipes, so wanted to find something new.  I didn't really want to get up to look through cookbooks.  I started by searching through my Google Reader, but nothing caught my eye.  My next stop was one of my favorite online baking resources, the King Arthur Flour website.  I typed "scones" into the search box, and waited to see what would come up.  I thought about making savory ones, like these scallion cheddar scones, but decided to save those for another day.  But a couple recipes down the page I hit pay dirt.  Peach Nutmeg Scones.  I love nutmeg.  I love peaches, and had some that I needed to use up.  I almost always have vanilla yogurt in the fridge--I buy the 32 oz container, and Brianna and Gillian often eat it with whatever fruit we have around.  I was set!

Like most scone recipes, these are easy to mix up.  First I whisked together the dry ingredients (AP flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, nutmeg) in a large bowl.  In a 2-cup measuring cup, I whisked together the eggs, vanilla yogurt and extracts.  The recipe calls for half a teaspoon of almond extract, but I don't like it that much, so I used a couple drops and made up the difference with vanilla extract.  Then I diced the peach into small pieces.  (I didn't bother to peel it, since I hate peeling peaches and avoid it whenever possible.)  I cut the cold butter into small pieces, then rubbed it into the flour mixture with my fingers.  I poured the liquid ingredients over the flour mixture and mixed everything together with a spatula.  Then I folded in the peach pieces.  I had a really hard time getting them mixed in, so next time I think I'll try mixing the peaches into the flour first, then adding the wet ingredients.  

Rather than mess with forming the dough into triangles, I just used my #16 disher (1/4 cup capacity) and scooped the dough onto a parchment-lined baking sheet.  I still got 10 scones.  I used wet fingers to flatten the dough a bit.  Since I knew I wanted to add glaze after baking (Gillian had asked if she could do the glaze), I skipped the melted butter and sugar on top.  I can't tell you exactly how long I baked them for, because I forgot to set the timer.  Fortunately, I realized it midway through baking, and just watched them closely, pulling them out when they were nicely browned on top.  I let the scones cool on the pan for about 5 minutes while I mixed up a glaze of powdered sugar, milk, and a bit of vanilla.  I transferred the scones to a rack and put the parchment paper from the baking sheet on the counter under the rack to catch drips.  Then Gillian and I took turns drizzling the glaze on top.

The verdict? Mmm, these are delicious!  B & G agreed.  I'll definitely be making these again.  While I pretty much stuck to the recipe this time, next time I'd like to try them with part white whole wheat flour (in which case I'd increase the amount of yogurt slightly).  If you'd like to try these for yourself, the recipe can be found here on the King Arthur Flour website.  And here's my ingredient list--I converted most of it to grams.  Enjoy!

Peach Nutmeg Scones

(full recipe from King Arthur Flour here)

250 g unbleached all-purpose flour (King Arthur, of course)

1/2 teaspoon fine salt

50 g vanilla sugar (because the container was sitting on the counter)

1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg (I didn't measure, just grated until it looked like enough)

1 teaspoons baking powder

6 tablespoons (85 g) cold unsalted butter

2 large eggs

75 g whole milk vanilla yogurt (Brown Cow whole milk)

scant 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

2-3 drops almond extract

1 peach, cut into small dice (sorry, forgot to weigh it)

12 Days of Cookies - Day 12 - Holiday Sugar Cookies

When I started this project, I didn't expect that my 12 Days of Cookies would take 20 to finish. =)  But I'm very glad that I did it.  One of the best reasons is that I discovered a bunch of great blogs to read in the process. The bakers participating in this baking extravaganza are an amazing bunch.  I love reading about everyone else's experiences, good and bad.  It's been neat to compare results on the recipes that we have in common.  And reading some of the other posts definitely influenced my final list.  There are actually a few more that I had planned to bake, but I ran out of energy and substituted easier recipes instead.  I'll be sure to share them when I do get a chance to make them.

Now for cookie number 12!  As I mentioned in my last post, I ended up making a lot more cutout cookies than I ever would have thought--five of the twelve.  I was worried at first that these Holiday Sugar Cookies and the Christmas Cutout cookies would be too similar.  But they aren't.  While the Christmas Cutouts seemed kind of bland to me, these had a lot more flavor.  In addition to the usual suspects (butter, flour, salt, a bit of baking powder, an egg and some vanilla), the dough also has brown sugar instead of white as well as a bunch of nutmeg.  By this point, I'm pretty comfortable with the whole process for this sort of cookie--mix the dough, chill the dough, roll out the dough, cut shapes, chill cookies on the pan, bake.  I liked this dough because unlike some of the others, it didn't get rock hard when chilled, probably because of the brown sugar.  I thought it was pretty easy to work with, though I made sure I worked quickly, since most rollout doughs get soft pretty fast.

The verdict?  I really like these cookies.  I like nutmeg a lot, especially when freshly grated, so I really enjoyed the flavor of these.  The nutmeg paired nicely with the brown sugar.  I took the easy route in decorating, with a simple glaze (the same one I used on the Spice Rollout Cookies) and some colored sugar.  They're tasty plain as well, but more fun when dressed up a bit.  I still have a bunch of plain ones that need to be decorated, as well as some dough in the fridge, so I might finally try my hand at more fancy decorating, with royal icing.  We'll see.

I'm actually a little bit sad to be done.  But I've got a few more holiday cookies and other treats to make and blog about, so stay tuned.  I also realized that I missed acknowledging my 200th post, which was on Day 1.  And my blogiversary is coming up in just a few short days.  So I want to come up with some way to celebrate.  I'm really happy that achieved one of my goals with this whole project, which was to get excited about blogging again!

If you'd like to try these cookies for yourself, you can find the recipe here.  And be sure to check out the other bakers participating in the 12 Days of Cookies to see what they've baked up recently!  =)

Andrea of Andrea's Recipes

(honorary member and our founder but not participating this year)

Claire of The Barefoot Kitchen

Courtney of Coco Cooks

Judy of No Fear Entertaining

Kelly of Sass & Veracity

Michelle of Big Black Dog

RJ of Flamingo Musings

Sandy of At the Baker's Bench

Tiffany of The Nesting Project