Ethnic Flavor: Aaaaples and Crisco for Rosh Hashanah

So the chagim (the many Jewish holidays that come one after the other in September and October) are finally over. Every year, it seems like they’ll never end, and then they do, and you’re like, huh, a small part of me misses them. But it’s a pretty small part.

One of the more fun parts about the chagim is the eating. Well, not on Yom Kippur. But whether you’re sitting at the dining room table or in a hut, there are plenty of festive holiday meals. This year, Rosh Hashanah was made doubly special by the fact that it fell on our dad’s birthday, and our mom requested that I make him a special holiday/birthday cake. (It was also a co-cake for our Uncle Joel, whose birthday had been the previous week.) I thought about it for a good long while and then – eureka! – remembered a tasty cake that my friend Nathan once shared with me when we came back to college after Rosh Hashanah senior year. Obviously it was a very delicious cake, to have stuck with me for the last two years. It was an apple cake, which is traditional for Rosh Hashanah. (We eat apples and honey for a sweet new year, get it?) So I e-mailed him and he kindly sent me the recipe. I knew it would be delicious but I wanted to add a little spruce to it, it being a double-birthday cake and all. Caramel glaze or frosting seemed the natural thing, but because we were having meat, I was concerned that it wouldn’t work out, as caramel is rather dependent on cream and butter. Luckily, I was able to dig up a surprisingly delicious recipe for vegan caramel frosting. It used the dreaded Crisco, for which I normally would substitute margarine, but I figured that one probably shouldn’t screw around with vegan recipes, which are already dicey at best. And then it was lucky that I had made the frosting, because we pretty much had to glue the cake back together when it came out of the pan, and it looked much nicer frosted.

The most fun part about this recipe was getting to use my dad’s apple peeler-corer-slicer, the latest in apple peeling-coring-slicing technology. It took me an embarrassingly long time and the help of my heroic father to learn how to use it, but once I did, it was so fun! I highly recommend using one if you are going to make a recipe with a lot of apples, like this one.

Me, coring/peeling/slicing apples

Neat!

The cake, despite being in pieces, came out just as yummy as I had remembered it being in the fall of 2010. There were a lot of desserts at that festive holiday meal, but this cake was by far the most popular! Serve it at your next apple-related event! (Perhaps a Steve Jobs memorial service? Haw haw haw.)

Ruth Margolin's Apple Cake

5 apples (tart, like Granny Smith)

2 t cinnamon

5 T sugar

3 C flour

3 t baking powder

2 C sugar

2-½ t vanilla

1 C oil

1 t salt

4 eggs

¼ C orange juice

Peel the apples, and cut into slices.  Sprinkle with the cinnamon and the 5 T sugar, and set aside.

In a large bowl, beat the remaining ingredients together until smooth.

Grease a large tube pan.  (Either use a Baker’s Joy type spray that includes flour, or grease the pan and then dust it with sugar.)

Pour half the batter into the prepared pan.  Place half the apple mixture on top.  Pour on remaining batter, spreading to cover apples.  Top with remaining apples.  (There will be some sweetened juice in the apple bowl; you can drizzle it over the apples.)

Bake at 350 degrees for 1-¼ hours.  Let stand 15 minutes and then remove from pan and cool on a wire rack.

You can find the frosting recipe here.

Chocolate Swirls of Deliciousness

So, my maternity leave is fast coming to an end.  Faster than I would really like.  I don't think I am cut out to be a full time stay at home mom, but I did really enjoy being home with the baby these past few months.  It was sad to drop him off at daycare this morning, even though I know he will be well cared for and even though it was only for a couple of hours (today).

For all the nice things about maternity leave, one thing I really didn't have a lot of time to do was bake.  Almost everything I posted these last few months, I made before the baby came.  However, since I will be going back to work next week, I decided it was time to go back to baking.  Also, there is nothing like a little (or a lot) of chocolate to take the sting out.

I have had my eye on these chocolate swirl biscuits from Bakerella for a while.  Please check out the photos of this recipe on her site.  You will want to eat them off the screen!  Since we were out of eggs, and this recipe only calls for one yolk in the glaze, which is also optional, it seemed like a good time to try them.  

I am one of those people who can be intimidated by working with dough, especially rolling it out and then rolling it into a jelly roll shape.  However, I found this dough to be easy to work with and these biscuits are very forgiving.  Part of their charm is that they don't have to look perfect!  It was fairly straightforward to roll out the dough (which I did on wax paper to help with the next step), spread on the filling, roll them up jelly roll style and slice.  Then it was just a matter of waiting until they were cool enough to eat!

These were delicious.  The dough is not very sweet, and so it balances nicely with the chocolate and sugar in the filling.  I used a mixture of milk and dark chocolate, because that is what I had and I thought they were fantastic.  They are soft like a biscuit, with chocolate deliciousness in every bite.  Next time, I might put in some cinnamon just to spice things up.  And yes, there will be a next time.

You can find the recipe here, on Bakerella's website.

The Final Baked Goods Friday (For Some)

Big news in Baking Sisters land - I started a new job at Oxford University Press this week. It's going well so far, with one exception. My reputation as a baker had apparently preceded me, which is great, but when I brought in Dorie's classic molasses cookies for Baked Goods Friday, no one was eating them! I was confused and dismayed, until my cubiclemate said to me, "It's so funny that you put it out right when you got here. Usually, people wait until after lunch." I, of course, replied, "Don't worry - I will train you to eat cheesecake at 9 a.m." Luckily, all the cookies were gone by 12:30, but it was a little touch-and-go for a while there. 

It was made especially galling by the fact that a number of my friends back at Basic were contacting me all day and telling me how sad they were not to have their weekly sweet fix. Now there's an office that really knows how to appreciate its 9 a.m. cheesecake. I knew that I had to make a special treat for my last day of work, and I settled on a cake recipe from Amy's Bread that had gotten rave reviews when I made for Rachel's graduation party. I don't usually make cakes for Baked Goods Friday because they're hard to transport, but I figured that this was worth it.

Here's the trick about this cake (or rather, this cake's frosting) - it's made with poured fondant, so you must remember to make that at least 24 hours before you want to make the frosting. The cake itself is pretty straightforward and quite delicious. It's got a moist density that reminded Rachel and me of the Entenmann's chocolate cupcakes we used to have on our half-birthdays. (Appropriately enough, my last day at Basic, the 28th, was also my half-birthday.) Those cupcakes were especially fun because of the stiff, thick layer of icing on top that you could peel off and eat separately. Ostensibly, the poured fondant is supposed to make the icing on this cake hard as well (although not as creepily, artificially hard as the Entenmann's kind), but it mostly tasted like regular frosting to me. I didn't make it pink, because what's the point? 

As you'll see from the photograph, I also tried to make the very dignified and classy-looking Basic logo out of Betty Crocker's finest electric blue frosting-in-a-tube, which I had bought at Morton Williams at 7:30 a.m. that morning. It didn't go that well, but whatever, it's the sentiment that counts. Oxford University Press, get ready to get fat!

You can find the cake recipe here and the frosting recipe here.

Roasted Peach Plum Frozen Yogurt

I'm having a love affair with my ice cream maker lately.  Don't get me wrong, I always love it, but in the past week, I have made four different kinds of frozen yogurt and sorbet and there is one more ice cream flavor on my list.  Most of these frozen treats were made out of necessity (of course) since we often buy much more fruit than we can reasonably eat at the farmer's market.  I can't help it.  The berries and stone fruit look so delicious and I can't help feeling like they might be gone at any moment (except that they are there the next week).  Fruit starts to get over ripe and out comes the ice cream maker!

This frozen yogurt is a result of a massive number of peaches and plums that were sitting on the counter waiting a bit too long to be eaten.  I did a bunch of googling and was inspired by a Roasted Peach and Plum frozen yogurt that I found.  However, it had a bunch of steps, so I just used it as a jumping off point.  This frozen yogurt was so, so delicious.  Roasting the fruit really brought out the flavor and the sweetness of the fruit was offset by the tang of the Greek yogurt.  If you have some peaches and plum sitting around, make this!  Even if they are not the greatest farmer's market fruit, the roasting should make them taste delicious.

Roasted Peach Plum Frozen Yogurt
Sliced peaches and plums, enough to cover the bottom of a 9x13 pan
1/2 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup of sugar (adjusted for the sweetness of the fruit)
1 cup Greek Yogurt

Put the sliced peaches and plums in a pan, cover with brown sugar and roast at 180 degrees for 30-40 minutes, until soft.

Cool the fruit to room temperature.  Put the fruit, sugar and yogurt in a blender and blend until smooth.

Chill in the fridge and then freeze in your ice cream maker.

Last Days of Summer Fruit Tart

So, there has been quite a lot going on here.  In July, we welcomed our second son, who decided to arrive 4 weeks early.  Life with a toddler and a new born is quite hectic, leaving little time for baking.  In addition, our wonderful friends and family have been feeding us practically every night and I haven't been in the kitchen in weeks.  I think it will be a little more time before I go back to baking, but I thought I would share this tart with you before summer fruit is completely done.

I made this tart in back in June.  It is a great combination of slightly sweet tart shell, creamy pastry cream and sweet/tart berries and fruit.  One of the great things about this tart is that you can pretty much use any fruit you want.  I chose peaches, strawberries and raspberries since I love that combination and this tart was enjoyed by all.  I made the glaze with strawberry jam (homemade, recipe to come).

This is a Dorie Greenspan special -- the Classic Berry Tart.  You can find the recipe in Baking from My Home to Yours or here.

A Passover Surprise (The Good Kind)

Okay, we admit it, August has been a pretty weak month for the Baking Sisters. Rebecca has an infant and a toddler so she gets a pass; Rachel has been in Los Angeles helping take care of the aforementioned infant and toddler, so she also gets a pass. Basically, I have been unacceptably lame when it comes to posting. But that doesn’t mean I’ve been unacceptably lame when it comes to baking, no no no! So I’ll do my best to catch y’all up with my exciting baking adventures this week.

You know what’s the best? When you try a delicious baked good, exclaim over its baked goodness, look up the recipe, and then discover that it is, of all things, kosher for Passover. This is what happened recently in my office. Our office recently moved, and while we are now far away from most of the delicious food in the Murray Hill/Flatiron area, we are a mere block away from the delicious Francois Payard Bakery. One of my coworkers bought a fudgy chocolate cookie with nuts from FPB, and was nice enough to share it. It was so good – a little chewy, a lot fudgy. Another coworker managed to find the recipe on New York Magazine, and – behold! – it was flourless! It’s seriously awesome when that happens. So it became immediately apparent what I would be bringing in for Baked Goods Friday that week.

These cookies are seriously easy, like simple arithmetic or a loose woman. The only thing that isn’t totally straightforward is the amount of egg whites, as I learned from reading the many helpful comments on the recipe. I started out with two and, when the dough still seemed too dry, added a third. This is obviously less than the recipe calls for, but even so my cookies had a chewier, more meringue-like consistency than the ones from FPB. But I don’t think it made them taste worse, just different. Also, I know that the Baking Sisters are as a rule opposed to including nuts in baked goods, but honestly these cookies have so few ingredients that there’s barely anything in them without the nuts. I felt the nuts made it a little more substantial. (Oh, did I mention that without the nuts, there's no fat? God these cookies just keep getting better and better.) But if you’re a purist, do whatever you want, I don’t care. Just be sure to enjoy these cookies next time Passover rolls around, or even before then!

François Payard’s Flourless Chocolate-Walnut Cookies

From Chocolate Epiphany by way of New York Magazine

2 3/4 cups walnut halves
3 cups confectioners’ sugar
1/2 cup plus 3 tablespoons unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 large egg whites, at room temperature
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350. Spread the walnut halves on a large-rimmed baking sheet and toast in the oven for about 9 minutes, until they are golden and fragrant.

(1) Let cool slightly, then transfer the walnut halves to a work surface and coarsely chop them. Position two racks in the upper and lower thirds of the oven and lower temperature to 320. Line two large-rimmed baking sheets with parchment paper.

(2) In a large bowl, whisk (or combine in an electric mixer on low speed) the confectioners’ sugar with the cocoa powder and salt followed by the chopped walnuts. While whisking (or once you change the speed to medium), add the egg whites and vanilla extract and beat just until the batter is moistened (do not overbeat or it will stiffen).

(3) Spoon the batter onto the baking sheets in 12 evenly spaced mounds, and bake for 14 to 16 minutes, until the tops are glossy and lightly cracked; shift the pans from front to back and top to bottom halfway through to ensure even baking. Slide the parchment paper (with the cookies) onto 2 wire racks. Let cookies cool completely, and store in an airtight container for up to 3 days.

Time to Go Bananas

As you all know, dear loyal readers, Sarah has instituted Baked Goods Fridays at her office, to celebrate the end of each week, show off her baking prowess, and (let's be honest) in the beginning to make people like her. However, I appreciate the impulse behind celebrating the end of each week. So this summer, when I was teaching in Drisha's five week July Institute, I decided that I would do Baked Goods Fridays for my students, as a way to motivate them and to reward them for their hard work all week.

Over the course of the summer, I made some classics (like this one, this one and this one) but this was the new recipe I was most excited about. I love banana bread, when it's done well, and I made three batches of this one-- one for a friend who had a baby, one for a friend I visited in Boston, and one for my students. All three were delicious!

I got this recipe from my dear friend Gila, who used to be my co-teacher until she up and left me to move to Israel. (I highly recommend her blog, which is not about baking but is still very entertaining and can be found here.) I like the chocolate chips, which cuts the sweetness of the banana bread, and the way the top is a little crunchy when it comes out of the oven. The one annoying thing about banana bread is that because it's so dense, it has to bake for a long time, but in my opinion, it is well worth the wait. You can fine the recipe below.

2 very ripe bananas, peeled and sliced
2 eggs
1/2 cup oil
1/2 cup plus 1 TB orange juice
1 3/4 cups flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla extract

You can also add chocolate chips (which I did) and walnuts (which I did not.) I also recommend cinnamon sugar sprinkled on top.

Bake at 325 for 1 hour and 20 minutes (if you're using a loaf pan - I use bake in something flatter so it's shorter cooking time.) Let cool before slicing.