Category: Recipe Review

TWD: Chipster-Topped Brownies

The theme at my house this weekend seemed to be “little pieces of heaven.” Between the smell of freshly baked-from-scratch brownies and the fluffy/fudgy texture of the dessert, it was wonderful dessert heaven, which has now turned into breakfast heaven, appetizer-while-I’m-making-dinner heaven…..

The comments during the baking process didn’t conjure the same cherubic bliss.  We started with nearly a pound of butter, a half dozen eggs and the double-dessert task of making brownie batter, washing to dishes, and then making cookie dough.  But you still only get one dessert out of the deal!  After I created the batters – which were each wonderful to lick off the spoon- Mom went to work on the pan, placing tiny drop of cookie batter on a smooshy base of brownie batter.  “Tedious” was I believe the word she used (right before she reminded me that she was, in fact, doing a “superb” job).  But her face said far more.  I don’t think her Dorie experience on this vacation did much sell her one of Dorie’s books.

Chocolate Chipster BRownies

But, an hour later when we were smelling the brownies and lifting them from the pan, all was forgiven.  They are spectacular! The brownie part is heavy on the chocolate, but also moist and dense and delicious. The cookie top provides a non-chocolate crunchiness to soften the blow of the brownies – it’s not far from the Toll House cookie recipe on the back of the chocolate chip bag, but the not-for-a-box brownies make it taste like so much more.

I recommend that if you have a whole afternoon to kill making one dessert that you will eat for every meal all week long, you visit  Supplicious, where Beth has posted the recipe. (BTW, Mom recommends using many small drops to get the cookie dough onto the brownie batter, rather than large clumps of dough.)

Food Find: SugarBliss Cake Boutique

I had one Wednesday not long ago that was just one of those days.  It started with a very frustrating call from my realtor (nine days before closing!), followed by a  frustrating conference call, a do-it-yourself plant arrangement (how many Senior Staff Writers can say they’ve arranged Birds of Paradise and orchids with their executive directors?)  and finally a Norwegian man who walked into my office seeking asylum from a private company (we’re a professional society, not a church).  I needed something sweet.

So when I happened upon SugarBliss on my way to the train station, I found a $10 bill in the bottom of my wallet and picked two: lemon drop and Texas red velvet.  They are both fabulous: dense and light at the same time, sugary sweet, made with real ingredients, and TONS of frosting.  Perfect!

LemonDrop

(The menu also lists frosting shots for $1, which I feel might be in my future, as well as breakfast cupcakes.  I’ll have to investigate that further.)

Yet another day called for more of the same, but with limited cash on me I popped for just one cupcake to eat on the train going home:  orange creamsicle.  It made me a bit nervous, but it was the best available option.  It did not disappoint. The frosting alone was a bit cloying, but eaten with the delicate vanilla cake it was delightful – the cake totally mellowed out the frosting and I was one happy commuter.  I just wish they had better packaging for a single cupcake fix so that I wasn’t forced to lick frosting off the bag on the train.

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TWD: Fresh Mango Bread

I baked this two weeks early and STILL didn’t get it posted on time…AARGH!!

Regardless, I really enjoyed this selection by Kelly, of Baking with the Boys. Thanks for picking the recipe and posting it on your blog.  I don’t think I would have tried this on my own, but I’m glad we all did it together!

Mango Bread

I trusted the title of this recipe and served this “bread” alongside a Caribbean chicken (cooked in orange and lime juices in the crock pot for several hours) and some carrot pudding.  HA!  While we all certainly enjoyed the sweet bread at the main meal, it was far more breakfast cake then bread.  I’ve been eating it every time I walk through the kitchen (before work in the morning, after I get in from the train in the evening, on my way to bed….).

I should have known when I pulled the ingredients for this cake that I was too sweet for a main course Sunday Supper, but by then I was too close to dinner time to scrap it and shop for some other starch – and I made so many substitutions I thought maybe it would be more savory that Dorie had intended. So I continued on: white sugar, brown sugar, golden raisins, frozen mangos, lime zest, ginger and cinnamon.  YUM to all of it, and especially when it’s baked with oil and butter.

Keep in mind, though, that I was short on vegetable oil so I used some olive oil.  I diluted the white flour with whole wheat flour. I used frozen fruit rather than fresh.  AND, mangoes are a good source on antioxidants A, C and E, and potassium – so there are health benefits to this sweet treat.

The bread browned quickly on top, so I wrestled with the aluminum foil as I tried to tent it while wearing oven mitts. It stayed in the oven longer than the  90 minutes the book recommended, too, and each time I took it out of the oven to test it with a knife I had to readjust with the foil tent WITH THE OVEN MITTS.  I must have been quite the sight, but I soldiered on and it was worth it.

The browned crusty top was wonderfully crunchy in contrast to the moist cake and sweet fruit. The Other Eater and I gobbled it donw for breakfast every day that week.

Next week: chipster-topped brownies.  I am SOOO looking forward to these!

TWD: Tiramisu cake parfaits

Like many of my TWD colleagues, the idea of having a whole cake in my house is not appealing. I’m not really the kind of person who makes a whole cake just for fun, and so rather than gobble the whole thing down it tends to dry out and tie up valuable real estate in my refrigerator. This is especially gross when the cake has a lot of dairy it in that gets crusty and makes the whole fridge smell.

Tiramisu cake

A parfait, on the other hand, lasts mere hours before my will power caves in an I am licking the glass clean (no wonder the dessert’s name translates to “perfect”). Many thanks to Megan of My Baking Adventures for picking this week’s Tiramisu Cake recipe recipe, and posting it on her blog. Tiramisu literally means “pick-me-up” and even though I left out all of the espresso powder the pure pleasure of indulging in this treat on a sunny Sunday evening lifted my spirits.

I spread Dorie’s fabulous vanilla cake batter into a 13×9 baking pan and made a really shallow sheet cake that I cubed and tossed into parfait glasses (which I had previously purchased at the local church-run consignment store for 25 cents each). I scrapped the espresso syrup and extract in favor of Starbucks liqueur I had in the house, and layered the cake with the filling and the mini chocolate chips, as Dorie recommended.  It was a hit at Sunday dinner with The Other Eater in my household and his mom! Light and fluffy, just the right portions and not too rich to stomach after a nice dinner and a walk through the neighborhood on one of the first really great spring days of the year.

(Earlier in the meal we tore into the [frozen] fresh mango bread that my TWD colleagues will be making later this month – what a treat! More about that later….)

TWD: Four Star Chocolate Bread Pudding

The weather here has been hit and miss lately: we’ll have one beautiful day of strong, warm sunshine and then five days of persistent light rain and general dumpiness.  “Good days for chicken Parm(esan)” one friend remarked the other day, and it seemed to sum it up just perfectly.

But Lauren of the Upper East Side Chronicle left me with chocolate bread pudding instead of chicken parm, and as long as I remember to microwave the dessert before applying whipped cream, I’m quite happy with her decision.  She’s posted the recipe for you, too, here.

Chocolate Bread Pudding

I love bread pudding, but it’s usually filled with vanilla and maybe bourbon or bourbon cream, so I was a little freaked out by the idea of bittersweet chocolate.  I decided I’d think about that at the grocery store – one of many things to think about, it turned out.

Sadly, the dairy producers do not consult with cookbook writers when they size their products (sort of like Steve Martin’s Father of the Bride rant about hot dogs vs. hot dog buns), so I did some creative recipe re-jiggering to make it all work without a plethora of dairy products in my refrigerator.

*three cups of whole milk and one cup of cream became two cups of each

*three eggs became the rest of the egg beaters I had leftover from something else

*6 oz. bittersweet chocolate became lots of bittersweet chocolate with a handfull of leftover milk chocolate and a few peanut butter chips sprinkled on top.

The end result was a delight! Dense, not too chocolate-y or overly sweet, and even kinda pretty to look at with those browned peanut butter chips on top. Whipped cream – even the fake kind from the can – makes everything better.  I’m a fan and I’ll be making it again next winter, I’m sure.  I just don’t see it as part of this weekend’s BBQ.

It would have been prettier if I had found the orzo

Like my TWD colleague over at EzraPoundCake, I too have let several bags of spinach die in my refrigerator.  But she’s inspired me to change my ways, and so I tried her spinach and feta orzo salad.

Orzo to clean out the crisper

But I couldn’t find orzo in my local grocery store, so I used salad macaroni. I poured myself a glass of malbec and added too much red onion, a small can of sliced sliced olives and a scoop of leftover pesto sauce for fun, and it was fabulous – if not the most attractive dish out there, I certainly enjoyed eating it. I bet it would be good with chicken straight from the grill, too.  Hhhmmmm…

TWD Fast Forward: All-In-One Holiday Bundt Cake

The pending move is making things a little tense around my house – and when the going gets tough, the tough crave sugar.  Thus, I scraped the last of the flour out of my pantry, comparing my current inventory with the list of ingredients in several of Dorie’s recipes and decided on a seasonally inappropriate All-In-One Holiday Bundt Cake.  The cake is DARN good, and I wiped out 1) a can of pumpkin, 2) the last of the golden raisins, 3) the last fraction of a bag of pecan halves that now I won’t have to move at the end of the month.  Woo-hoo!

holiday cake

The cake is dense without being heavy, moist and delicately spiced with dried ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg. And the canned pumpkin makes the cake just as orange as the photo suggests (even though I know the photo is not great – I tried using my far-more-convenient cell phone camera instead of my actual camera for the first time, and I won’t do it again. Promise.).  But the combination of golden raisins and dried cranberries and pecans is really nice – not too fruitcake-y, but definitely not the traditional birthday cake that I get used to at this time of year. It could absolutely be an acceptable breakfast food. I like this a lot.

The icing made me nervous – it’s maple syrup and powdered sugar – but it goes well with the otherwise not-too-sweet cake.  I’ll look forward to making this in my new kitchen next winter!

(I apologize to the Dorie bakers who haven’t made this yet, but I’ll make it again with all of your when it comes up in the rotation!)

TWD: Caramel Crunch Bars

These, I must say, have been a mixed bag.

Caramel Crunch Bars

Initially, I was disappointed with them. The instant coffee in the batter was too strong.  The thin cookie was too crisp. The toffee pieces got stuck in my teeth.

But this being the second day they have been in my cake dome, sliced (some broken) and ready for snacking at a moment’s notice, I feel much better about them. As in, I can’t stop eating them. But that may be because I doubled the chocolate on top.

Let me explain.

As you can see from the recipe (Thanks to Whitney, who chose the cookies we all baked this week and will post the recipe), the thin and buttery pan cookie is baked, topped with chocolate ( I used milk chocolate bars rather than the bittersweet chocolate Dorie recommended) to melt, and then sprinkled with toffee. However, I got sidetracked in the kitchen and I forgot the toffee!  When I discovered my mistake 24 hours later, I topped the cookies with another candy bar, returned them to the oven to melt the chocolate, and then sprinkled them with the toffee.

It was fine.  I sliced most of them and broke several along the way, and now am enjoyed them each and every time I walk into the kitchen….got to pass the cake dome to get to the fridge, the laundry room, the kitchen sink…. They’re not my favorite, but they’ll do.

In the meantime, my TWD posts will be few and far between for a while, as I will be moving!  Cross your fingers for good weather at the end of March.

TWD: Devil’s Food White Out Cake

The idea of making the cake that is on the cover of Dorie’s cookbook was totally overwhelming.  I knew that mine would never look like that glossy covermodel in my dining room and that I would make myself crazy trying, so I went in a new direction:

Devil’s Food White Out Whoopie Pies!

Whoopie Pie

I made Dorie’s batter (substituting milk chocolate for bittersweet) and poured it into a 13×9 cookie sheet. I baked for 15 minutes, cooled for the rest of the afternoon, and then attacked the sheetcake with my heart shaped cookie cutter.

Each heart was slathered with Marshmallow Fluff and then stuck together like a Whoopie Pie.  It looked darling, especially next to the tulips I received from the Other Eater this weekend.

When we cut into them the next day, we found two problems: one, the cake had sort of dried out and wasn’t quite as perfect as the odds and ends I picked  out of the cookie sheets the night before, and two, the Fluff had run all over the little dishes, even though I had stored them covered in the fridge overnight.  Hmmmmm.

Granted, there are worse ways to spend a Monday night than licking fluff off my fork while Jack Bauer saves the free world, but still….you get the idea.

You can find the recipe here, where  Stephanie shows off two different cakes made from the same batter.

Mini Cherry-Pecan Streusel Loaves

Yum Yum Yum

Cherry loaves

I picked up this recipe for mini loaf cakes at Christmas time when I was trying to expand my holiday baking menu (many of our gift exchanges were canceled this year, so I felt inspired to bake really good stuff for friends and family members who hosted gatherings) but I never got to them.  When I finally did try these out recently, I was sorry it took me so long to get around to it. I took one to work, shared one with my sister-in-law, gobbled one myself (over several days, so simmer down, people) and I still have one in my freezer!

The cake it moist and vanilla-y and fluffy and light, if that is even possible.  It was just perfect – not at all like the dense bricks you get at mega-coffee shops in the morning. I used dried sour cherries, which I really enjoyed as a contrast to the sweet vanilla cake. And because they were dried the color didn’t run into the snowy white cake at all and the color contrast was beautiful (though you can’t really tell in this photo because I didn’t have quite enough cherries on hand and I was being too lazy to go buy more)!

And, no, I did not wrap them all cute like Martha suggests (see lazy, above), but I will consider it for the next holiday season.

Enjoy, folks!