Lots of fruit lying around...

Strawberries, a couple of aging peaches, and half of an apple that no one ate...  I haven't made muffins for a while.  So I looked up a strawberry muffin recipe and then basically didn't follow it.


Strawberry Muffins
Recipe adapted from Sprinkle Charms

Ingredients:

• 1/2  cup canola oil
• 1/2 cup apple sauce
• 6 egg yolks
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup or more soymilk

• 2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1 cup ap flour
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• 2 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp. salt

• 1 pint chopped strawberries
• 2 mashed peaches
• 1/2 apple (chopped)

Method:

Wash and cut all of your fruit into one bowl, set aside.  Preheat oven to 430 and paper a 12 cup muffin tin.  Combine all wet ingredients in a bowl, mix, set aside.  Combine all dry ingredients in a separate bowl, mix, and add to the wet ingredients.  Mix until almost combined, add fruit and then mix just until combined.  Divide into prepared muffin pan and bake on 430 for 7 minutes.  Lower temp to 400 and bake for another 13 or so minutes, until muffins bounce back to the touch.  

Daphne's 1st birthday cake

I made this cake for my friend Sylvia's daughter's 1st birthday party.  It's lemon curd with cream cheese icing.  I like this cake because it's nice for summer and everyone really loves the zing of the lemon curd.  The cake itself is a pretty simple orange juice cake that is very moist and tastes great with any kind of icing.  In this case it really lets the lemon curd shine.  And who doesn't love cream cheese icing?  That also goes really well with lemon curd.  They have a complementary tang.

This cake needed to feed 25 people and I'm not super keen on double stacked sheet cakes so I used
2- 12" rounds and 2- 9" rounds.  I tripled the cake recipe, made one batch of lemon curd, and doubled the icing recipe.  I had the perfect amounts of everything- I like to have a little bit of everything left over in case I need to touch something up or just to save in the freezer.

I layered lemon curd in between the 2- 12"s and the 2- 9"s but between the 12" cake and the 9" cake I just spread a nice layer of cream cheese icing.  One thing that I did to make serving the cake easier is I put a tinfoil covered cardboard cake round in between the 9" and 12" cake layers.  This way the top cake can be cut and served, they can remove the cardboard round and then cut the bottom cake.  I put lemon curd on the very top, piped dots around the edges with the cream cheese icing, and wrote on top of the cake with melted butter and semisweet chocolate chips.  Lastly, I threw on some sliced strawberries for color.

Lemon Curd Cake
Recipe from The Night Kitchen Bakery

• Lemon curd
• Yellow cake
• Cream cheese icing

Strawberry cake with jam and lemon curd

Question: What to do when you have a ton of fruit salad that's taking up all the room in your fridge? Aaaaaand you need to make a birthday cake for someone at your mom's work?

Answer: Strawberry cake with home-made strawberry and blueberry jam and lemon curd left over from the blueberry cake you made on Saturday!!

Strawberry Cake with Jam and Lemon Curd
Recipe adapted from Cooking by Moonlight

Ingredients:
(for the cake)

• 2 cups ap flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp baking powder

• 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened
• 1 1/3 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 1 1/2 cups strawberries, mashed

(for the jam)

• 2 cups strawberries and blueberries (you can pretty much use any berry combo)
• 1/2 cup sugar
• water

Lemon Curd Recipe Here

Method:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease and flour 2 9-inch round cake pans.
Sift together the flour, salt, and baking powder and set aside.
Mix together the softened butter and sugar until combined. (I let my butter soften in a dish on the stove while it's preheating). Then add the eggs and vanilla and stir to combine.
Pour the dry into the wet and stir until there are just a few small lumps. The batter will be stiff compared to many cake batters, that's okay... the strawberries will loosen it up.
Wash the strawberries and remove their green tops. Using a potato masher or fork mash the strawberries into strawberry soup. Pour the crushed strawberries, juices and all, into the cake batter and stir just until evenly distributed.
Pour the batter evenly into the two pans and use a knife or spatula to spread the batter evenly in the pans.
Bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes or until a cake tester comes out with just a few small crumbs attached.

Make the lemon curd according to the directions in the above link.

Make the jam by putting the berries, sugar, and a splash of water in a saucepan and cooking over medium heat for about 25 minutes, stirring pretty often. Don't put the heat too high or it will burn the bottom of the pan.

Once the cake, jam, and curd are cool, cut each cake layer in 2 to yield 4 layers. Put lemon curd in between two layers and jam in one layer and on the top of the cake.

I think tomorrow I am going to sift a little powdered sugar on top just to be fancy, this cake really doesn't need an icing, it's got all kinds of delicious spreads going on. I could see a ganache or something since strawberry and chocolate go so well together but I'm going to let this one be for now.

Lauren's Birthday Cake

This cake is a standard at our house. When you just feel like making something easy and delish this is the cake for you. It's always a big hit and it has so many possibilities. Sometimes we do layers of ganache, this time I did ganache and raspberry jam. You can definitely do lemon curd layers, whipped cream and fruit, a mousse, yadda yadda...

Here's the recipe for the cake and ganache, and here is the lemon curd recipe should you choose to go that route.

Muffin Thursday: Strawberry Rhubarb Whole Wheat Corn Muffins

I picked up a huge bag of rhubarb this week at Produce Junction!! What to do with it? Obviously strawberries have to be involved, and I think it was Marie who suggested the corn muffin part. We have been trying to think of ways to use up the huge bag of masa corn flour that has been sitting on the shelf forever.

I used this recipe for the muffins but added about 1 1/2 cups of strawberries and 1 1/2 cups of chopped rhubarb. I made a few other changes to include the masa flour and balanced it out with whole wheat. I changed the butter to oil and instead of using all milk I threw in some buttermilk that I found in the fridge and a little skim too. I cut back on the sugar and used a giant muffin tin to bake them. I also doubled the ingredients from the original recipe because I wanted to use as much rhubarb up as I could and I still have some left sitting in the fridge.

INGREDIENTS:

2 cup cornmeal
1 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup masa corn flour
2 Tbs. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1/2 cup canola oil
scant 1/4 cup sugar
2 egg
1 1/4 cup butter milk
3/4 cup skim milk
1/2 pint strawberries, chopped
4 stalks or so rhubarb, chopped

INSTRUCTIONS
Stir the dry ingredients together in a bowl.
Stir the sugar into the oil.
Add the eggs and milks.
Pour the dry ingredients into the wet and stir, just to combine.
Pour in strawberries and rhubarb and stir just until dispersed.
Divide into 6 greased giant muffin cups.
Bake at 425 degrees for 25-30 minutes or until the tops are crusty and the muffins bounce back to the touch.
Let the muffins cool for a while in the pan- the masa flour makes them very brittle, if they look like they're going to stick heat the bottom of the pan and use a knife to loosen around the edges. They taste great even when the tops fall off!

Strawberry Shortcake

What a nice Easter! I spent the weekend welcoming my cousin Arthur to Philadelphia and then hanging out with him and my sister. Saturday we had a nice lunch with his parents (my Aunt Barb and Uncle Bruce) at Top Of The Hill Market and bought some Easter candy at Zipf's. Good thing he came to visit because he was a great help in the kitchen; baking this cake and rolling out balls of Jaques Torres' chocolate chip cookies. I need him next Xmas when we turn my mom's house into a gingerbread cookie decorating factory again. But back to the cake...

In honor of my Nona I made strawberry shortcake for Easter dinner at my Aunt Pat and Uncle Tommy's house. Nona used to make her cake from a box- but when we were little kids we didn't care. It was delicious anyway. I came across this recipe while stumbling around Taste Spotting one day. The recipe comes from Thyme, it's called Mammie Moo's Strawberry Shortcake.

What an easy recipe!! I pretty much followed it to a T except I didn't realize that they don't sell creme fraiche at Pathmark so I just made regular whipped cream instead of the one in the original recipe. I also just used two 9 inch cake pans and covered the bottoms with tin foil and Pam since I didn't have a spring form. But I knew I'd have to cover the bottom because this cake will stick if you just try to grease and flour the pan. Parchment circles will work as well. Then I cut each cake in two and made a four-layer cake with whipped cream in between each layer and strawberries in the middle and on top. Again, really easy and very tasty.

For the cake:

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/8 tsp. salt
5 eggs, separated
1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
5 Tbs. boiling water
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
Grated zest of 2 lemons

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 350, in a bowl sift together the flour, baking powder and salt. Set aside.

2. In a large bowl whip together the egg yolks and sugar with a hand mixer on high speed until thick; the mixture will still be grainy. Reduce the speed to medium-low and add the boiling water. Turn off the mixer and scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl. Increase the speed to high and whip again until thick. Stir in the vanilla extract and lemon zest. Reduce the speed to low and stir in the flour mixture.

3. In a separate bowl, whip the egg whites on medium-low speed until frothy. Increase the speed to medium-high and whip until thick and smooth; the mixture should not look dry. Fold half of the whites into the batter with a spatula, then fold in the remaining whites.

4. Gently spread the batter in the prepared pans. (You can use a 9 in spring-form pan, I used two 9 inch cake pans- don't forget to line the bottoms) Bake until a knife inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean, 25 to 30 minutes. Let the cake cool in the pan for 10 minutes. Run a knife around the inside edge of the pan and invert the cake. Transfer the cake to a wire rack and let cool completely. Using a serrated knife, cut the cake horizontally into 3 layers if you used the spring-form or cut each layer in 2 to make 4 layers if you used the two 9 inch cake pans. (Snippet's Notes: If you used the spring form wrap dental floss around the cake, cross the floss, and gently pull it through the body of the cake to get 3 even layers.)

For the strawberry layer:

2 cups fresh strawberries, hulled and thinly
sliced, plus more for garnish
1 tsp. fresh lemon juice
2 Tbs. granulated sugar

Method:

Place the 2 cups strawberries in a bowl. Stir in the lemon juice and 2 Tbs. of the granulated sugar.

For the whipped cream:

2 cups heavy cream
4 Tbs. sugar
1 tsp. vanilla

Method:

Whip cream, sugar, and vanilla with a hand mixer on high until cream is thick and fluffy- don't make butter out of it.

Hurry up, it's almost gone!!

Adapted from Williams-Sonoma TASTE Magazine, "Layers of Delight," by Emily Luchetti (Spring 2002).

My First Pie: Fin

It's doooooone! Took almost an hour, and we ended up turning it up to 375 to finish because the fruit was still not bubbling. But then I heard the sizzle of it boiling over onto the bottom of he oven and we knew it was over. Pulled it out and now it's cooling.

So my impressions of this crust recipe is that it's not quite what I want in the end. Light and flakey but it was kind of hard to roll and it's not sweet enough. I will be experimenting for the next one but otherwise- nice first try!

My First Pie: Part Deux

So the pie is in the oven and here's how we did it:

I cut up 5 apples: 3 granny smith and 2 fjui (each apple cut into 12 pieces), and a quart of strawberries (each cut in half). To that I added:

zest from one orange
2/3 C Sugar
1/4 AP Flour
1 Tbsp Lemon Juice

Mix up that mixture and then toss the fruit in it and set aside.
Then take your pie doughs out of the fridge and let stand for 5-10 minutes. Put a little whole wheat flour on your counter and dust your rolling pin and your work space. Using the weight of the rolling pin roll from the center out moving your dough clockwise until it is big enough to cover the bottom of your pie plate with plenty of room for the sides and the crimping around the edges. This lady on youtube does a good demo. Roll the dough over your rolling pin and use it to get it on the pie plate. Make sure that it's slightly pressed into the bottom corners and use egg whites to glue any pieces that fell off. Throw that baby back in the fridge and roll out your top using the same method- or make a crumble for the top and save that other half of dough for another pie with a crumble top. Once your top is rolled take the bottom from the fridge and pour in the fruit. Make sure that you don't have a mountain of fruit- make it kind of level or it will never cook all the way through. Using the rolling pin again roll the top layer onto the pie and crimp the edges. Here's a demo on crimping. Then, I scored the top to get 9 slices so it will be easier to cut later. I also cut 2 little holes in each top to let the steam out. Then it went in the oven at 450 for 10 minutes and then I reduced the heat to 350 for 35 minutes, or until the fruit is bubbling and the apples are tender but still have a bite to them.

Let cool then cut or your fruit will not be set and will run everywhere.

My First Pie

Today I am attempting my first pie. I just made the dough and it is chilling in the fridge. Her is the recipe I used- it's a combo of some stuff I found on the interweb and my mom's pie recipe.

Ingredients:

2 Sticks Butter

1/3 C Ice Cold Water
2 Egg Yolks
3 Tbsp White Vinegar or Lemon Juice

3 1/2 C AP Flour
1 Tsp Salt
2 Tsp Sugar

Method:

Cut the butter into 1/2 squares and throw then back in the fridge/ freezer to keep cold. Then measure the water and break the yolks right into the measuring cup and add the vinegar in there too- save yourself some dishes. Put the wet in the freezer to keep cold until you're ready to use it. Then SIFT the flour into the bowl of your stand mixer and throw in the salt and sugar. Mix it real quick just so the dry is combined. Then throw in your butter and mix for a few minutes (flour might get all over you)- until the butter has broken into pea-sized pieces and flour has turned a little yellow. Don't over mix!! Then take the wet out of the freezer and add to the mixer on low. Mix and stop and mix and stop for like 20 sec intervals until it has juuuuuust come together. We had to add about 2 Tbsp more cold water to get it to come together. For real though, don't over mix this. It has to just come together when you squeeze it with your fingers. Once combined- dump the dough onto saran wrap and divide it into two discs- don't handle it too much or you'll melt it damnit. If you're going to bake today, throw the discs into the fridge for 1/2 hour. If you're going to bake at a later date throw them in the freezer and they will last indefinitely.

Next post after I get back from the gym: the filling (strawberry and apples), rolling out the dough, and baking.