eggs on sunday

Yes, I don’t think of these as mere cheesecake pops — I say “cheesecake pops!!!” every time I eat one. What a cute idea for this month’s Daring Bakers challenge! I’ve been enamored of the dessert pop idea ever since I saw Bakerella’s cupcake pops (aren’t those amazing?), and I was thrilled to have these as my second DB challenge.

The pops are a New York-style cheesecake — smooth and creamy — rolled into balls and coated with melted chocolate. According to the rules for this month’s challenge, we had leeway as far as flavoring the cheesecake (though it had to remain white), as well as what we used to decorate the pops. I divided my batch of cheesecake batter in two and made half raspberry-flavored (with Chambord) and the other half hazelnut flavored (with an organic hazelnut extract.) I rolled both kinds of pops in dark chocolate, and then drizzled white chocolate over the raspberry pops and rolled the hazelnut pops in finely chopped toasted hazelnuts. They were really delicious, and I’ve been keeping ours in the freezer…which makes them OH so good. Like frozen chocolate-covered cheesecake! We’ve been having some every night for the past week; no one is complaining.

Here’s how the cheesecake pop adventure unfolded: (more…)

…along with some ginger, cream and sugar. Then I scooped ‘em both up.

Yes, every time I think of this ice cream, I get the Coconut Song stuck in my head. (more…)

One of the very first things I did when I began this blog back in January was to join the Daring Bakers — a group of talented bloggers who, every month, take on a different challenging baking recipe. The idea is to make the recipe as is, resisting the temptation so many of us have to fiddle with ingredients, and to go outside our comfort zones a bit: baking something that we might not normally choose. All the members post their results on the same day at the end of the month, and it’s always so much fun to see all the variations that arise when a large number of people take on the same baking task!

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I LOVE purple carrots!

When I saw them in the grocery store last week, I almost yelped out loud with glee — they’re one of my very favorite vegetables. They don’t taste particularly different from the regular orange carrots, but they are a creation of pure and utter beauty in my mind:

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Out of all the flavor combinations out there, coffee and chocolate is one near and dear to my heart. When I look through a new cookbook or a collection of recipes, the ones that always catch my eye are the ones combining coffee and chocolate. In fact, even if a chocolate dessert doesn’t have some type of coffee flavor in it, I sometimes play around and stir a little espresso powder in — sometimes to add a hint of coffee flavor to the chocolate dessert, but just as often to simply deepen the chocolate flavor. To me, something about coffee, when added in small amounts, seems to make “chocolate” taste like “CHOCOLATE.”

My penchant for chocolate and coffee together must be genetic: both my parents and my brother love it just as much as I do! Coffee is our beverage of choice when we’re together — it flows freely during family get-togethers, and we love it that way. And what better to go with a cup of coffee than an intensely dark chocolate, chewy, chunky espresso-flavored cookie? (more…)

We love our scones on weekend mornings! Occasionally I like to mix it up a bit from the traditional white flour cream scones, though. You may know by now that I sometimes fiddle with substituting white whole wheat flour into baked goods; I try to do the substitutions only when the flavors seem like they can take it — i.e. I wouldn’t use whole grain flour in a delicate, light lemon cake. Maple and oatmeal, though? They’re made for whole grain flour!

I use Arrowhead Mills oat flour in these scones instead of white flour, and there’s whole oats ground up a bit in the batter. I love the combination of brown sugar, maple syrup and cinnamon in the dough. Instead of cream for the liquid, I use a mixture of milk and yogurt. (more…)

Growing up, I was lucky enough to have a mom who — among many other wonderful qualities — baked a lot of muffins. Weekend mornings were often filled with the warm, spicy smells of cinnamon wafting from the kitchen; on the table would be a basket filled with treats like pumpkin muffins, zucchini spice muffins (especially in the summer, to use up the bumper crop of zucchini that was always bigger than we’d planned), and applesauce oatmeal muffins. Her baking extended beyond muffins to other delicious treats, but the muffins are one of my fondest memories of our breakfasts together as a family.

The applesauce oatmeal muffins she used to make were one of my favorites, because they combined some of the flavors and ingredients dearest to my heart: apples, oats, and cinnamon. Last year, when I received Dorie Greenspan’s wonderful tome “Baking: From My Home to Yours” — from none other than my sweet mom! — one of the recipes that I immediately wanted to try was the Oatmeal Breakfast Bread. It has lots of applesauce, cinnamon, oatmeal and raisins in the batter, and a brown sugar-walnut streusel on top. Call it a variation on the applesauce oatmeal muffins my mom used to make!

This bread is unbelievably moist, and when it bakes, it perfumes your whole house with the comforting, welcoming, homey smell of cinnamon. Something about the aroma of cinnamon, for me, evokes feelings of being home — and because of that, it’s one of my favorite ingredients to cook with, hands down.

Have a slice as a delicious accompaniment to a hot mug of coffee or tea. Also, if you’re like me, you could consider the bread to be slightly more on the healthy side…applesauce takes the place of butter in the batter, and I like to make mine fully whole grain, using King Arthur white whole wheat flour along with the whole oats. The recipe actually takes really well to using the white whole wheat flour; it blends really nicely with the spices and oats without losing any of the — as Dorie puts it — “pudding soft” texture. And, I cut down just a smidge on the amount of sugar in the recipe, using 1/2 cup in the bread instead of the 3/4 cup in the original recipe, and I find it to be plenty sweet.

This is also my entry into this month’s Master Baker challenge. It was started by Nikki of Crazy Delicious, and each month of the challenge has a different theme — this month’s theme is cinnamon! I can’t wait to see the other entries.

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Oatmeal Breakfast Bread

From Dorie Greenspan’s Baking: From My Home to Yours

Ingredients

For the topping:
1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
1/4 cup chopped walnuts or pecans
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

For the bread:
2 large eggs
1 1/4 cups unsweetened applesauce
1/3 cup flavorless oil, such as canola or safflower
1/4 cup buttermilk or whole milk (I’ve also used plain yogurt with good results)
1 1/4 cups all-purpose or white whole wheat flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
pinch ground cloves
1/2 cup dried figs, apples, apricots, or raisins (I usually use raisins)
1 cup old-fashioned oats

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter and flour a 9×5 inch loaf pan, and tap out the excess flour.

In a small bowl, use your fingers to toss together the streusel topping ingredients (brown sugar, walnuts, and cinnamon.) Set aside.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar, applesauce, oil and buttermilk (or milk or yogurt) until they’re well blended.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, nutmeg, and cloves. Stir in the oats.

In a separate small bowl, toss the dried fruit with 1/2 tsp of the flour mixture, just to coat. Set aside.

Pour the liquid ingredients over the flour mixture in the large bowl, and fold with a spatula just until they’re combined (try not to overmix.) Fold in the dried fruit, just until distributed throughout the batter.

Pour the batter into the prepared loaf pan. Scatter the streusel over the top, and lightly press it onto the surface of the batter with your fingers. Place the loaf pan on a baking sheet (just so it’s easier to lift out of the oven when it’s done), and place in the oven. Bake for 50-60 minutes; I usually take mine out around 50 minutes. You can check that it’s done by inserting a sharp knife in the middle of the bread; no batter should stick to the knife.

Cool for about 10 minutes in the pan, then carefully run a knife around the edges of the pan and unmold the bread. Invert it back to right-side-up and cool it completely on a rack before you cut it.

So apparently, it’s meme time around the food blogs! I was pretty flattered to be tagged by Gretchen from Canela & Comino for a “5 Things” meme — I love what she cooks, and her photographs are always gorgeous! Being tagged for a meme is kind of a rite of passage in the blogosphere, and I was tickled to be tagged (say that 5 times fast!)

So here we go with my “5 things”:

1. I somehow always end up humming along to the music piped in over the loudspeakers in the grocery store. Usually this consists of 80’s and 90’s soft rock, and it amazes me to know that there is apparently part of my brain that remembers every lyric and note to these songs that I haven’t heard in about 15 years. The Whole Foods I used to shop in when we lived in Boston had a particularly good soundtrack; I used to bop down the aisles there, humming away. I don’t usually notice I’m doing it, though, until I sidle up to someone in the produce section to reach for, say, a head of kale, and they shoot me a surprised look. It does always put me in a good mood while I’m shopping, though!

2. I can peel an orange with my hands so that the peel comes off all in one piece.

3. Someday I hope to own a little flock of laying hens, tend a garden large enough to grow most of our own vegetables, and make all of our own bread (that I will bake in my outdoor wood-firing oven. Dream big!) And I’d like to try my hand at cheesemaking, too. Since we’re not there yet, I love to read books about people who’ve done this kind of thing: Fifty Acres and a Poodle, A Pig in Provence, and Animal Vegetable Miracle have been some of my recent favorites in the past few years.

4. I always cook to music. My favorite singer in general to cook with is Ella Fitzgerald; I just adore her. I usually just listen to a huge playlist of all my Ella CDs when cooking, but if I had to choose just one that’s my favorite, it’s Let’s Fall in Love.

5. I can recite all the prepositions in under 20 seconds. Don’t ask. Suffice it to say I had to learn them for 7th grade English class, and they’ve stuck ever since.

And now, after sharing my “5 things,” it’s time for me to tag some other bloggers!

Figs with Bri
Erin Cooks
Technicolor Kitchen
And Then I Do the Dishes
Straight From the Farm

Hope you’ll all consider participating!

“5 Thing” Meme Rules:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. Share 5 facts about yourself
3. Tag 5 people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them).
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment at their Blogs.

Boy, oh boy, oh boy…earlier this week, since I had President’s Day off, I decided to experiment with something that I’ve been excited about trying to make for a while now. Actually, ever since November — when the tv show Pushing Daisies introduced the idea of the “cup pie.” And now that I’ve had some cup pie success, I’m so excited to post this recipe!

What’s a cup pie, you ask? Think cute-as-a-button, little miniature single-serve pies, baked in a cupcake pan! The main character in Pushing Daisies is a pie-maker, and his girlfriend convinces him to add “cup pies baked with honey” to his menu. Besides the fact that I have a serious weakness for any “miniature” single-serve dessert, cup pies are for people who love the pie crust (like me) — there’s a slightly higher crust to filling ratio than regular pies. I was envisioning an exact replica of a full-size pie, with a fluted crust and decorative slits cut to let the steam escape included.

I have, for some reason, always been a little scared of making my own pie crust. There’s so much debate about flakiness, tenderness, butter vs. shortening, ice cold ingredients, etc. that I was always a little hesitant to jump right in and choose a method. But I bit the bullet and did it on Monday, and WOW were the results good. I used an all butter pie crust recipe (I’m not a big fan of shortening) from Gourmet magazine and it was so incredibly flaky, and tasted great, too (that’s what you get with butter.) I’m already thinking of other recipes to make with this pie crust.

I used a standard muffin cup tin, but spaced the cup pies out so their crusts wouldn’t touch each other; I also made sure to lightly butter the cups and rim around the tops, so the crust wouldn’t stick. It took me a few tries to get the hang of shaping them, but I think I finally managed to get a technique down — pressing the pie top down around the edges to firmly seal it was really key (my first run of this recipe resulted in a few loose tops!) I filled them with diced apples tossed with cinnamon and a little sugar. MMM.

I was so happily surprised, and pleased, at how cute they were! Exactly how I’d pictured them…fortunately, this was one kitchen experiment that went right!

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It’s a feast of color for the eyes, and a feast of flavor for the tastebuds!

For this weekend’s soup recipe, we travel to Southeast Asia for inspiration, where peanuts are often used in sauces and condiments. In this soup, the nuttiness of the peanuts plays in the background, while the spicy chiles, carrots, and garlic take front row seats. You can make this soup with ingredients most of us usually have on hand in the pantry — carrots (a full 2 lb bag — think of all the Vitamin A and C you’re getting!), onions, garlic, celery, soy sauce, peanuts or peanut butter, juice of a lime, and crushed red pepper. If you have an immersion blender, you can make quick work of blending the soup with it (my immersion blender has a firm spot in my list of top 5 useful pieces of kitchen equipment*); otherwise, just blend it in batches in a blender or food processor. I like to garnish it with some chopped cilantro, a lime wedge or two, and a sprinkling of chopped peanuts. It was cold here today, and this spicy soup really warmed our bellies!

The original recipe is from the Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special, a cookbook full of recipes for soups, stews, salads, and other related goodies. It calls for Asian chili garlic sauce, which I had at one point, but when cleaning out my fridge the other week, I found the bottle of it at the back and realized I couldn’t remember (a) when I had purchased it, or (b) when I had last used it. Neither boded well for how long that bottle had been in there…so sadly, it got the boot. Since I don’t buy chili garlic sauce on a regular basis, the recipe below is made without it, but rather uses a combination of crushed red pepper flakes and minced garlic cloves. If you had a fresh chile hanging around, that would be terrific to use in lieu of the crushed red pepper flakes.

Incidentally, this recipe is also my entry into the No Croutons Required food blogging event, started this month by Lisa’s Kitchen and Tinned Tomatoes. Each month, they’re inviting bloggers from around the world to submit a recipe for a vegetarian soup or salad, and this month’s theme is simply vegetarian soups. They’ll be posting a roundup of all the submissions later on this month, and you can vote for your favorite vegetarian soup in the comments section. Should be fun, and I can’t wait to see what other vegetarian soups are submitted — I’m always looking for new ideas!

So without further ado, here’s the recipe. Savor those spoonfuls of spicy carrot peanut soup, and stay warm!

*Rounding out my list of top 5 pieces of kitchen equipment - besides immersion blender - are my enameled cast iron dutch oven, my heavy-duty aluminum half-sheet pans, my chef’s knife, and my myriad silicone spatulas. Though, now that I’m thinking about this, I might have to make it top 6 - I don’t know what I’d do without my Kitchen Aid mixer!

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Spicy Carrot Peanut Soup

Adapted from Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special

Ingredients
1 tbsp canola oil
2 onions, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
2 lb organic carrots, sliced fairly thinly (don’t go crazy, but you don’t want thick chunks, either. Shoot for 1/4-1/2 inch slices.)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4-1/2 tsp crushed red pepper flakes, depending on how spicy you like it (or use a fresh chile, stemmed and chopped)
1 tsp coarse salt
6 cups water
2 tbsp all-natural peanut butter
3 tbsp soy sauce
juice of half a lime

For garnish: chopped cilantro, crushed peanuts, lime wedges

Directions
Heat the oil in a large heavy pot over medium high heat, then add the onions, celery, carrots, garlic, salt, crushed red pepper flakes and saute until the onion softens, about 5 minutes. Add the water and bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer until the carrots are soft, about 25-30 minutes.

Add the peanut butter, soy sauce, and lime juice, and stir until the peanut butter melts into the soup. Puree the soup until smooth, using either an immersion blender or a food processor/blender (if using the latter, you’ll need to puree in batches.) Taste the soup and adjust the salt, if needed (though I usually find the 1 tsp originally added is enough.)

Serve garnished with chopped cilantro, crushed peanuts, and/or lime wedges.

Serves 6-8.