Peach Cobbler

You needn’t fear that I’d abandoned my hankering for peach cobbler. I’m firmly in the “biscuit crust” cobbler camp. Pate brisee is a fine thing for pie, but that’s my primary use for said pastry. Cobblers demand a hefty biscuit crust, all the better with which to sop up delicious peach (or other fruit) juices.

This recipe is very, very generously adapted from the The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. I have yet to see an America’s Test Kitchen baked good recipe that demands yoghurt instead of cream, sour cream, or milk, but I think they’re missing out. I used vanilla yoghurt as the biscuit’s moistener to add both sweetness and flavor and have no cause to regret it. The biscuit topping was light, tender, and moist – the perfect foil to the succulent fruit that lay beneath.

Vanilla Malt Ice Cream with Almond Butter Swirl

Apparently, we just had the hottest month ever recorded here in Connecticut. Usually, I scoff and pish at those who whine about New England’s meager heat and humidity, but July was excessive even by my standards. I fear this means I’m getting soft. I’ve been up here for over six years now; perhaps it’s impacted my capacity to distinguish oppressive heat from the merely uncomfortable.

Ice cream is lovely on either type of summer day. This is a delicious, rich vanilla ice cream spiked with malted milk powder and a creamy almond butter swirl. I think it’s my favorite of the ice cream recipes I’ve made so far. Words are inadequate to the task of conveying how perfectly the flavors of vanilla, malt, and almond complement one another. It’s like ice cream: the religious experience.

I would therefore be remiss if I failed to share the recipe.

Cheesecake-Filled Cupcakes

These were supposed to be Black Bottom Cupcakes, but something funny happened in the heat of my oven. Essentially all of the cream cheese filling I had carefully dolloped in the midst of my cupcakes was overpowered and encased by rising cupcake dough. The cupcakes depicted are actually a minority, the resolute few whose cheesecake filling refused to be wholly submerged in a tide of rising dough. I thought they’d photograph better than the others, which look exactly like regular chocolate cupcakes with sunken tops. This sunken-ness is typical of all black-bottom cupcakes and is a design feature rather than a flaw.

That these resulted in a cheesecake filling, rather than topping, was a bit of a pleasant surprise. These cupcakes, for example, lend themselves to frosting far more readily than do their traditional black-bottomed counterparts. The cheesecake in the middle is like the malt filling in the whopper, the caramel sandwiched between cookie and chocolate in the Twix. It’s the delightful hidden surprise. Really, I think them far nicer because one doesn’t realize (unless one happened to bake them) that a plain, slightly sunken chocolate shell conceals vast reservoirs of cheesecake. Or proto-cheesecake. Cheesecake-like substance.

Olive Oil Yoghurt Cake with Wild Blueberries and Lemon

Don’t be fooled by the lengthy title. This is a simple dessert that can be ready for the oven about 20 minutes flat. I’ve actually done it in ten, but I don’t want to inspire false confidence for those of you who don’t spend such a great portion of your waking hours in a kitchen.

This is a light, tender-crumbed cake that makes a perfect weeknight dessert. It’s so bright-tasting that I do think of it as quintessentially summery, but since I always use frozen blueberries (though fresh would be divine), there’s nothing to stop you from whipping this up in the dead of winter – which is when lemons are at their best, after all.

I love using olive oil because its fruity flavor makes such a nice contrast with the citrus and berries. However, canola or another neutral oil would certainly be fine. If you’re worried about too much tartness, you could swap orange zest and juice for the lemon. My mom always used to make blueberry muffins with orange juice, so that would make this like a blueberry muffin cake to me. And I can think of far worse things.

Raspberry Dark Chocolate Ice Cream

Husband was kind enough to buy me an ice cream maker for my birthday. A more cynical person might wonder if this were an entirely disinterested purchase, but I had placed it on my amazon wishlist and lobbied hard for its purchase, so I’m willing to let him off the hook.

The nice thing about homemade ice cream is that it’s actually kind of hard to screw up. For example, I enjoy the richness that tempered egg yolks lend to ice cream. Unfortunately, for my first batch, I tried to use frozen egg yolks leftover from my recent angel food cake that were insufficiently thawed. Instead of incorporating neatly into my milk and cream mixture, yolk bits floated to the surface in ugly yellow clumps. I strained them out, and no one was the wiser – though I’m sure you’ll understand that I want to try again before sharing the first ice cream recipe (which was peanut butter chocolate swirl) with the world. The strained product was still ridiculously tasty.

This time, I used fresh eggs, and let me just say that it made a difference.

Crème Brulée for Two

This Christmas yielded a bumper crop of exciting new kitchen gadgets and cookbooks. Hint for those of you with under-stocked kitchens: start a food blog, and the gift-giving people in your life will really get the message that you are serious about this whole cooking-and-baking thing. It probably doesn’t hurt that I blatantly publicize my amazon.com wish list before holidays and birthdays. This list has lately been stocked with lots of culinary accessories, but no more! I am pleased to report almost all of them were bestowed on me by generous friends and family. Listing them all would be tedious and slightly boastful, but I’ll definitely be highlighting various kitchen tools and cookbooks and their virtues in the weeks to come.

Today’s tool-du-jour is the Crème Brulée Torch. A Crème Brulée Torch is in the category of “things I’ve wanted for a long time that I’ve always been too frugal to actually purchase.” It seemed frivolous somehow, and frivolous things that you want but aren’t willing to invest in yourself make excellent presents. My cousin Ryan dispatched this charming tool to my house. In addition to melting and browning the sugar for crème brulée, the torch also provides hours of fun in the time-honored “playing with fire” tradition. We are fond of that tradition chez moi. Do note the ur-sophisticated use of French, because we are a fancy household, what with our food torches and French cuisine.

Other Christmas culinary gifts included real vanilla beans. I don’t know if these are the beans my husband bought for me, but he got me quite the substantial bundling of everyone’s favorite orchid pod. While I’ll continue to use vanilla extract for lesser baked goods, I thought that crème brulée deserved the real bean.

The biggest problem with Crème Brulée recipes is that they’re mostly designed to feed a crowd, and I really just wanted to make enough for my husband and me – and wanted smallish servings at that. I had more than my share of cookies this holiday season, and if I want to keep my figure (and I’m vain: I do) and don’t want to live at the gym (which I don’t: it smells), I need to be careful about my consumption of such decadent sweets.