Cheddar Yoghurt Biscuits

So these are the easiest thing ever.  I always thought biscuits were pretty painless – cutting fat into flour has never struck me as an especially onerous chore – but this recipe eliminates even that minor step.  There is no butter.  Repeat: no butter.  Nor is there any lard, shortening, margarine, or other solid fat ingredient.  With this recipe, you just whisk together the dry ingredients, dump in yoghurt or cream and cheese, and stir.  Well: there is some light kneading at the end, but it’s very de minimis.  I actually kneaded the dough in the mixing bowl instead of turning it out because I’m lazy that way. 

Despite their lack of solid fat, they really taste like biscuits.  They are, perhaps, slightly less flakey than a traditional biscuit.  However, they’re still far superior to anything that comes out of a cardboard cylinder.  If you’re put off of biscuits because they seem too fussy but are loathe to expose your family to whatever it is that goes into those refrigerated “biscuit” packages, then this might just be the recipe for you.

Apple Crisp

So, apples: this is their season, after all. Apples are on the EWG’s list of highly pesticide-soiled fruits, so I always try to buy them organic. I’m not persuaded that buying organic really make a difference – either to my health or the planet – but my tendency is to err on the side of caution, though there are times I suspect myself a bit of a Whole Foods stooge. At least the stores have a nice ambience.

The point of my preliminary ramblings is that organic honeycrisp apples were on special at Whole Foods last week for $1.49 a pound. This is, of course, insanely cheap. It’s like the price of regular apples! For honeycrisps, perched as they are atop the pinnacle of the apple world, they might as well be giving them away. I couldn’t turn my back on such a sale, but I also couldn’t summon the fortitude to tackle another apple pie.

Apple crisps make a lovely shortcut. They’re easy, delicious, and if you use all whole-grains, almost healthy. This recipe is based off of one in Seasons of Central Pennsylvania: A Cookbook and was apparently first devised in a Penn State agricultural lab. I usually prefer recipes with more homespun pedigrees, but I like that their concoction calls for all whole-grains for the topping. This is not to say that I baked as directed; I never do. I find the crisp improved with more sugar, a dab of cinnamon and nutmeg, and a hit of booze to sauce the apples – none of which are called for in the original. However, the whole grains are altogether appropriate and delicious. You won’t find yourself pining for a white flour crumbly top, or if you do – then you and whole grains simply don’t have much of a future, and you’ve probably never cared for apple crisps. How distressing!

Malted Vanilla Tart

This is a bit of a lazy recipe. I bought some cream cheese a month or two ago with vague ambitions of making danishes, but danishes only stay fresh for a day or two, and I doubt the capacity of my two-person household to consume an entire batch of danishes. I suppose I could be munificent and send the extras into my husband’s lab (as I often do with cookies), but I’m not sure they’d travel. Also, danishes sound like kind of a pain, and lately, I’ve been eschewing complicated, difficult recipes in favor of less convoluted alternatives.

This recipe includes a pastry crust, so it might not fall within most people’s definitions of “easy,” but I cannot emphasize enough the extent to which the art of making a pastry crust can be easily mastered with practice. I don’t even bother using ice water to bind the dough most of the time – I just use cold tap and am careful to be gentle when stirring.

So this isn’t the sort of recipe over which one ought to lose any sleep. However, the truly crust-averse among y0u could consider crushing chocolate graham crackers, adding a bit of butter, and using that for the tart’s bottom layer. I might have done so myself if I ever had graham crackers laying about my pantry.

But ought I bother? you might be thinking to yourself. Is it flavorful, this uncomplicated tart? I think it’s quite lovely. Its texture is somewhere between that of custard and cheesecake, and the flavors are simple, agreeable, and complementary. It’s not the most exciting thing to ever emerge from my oven, but husband and I polished it off with no difficulty. One would be hard-pressed to truly spoil a dessert combining the flavors of vanilla, chocolate, and malt.

Wild Blueberry Pie

My mother-in-law likes to vacation in Maine every year, and where husband and I live is a convenient near-halfway stopping point between the pine state and her Pennsylvania home. For the return leg of the trip, she has adopted the excellent habit of toting back huge quantities of wild blueberries for us to enjoy.
I am not kidding about the large quantities part: this time, she brought us a five-pound flat of wild blueberries. Delightful! Delicious! A great many of these still remain in our freezer and are gradually being whittled down as I use them for cereal and yoghurt toppings. However, I thought it best to enjoy the bulk of these blueberries in the fresh, unfrozen state in which God intended them to be consumed. By fresh and unfrozen, I don’t mean to imply unmodified … clearly, blueberries exist chiefly to be baked into pies.

Apple Crumb Pie

Like many cooks, I find myself far less drawn to the kitchen during summer months. We don’t have central a/c, and our kitchen is ill-served by the lone wall unit that keeps the living room tolerable on the warmest days. This doesn’t usually bother me, but it does make one give pause before baking something like pie that requires an hour or so of oven time.

Husband’s favorite pie is apple pie. Despite the heat, and despite the fact that apples are just now coming into season (and I made this pie about a month ago), his craving would not be denied. I think I was promised a pony in return – husband, where is my pony?

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.

Fresh Fig Tart with Citrus Custard

Since the beginning of the summer, I’ve been hoping to lay my hands on some fresh figs. I’m not so keen on them plain, but I love them in baked goods. I had some fig “pizza” – really, something very similar to what’s shown here – when I went to the local farmer’s market with some friends a few of weeks ago, and that only strengthened my resolve to locate these delectable, eminently perishable delights.

I finally stumbled across some figs while on a quest for peaches. Cobbler, I decided, would be just the thing for a late summer afternoon. I never even made it to the stone fruits; these figs were arrayed in luxuriant detail near the market door. I think it was fate.

Chocolate Whiskey Pots de Creme for Two

I am insanely enthusiastic about these crème brulee and crème brulee-like desserts for two. They’re so much simpler than cookies and pastry and so much easier to scale to a two-person household.

This is the first time I’d used my ramekins without also whipping out my crème brulee torch. It’s not that this wouldn’t be good with the crème brulee treatment – I seriously considered dusting each of my pots de crème with the requisite sugar shell – but they’re so rich, so decadent, so that I feared the sugar would just be overkill.

That said, if you decide to go ahead and make this a chocolate whiskey crème brulee, I won’t tell. It’ll be our little secret

I would recommend using light cream instead of half and half for improved texture. I had intended to use light cream but could only find half and half at the store. While the flavors were superlative – caramelized honey overlaid with a whiskey bite and all wrapped up in a chocolate velvet decadence – there was a very slight grainy texture to the pots de crème. Using cream would probably eliminate it. Even with half and half, though, there were no complaints about this dessert at my house.

Vegetable Tart

I bought a new tart pan a while back, and at the time, I had been concerned that this was a frivolous and superfluous kitchen indulgence. Did I really need it? Would I ever use it?

When I married, I didn’t know what size tart pan was standard and registered for (and received) a shallow 11” tart pan. I learned shortly after the wedding that 9” is the norm
and I’ve been kicking myself ever since, though, of course, most tart recipes are adaptable to either size.

Anyway, I bought a 9” pan, and it’s been in near-constant kitchen rotation since I made the ($8) splurge.

Gougeres Two Ways

So this is going to be an oddity of a blog entry. I’m showing pictures of one version of gougeres, but I’m going to recommend a non-depicted recipe that I made two days before. Both were done in a bit of a rush – one for a friend’s birthday party, and one for a French-themed dinner with some other friends. I only had a moment to photograph the second batch of gougeres, but I thought the first one was better.

Gougeres, if you aren’t familiar with them, are a pate a choux-based French cheese pastry. They taste rather like the most decadent cheese bread rolls imaginable. Pate a choux is the same pastry used to make éclairs and chouquettes. It’s quite the versatile combination of flour, water, eggs, and butter.

Both versions of gougeres were plenty tasty. The main difference is that version #2 deflated slightly after I took them out of the oven, whereas version #1 stayed fat, puffy, and round even after being hastily stuffed, still a touch warm, into a paper bag and thrown in the passenger seat of my car.

I’m all about fancy presentation like that.

Raspberry Custard Tart

One of the lovely simple desserts I tried in France (on the few occasions I was able to resist gorging on tarte tatin) was a custard raspberry tart. Emily and I were starving and needed a bit of a snack before making the uphill trek to the medieval walled city of Perrouge. Luckily, we passed a modest café that had coffee and pastries, and their raspberry tart looked especially appealing.

Shaker Lemon Tart

I’ve been itching to make a Shaker Lemon Tart for some time. For the uninitiated, a Shaker Lemon Tart (or pie) includes whole lemons, sliced very thin, that have been macerated in sugar and combined with eggs before being poured into pie crust and baked.

Because one uses the whole lemon, it seems advisable to use organic lemons, and those can be kind of hard to come by – although they are less so now that we finally have a local Whole Foods.

I tried to resist its allure.  Last time I lived near a Whole Foods, when I was a grad student in Houston, I was too broke to make it a shopping destination.  This time, I have succumbed by deluding myself their produce isn’t expensive in moderate quantities.

Where were we before my Whole Foods apologetics? Ah, Shaker Lemon Tart. This is usually a pie rather than an actual tart, as most recipes call for the lemon-sugar-egg mixture to be baked in a double crust. I have always cared much more for fruit pie fillings than their shells. Not believing this dish really necessitated the double crust treatment, I decided to make it an actual tart rather than a pie masquerading as such.

Tarte Tatin

So I totally wasn’t kidding about how it’s all French Food all the time at my house. I’ve made two tarte tatins in the past week. I think I’m going to throw in a lemon tart next week to shake things up, but tarte tatin shows every sign of becoming my new go-to dessert.

And how has it achieved this exalted status? Like my apple pie cookies (and yet: so unlike), tarte tatin has all the great flavors of apple pie for a fraction of the effort. Actually, I prefer it, as I can do without the cinnamon that is de rigueur in American apple pie. Tarte tatin omits superfluous spices and focuses on the core ingredients of sugar, butter, flour, and apples.

Does preferring a French version of apple pie to the American version make me unpatriotic? Or merely lazy?

Butterscotch Creme Brulee for Two

I can’t begin to tell you how enamored I remain of my crème brulee torch.This is the fifth or sixth batch of crème brulee I’ve made since Christmas. I’ve made chocolate crème brulees several times, but I’m still perfecting that recipe – the first batch tasted like heaven but was a bit too firm; in the second batch, I erred too far the other way and ended up with something too pudding-y – but neither experiment was at all taxing to consume. They’re just not ready for prime time, as it were.

I love butterscotch flavors and had been hankering to make butterscotch crème brulees for a while, but fear of burnt sugar put me off. Don’t let it dissuade you! As long as you use a modest burner heat and keep the half and half ready to be dumped in to the caramelized sugar at just the right instant, this should come out perfectly. I found the ease of this recipe rather ironic, as I had been expecting to be much more fussy than chocolate crème brulee.

This is what they looked like before the sugar shell, in lovely natural light 

I used my own crème brulee for two recipe as a template. I’m not sure why, but I felt like this gave me smaller crème brulees – or maybe I just divided the custard less evenly between the ramekins this time. But really, a little crème brulee goes a long way, and these were the perfect finale to a nice meal of roasted tomato soup.

By the by, I will be on vacation abroad when you read this, so if I'm unresponsive to comments, it's because I expect to spend very little time on the internet.  I'll be in France and Germany.  More on that will follow through the wonder that is automatic posting.

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.

Sweet Potato Pie

I don’t like pumpkin pie. I love pumpkin in other contexts – bread, cookies, cinnamon rolls – but in pie form, pumpkin doesn’t do it for me. Pumpkin pie always tastes flat and one-note to me, like cheap coffee or artificial vanilla-flavored ice cream. It’s totally not worth its calories.

Sweet potato pie, on the other hand, is something I can’t get enough of. It tastes like pumpkin pie’s brighter, sharper cousin – or perhaps pumpkin pie is the ugly stepsister to sweet potato pie’s Cinderella. Sweet potato pie is what pumpkin pie aspires to be when it wishes on a star.

Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls with Cream Cheese Frosting

I’d been craving Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls for the better part of two weeks. Ever since I saw this recipe (via macheesmo), I had been tormented by visions of fresh, gooey, pumpkin-y goodness.

Not that I’d ever had such a thing. Last time I had fresh-baked cinnamon rolls was back when I took Advanced Food in high school. That’s the sort of course they had at my religious fundamentalist boarding school. I mock that sort of thing now, but actually? Advanced Food was pretty fabulous. We came, we cooked, we ate. Repeatedly, for a whole semester.

Sour Cream Cheddar Cheese Biscuits (for one or two)

Among my sorrows is the fact that husband is not fond of biscuits. He is not enticed by fresh-baked biscuits with strawberry jam. He does not like them them slathered in gravy. He does not much care for their British cousin, scones with currants and clotted cream. He is more or less impervious to the appeal of the biscuit family of baked goods.

This is crazy. As a southern girl, I honestly don’t think I ever met anyone before him who doesn’t like a good biscuit. He did not confess his lukewarm feelings toward biscuits until after we were married, so I had been ignorantly and happily baking them for years. Sure, I noticed that I tended to eat the bulk of them, and that we had to throw away stale leftover biscuits with surprising regularity, but I thought he was just being health-conscious.

My First Chouquettes

I’ve been wanting to make chouquettes forever. The only thing holding me back has been lack of access to pearl sugar. My local IKEA does not have pearl sugar – I know, because I made a special trip just to find it – and it seems really stupid, conceptually untenable, to buy a $6 item online for which you have to pay another $6 in shipping. The alternative to pearl sugar is mini chocolate chips, but for whatever perverse reason, I don’t like them. I like regular-sized chocolate chips just fine, but mini-chips are not my cup of tea. I’m allowed to be inconsistent like that.