melting your mouth

This month’s Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Morven at Food Art and Random Thoughts. It was another wonderful Dorie Greenspan recipe — I’m seeing a lot of these lately. Baking from My Home to Yours is definitely on my wish list. I served Dorie’s “Perfect Party Cake” for our Easter lunch with my parents. This is a lemon flavored cake topped with a lemon meringue buttercream (also called Swiss buttercream) frosting and raspberry jam filling. I followed the recipe pretty much as directed, though it was supposed to be topped with coconut and I left that out. I don’t know, maybe it would be good, but coconut just doesn’t really go with lemon and raspberries to me. So I garnished it with lemon slices instead. If I’d had a tad yellow food coloring I probably would’ve added it to the frosting, too.

Anyway the cake was delicious, especially the frosting. It didn’t really rise that much, but it was plenty tall enough anyway. Someone apparently leaked to Dorie that we were making her cake, and so she got a message to us that some people had told her they’d had problems with the cake not rising, and she thought it might have to do with the flour. She thus recommended substituting 1 C minus 2 T all purpose flour for the cake flour, which I did. So I don’t know, it still didn’t rise much, but I thought it had a very nice texture anyway. It was really moist and pretty light.

The buttercream is rich, but I thought it nicely balanced the cake. (Mom thought it was a bit too heavy and that I should’ve been a bit lighter on the butter, and of course mother always knows best…) To make a Swiss buttercream frosting, you first cook the meringue (egg whites and sugar) over a pot of simmering water, and then beat it until very stiff before beating in the butter, and then, in this case, lemon juice. I will definitely be trying this again!

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In case you were wondering what I made for dinner to go with my French Bread — wonder no longer! Matt and I had Mom and Dad over for dinner so I could cook out of my new Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook that I got for Christmas. I chose one of her so-called “uncomplicated menus”, with a few changes. This is the original menu:

• Baked Goat Cheese with Garden Salad
• Carrot and Shallot Soup with Chervil Cream
• Charcoal-Grilled Chicken with Garlic Puree
• Cherries and Almond Cookies

We decided to change things around from this a bit. We had planned to make this menu back in January, and we bought ingredients and everything before Matt and I both got sick and had to cancel. We made the carrot soup then (I always like soup when I’m sick), and it was good but I wasn’t quite ready to have it again yet, so we decided to make our friend Kelly Branson’s butternut squash soup instead. Also, I’d been wanting to try the CBGB (cherries, biscuits, ginger, and butterscotch, oh my!) dessert Habeas Brulee posted a while back. But, we decided we didn’t need something quite so rich or complicated, and so we made just the almond biscuits and cherry sauce instead.

I’m not going to copy whole recipes out of this book, but I do have permission to share Kelly’s recipe for butternut squash soup which I highly recommend. I’ll give a summary of the other recipes though, and if you want more details, you can buy the book. Which, by the way, I highly recommend. I basically read the whole cookbook cover-to-cover between Christmas and New Year’s this year. It’s so beautifully written, and she includes interesting details about the origins of each recipe. Now, I just need to find an excuse to go eat at Chez Panisse!

Baked Goat Cheese with Garden Salad

I marinated the goat cheese rounds in olive oil and rosemary for a day. (It was supposed to be thyme, but I think Alice Waters would approve of using what I grow instead of having to buy something at the store.) Then I dipped the goat cheese in bread crumbs and baked it for a few minutes. I served this over mixed greens tossed in a light vinaigrette of olive oil and red wine vinegar.

Butternut Squash Soup
Recipe from Kelly Branson

Charcoal-Grilled Chicken with Garlic Puree

I marinated a whole chicken (cut into pieces) in garlic, red wine, and rosemary (again, it was supposed to be thyme, but I had rosemary so I used it). Matt grilled the chicken on a low charcoal fire. We also roasted garlic, and made a puree of that which we rubbed on the chicken after it came off the grill. We served this over roasted potatoes, and garnished with lemons.

Almond Biscuits with Cherry Sauce

Danielle at Habeas Brulee posted this gorgeous dessert a few months ago. She named it CBGB, for Cherries, Biscuits, Ginger and Butterscotch. The original version was almond biscuits, with a sauce made from sour cherries, garnished with candied, pickled ginger, and accompanied by butterscotch sauce. Some dessert, huh?! I’d still like to try the whole thing sometime, but for this meal, I wanted something not quite so rich and sweet. So I made the almond buttermilk biscuits and made a sauce of (frozen) black cherries, since I couldn’t find sour ones. I thought this was a perfect close to this meal. The cherry sauce was pretty sweet, but I added lemon juice for a nice tart flavor, and the biscuits were nice and crumbly but not too sweet. I definitely think I will at least make the biscuits again, and I might add some more almond extract next time, or maybe press some slivered almonds into the tops, as I wanted a little more almond flavor.

Tarts are a special dessert to me. In my Mom’s family, we always had Chess Tarts, usually made by my grandmother Meme, at special gatherings like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Before she moved into a retirement home, Meme taught me to make her tarts and gave me many of her tart pans so that I could make them on my own. So anytime I get to pull out her tart pans is special but I don’t think I’ve ever used them to make anything but Meme’s chess tarts, using her recipe for the pastry and the filling.

But, inspired by a recent post from Feeding My Enthusiasms for what Elle calls St George’s Chocolate and Qunice Jam Tarts, I decided to branch out. These tarts consist of pastry topped with jam (she used quince, I made some with apricot and some with orange marmalade) which is then topped with a filling made of dark chocolate and ground almonds. They are apparently reminiscent of English Bakewell tarts, though those usually don’t have chocolate in them. I made my own pastry instead of using ready made pie dough. I also used a new recipe for pastry, which I altered from a recipe my friend Stirling found at Cook’s Illustrated. It uses vodka to replace some of the water, which makes the pastry easier to work with but doesn’t make the pastry tough. The vodka evaporates while it bakes, and it apparently doesn’t react with the gluten in the flour the way water does to make it tough.

The tarts turned out pretty well. The new pastry was buttery and flaky, though a little less brown than my usual pastry, and the chocolate filling was rich but nicely complemented by the fruit in the jam. The apricot and orange were both good, but Matt and I both like the orange ones better. I didn’t really think the almonds added all that much though. I felt like they just made the filling heavier without adding much flavor. I think next time I would try using hazelnuts instead, which I think might go better with the chocolate anyway. But overall, it’s a recipe I would recommend. If you want to try the filling, click here for Elle’s recipe. My modified pastry recipe follows.

Sweet Pastry

3 c flour, sifted
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 c butter (1 stick), cut into slices
1/2 c shortening
1/4 c ice water
1/4 c vodka

Measure out sifted flour. Sift dry ingredients. Cut in butter and sugar. Add ice water and vodka, and mash together until just blended. If the dough won’t stick together, add a little more vodka. Pull off a small piece of dough and roll out to fit in tart pan. Place the dough in the pan, and use the palm of one hand to cut off the extra dough from around the pan. Reuse the extra dough scraps for the next tart. This makes enough pastry for a couple dozen tarts or two pies.

So I got the idea of stuffing acorn squash with pears a month or two ago from a post at briciole, someone commented suggesting gorgonzola, and I went from there. This is good as a not-too-sweet dessert, which was how I made it, but it could probably be a side dish or even a main dish with a few sides. This was a very good combination and one I will definitely make again.

Ingredients:
1 Acorn squash
about 1/3 c crumbled Gorgonzola
about 1/2 c Pecans, roughly chopped
1 Pear, chopped into 1/2″ cubes
a couple T Brown sugar

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 400 F. Cut acorn squash in half and scrape out seeds. Put a little bit of water in a jelly roll pan, and place halves of squash upside down in the pan. Bake for about 45 minutes, until squash is just tender. Meanwhile, mix gorgonzola, pecans, pears, and brown sugar. I’m not really sure if the amounts I listed above are right, so eyeball it. When the squash is done, turn it rightside up and mound the filling in each half. You may have to slice off the top of the squash so that it will sit flat. You want the filling really mounded up as much as possible, as it will cook down a little bit. Empty the water out of the pan, and bake the filled squash for another 7 minutes or so, until the topping is a little bit brown.

I know, it’s the new year, and everyone’s got all kinds of resolutions to exercise and eat healthier, and the last thing you need is more pictures of delicious sweet things. So, I promise this is the last of the Christmas sweets. This is a traditional yeast bread/cake often made by Moravians, usually at Christmas time, but sometimes other times of the year as well. My mom grew up in the Moravian Church, but doesn’t remember making sugar cake herself until I was little and she made it for the Candle Tea (a kind of church bazaar at Christmastime) at Raleigh Moravian Church in North Carolina. She got the recipe there from Mae Marshall.

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