melting your mouth

These come from my Aunt Kathryn, who is always sending me great, not-too-complicated recipes to try.  She always especially has delicious finger food.  Our extended family gatherings are often at her house, and she served these cheese biscuits at our Christmas gift exchange a few years ago.  I try to keep the ingredients for these on hand, as they come together pretty quickly.  They also freeze well, so I usually freeze half the batch for a night when I need a before-dinner snack.

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As you may already know from a previous post, Red Velvet Cake is by far my favorite type of cake. So when I saw these Red Velvet Cake Balls from Bakerella, I had to try them. Her original recipe calls for a red velvet cake mix and cream cheese frosting from a jar. I’m sure that would be a much easier way to make them, but I decided to make them from scratch. I think ready-made cream cheese frosting tastes a little funny, and making a cake doesn’t really take that much longer than using a box anyway. The down side of this, though, is that they need to be refrigerated because of the cream cheese. I brought these to choir rehearsal a few weeks ago, but when I was calling them Cake Balls, everyone thought they needed a more elegant name, so I’ve decided to call them Red Velvet Cake Truffles from now on. This is obviously a recipe you can do a lot of playing with depending on the occasion (for instance, Bakerella now has an adorable Cupcake Pops version), so you may be seeing more of these in the future!

Red Velvet Cake Truffles

Here’s the basics of what I did, adapted from Bakerella. Feel free to let your creativity shine!

1. Make a quarter sheet cake. (I used the Red Velvet Cake recipe you can find here, which will fit in a quarter sheet pan, though just barely.)
2. While it’s cooling, make some frosting. (I used this cream cheese frosting, but without the peppermint.)
3. When the cake is cool, crumble it up into a big bowl. Add enough frosting so it will hold together in balls (probably about 16 oz, the size of one can of frosting).
4. Roll into balls, or whatever shape you wish, and chill in the fridge or freezer until nice and firm.
5. Melt some chocolate or candy coatings according to the directions on the package for dipping. (If you’re using chocolate, you probably will need to add a little bit of oil to it when you’re melting it.)
6. Dip the truffles into the chocolate or candy. I did some dark chocolate and some white chocolate. I thought the dark chocolate tasted better, but the white was prettier and looked more like a traditional red velvet cake. You could also drizzle them afterward with a different kind of chocolate or color of candy, dip them into sprinkles or other toppings while the chocolate is still warm. The possibilities are endless!

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.

This is another recipe that we always make at Christmas and that I don’t remember having any other time of year. They are a pecan shortbread cookie rolled in powdered sugar (the ones on the left in the picture). I’ve also seen similar cookies by other names, such as Mexican wedding cookies. We make ours in a skinny finger shape though, so we call them nutty fingers or lady fingers.

The recipe makes a bunch, but they are small and tend to go fast. They are slightly more labor intensive than some cookies, but they are absolutely delicious. The recipe comes from my grandmother, who always made them when my mom was growing up.

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This is my mom’s recipe for pecan toffee, which she thinks came from Better Homes and Gardens several years ago. It’s another one of those things that’s special because we only make it at Christmas. Like the Date Rock Cookies, I’m not putting a picture, but they’re on the platter with the Nutty Fingers on that post.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 c chopped pecans, divided
1 c sugar
1 c butter, softened
1/3 c water
5 1.55 ounce milk or dark chocolate bars, chopped into small pieces (I prefer dark. And of course, the better the chocolate you use, the better the toffee)

Special Equipment:

Candy thermometer

Line a 15″x10″ jellyroll pan with heavy duty aluminum foil.l Lightly grease the foil. Sprinkle 1 c of the chopped pecans to within 1″ of the edge.

Bring sugar, butter, and 1/3 c water to a boil in a heavy saucepan over medium heat. Stir constantly about 12 minutes, or until a candy thermometer reads 300 degrees. This is the “hard crack stage.” You can also check this by dropping a few threads of the candy into a glass of ice water to cool. The threads should then crack when you bend them rather than stretching.

Pour over pecans. Quickly sprinkle with chocolate pieces (so they melt). Let stand 30 s. sprinkle with remaining 1/2 c of pecans. Chill 30 minutes (or until hard) and then break up the toffee into bite size pieces. Store in an airtight container.