TWD: Lemon Loaf Cake

I have made, over the years, rather a lot of lemon cakes. There's the lemon cake to impress and the demure little lemon cake and the lemon cake I make all the time.

Thanks to Dorie and our hosts this week at Treats and The Beauty of Life, now there's another one. Whatever shall I do? This one may become my "all the time" cake. It's a very simple recipe, requires one bowl and no mixer, is firm in texture and modest on the tongue, and goes excellently with an afternoon cup of tea. An excellent sort of thing to have in the freezer for Cake Occasions.

I have not been getting the camera out much lately, but here are before and after shots.

 

She left off watching Kipper as soon as the camera flashed, at which point I became very grateful for how quickly-put-together this recipe is.

I brought it to the office for an afternoon meeting, and it was well-received. I may have had three slices. Maybe.

I have been horrible at visiting everyone else's blogs. I will try harder this week, promise!

TWD: Pizza Rustica

I figured that this project would involve baking things I have never made before; that was pretty much the whole point. As someone who has been baking for well over a decade, I didn't expect that we would be making things I have never heard of. When I saw the words "pizza rustica" I thought, Hey, pizza. I make pizza all the time. Then people started talking about lattice tops and I thought, Uh... what?

Pizza rustica isn't pizza. It's kind of like a quiche, except it's mostly cheese instead of being mostly egg. It's kind of like a cheesecake, except it's savory. It's like nothing I've ever eaten.

But it is seriously good. Also--easy to make! The dough for the crust comes together in two minutes in the food processor, and is very soft and forgiving.

The filling gets a few turns with a spatula and you're done.

Lattice top? Like a boss.

 Put it in the oven. Bake it a bit longer than I did; at 35 minutes it was perhaps a teensy bit underdone, or else I didn't let it cool long enough because we were anxious to eat it!

For the recipe, check out Capital Region Dining and The Place They Call Home!

The recipe said it was usually served as a starter. Since we were having a friend over for dinner, we did that. I made a whole wheat walnut bread, roasted asparagus, Ina Garten's parmesan chicken, and for dessert we had ice cream and Outrageous Brownies. It was, in all modesty, one of the best menus I've pulled off in a long time.

And if you have any left over, I am informed that pizza rustica makes an awesome breakfast.

TWD: Irish Soda Bread

After the Great Rugelach Debacle earlier this month, I have to admit that I was relieved to have a simpler recipe on the schedule. Baking doesn't get any simpler than this: flour, baking soda, salt, buttermilk.

Mix, shape it a bit (but craggy-looking is good!).

Bake it.

Put butter on it (preferably Kerrygold Irish butter, which is amazing stuff). Eat it. That's it.

Which was good, because we were having company for dinner, and for some reason I decided to do it up proper. I made this ham from Food52, roasted butternut squash and tossed it with sauteed kale and toasted pine nuts, whipped up some mashed potatoes, and made a cinnamon-streusel pound cake from Tish Boyle's The Cake Book. On top of that, in the morning I made my usual cinnamon scones. (I had planned to make those on Friday, but inexplicably ran out of cinnamon chips, and my scone cravings do not permit denial.)

Everything was awesome except for the cake, which stuck to the pan (and still tasted awesome). This seems to happen whenever I try to make Bundt cakes with streusel in the middle, even with half a can of spray. I am going to swear off the darn things.

Our dinner guest, who has actual experience with the stuff, said that the bread was "almost" like the one his dad used to make. The "almost" was evidently because it was not dense as a brick, a distinction I am quite happy to live with. I thought it was wonderful, especially for something so dead easy, and will be happy to make it often.

Our hosts this week are My Culinary Mission and Chocolate Moosey. Go check them out!

TWD: Rugelach

It only took three recipes for this TWD project to get me out of my comfort zone! I've never made rugelach.

I've never eaten rugelach. For most of my life, I thought I didn't like nuts, and I've always been suspicious of fruit-based desserts. But that's what this project is for. Making things I wouldn't ordinarily make, because you never know. I was a bit daunted by the ingredient list and the time estimates, but I soldiered forth, list in hand. I ended up with two containers of Aurora toasted mixed nuts, a bag of SunMaid mixed dried fruit, and a jar of prune butter from our store's tiny kosher section.

The dough looked easy enough, and on Sunday morning while Youngest toddled screechily around the kitchen and got out all of the measuring cups, I warmed up Godzilla and got this thing underway.

I have to admit, this is a pretty awesome way to start a project:

The finished dough was pretty sticky. Someone was curious about what Mom was up to.

While the dough chilled, I mixed sugar and cinnamon, and more sugar and cinnamon and nuts. It looks like beach sand--or maybe I'm just ready for summer?

I started thinking about what a crazy-indulgent, expensive dessert this must have been to make back in the day--butter! cinnamon! nuts! My mental bar for ingredient availability is stuck around the year 1500. Meanwhile, Youngest strewed Cheerios all over the floor.

Everyone else came back from church. Lunch was eaten.

Dishes were done (also, sweeping). A walk to the park was taken, in hopes of ensuring a nap for the baby and at least a half hour of recharge time for the boy--the first part worked better than the second, but he was engrossed enough by Dinosaur Train for me to get back to the kitchen.

Time to fill these puppies! The dough was very easy to work, and I had ample filling--possibly more than ample, I discovered when it came time to roll them. No beauty contest winners, these! In they went for chilling. It was already after 2:00. I recommend spreading this over two days if you can.

Time for tea and Toll House cookies and some editing work on Fury before diving into dinner prep. Dinner consisted of roasted chicken quarters, roasted potatoes, and steamed green beans--AKA things I can make in my actual sleep--because at the ripe old age of 38 I have finally learned that one big kitchen project per day is quite enough. After dinner, I started slicing and baking. I always bake one pan at a time because honestly, I would rather it take longer than be fussing around switching and rotating pans and shooing away children while my oven gets cold.

DO NOT TRY TO SKIP THE PARCHMENT PAPER. Nonstick or not, I would still be scrubbing these things if I hadn't lined them.

The best-looking of the final results:

Not the most photogenic thing I have ever made. A lot of filling leaked out; a lot of rolls loosened. About half of them were reasonable-looking enough that I took them to the office for tasting (since I've never had them, I didn't want to rely on my own judgement). The verdict was a unanimous YUM. I can't say I cared much for them myself, and I probably won't make them again, but it was an interesting project, and now I can casually say, Oh, I can make those if the subject should ever come up.
 This week's hosts are My Baking Heart and The Urban Hiker, so you can visit them for the recipe.
Looking forward to the Irish Soda Bread, which only has four ingredients. ;-)

TWD: Choclate Truffle Tart(s)

Making sweets for other people is a bit of a tricky thing. More so than simply cooking for them, I think. A meal is sustenance, after all, a basic thing. Dessert is the extra mile. You want to make something they will like. You want them to like you for it. You want them to feel both appreciated (look at what she did! for me!) and appreciative (look at what she did!) without it being, well, all about you because you are, after all, doing it for them.

Sometimes I wonder how humans manage to do anything at all.

This is a surprisingly easy recipe. It does take time, what with making and prebaking the dough, but there was nothing particularly tricky about any of the steps (she said, fresh off a cake that required making two different sorts of caramel). That, too, makes it a good dinner party recipe, assuming that you have most of the day to fuss around with things; at least you'll know that dessert is done.

I made one error and two deliberate changes in this one. The error was adding a whole egg, not just the yolk, to the tart crust. I'm pleased to say that it didn't seem to be a problem.

The first change was that I made one 9-inch tart instead of 6 tartlets, because much as I adore Dorie and Julia, and much as I love an excuse to buy cooking gear, I couldn't really justify going out to buy a bunch of tiny tart rings. I had to bake it somewhat longer than the recipe stated before the center firmed up.

The second change was that I skipped chilling the rolled dough before baking it, because I have a side-by-side refrigerator that does not have room for a sheet pan full of tart. This, again, did not appear to harm the result.

I suggest making this for people you love, as soon as possible. Not a person, mind you. It's just as well that this post comes too late for Valentine's Day, because you need a lot of friends to help you eat it, and they should be good friends, because this is a very good dessert. This is serious chocolate. Six servings? I think we got ten.

For the recipe, see Good Eats and Sweet Treats, one of the hosts this week.

TWD: White Loaves

Is it strange that I can't remember what first moved me to make bread? I remember the kitchen I made it in, on the 1800 block of Commonwealth Avenue, a wretched little space with one balky window that looked into an airshaft. The refrigerator was older than I was, and needed frequent defrosting -- something I often did with a hair dryer, in defiance of all common sense. Our kitchen table was a folding card table I ordered from a Spiegel catalog (I had no idea how to shop back then); it had a green checked tablecloth, and was not by any means an ideal surface on which to knead bread. It would be years before I acquired a stand mixer, or a decent table.

It's not as if I grew up with memories of fresh bread wafting through my mind. We bought cheap, square supermarket loaves, and I ate them with peanut butter or salami. An unvarying menu met some need in me that is probably not all that obscure.

Still, one day in that unpromising kitchen, I put yeast and flour and water together and made the first recipe in Bernard Clayton's landmark tome. If I knew who Julia Child was, it was a vague awareness of her on television, and I had never heard of Dorie Greenspan. The Internet was in its infancy. The bread was underkneaded and overfloured, but I eventually made more of it.

That is one of the things about bread. It is almost impossible to make it, or to eat it, without thinking of all of the breads that have gone before. It gets its hooks into you deeper than just about anything else, in my experience, however casual your baking. Yeast, flour, and water are a time machine. You can look through your own kitchen window into ancient Mesopotamia, where the yeast (probably) made its way into bread via beer, into colonial America, into ovens around the world.

The simplest of animals and an accident of its biology link your hands with thousands before. I can't imagine a better choice for the inaugural recipe of the new Tuesdays with Dorie project.

I am not particularly good at these setup shots, but here are the ingredients.

The dough ready to rise.

First rise. (Elapsed time: sufficient to bathe a toddler and clean up the kitchen.)

Shaping.

Second rise. (Elapsed time: sufficient to try feeding toddler three different things in hopes she will eat something.)

Baking. (Elapsed time: sufficient to wipe toddler's nose approximately two hundred times.)

The verdict? Perfectly pleasant, smooth, and scrumptious, but a bit saltier than I would prefer in a perfect world. I could probably have let it enjoy a longer second rise, but I thought we had somewhere to go in the afternoon. Still, an auspicious beginning for the new project!

The recipe is posted with one of this week's hosts, Someone's in the Kitchen.