Pineapple Upside-Down Cake

I’ve always had a fascination with pineapple upside-down cake, but I hadn’t actually eaten it. It just looks like something that would appeal to me: fruit, cake, and more sugar than could ever be necessary. And it’s upside-down. Plus, it’s something that can be screwed up pretty easily, which means I have to try baking it, and then I have to mess it up. Destiny.

The basic formula for the recipe is Cake + Pineapple. If you know how to make a cake, you (theoretically) know how to make pineapple upside-down cake.

First comes the sugar. This is what goes in the pan first – what the pineapple will be saturated in when you flip the cake over.

It starts with melted butter, as these things so often do. Then you add brown sugar and regular sugar, melting the whole mass until it bubbles and turns into something resembling caramel:

Depending on the recipe, this can either go into the pan over the pineapple or under the pineapple. Either way, both of them go in after the cake. Very important. This is not a Pineapple Right-Side-Up Cake.

This part is where you can get really creative with pineapple patterns. I mostly just tried to stuff as much pineapple into the pan as I could possibly fit. Also, it’s the general rule to throw some maraschino cherries into the mix; I didn’t have any. Oops. This pile of goo can sit while you make the rest of the cake.

Mix the wet and dry ingredients separately, except the butter and sugar. Keep those for later.

See how simple this is? Don’t worry, I screwed it up.

Next, cream the butter and sugar together until they’re as smooth and fluffy as butter and sugar can get.

Maybe not that fluffy.

Then, add a third of the flour mixture to the butter. Then half of the egg mixture. Another third of the flour. Last half of the egg mixture. Next? Add the rest of the flour mixture! Ta-daaaa… Cake batter:

All this batter gets spread out over the top of the pineapple/sugar-goo mixture. Then stick it in the oven for 50-55 minutes, or however long it may take. I left mine in the oven for an hour, and it still wasn’t completely done.

Now. Whatever you do, no matter how excited you are to eat a piece of cake, do NOT remove this from the pan yet. It will fall apart and make you feel horrible. This is personal experience talking. Leave the cake in the pan. Let it set up for a while before you risk moving it. That way, it will taste as good as it looks.

Verdict: Success, but I’m not happy about it. After it set up for a while, it was pretty tasty, even though it had mostly fallen apart.

 

Summer Fruit Tart

I have several recipes that are on my “Baking Bucket List,” except I don’t actually call it that. Croissants are on the list, as were eclairs (check!), and this particular type of fruit tart.

During my time in France, this is one of the desserts I consistently picked up at the pâtisserie, and it never occurred to me until sometime in the past six months that I could actually make my own. For all the pastry-worship I give it, there’s really nothing terribly complicated about the recipe, as long as you can master a flaky crust and pastry cream, and manage to cut up several pieces of fruit without collapsing.

It does, however, take the better part of a day, so you should probably just call in sick to work to make one.

First step: Pastry cream. This has to chill for 3 hours, so it’s best to start with it (if you want, you can make this earlier and store it in the refrigerator for a couple days before making and filling the crust). It’s a somewhat fussy mixture, so you may want to have enough ingredients on hand for a backup batch if it’s your first time attempting pastry cream. I had already made it at least once (Banana Cream Pie) so I knew what I was getting into.

Heat the half-and-half with 3/4 of the sugar over medium heat. Important! Make sure you are familiar with your stove’s heat level. If you assume medium heat means putting the burner at 5 on a 10 scale, you would be mathematically correct but cooking-ly SO wrong. My (parents’) stovetop tends to be much hotter than I remember.

While this is heating up, prepare the egg mixture, working quickly so you can get back to the milk before it scorches. Mix 5 egg yolks together, then add sugar and mix again, then add cornstarch and mix again. The egg mixture color should go from Raw Yolk Yellow to Tweety Bird Yellow (ie, become a little paler).

Yolks alone

Yolks with Extra

When the milk mixture is fully heated, pour it into the egg mixture and stir. Then, pour everything back into the saucepan and return to heat – I suggest LOW heat. What is a liquid now will become a custard suddenly and without warning, and then will begin to burn if the heat is up too high. Stir it constantly and as soon as it becomes thick enough (you’ll know when it happens) remove the saucepan from heat.

I actually burnt mine a little, but caught it before it became unusable. All that happened is the sugar caramelized a bit, making the whole thing taste a bit like crème brûlée, which is far from a bad thing. While the cream is still hot, add the 1/2 inch slices of butter and the vanilla, mixing until the butter completely melts. Cover the cream with plastic wrap, making the plastic touch the surface of the cream so it does not form a skin (it’s as gross as it sounds), and refrigerate for 3 hours, at least!

NEXT! The crust. Making pastry crusts is one of my favorite things, made simpler by my mom’s Mothers’ Day present of a food processor. Now, all crusts are not created equal. Different crusts are used for different pastries; this is a tart, so it uses a tart crust. Differences include, among other things, the presence of an egg and the absence of water.

If you don’t have a food processor, you can use the old fashioned hand-mixing method, which I had to suffer through for many crusts. Your best investment is a pastry blender, which is significantly cheaper than a food processor.

First, combine all the wet ingredients with one another, and the dry ingredients with one another.

Egg yolk, cream, and vanilla

Flour, sugar, salt.

Then, cut a very cold stick of butter into small chucks – mine are usually around 1/4 inch. The way I do it is to cut down the stick lengthwise, then rotate the butter 90 degrees, and cut lengthwise again. This gives 4 long strands of butter, which you can then cut across the middle to get small chunks.

"Things that are more easily described with pictures"

Toss this chunks into the flour so they are lightly-coated – I coat my fingertips in flour, too, so the butter is easier to handle and less likely to melt. Process (or use pastry blender) until the butter is cut into the flour and the whole thing begins to look like coarse meal. This is about 15 one-second pulses or several minutes of pastry blending. Pastry crusts are some of the only recipes in which I will deter you from using your hands to mix – it’s important to keep the butter as cold as possible throughout the process.

Then add the egg mixture from before and mix until the dough just begins to come together, sort of like when you are building a sandcastle but the sand is not quite wet enough to keep it all together.

I probably compare my foods to wet sand too often

Now you can use your hands! Smash all the dough into a disc, about 6 inchs in diameter, and wrap the whole thing in plastic wrap. Refrigerate it until fully chilled; mine only took 45 minutes or so. If you keep it chilled too long, it becomes difficult to roll out, and you have to sit around waiting for it to warm up again.

Figure out something to do for 45 minutes. I took this opportunity to take a shower, because that is something I like to do… pretty much daily.

When the dough is chilled, roll it out to a diameter about an inch or two larger than the tart pan you will be using. This time I used a new trick I learned: placing the dough between two lightly floured pieces of parchment paper. It worked alright, but not any better or worse than just using the counter. I suppose it made for less mess in the end, though. After the dough is rolled out, place it in the tart pan and gently push the dough into the pan corners and the fluted outside edge. Remove the excess dough by rolling a rolling pin over the top of the pan, and put the pan in the freezer for around a half hour.

While it’s cooling, preheat the oven to 375 degrees. After a half hour, remove the crust from the freezer and line it with a piece of aluminum foil, and fill it with whatever you use for pie weights. In my house, we use beans. I think we’ve been using the same beans the whole time I’ve been alive. This is not an exaggeration.

Bake this for about 30 minutes, then remove the foil/weights and bake for 5 more minutes, until the inside of the crust is completely baked. Let the crust cool completely before filling it with the pastry cream, or else you will have a milk-soup filled crust. There is a reason people don’t make milk-soup pies.

The little brown flecks are the previously mentioned burnt sugar, but like I said, it added a nice flavor. Next, arrange the fruit you cut up at an earlier time, probably either when the crust was cooling in the refrigerator or when it was cooling in the freezer (I told you this was an all-day thing). I was going to have strawberries, but what had appeared to be a fresh box at the store was dangerously close to moldy.

WAIT. You’re not done yet. A fruit tart is not complete without the shiny gloss that comes from a jelly glaze. Just heat up some apple jelly on the stove until it’s boiling (have you ever seen jelly boil? it’s weird) and use a pastry brush to drizzle it over all the fruits. You could use other types of jelly, but apple is good because (1) the color won’t mess with any of the fruit and (2) apple flavoring is too mild to overpower any other flavors.

Verdict: Success! Life goal completed!

Next Mission: Definitely bread, it’s just difficult to decide what kind.

Recipe after the jump…

Red Velvet Cake… Spheres

This recipe is adapted from one found on Bakerella, but I substituted from-scratch cake for a box mix.

There are times when things just have unfortunate names. This is one of them. I even tried several alternatives, but there’s really no other way to name these morsels except “Cake Balls,” which my sister had a heyday with. It’s cake; it’s in a ball. What can you do?

The whole process starts with a Red Velvet Cake, which is pretty much a Devil’s Food Cake with 3,000 (or so) fluid ounces of red food coloring. It is traditionally served with Cream Cheese Frosting.

The cake starts out as most crumb cakes do, by beating the butter until smooth, adding sugar and beating until fluffy, and then incorporating the eggs one at a time. After all that, it looks like this:

Oh, and. Don’t forget the dry ingredients. Either before or after the butter-creaming (I prefer before, because I like to have everything in order before I throw it into disarray), the cake flour, cocoa, and salt should be sifted together and set aside. I’ve mentioned the importance of sifting cake flour about ten thousand times before, but it is important and so I will repeat it. Sift the cake flour. And sift the cocoa too, because it acts just like flour. Okay? Okay.

Then, the fun part. If you look closely in the picture of all the ingredients, you see a teeny little bottle of red food coloring, right in front of the buttermilk. That is only half the amount of food coloring needed for this cake (2 Tbsp). It seems like a lot because… it is a lot. Have your mom buy it, like I did.

The food coloring goes straight into the buttermilk:

And then fully incorporated:

Now, gather all your items around you in a little pow-wow. The butter-mush should be in the largest bowl, directly in front of you, because everything else will be added into that bowl.

Now, the dry ingredients and the blood-colored buttermilk – blood-ermilk – will be added in alternating sequence, and in three steps. It goes like this: Half of the flour, all the blood-ermilk, rest of the flour. It will not want to mix at first, because flour never likes to do anything with anyone, but keep at it until completely mixed.

Then comes the step that, chemically, I cannot account for. I understand the need for a chemical leavener (I mean, duh, it’s cake) but I don’t understand why it has to come in this particular form. Then again, I haven’t Googled it, so that might be my own fault. It’s pretty fun, though – remember in elementary school when everyone’s Science Fair project was making a volcano with baking soda and vinegar? You get to do that!

Another part I don’t understand: you let the reaction carry out completely (until it stops bubbling) and then you put it in the batter.

Whatever, it’s fun and explosive.

Bake for 25-30 minutes at 350 degrees, and let the cakes completely cool before starting the… sigh. Ball-forming process.

Step one is crumbling up both layers of the cake into a giant bowl. Seriously, the largest bowl you own.

Add the entire can of Cream Cheese Frosting and mix until all the crumbs are equally coated. I used my hands, because I think it’s easier that way, but it does get messy and turn your hands a bit pink. Then, take small globs of the mixture at a time and roll them into balls, about an inch in diameter.

Let them cool in the refrigerator for a bit. The Bakerella recipe says “several hours,” but I just put them in for 45 minutes and it was enough for me. You just want them firm enough so that they don’t crumble when you try to coat them. Speaking of: melt some chocolate in whatever chocolate-melting fashion is your favorite (I chose the microwave) and coat each of the balls in chocolate, setting them on wax paper afterwards.

Then let them set until the coating hardens. Toward the end of it all, I was getting impatient, so I put around half of them in the freezer so they set up more quickly. But in Taste Tests, my family seemed to Ooh and Aah over the ones that were still partially wet, so keep that in mind. It kept the cake lighter/fluffier, while the freezer made it denser (but still delicious).

Verdict: Success! Of great proportions! I don’t even like Red Velvet Cake, I made these for my sister, but all my family members turned to mush over the delectability of these mini-desserts.

Next attempt: A bread of some sort; possibly (finally) croissants, if I get enough sleep.

Recipe after the jump…

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

My first-ever attempt at baking something – actually baking something, not just mixing ingredients in a bowl – came when I was around 9 years old. I mixed eggs, flour, salt, chocolate chips, and a few extras that had no business being in the batter, put blobs of them in the microwave, and ruined our dark blue plastic plate. The kind with different compartments.

They turned out… edible… and I amazed my parents by creating something that was both chewy and crunchy at the same time.

Anyway, I have a sort of nostalgia for baking chocolate chip cookies; even though they’re not my favorite cookie to eat, they’re my favorite to bake. Oatmeal is a nice addition, because I like to keep things interesting.

The cast includes two types of sugar, which I will spend a lot of time raving about when we get there.

A good thing to do before you start cooking, which I hardly ever remember to do, is to look through the ingredient list and see what temperature things need to be. Par example, the butter here needs to be softened, so it can be easily creamed, but not too soft – melted butter would turn this cookie super-flat and extra-crispy. But not really in the good way that you’re thinking of.

So, while you’re setting everything out, let the butter sit on the counter. I put my two sticks directly over where the dishwasher was running, because it heats up the counter and would speed up the softening process.

To use up extra time, I mixed all the dry ingredients together, too:

Once I start baking, I like to be able to do a bunch of things all in sequence. So I try to mix as many things as possible that won’t chemically react with one another and mess up the final product. Even though I generally mess up the final product anyway.

How’s the butter? Softened? Neat. Now it goes in a large bowl (all other ingredients will eventually end up in this bowl) and can be creamed with a hand-mixer.

It’s so pretty! Next comes my favorite part: the sugar. Specifically brown sugar. I’ve always had an infatuation with it, because… just… look at it!

It has an amazingly rich, nutty aroma and the consistency reminds me of sand – there’s no romantic way to compare something to sand, but it’s true, and I love it. But it’s not just the brown sugar: equal parts brown & white sugar are mixed into the butter until it’s fluffy. Then, two eggs, added one at a time, to make this:

It almost looks like it could be dough – I wonder what would happen if it was baked just like this? Probably something similar to microwave-cookie-fiasco. To avoid that, the dry ingredients are mixed in next. Use some old-fashioned elbow grease to smooth the dough out, because at first, it won’t want to mix.

Fully submissive cookie dough

Then, the vital parts – chocolate chips and oatmeal.

At this point, the dough was a little difficult to deal with and my bowl was overflowing, because I had started with one that was too small. So I stuck my hands right in and mixed it, trying carefully to do it as quickly as possible so nothing melted. When I read the directions again, it said that this recipe would yield sixteen cookies. That’s all. This was a massive bowl full of dough that was only supposed to make sixteen cookies. I saw this as a challenge, and make gigantor heaping two-inch (at least) balls on my cookie sheets, then slid them into the oven.

These massive dough-balls turned into likewise massive cookies, some of which attempted to conglomerate into One Cookie-to-Rule-Them-All:

But it’s not so bad, because if you tell yourself you’re just going to have one cookie, you can ignore the fact that it’s probably the size of 4 normal cookies, combined.

Verdict: Success! But these are the type of cookies that taste better after they’ve cooled completely.

Next attempt: Something involving Red Velvet; my sister is visiting and she’s made a request.

 

Angel Food Cake: I Made All the Mistakes, So You Don’t Have To

When I brought this cake to my friends (told you I share!) almost all of them remarked that they’d never had homemade angel food cake before.

Probably because baking angel food cake makes you (me) want to die. Well, it used to, for the first three times I made it. But I think – I think – that I’ve messed up everything that can be messed up in this recipe. So, now, the last two cakes I made turned out wonderfully.

Angel food cake is really a test of skill, because the ingredient list is quite short (eight of them) yet it manages to still be so fickle.

Not that I have any skill.

WAIT – I said eight, didn’t I? And that picture only has… seven… what’s missing?

THESE. ALL OF THEM.

Yup – one dozen eggs. Well, specifically just the egg whites, which reminds me. The first step is to separate all the whites and yolks, and it takes a little time.

This should be done first because eggs separate more easily when they are cold. The yolk is less likely to break, and if there is ANY yolk AT ALL in the batter, your cake is ruined and you just wasted a dozen eggs. This is not a good feeling; I’ve felt it too many times in my short life. Here, red text: DO NOT GET ANY YOLK IN YOUR BATTER.

Or eggshell, either. Because that is just gross.

SO. The eggs should be cold when you separate them, but need to be room temperature for the cake; that’s why this is the first step, so the egg whites can hang out and warm up while you set out all the other ingredients:

This is called mise en place. It’s French, which means it makes you a legitimate baker. It’s also very important for making angel food cake, because everything has to happen in fairly rapid sequence.

First, use a hand mixer (or whatever) (just don’t hurt yourself) to beat the egg whites until juuuust frothy.

Ew.

Then you add the VERY important ingredient: Cream of Tartar. Also some salt, but tartar is the most important. This powder is a residue found in wine barrels after they are emptied, because grapes are one of the only significant sources of the acid. What it does with egg whites… well. I’m a Chemistry nerd. You might skip this part if you’re not. The acid breaks down the proteins in the egg whites (which normally prevent the incorporation of air, making a dense cake) and makes them lighter, so that they form the fluffy, bubbly blob of goodness:

I want an egg-white pillow

THEN the sugar comes to the party, which the Cream of Tartar turns all shiny. Continuing to beat the egg whites makes them set up into “soft peaks.”

Which I think is what this is

Just remember, egg whites are easily over beat… en. over beaten. So just beat them until they are definitely staying up on their own, but not much longer than that. Then the vanilla, lemon juice, and almond extract go in.

Next is my favorite part, when the dry ingredients get incorporated into the egg whites. It’s tricky, because you don’t want to agitate the egg whites too much or they will deflate. So, you use a technique called “folding,” where you take a rubber spatula and… then link to a video from YouTube because it’s too difficult to describe. I learned from watching Alton Brown. Hyperlinks are fun!

Next, the batter goes into a pan which has NOT BEEN GREASED AT ALL, DO NOT GREASE IT. It will end up like my deflated Black Forest Cake, except worse. Deflated Black Forest Cake is still good – deflated Angel Food Cake tastes like dried rubber cement made from rotten eggs. Also, greasing the pan prevents the vacuum seal from forming between the different portions of the pan (assuming yours has a removable center), so the batter will drip all over the oven floor. Yes, it’s from personal experience.

Bake it!

Then, don’t touch it!

That is, you can touch the pan. But leave the cake in the pan until it cools completely. Most angel food cake pans come with little legs so you can invert the pan, but if yours doesn’t, resting the center on the neck of a bottle or funnel works, too.

If you did everything correctly, the cake should stay in the pan, even when it’s upside-down.

Verdict: Success! I have one friend who I’m fairly sure ate half of the cake all by himself. It made me feel accomplished.

Next Mission: Get a decent night’s sleep.

Bakin’ with Booze: Black Forest Cake

I love holidays, because: (1) they give me a legitimate reason to bake sweets, and (2) they give me a captive audience on which to test my creations.

Also… because they are holidays.

For Fathers’ Day this year, my dad – or “father,” as it were – wanted a Black Forest Cake, which I’ve always been curious to try out. Any food involving poached cherries is good in my book. Plus, since this recipe hails from Germany, it has a sweet authentic German name: Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte. Oh, and, just when you thought it couldn’t be more intriguing… liquor. Specifically kirshwasser, which is a cherry-flavored brandy and essential to the recipe. Sort of. Just because it means I get to use alcohol in my cooking.

Three main ingredients come together to make the kirshtorte: cake, poached cherry filling, and whipped cream.

Voila, the cast of characters for the cake (ignore the Ghiradelli, it was a little too eager to get in the picture, but doesn’t get involved until the last step). This particular recipe calls for the cake to be a genoise, which is a fancy name for a sponge cake made with whole eggs. Genoise is a much lighter, drier cake than what is commonly found in America, which makes it good for this recipe; too dense a cake could overpower the cherries and make everything in general too cloying to be satisfying.

The important thing to remember about genoise – wait, this needs to be in red – Do not ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER, ever grease the pan. Do. Not. Do it. Naturally, I forgot this. We’ll see what happens.

Another important step to remember for not only genoise, but for any cake, is to make sure to sift the flour. It’s especially important for a sponge cake such as this, which uses no chemical leavener but relies on air pockets in the batter to give it lift and texture. In the case of this chocolate genoise, sift the flour and the cocoa powder together. Then let it hang out for a bit while you do some important stuff.

This recipe uses a lot of eggs, because they basically stand-in for any liquid that might go in a cake instead. Using the whole egg makes it easier to beat; egg whites are notoriously fickle. Still, you’ll follow the same steps as you would when using egg whites, by folding the dry ingredients into the eggs in small increments.

 

For now, focus on beating the eggs.

 

Mix everything together and put into a 9″x 3″ round pan, or two 9″ x 1.5″ round pans like I did. Remember, these pans have NOT been greased, because you are much smarter than I am. Instead, line the bottom(s) of the pan(s) with parchment paper. Just the bottoms. No grease.

Sigh.

Put in a 350 degree oven for 30-35 minutes, and get ready for booze-time!

The next three steps (because I lied, there are 4 ingredients, not 3) need not be performed in any particular order, as long as everything is finished by the time the cake cools. I started with the cherries.

The recipe originally called for one cup of cherries, but my dad is a notorious cherry-lover, so I bumped it up to two cups. And a bit extra. Actually, I just used the entire bag – I think it was 12 oz. But really, ONE cup of cherries? That simply does not cut it.

Poaching the cherries is pretty easy, it’s sort of like making macaroni and cheese. Well. In the fact that you are using a saucepan and boiling water in it, and then putting something else in the saucepan. That’s about all they have in common. Just put some sugar and water in a saucepan, boil the water, then add the cherries and lower the temperature to a simmer (I used a 2.8 on a 10 scale burner). Let them hang out there for about 10 minutes, or until they’re soft. Then drain them, tossing out all the juices, even though it’s sad to see them go.

Next: the cake syrup. Like I said, genoise is a somewhat dry cake, so if you’re used to a moist, Betty Crocker cake, the solution is to brush your cake with syrup after you bake it. A cake syrup is just simple syrup, except I call it cake syrup because you put it on cake. Ta-da. My kids will probably have very logical names, too.

Simple syrup: Equal parts sugar and water. Boil until the sugar dissolves, then let cool. Cake syrup: Take cooled simple syrup, add flavoring. Specifically, kirshwasser.

 

Party's here !

 

An important thing to note with this recipe is that none of the alcohol used will be baked off; it’s all going into ingredients that are done cooking. I mean, I used maybe three teaspoons in the whole cake, but if you’re someone who does not want any alcohol at all, you might want to opt out of the ‘wasser, because it will be staying in there. I used 1/4-tsp of kirsch for 1/2-cup syrup.

Next! Whipped cream. I went over this in my elcair recipe, it’s just heavy cream, sugar, and… wait… More Kirshwasser!

 

We're gonna have so much fun, you guys!

 

After all this, the cake should be done baking, and the results should look nothing like this:

Those are not pancakes. Those are my genoise…s…? I realized my mistake as soon as they came out, of course. The reason you don’t grease the pan(s) when making a spongecake like this is because the cake gets its lift from the air bubbles. The batter needs something to cling to in order to help it rise, ie the sides of the pan, but when the sides of the pan are greased, the batter can’t cling, and it deflates into a helpless pool of mush.

But it still tastes good.

After the cake cools completely, assembly begins. I was originally going to have 4 layers, but with my cakes turning out so thin, I could only manage two. So. Take a layer of cake and brush it with kirsch-cake-syrup. Put it on the cake, not in your mouth. Next, a thin layer of whipped cream, on top of which go the poached cherries:

I almost stopped right there. Doesn’t it look beautiful? Deconstructed Black Forest Cake. But I was on a mission, and I don’t give up easily. So, next layer on top, and repeat with the cake syrup and whipped cream. Then coat everything with whipped cream, making sure to wash your hands every time you dip your fingers in the cream and have to lick them off. On accident. Coup de grace: chocolate curls.

Kind of short, but still pretty. It’s easy to pretend that you meant to make it this way.

Verdict: Success… ish. My dad was happy, so I was happy. Damn greased pans.

Next Misson: Still planning on those meat pies, but cake-time interrupted.

 

Bakin’ with Booze: Beer Batter Bread

I have conflicting theories on who the major audience for Beer Batter Bread would be. On one hand, college students are notorious beer drinkers, therefore being more likely to have a brewski hanging around the house.

On the other hand, college students are notorious beer drinkers, so why would they use a bottle for something other than drinking?

Either way, beer bread is amazing. It’s crispy on the outside but deliciously dense and soft on the inside, and it only takes 6 ingredients to make.

If you’re over 21. Because I think I’m required to say that.

Cast of Characters: Flour (duh), brown sugar, baking powder, salt, and melted butter. And beer (duh, again). One of the fun things about beer bread is that the type of beer used influences the taste of the results; every time you make it, you potentially get a new kind of bread. I used Harp, because it is a nice beer, and it happened to be in my refrigerator.

I would suggest not using a cheap beer (Read: Keystone, PBR if you’re a dirty hipster) because you’ll get a cheap bread. But don’t use your favorite beer either, as you’ll probably want to drink that one halfway through the recipe, which will not make your bread bake well.

Aim for your 3rd favorite beer.

Preheat oven to 375; grease one (1) bread pan. I use this:

to grease my pans. My dad got it for me for Christmas. It’s “professional grade” and pretty intense, but spray one coat and absolutely nothing will stick to the inside of that pan. Smells a little funky, but highly recommended.

Now. Mix all the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Then, read the recipe again. Realize it says the beer needs to be at room temperature. Your beer is cold. Set beer on counter and wait.

I passed the time by packing my lunch for tomorrow and then working out.

<Tangent> Do you ever do this after you work out? Right afterwards, I am feeling so strong and ferocious, so I go to the mirror to see if anything has changed. How would that ever make sense? It’s never different, so I usually just suck in my belly a little bit to make myself feel better. </Tangent>

Afterwards, the beer was still a little bit chilly, but I tend to be impatient. Open the beer and immediately pour ALL of it into the batter – it will get foamy, and that’s what you want. All that foam makes it easier for you to mix the moisture into the dry ingredients, and it will disappear quickly, so use it while it’s still there. Stir quickly until the dry ingredients are fully incorporated, but the batter is still lumpy.

If it reeks of beer, you’re doing it right.

“Pour” the batter into your greased pan. It won’t want to go there; it likes the safety of the bowl and will try to stick to it with all its strength. Don’t feel bad, just scrape it out with your hands if you need to.

Remember that butter that you melted, like, ages ago and you forgot even existed? Go get it. Drizzle the butter over the bread – this is what will help it get that crispy, delicious crust. Bake for 37 minutes.

It will look a little weird when it comes out. This is completely normal and also kind of unavoidable, but the aroma will make you forget to care about looks. Let it cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then flip it out and EAAAAT IIIIIT. Right away, seriously. Don’t wait; the shelf life on this bread isn’t too long.

Verdict: Success.

Next Mission: “Savory pies,” though I’ve always known them from Harry Potter as “pasties.” Apparently in American lingo, though, those are what Janet Jackson wears.

Recipe after the jump…

Baby Steps: Salsa & Guac

I did something stupid. Remember that dough I made, the one that kicked my butt? And remember how after that, I decided my next attempt would be croissants? That was dumb. The worst thing you can pick to follow-up a tricky dough is another, trickier dough. Croissants are rough.

So I’ve decided to start from the bottom again, making some simple recipes to bolster my confidence. You know what’s really easy? Dicing things. You know what’s made completely from diced things? Salsa. Oh, and guacamole. Because I’m actually going to start with the guac.

The easiest way to make guacamole is to start with pico de gallo. Pico is a coarsely chopped condiment (I have been warned to not refer to it as a salsa) of mainly tomato, onion, and cilantro, which translates to mean “rooster’s beak.” Who knows.

Now, technically, to make pico, you should use equal parts of tomato-onion-cilantro. Here’s the problem: I cannot stand onion or cilantro. But they have to make appearances, otherwise you just have diced tomatoes. So I used (roughly) a 2:1:1 ratio with my ingredients.

First step: smash everything up with the biggest knife in your kitchen. I love using the Chef’s Knife, even for cutting small things, because it makes me feel dangerous. As it so happens, I am. To myself.

Here’s is a cooking tip, straight from the professionals: If you cut yourself while cooking, DO NOT BLEED INTO THE FOOD. Instead, do what I do – fashion a paper towel tourniquet around your finger and keep at it, until you’re finished and can grab one of your Buzz LightYear band-aids.

After chopping up the tomatoes, onions, and cilantro – keeping the pieces as coarse or as fine as is your preference – it’s time for the jalapeno. Here is another important tip, so important that it is going to be red: DO NOT chop fresh jalapenos with your bare hands. Do not let any of the oils touch any of your skin (this applies to any type of hot pepper you cut). You will wake up the next morning with hands the size of… swollen hands.

It’s typical to wear gloves when dealing with this sort of thing, but I couldn’t find any in the house (I didn’t look). Instead, I… well, just see for yourself:

This was actually quite a nice system, and I didn’t have to touch the pepper at all. How you proceed after the initial cut depends on how much you like spice. The hotness of a pepper comes from the seeds and inner membranes; if you scrape those out, your salsa will be milder. If you aren’t a sissy, you leave all the bits in, because you can take it.

It’s my personal opinion that a good salsa should make you feel like you’ve been punched in the jaw.

Don’t worry, just one jalapeno isn’t going to make it that spicy, even with the seeds included. This pico recipe is fairly mild.

Throw everything in a bowl and mix it up with your giant knife. I was serious when I said how much I loved that thing.

Little lime juice, dash of salt, finished! This is Pico de Gallo. For guacamole, smash up a couple of ripe avacados, then add a heaping spoonful of pico and mix it all up. Do not add the avacados to the pico – you will end up with a poor avacado-to-pico ratio, and it will not be the creamy deliciousness that is guac.

The picture is blurry because I was drooling on the camera lens

Now, teeeeechnically, since there is all this leftover pico, you can just use that as a salsa. But I am very particular about my salsa, so I started anew.

Things I want my salsa to be:

• Thick, not watery
• Not too chunky, sort of the consistency of Cream of Wheat
• SPICY

I was using canned tomatoes for this salsa, so in order to achieve the first Golden Rule of Salsa, I had to drain everything:

Canned tomatoes are gross

These were actually draining the whole time I was making the pico/guac, so as to get the most juices out of it.

Next, chop up part of an onion – not much! That’s part of the reason why I love this recipe, is because it only uses 1/4 cup of onion in the whole batch. Doctor up another jalapeno in the same way you sliced the other one, again, do NOT touch it and do NOT take the seeds out unless you want me to make fun of you. Add some chopped cilantro, however much you want. I just used 1/4 cup again, but if you enjoy the taste, add up to a full cup. Little squeeze of lime juice again, one small diced garlic clove, and put everything in a food processor. If you don’t have a food processor, get one. Or have your mom get one for Mother’s Day, and just use hers.

Or maybe try chewing up spoonfuls of the salsa at a time and then spitting it back out.

Then add 1/4 teaspoon each of: salt, sugar, cumin, and (if you want more spice – third Golden Rule of Salsa) cayenne pepper.

Process it until it reaches your ideal consistency (Cream of Wheat – second Golden Rule of Salsa).

Verdicts: Success, all around. The salsa is incredible; I don’t know if I can ever go back to canned.

Next Mission: TBD. If I’m still starting from the beginning, it might be toast.

Recipes after the jump…

Pâte à Choux – The Devil Pastry from Hell

Every so often a recipe comes along that makes me need to drink. Not much, mind you, because it is important to not get schnockered until after you turn the oven off, but drink nonetheless. Pâte à Choux – puff pastry, roughly pronounced pat-ah-shoo – is one of those recipes.

Its trickiness comes from the seeming simplicity of the whole thing. Like most doughs, it’s based on butter, moisture (in this case, whole milk), and flour. But choux pastry throws you off from the beginning by starting off in a saucepan.

Look, I'm not ruined yet!

Once the butter melts, a whole bunch of things have to happen in rapid sequence. Okay, like 3 things have to happen in semi-rapid sequence, but hot burners tend to overwhelm me. 1: Add flour all at once. 2: Stir super extra quickly with a wooden spoon. (I don’t know the significance of the wooden spoon, but every recipe I look at specifically mentioned it should be wooden. I complied.) 3. Return to heat and continue to stir vigorously, until the dough clings to itself in this weird flesh-colored blob in the middle of the saucepan:

The dough above is actually not blobby enough, the effects of which will be shown soon. Next come the eggs – 4 of them, all of which must be added individually. Add egg, stir with wooden spoon until slimy flesh blobs come together in larger, less slimy flesh blob, repeat. (Flesh blobs may not be the most appetizing description, but I am a tad bitter toward this batch.) Let the dough hang out for a little while and catch its breath before stuffing it in a pastry bag.

I have a mechanical pastry bag which I commandeered from my father; to my knowledge, he has only used it once, and I’ve used it at least 5 times. Pretty sure there’s something in Squatters’ Rights about that.

The purpose of your choux dictates how you’ll want to pipe out the dough. Profiteroles? Make tiny little blobs. Cream puffs? Make slightly larger blobs. Eclairs – which I was making – need what are known as “logs,” and yes I did laugh about this while reading the recipe. Other recipes called them “fingers,” which is less awkward but correspondingly less funny.

You Choose: Logs? or Fingers?

Then you cook ‘em. The first recipe I used had an oven temperature 125 degrees lower than the second recipe, so who knows what the average choux-baking-temperature is. Personally, the second recipe turned out much better than the first, but that is probably just because I am sometimes (sometimes!) bad at things.

Here is what happened to my first batch:

See how it looks like they have hundreds of little blisters all over them? That is weird. I mean, I don’t even know if that’s what happened with the other batch, because I was too tired to care. Doesn’t that just make you feel uncomfortable? Like the logs are in pain? But I figured I would let them bake fully and see if anything changed. Meanwhile – cream filling and chocolate topping.

At this point, I was already planning on starting another batch, and there were only 5 eggs left in the house. Pastry cream, the usual eclair filling, needs 4 egg whites. Way demanding, right? So I skipped over it and went to whipped cream.

Whipped cream is probably the easiest thing you could ever try to make. Toast might be slightly easier, depending on what quality toaster you have. Ingredients: Heavy whipping cream (duh), powdered sugar, and vanilla. Measurements are for sissies. Use either a hand-mixer or your own greasy elbows until stiff peaks form, which means that when you raise the mixers up, it looks like this:

See how they stay?

That’s all. You made whipped cream. Isn’t it lovely? This little break was just what I needed to feel confident as a baker again. Chocolate topping is just as simple: put a buncha chocolate in a bowl, and pour boiling heavy whipping cream over it. Stir and stir and stir, even though it looks weird, just keep stirring. Maybe add a bit of coffee, if you’re into that sort of thing. Turns into this:

2/3 ingredients completed. Now that I had the filling and topping, I was obligated to start the choux from scratch again, since by this point the first batch had already come out of the oven looking malnourished and smelling like burnt popcorn.

I arranged them based on attractiveness. Guess who lost.

If you need to know what I did the second time, scroll back up to the beginning of the post and re-read the first section, where I make the dough. I’ll wait for you.

A few things I did differently:
- When smashing the dough until it comes together in a ball, keep at it for several minutes, even if it seems to be blobby already. 3-4 minutes should do it.
- Let the dough cool before adding the eggs.
- Whisk the eggs before adding them one at a time.

Second attempt creates:

Now those are choux you'd be proud to take home and introduce to Mom.

Use a serrated bread knife to cut lengthwise down the entire pastry, which will be mostly hollow on the inside. You can poke the choux and fill it with cream that way (think cream-filled doughnut) but at this point I was more concerned with just finishing the dang things, and didn’t want to have to worry about exploding choux. My little method, which I think worked very nicely, involved placing the top half of the choux in the melted chocolate while I filled the bottom half with cream, then carefully putting the chocolate-covered top back on.

Verdict: Success. Hey, you have to do something wrong before you can understand how you messed up… right? Usually that’s how it works for me, anyway.

Next Attempt: Croissants.

Note: I will not post the first recipe I used, because it’s probably a very nice recipe and I just screwed it up by being awful. I don’t want you to happen upon it at some point and think it’s a bad recipe. The second attempt that worked out for me came from Williams-Sonoma – I have a couple cookbooks, but the recipe is also available online (via link).

Margherita Pizza & Maple-Mustard Green Beans

Alright, here’s the deal. I don’t like pizza.

Some people have a hard time dealing with this. Take as long as you need.

Every two months or so, I will get a craving for pizza. Otherwise, it just bores me (exception to this rule: pizzas from Mad Anthony Brewing Company on Broadway). But as far as quick, simple weeknight dinners go, pizza is a pretty good fallback. After a long day of computer-screen-staring, I decided to take it easy and test my pizza-making abilities with a simple margherita pizza.

The basics of a margherita pizza are: Tomato. Mozzarella. Basil. Add in whatever amounts your taste buds feel fit. I happen to love cheese, so I used (almost) the entirety of an 8 oz ball of fresh mozzarella for my little 12-inch.

The problem (you knew there would be one) came with the tomatoes. When I bought my two cans of diced tomatoes, I accidentally bought them with green chiles included. These will be called Mexican Tomatoes. The Mexican Tomatoes were fine for when I cooked my jambalaya – which can always use more spice – but were not quite what I needed for this Italian staple. Luckily, mom had some Italian Tomatoes in the pantry. They had all sorts of herbs in them. But – there was only one can. And that was barely enough for half the pizza.

So I had to use some Mexican Tomatoes.

It turned out alright; my dad ate some and said he liked the spicy kick. But I still don’t like pizza – I ate half a slice and left the rest for him.

But what I really want to talk about is the green beans. These are the best green beans I have ever eaten. Ever. In my entire life. And here is how they work:

Take some green beans, a couple handfuls. Toss them in some oil & salt, put them in a shallow pan, and roast for, eh, let’s say 10 minutes. 450 degrees-ish. Meanwhile, mix together some mustard and maple syrup in a 2:1 ratio, with a little dash of cayenne pepper for good luck.

Note: I used Grey Poupon Country Dijon because it’s a course mustard, and I’m into that sort of thing. The flavor is intense, so if you like spicy mustard, I recommend it. Also, like everything else in the kitchen, I used real maple syrup. Please, please splurge and buy a bit for this recipe. Aunt Jemima will not be angry with you, I promise.

Stick the beans in the sauce, toss ‘em around a little, and stick them back in the pan and in the oven for another 10-15 minutes or so, until the beans are fully roasted – a little brown and a little shriveled, yes that sounds gross but just trust me on this. They come out looking something like this:

They look a little weird, I know. But the taste makes up for it. I cooked a half pound of green beans and ate all but 6 of them, because I wanted mom & dad to be able to try a sample.

Verdicts:
Margherita Pizza: Success. Dad likes it, and the half-slice I ate was pretty good, I will admit. But I still don’t like pizza.
Maple-Mustard Green Beans: Success x8000. I don’t know what else to say that will make you understand.

Next mission: Eclairs.