Snowmageddon 2010: a Bread Marathon

As you may have heard, D.C. was just hit by a big snowstorm. I'm happy to report that we are no worse for the wear. Tom and I made it through the weekend without losing any trees, gutters, or our power supply. In fact, we took advantage of our time cooped up inside to bake a lot of bread. I already had a container of bread dough in the fridge (from the master boule recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day), and I baked a loaf for our neighbors. Tom also has been experimenting with no-knead doughs and he baked up a couple of loaves using coppa, parmesan cheese, rosemary, and garlic. And after we ventured into the winter wonderland at the tail end of the storm on Saturday and discovered that CVS was open, I was able to buy some raisins and try Nancy Baggett's recipe for "Cinnamon Pinwheel Raisin Bread" from Kneadlessly Simple: Fabulous, Fuss-Free, No-Knead Breads.

The base dough for this bread is Baggett's recipe for "Country Fair White Bread," which contains bread flour, sugar, salt, yeast, and ice water. After the first rise, you stir in melted butter, nonfat dry milk, beaten egg, and raisins. After incorporating those ingredients and letting the dough rest for a few minutes, you shape the dough into a rectangle, brush it with beaten egg, sprinkle on a mixture of cinnamon and sugar, roll it up into a log, and put it in a 9- by 5-inch loaf pan for the second rise. I found this dough almost impossible to handle. Even though I shaped it into a rectangle on a well oiled and floured piece of parchment paper, it was very sticky, and my log got pretty mangled on the way into the loaf pan. After the second rise, you brush the top of the loaf with more beaten egg and sprinkle on more cinnamon sugar before putting it in the oven to bake.

This bread was really delicious. It tasted just like store-bought cinnamon-raisin bread (here, that characterization is meant as a compliment). The texture was lighter than the Oat-Whole Wheat Honey-Raisin Bread I made last week, since this recipe included only white flour. Tom and I enjoyed some toasted for breakfast today, and the bread was a lovely, sweet treat!

Recipe: "Cinnamon Pinwheel Raisin Bread" from Kneadlessly Simple: Fabulous, Fuss-Free, No-Knead Breads by Nancy Baggett.

Ipso Fatto Instant Photo: Double-Ginger Chocolate Chunk Cookies

There is only one thing I would have changed about this cookie. I ran out of the semi-fine sanding sugar from Surfas that I've used previously to coat the cookies before baking, so I used coarse sanding sugar instead. (If you look at the photo from the last time I made these cookies, you can see the difference -- the sugar crystals were much larger this time around.) The coarse sugar is a little much and the overly crunchy texture distracts and detracts from the wonderful underlying flavor of the cookie. That said, the cookie is still so delicious that most people probably didn't notice.

Recipe: Double-Ginger Chocolate Chunk Cookies by Susan Spungen for more.com.

Previous Posts:

• "The Best Thing I've Ever Learned During a Conference Call: Double-Ginger Chocolate Chunk Cookies," December 4, 2009.
• "Ipso Fatto Instant Photo: the New and Possibly Improved Ginger Chip Cookie," December 6, 2009.
  

Sticky Fingers Yield Another Great Recipe: the Strawberry Shortcake Cupcake

On Friday I spent three hours at the car dealership waiting to have my car serviced, and I was delighted to see a single issue of Food & Wine in the waiting room. Usually they just have the Washington Post. As I flipped through the dogeared copy of the magazine, I came upon a test kitchen article entitled, "perfecting the cupcake." The article offered recipes for two different batters, three different frostings, and a long list of suggested toppings to make interesting creations like caramel-pretzel cupcakes, fluffernutter cupcakes, and rocky road cupcakes. I'm sure it was kismet. I'm supplying baked goods for an event my cousin is hosting next weekend, and a couple of weeks ago, she had specifically asked me if I had a strawberry shortcake cupcake recipe that I might be able to use. I didn't, and I wasn't able to find one. But on Friday morning, literally right there in my lap, was a recipe and a beautiful photo of a strawberry shortcake cupcake. I felt the circumstances warranted tearing out a few pages of the magazine to take with me. (Coincidentally enough, I obtained another one of my favorite cupcake recipes from a page I tore out of Food & Wine while waiting for a hair appointment a few years ago.)

The cupcake batter was slightly unusual in that it contained cornstarch, and I think the cornstarch might be responsible for a very odd quality I noticed in the batter. I made a double batch of batter, which ended up yielding 29 cupcakes that I baked one 12-cupcake pan at a time. When I scooped out the batter for the first dozen, immediately after I finished mixing the batter, the batter was extremely thin. Twenty minutes later, when I was scooping out the batter for the next dozen, the batter was considerably thicker. Twenty minutes after that, when I baked the final five cupcakes, the batter was even thicker. Accordingly, the first batch of cupcakes hardly rose at all, the second batch had nice rounded tops, and the final five had pronounced pointy peaks. Weird. If you make these cupcakes, I would advise perhaps letting the batter sit for 20 minutes or so before you bake to allow the batter to thicken a bit.

To make the frosting, I ran a 10 oz. jar of strawberry spreadable fruit through the food processor and incorporated it into a double batch of the buttercream frosting recipe. Even with all that strawberry spreadable fruit, the color was just barely pink and the strawberry flavor was not that strong. I used scalloped green flower cupcake liners thinking that they would create the illusion of a strawberry stem. It didn't exactly work out that way, but I'm still happy with the way the cupcakes turned out. The cupcake itself was nice and moist, and while the frosting was a little on the sweet side, the overall combination of the vanilla cupcake and strawberry frosting was nice. I think that adding some freeze-dried strawberries to the batter would give a nice boost of flavor to these cupcakes and might elevate them to spectacular.

Recipe: "Strawberry Shortcake Cupcakes" from Food & Wine, May 2008.

Healthy and Sweet: Oat-Whole Wheat Honey-Raisin Bread

Tom and I have quickly become addicted to cheesy bread (I've baked a few other cheesy bread loaves that haven't made it to the blog -- but in our defense, they were all shared with friends!), and I knew I really needed to start baking some healthier bread options. I found a tasty looking recipe in Nancy Baggett's Kneadlessly Simple: Fabulous, Fuss-Free, No-Knead Breads, for "Everyday Oatmeal Honey-Raisin Bread." Chock full of rolled oats and raisins and sweetened with honey, this bread seemed like it would be hearty and relatively nutritious. Baggett also offers a whole wheat variation of the recipe that is approximately two-thirds white flour and one-third whole wheat flour. Even healthier!

I used King Arthur White Whole Wheat Flour, which is whole grain, but lighter, finer, and milder than ordinary whole wheat flour. The final ingredient list included white flour, wheat flour, rolled oats, cinnamon, salt, yeast, honey, vegetable oil, ice water, and raisins. Everything except the raisins is stirred together in a bowl to make the dough. After the first rise, you stir in the raisins, and put the dough in a well-greased 9- by 5-inch loaf pan for the second rise. Right before you put the loaf in the oven, you sprinkle it with a mixture of cinnamon and granulated sugar.

The top of the loaf ended up quite dark and slightly burnt at the corners, but it was nicely rounded and otherwise fairly attractive. Baggett advises that the loaf must be completely cool before slicing, which took a few hours. Cutting the loaf was a very messy proposition -- there was cinnamon and sugar falling off from the top of the loaf and scattering everywhere. The cut slices had the tan color of whole grain, with lots of raisins. The oats were undetectable. The texture was dense, but not unpleasantly so. And the taste? Lightly sweet, hearty, flavorful, delicious! I think this would be great toasted with a little butter. Baggett also suggests that the bread makes an unusual peanut butter sandwich. Hopefully this loaf will keep us occupied and off the cheesy bread for a while!

Recipe: "Everyday Oatmeal Honey-Raisin Bread (Oat-Whole Wheat Honey-Raisin Bread variation)" from Kneadlessly Simple: Fabulous, Fuss-Free, No-Knead Breads by Nancy Baggett.

The Best Topping Isn't Always on Top: Buttermilk-Chocolate Chip Crumb Cake

While Tom was watching the NFC championship game on Sunday night and screaming at the TV (having grown up in Wisconsin as a Packers fan, Tom has a strong sentimental attachment to Brett Favre), I was flipping through cookbooks looking for a new recipe using buttermilk. I had an open quart in the fridge after making a red velvet cake and some corn-cherry scones last week. I settled on "Buttermilk-Chocolate Chip Crumb Cake" from Lisa Yockelson's Chocolate Chocolate.

This recipe is a tender buttermilk cake (all-purpose flour, cake flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, miniature chocolate chips, butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, and buttermilk) that is sprinkled with a butter crumb topping (flour, sugar, brown sugar, salt, cold butter, and vanilla) before baking. Yockelson describes the topping as "a mixture of butter-bound flour and sugar, with a little vanilla extract added as a fragrant seasoning." The recipe makes a lot of topping, enough to generously cover the entire surface of the cake. The final steps in the recipe are to sprinkle the hot cake with more miniature chocolate chips right after it comes out of the oven, and then dust the cake with powdered sugar after it's fully cooled.

I was very surprised by the way this cake turned out. The surprise was that a significant portion of the topping sank into the cake and migrated randomly throughout it. I'm not sure if this was supposed to happen, because Yockelson doesn't mention this phenomenon anywhere in the recipe, and in the picture of the cake in the cookbook, it appears that all of the topping stayed right on top. But in the pictures of my cake above (these are actually the front and side view of the same piece of cake), you can see the tan topping running throughout the entire cake. Intended or not, this was the best feature of the cake! Every bite of cake was permeated with the sweet topping's delightfully crunchy texture.

A minor annoyance with this cake is that the chocolate chips sprinkled on after the cake is done baking don't really adhere and there were quite a few loose chips rolling around as I was trying the cut the cake. I wonder what would happen if you sprinkled on the chips before baking -- if they would also get sucked down into the cake. I might give it a try the next time I make this cake, because I'd love to make this tasty treat again!

Recipe: "Buttermilk-Chocolate Chip Crumb Cake," from Chocolate Chocolate by Lisa Yockelson.

Mother Nature's Sweetest Gift of Winter: Grapefruit Cake

I have some fairly predictable shopping habits whenever I visit my parents in Los Angeles. My routine stops include Surfas restaurant supply, the Westfield Topanga mall, Gelson's supermarket, the Old Town Calabasas Farmer's Market, and Mitsuwa Japanese grocery. If I happen to be visiting between the months of December and March, I also make a point of getting a hold of as many Oroblanco grapefruits as I can possibly cram into my suitcase.

The Oroblanco (the name means "white gold" in Spanish) is an amazing gem of a white-fleshed fruit that is almost inconceivably sweet, with none of the tartness typical of grapefruit. I can't stand to eat other varieties of grapefruit without a liberal coating of sugar, but I can happily pop plain Oroblanco segments like candy. The thick-skinned cross between a white grapefruit and a pummelo was developed at the University of California 50 years ago and patented in 1981. Besides being sweet and juicy, the Oroblanco has the delighful quality of being very easy to segment.

Unfortunately, while Oroblancos are plentiful in Los Angeles, they are fairly difficult to find here in D.C. Domestically, they are cultivated only on the west coast and have a short window of availability in the winter. On occasion I've resorted to having my mother mail grapefruits to me, but this quickly becomes a prohibitively expensive proposition. In past years I have been able to purchase Oroblancos at Harris Teeter for $2.99 each, but I can no longer find them there. The only place I've been able to find Oroblancos lately in the D.C. area is Asian grocery stores, and even that is fairly hit and miss. Last weekend I went to Kam Sam grocery in Rockville, and when I saw they had a plentiful supply of Oroblancos, I purchased 23 pounds of them. That's actually a completely reasonable quantity for me to have on hand. I eat one or two daily and the grapefruits keep well in the refrigerator for weeks.

Having an ample supply of Oroblancos gave me the perfect excuse to try a recipe I've been holding onto for a while, Brown Derby Grapefruit Cake. The Brown Derby is a now-defunct Hollywood restaurant, and the Los Angeles Times printed the recipe for the Derby's well-known grapefruit cake in its Culinary SOS Column. The recipe is included in Dear S.O.S.: Dessert Recipe Requests to the Los Angeles Times and is also available online here (on pages 4 and 5 of the article). The recipe is not written for Oroblancos, but I figured that anything that is good with regular grapefruits has got to be positively spectacular with Oroblancos.

The cake is flavored with lemon zest and grapefruit juice. It contains no butter, includes only 1/4 cup of oil, and is leavened with baking powder and whipped egg whites. The cream cheese frosting is flavored with lemon zest, lemon juice, and grapefruit juice. There is segmented grapefruit both between the cake layers and on top of the cake. I ended up using three entire grapefruits -- one between the layers and two to garnish the top.

The cake itself had a nice light lemon flavor, but I felt it was a bit dry. The grapefruit segments and the frosting helped add needed moisture to the cake, but there was one huge problem with this recipe. It didn't make anywhere near enough frosting. The frosting recipe only calls for 6 oz. of cream cheese, 3/4 cup powdered sugar, citrus juice, and lemon zest. In contrast, when I frost a two-layer red velvet cake of the same size, I mix up a frosting recipe of 12 oz. cream cheese, 2 cups powdered sugar and 2/3 cup butter, which yields the perfect amount to fill and frost a 9-inch cake. You can see in the pictures above that the frosting layer was so thin that you could see right through it, and you can barely see any frosting in between the layers. In the future, I would make a double or triple recipe of the frosting to make sure I could adequately cover and fill the cake.

Oh, and and if you try this recipe, I strongly recommend you use a piece of parchment paper on the bottom of your pan. The recipe specifies use of an ungreased cake pan, but the cake sticks! I understand that not greasing the sides of the pan probably helps the cake rise a little higher, but I don't see any reason why you shouldn't grease and/or use parchment on the bottom.

All in all, this was pretty tasty, but it wasn't quite as good as I had hoped. I think my expectations were sky high, considering how much I love Oroblancos. But to be honest, a plain Oroblanco grapefruit makes for an equally good dessert all on its own!

Recipe: "Brown Derby Grapefruit Cake" from Dear S.O.S.: Dessert Recipe Requests to the Los Angeles Times; also available in the Los Angeles Times, April 27, 1989.

Ipso Fatto Instant Photo: Restaurant Eve Birthday Cake

This year, my friend Dorothy again requested a Restaurant Eve Birthday Cake for her birthday. When I was trying to decide what color to make the frosting, I definitely wanted to avoid repeating last year's pink frosting overload. I decided a little burst of sunshine yellow would be a nice for a gloomy winter's day. I also tried out an orange border on the top but didn't like the way it looked. Instead of scraping it off, I left it and just piped green frosting around it. I knew Dorothy wouldn't care and it added a little bit of visual interest (that's my story, and I'm sticking to it!)


Recipe: Restaurant Eve's Cake from the Washington Post, April 23, 2006.

Previous Posts:

• "Alexander's Birthday Party, " September 21, 2008.
• "Inaugural Bakextravaganza Part III: Cute Little Cakes," January 24, 2009.