Hello, Gorgeous!

We're back in party mode at the office, and with fall definitely setting in, I felt like making a spice cookie for today's celebration. I scoured epicurious.com for a while and decided to give a Molasses Crinkle recipe a try.

This cookie recipe includes both butter and shortening. It calls for a spice mixture of ground ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and allspice (I couldn't find my allspice, so I used nutmeg instead). The finished dough is very very soft. I refrigerated the dough for about an hour before baking, and it would still barely hold its shape and was easily deformed when I dipped the dough in some sanding sugar. I cannot imagine how you would make these cookies without a cookie scoop, since the dough was so difficult to handle. However, despite the fact that the cookies were no longer in neat hemisphere shapes by the time I put them in the oven, they all still managed to bake up perfectly round.

I was completely captivated by the finished cookie. It smelled deep and dark, like fall. And what a beauty! Round, golden, crackled, and full of sparkle. Hello, gorgeous! These cookies were chewy and spicy, with a wonderful textural crunch from the sanding sugar. The cookies were slightly pliable when I served them, but people didn't seem to mind.

After I baked these cookies, I packed up my KitchenAid stand mixer... I'm moving this weekend and I'm very excited about my new kitchen. I always get a little performance anxiety when I have to bake somewhere new, but I can't wait to try out my shiny new Viking oven. I'm looking forward to posting from my new locale starting next week!

Recipe: Molasses Crinkles from epicurious.com.

Alexander's Birthday Party

This afternoon I supplied some baked goods for my friend Alexander's birthday party. Alexander just turned 2, and his mother is my best friend from law school. This blue cake pictured here is the cake I made for his birthday last year. My cake decorating skills are pretty mediocre, especially when it comes to cake writing (I just cannot seem to coordinate applying the appropriate pressure to a pastry bag at the same time that I'm keeping a steady writing speed). So, last year, I didn't write anything on Alexander's cake and just spelled out the birthday message in candles.

My standard birthday cake recipe is from Restaurant Eve in Alexandria. The restaurant offers an individually-sized pink birthday cake on their menu, and the Washington Post printed the recipe on April 23, 2006 (oddly enough, the recipe appeared in the newspaper's Sunday Source section instead of the Wednesday Food Section). The cake bakes up moist and lily white, with an extremely dense and fine crumb. It is similar to a pound cake in texture. The frosting is made from butter, powdered sugar, vanilla, and heavy cream. The cake is very good, but especially delicious served with ice cream.

This year, Alexander's birthday party had a fire engine theme, so I made the cake yellow and red to match. I again dodged writing anything on the cake and instead put on an excessive number of red and yellow candles (sometimes I can get a little carried away at the party store).

I also baked up a Chocolate-Almond Souffle Torte for anyone who might want some chocolate (I forgot to take a picture, although you're not missing much since it was particularly homely this time around), as well as some Caramel Pecan Cookies and Chocolate Chip Cookies to give out as party favors.


Recipes:

• Restaurant Eve's Birthday Cake from the Washington Post, April 23, 2006.
  
• Chocolate-Almond Souffle Torte from epicurious.com.
• Caramel Pecan Cookies from epicurious.com.
  
• Chocolate Chip Cookies from the New York Times, July 6, 2008.
  

It's Starting to Taste a Little Like Autumn

The weather here in DC has taken a distinct turn towards fall. The air is cool and crisp and the days are getting shorter. For some reason, I consider pecan pie to be a fall food (maybe because I associate it strongly with Thanksgiving), and so last night I decided to make a sort of cookie version, Caramel Pecan Cookies.

This recipe involves a butter cookie crust that is pressed into the bottom of a pan, chilled, and baked. The baked crust is then topped with a homemade caramel pecan mixture and the pan goes back into the oven until the caramel is bubbly.

I was a little scared to make the caramel. It involves melting one and a half cups of granulated sugar on the stove until you get a dark brown caramel. Then you add a cup of heavy cream, at which point the caramel hardens into a solid disk. You have to dissolve the solidified caramel into the cream, before finishing the topping with butter, vanilla, salt, and pecans. To me, this method seemed to have a high likelihood of creating burnt sugar, but much to my delight, everything worked out fine (although it did take about 30 minutes altogether for me to make the caramel). And boy, was that caramel worth it. The flavor was deep and rich, much better than pecan pie. The bars came out beautifully and the caramel was delightfully chewy. Mmmmm, fall!


Recipe: Caramel Pecan Cookies from epicurious.com.

The Most Delicious Fish You Should Try Not To Eat (Or, What I Learned From My Mom This Week, Part II)

Despite my mother's incredible culinary skills, I was a very picky eater growing up. I refused to eat all green vegetables and I turned up my nose at any sort of fish besides catfish, even though my mother served fish on an almost daily basis. At some point in college, I made a conscious decision to try and eat fish. I actually took a series of seafood cooking classes at Homechef (which I believe is now closed, but was a store that sold kitchenwares and provided cooking lessons, like Sur La Table) to try and get the ball rolling. I still remember the very first time I ordered fish in a restaurant. It was June 2000, and we were celebrating my law school graduation at Maison Robert in Boston (also now closed). I remember my mother's jaw literally dropping after I ordered, as she exclaimed with unrestrained joy, "You ordered fish! I'm so proud of you!"

So fast forward a few years, and I have turned around 180 degrees. I regularly order fish in restaurants and I have even moved from vegetarian sushi to spicy tuna rolls. But I firmly believe that the most delicious fish in the world can be found in my mother's kitchen. She makes a Chilean sea bass that is to die for.

Now, I feel incredibly guilty about eating Chilean sea bass. A few years ago I read the book Hooked by G. Bruce Knecht. It's positively riveting, and I highly recommend it to anyone. Knecht describes the rise of what we now know as Chilean sea bass from its humble roots as the undesireable and inexpensive Patagonian toothfish, to one of the most popular and desired ingredients in American cuisine. This dramatic change and the high demand for the buttery and mild fish has caused the species to be fished to the brink of extinction in a very short period of time. Knecht's book alternates this background information with the incredible true story of an Australian patrol boat's 4,000-mile pursuit of an illegal fishing vessel halfway around Antarctica through treacherous conditions.

After I read Hooked, I implored my mother to stop buying and serving Chilean sea bass, even though her preparation is incredibly delicious. But then I read an article in the New York Times reporting that Whole Foods, which had stopped selling the fish altogether in the late 90s due to concerns of overfishing, was going to start selling Chilean sea bass again, only stocking fish from a sustainable fishery in the South Atlantic. I eagerly encouraged my mother to buy her Chilean sea bass from Whole Foods so that I could eat it without guilt.

Last week when I was home, my mother made her yummy Chilean sea bass and I asked her to explain the recipe to me. To my surprise, she brought out a Japanese cookbook (as I have mentioned before, my mother almost never uses cookbooks) and flipped it open to the recipe, "Broiled Fish Pickled In Miso." My mother has adapted the details somewhat, but the essence of her recipe is this. Take a washed Chilean sea bass fillet. Wrap it in a single layer of cheesecloth. Make a paste of miso, rice wine, and sugar. Coat the cheesecloth-wrapped fish in the paste. Put the coated fish in a plastic bag and let it marinate in the refrigerator for a day or two. Take out the fish and remove the cheesecloth. Put the fish under the broiler until it's done. The finished dish is moist, flavorful, sweet, and tastes as if the whole thing has been dipped in butter. I was puzzled as to the use of the cheesecloth, but my mother explained that the marinade passes through the cheesecloth, but then you can take off the cloth and you are left with a completely clean and attractive piece of fish.

I'm glad that they are starting to develop sustainable farmed populations of Chilean sea bass. Because my mom's fish is so tasty that it's enough to test the willpower of even the most resolute!

Waiter, There's a Sponge In My Soup! (Or, What I Learned From My Mom This Week, Part I)

I just spent a few days at home with my parents in LA. My father picked me up at LAX around 5:30 p.m., but because of a bad accident on the 405 freeway, we had to take a scenic detour via Pacific Coast Highway, and by the time we finally arrived at the house at 7:00, I was absolutely starving. Fortunately, my mother had dinner waiting.

My mother is an amazing cook. One of the delicious dishes she had whipped up was what she referred to as gourd soup. It was mild, but very sweet and delicious. I asked her if she had used chicken stock in the soup and she said no, it was absolutely nothing but gourds, salt, ginger, and dried scallops. I asked her what type of gourd she had used (she told me the name in Taiwanese but it didn't mean anything to me), and she said I knew what gourd she was talking about, it was also used as a sponge. My parents just returned from a trip to Las Vegas and a stay at the Wynn, and my father got up from the dinner table and returned with a Wynn-branded loofah sponge. This is the gourd, my parents insisted.

At this point I was completely confused and I thought my parents must be mistaken. I was eating loofah?! But after dinner, I looked up "loofah" on wikipedia, and lo and behold, the entry describes a gourd that grows from a vine, which is eaten as a vegetable in Asia and Africa, and also used as a bath sponge when it's been processed to remove everything but the xylem. Before I left, my mother made the soup again, and I stood by to take notes and watch how it was done.

First, the gourds themselves. The gourds were dark green with slight ridges, over a foot long, and they were soft to the touch. My mother peeled the gourds, sliced them about 1/4" thick and quartered each slice. The inside of the gourds was bright white and very spongy to the touch.

In a hot wok with some oil, my mother sauteed some sliced ginger and added some rehydrated dried scallops. Then she added the sliced gourds, added salt, stirred a bit, and put a lid on the wok. Five minutes later, the gourds had released enough liquid to make soup. That was it, the entire recipe. In the pictures below, the one on the left shows the gourds right after my mother added them to the wok, the middle picture is maybe two or three minutes into cooking, and the final picture on the right is my finished bowl of soup.

The soup is surprisingly flavorful and very sweet. The cooked gourds are very soft and mild. I was amazed that my mother could make a delicious soup so quickly with so few ingredients. (Coincidentally, Mark Bittman published an article in the New York Times that very day about making soups with nothing but vegetables and water... My mother's soup didn't even require water, since the gourds give off so much liquid when they are cooked!)

A couple of days later, my mother made yet another incredible vegetable soup. She had me cream two ears of corn (I have never used a corn creamer before, a contraption that doesn't just cut whole kernels off the cob, but also pulverizes them and releases quite a bit of juice in the process). She added a little bit of water, simmered the mixture on the stove for a bit, and stirred in an egg at the end. She topped it with black pepper before serving, and it was sweet, creamy, and delicious.

When people find out about my mother's amazing cooking skills, they usually ask if I've inherited them from her. The truth is, I don't have my mother's natural cooking talent (then again, she doesn't bake, so I guess each of us has our strengths). My mother almost never uses written recipes, and I find it frustrating to try to learn how she cooks because she usually just throws in a little bit of this and a little bit of that. But I'm trying! And I will definitely add these two soups to my recipe collection!

Refrigerator Odds + Ends = Yummy Cake!

Last night I was faced with the need to clear a few items out of my refrigerator before going out of town for a few days. I had a freshly opened pint of heavy cream and a container of sour cream I was hoping to use up, so I put the search terms "sour cream cake" into the epicurious.com search engine and sifted through the results (I love the Epicurious website for the ability to do searches like this). Bingo, I found a recipe that needed both ingredients, "Fudgy Chocolate Layer Cake with Coffee-Chocolate Frosting." The recipe was apparently requested by a reader who had enjoyed the cake at Watershed Restaurant in Decatur, Georgia.

While the recipe makes two round 9-inch cake layers, I baked it into a single 9" x 13" sheet cake instead, which is much easier to divide into convenient squares to serve to people at my office. If you're going to substitute a different-sized pan than the one specified in a recipe, you should do a quick calculation as to pan volume so that you can adjust the baking times accordingly. First, calculate the area of the bottom of the pan (or pans) specified in the recipe. In this case, the total area of two 9-inch round pans is approximately 127 sq. in. (you do need to flashback to grade school geometry and remember the value of π to figure this out). Then calculate the area of the bottom of the pan (or pans) that you intend to use. In this case, it equaled 117 sq. in. Since the pan I was going to use had a smaller area than the ones specified in the recipe, I knew that the depth of the batter in my pan would be deeper and I should expect that it would take a little longer to bake. (Sometimes the math works out quite neatly; the area of a 9-inch round pan and an 8-inch square pan are equal, so you can substitute between those two pans without any impact on baking times.)

Anyhoo, the recipe produced a very moist and flavorful cake. The frosting component was interesting. The recipe advised that the frosting needs at least three hours to cool and thicken to spreading consistency, so I made the frosting before I made the cake to get a head start on the cooling process. I let the frosting cool for about 4 hours before using it, and it was still slightly runny. I put the cake in the refrigerator overnight to firm up the frosting, and in the morning, it was quite solid, like fudge. However, it was humid and warm today, and by the time I brought the cake into the office, the frosting was very soft (although it did hold its shape and stay on the cake).

Recipe: Fudgy Chocolate Layer Cake With Coffee-Chocolate Frosting from epicurious.com.

A Childhood Treat from a Purloined Page

I'm in the process of getting ready to move out of my apartment, and I decided that it was finally time for me to part with a significant portion of my cooking magazine collection. I've been subscribing to multiple cooking magazines since I was in law school, and the amount of space taken up by my magazine library was getting out of control. I received quick responses to my post on Craigslist offering magazines for free, and this weekend I was able to unload four bankers boxes worth of Bon Appetit, Gourmet, Cook's Illustrated, and Food & Wine (I still have plenty of back issues of Chocolatier, Saveur, Gastronomica, and current subscriptions to Bon Appetit and Gourmet that run through 2014 to keep my collection going).

I do love reading cooking magazines, even if I sometimes let them sit on the shelf unused. I will admit that one day several years ago, I was reading an issue of Food & Wine in the waiting room at my hair salon when I came across a recipe I knew I had to try. I tore out the page and stuck it in my purse. After all, I figured that there was little point in having a cooking magazine in a hair salon if someone couldn't take the magazine (or just a page or two!) home to actually put any of the recipes to use. To this day, that recipe I took (which has since been laminated for posterity) is one of my favorites. The recipe is titled "Chocolate Cupcakes with Cream Filling," but I call these treats the "I Can't Believe It's Not a Hostess Cupcake!" (and if you look at the pictures I'm sure you'll see why).

The recipe is a chocolate cupcake with marshmallow filling (butter, powdered sugar, marshmallow fluff, and heavy cream), topped with chocolate frosting (chocolate, butter, heavy cream). The number one question I get whenever I make these cupcakes is, how do I get the filling inside? The answer is, you bake the cupcakes, let them cool, and then use a pastry bag and tip to fill the cupcake from the bottom. The cake is quite tender, and to some extent, the filling will displace the cake. I fill the heck out of these cupcakes, putting in filling until it bursts through the top. It looks horrible when you do this, but you can use the frosting to spackle over and fill in any cake eruption and no one will know the difference.

The cupcakes are decorated with a few white swirls just like the ones you remember from childhood... These cupcakes consistently get a very warm welcome wherever I take them; there's nothing like a little bit of nostalgia with a surprise cream filling inside to bring a smile to someone's face!

Recipe: "Chocolate Cupcakes with Cream Filling," from Food & Wine, November 2002.

Back to Banana Basics

A few weeks ago I saw yet another recipe from the LA Times Culinary SOS Column that I knew I had to try. First, the recipe was for a banana cake with cream cheese frosting. It's hard to see how you can go wrong there. But what really caught my eye was the fact that the recipe was from Clementine in Los Angeles. Even though my parents live in Los Angeles and I go there pretty regularly, I have never been to Clementine. Nonetheless, I have a soft spot in my heart for the place since their scone recipe that was published in the April 27, 2005, Culinary SOS Column is one of my absolute favorites. (You can read a post about my experience with that scone recipe here.)

The banana cake recipe is pretty straightforward; the cake itself contains no butter but includes both buttermilk and canola oil. Also, the recipe specifies pastry flour, for which I substituted White Lily all-purpose flour (which has a low protein content similar to pastry flour) instead. The frosting is made from cream cheese, butter, powdered sugar and sour cream. The resulting combination is extremely moist, not very sweet, and has a pronounced tangy finish. It's a very basic cake that is a cinch to make. But sometimes going back to basics is the best!

Recipe: "Clementine Bakery's Banana Cake," Los Angeles Times, August 13, 2008.

Whoopie!

Yesterday I had the chance to see my friends Aaron and Jess, who were in town for the weekend. I met Aaron in 1990, when he was my counselor at a summer science camp, and we have remained friends since. I was very excited to finally meet their adorable son Matthew for the first time! Aaron and Jess live in Hopewell, NJ, where the town Christmas tree happens to be located on their front lawn. I've had the pleasure of attending the annual Hopewell Christmas tree lighting, and it is a truly charming slice of small town Americana.

I decided to make Aaron and Jess some Whoopie Pies. I'm a bag fan of this combination of soft chocolate cakes sandwiched around a gooey marshmallow cream filling. Sometimes I mix things up a little bit and make pumpkin or carrot cake-flavored whoopie pies instead of the classic chocolate. In any case, they are always an indulgent, messy treat! Whoopie!

Recipe: Whoopie Pies from epicurious.com.