Sorry, You Didn't Get the Job... But Can I Keep Your Recipe?

Back in college I lived in EAST House (Stanford's East Asian Studies Theme House) for two years. EAST is a self-operative house, which means that they do not have university food service. Students pay their board bills directly to the house and the house hires its own chef to prepare and serve ten meals a week. As a self-op house, residents are also required to spend a few hours a week pitching in to do house chores (like assisting the chef or vacuuming the dining room).

During the 1994-95 school year, the longtime chef at EAST decided to quit during the first week of the fall semester. I don't remember why he quit, but I do remember what a horrible problem this caused. Without university food service, the house had to order (and pay for) take out meals for its 60 or so residents until a permanent chef replacement could be found. We placed an ad in the paper, went through resumes, and brought in several prospects for interviews and tryouts. Each candidate was asked to present two weeks' worth of menus and to prepare a single dinner meal for all of the house residents.

I happened to be on kitchen assistant duty during one of these dinner tryouts. The chef candidate was a tiny Asian woman, who assigned me the task of making banana bread. She handed me a scrap of paper with the following handwritten information:

BANANA BREAD
2 1/2 cups flour
2 cups sugar
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
3/4 cup oil
2 1/2 cups mashed bananas
1/4 cup walnuts
4 eggs, beaten
bake @ 350 degrees, 30-45 minutes

That was it. The recipe didn't include any information on what size pan to use, or how much bread the recipe would yield. I mixed up a double batch of the recipe, which I discovered made enough batter to fill four standard-sized loaf pans. I was very pleased that the bread came out very well and several students commented how much they liked it. The little Asian woman didn't get the job, but I did take the liberty of appropriating her recipe.

To this day, I use this recipe as my standard banana bread recipe. I usually have to bake the bread for longer than 45 minutes, but it's still pretty foolproof, so long as you keep an eye on it in the oven and tent the loaf with foil if the crust looks like it's getting too dark. While I wouldn't say this recipe is anything spectacular, it's moist, flavorful, and good comfort food. Plus, you can throw it together in a snap. I made the loaf pictured above last Thursday afternoon while I was on a conference call at home.

Unfortunately, EAST House's chef troubles persisted through that entire school year -- they ended up hiring three more chefs before the year was through. But at least I got a good banana bread recipe out of it!

Salty. Fudgy. Chocolatey. Sweet!!

I happened to be browsing the Food and Wine website earlier this week when a recipe for Salted Fudge Brownies caught my eye. This was probably due to the fact that last week, someone in the office brought in a tub of Trader Joe's sea salt brownie bites. I tried one, and it was pretty tasty.


I think I'm going to have to put this brownie in my regular baking rotation. The recipe is very easy to put together, the finished bars are beautiful and fudgy with a strong classic chocolate flavor, and the fleur de sel that I used added a distinctive bite. I sprinkled on the salt right before baking and swirled some of it into the batter as directed in the recipe; when I took the finished bars out of the oven, all of the salt that had been on the surface of the batter was melted into the brownies. I don't think you could get brownies like the ones in the picture that accompanies the recipe on the Food & Wine website -- covered in flakes of salt -- unless you sprinkled on a lot of salt after you take the brownies out of the oven.

I am really digging this salty-sweet trend that is becoming all the rage...

Recipe: "Salted Fudge Brownies" from Food & Wine.

When You Care Enough to Send the Very Best

Another wedding planning project that Tom and I were recently able to cross of the list is the save the date cards. A couple of months ago, I had a baked goods inspiration for the cards. It occurred to me that I could spell out the save the date message in frosted cupcakes, and then use a picture of the cupcakes on the cards.

Even though I came up with this idea a while ago, I didn't find the time to actually undertake the project until President's Day weekend. I planned out the message I wanted for the cards and determined that I needed 24 large cupcakes for the main message ("save the date" and the actual date), and another 28 mini cupcakes to spell out the wedding location (hotel name and city). I decided that the color scheme would be pink and green, both because those are my two favorite colors, and because the room where our wedding reception is being held happens to be painted pink and green.

As I started baking the cupcakes, mixing up two batches of Restaurant Eve cake batter, the realization suddenly dawned on me that I should have just purchased some cake mix or something instead of going to the time and effort of actually making good cupcakes. But I suppose that my disdain for cake mixes run deep. In any case, I would have made my own frosting, because that frosting-like stuff that comes in a can is just horrifying.

I made two batches of frosting, dying one pink and one leaf green. I decided that the large cupcakes would have a pink frosting base with green letters and vice versa for the mini-cupcakes. I wanted to make the base frosting as smooth and flat as possible so that the letters would be both easier to pipe on and easier to read. To get the smooth frosting base, I used an ice cream scoop to parcel out equal hemispheres of frosting on each cupcake, waited a few minutes for the frosting to crust over, and then I used a paper towel to flatten the frosting and pat it out into a perfectly flat, attractive circle. (The paper towel won't stick to the frosting whereas your hand will.)

I wanted to take a picture of the cupcakes in natural light, so I took them out into the backyard and laid them out on the patio dining table (the weather conditions were ideal for this project -- cold, but sunny and windless). The picture above is a cropped version of the final photo, without the mini cupcakes underneath spelling out the location.

I designed a card around the photo at tinyprints.com, and I've been holding off on publishing this post until all of the cards were sent out... Which I can finally say is done!

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

Previous Posts:

• "Alexander's Birthday Party," September 21, 2008.
• "Think Pink!," November 15, 2008.
  

Blondie + Brownie = Meh

For Christmas, Tom also gave me a copy of Flo Braker's Baking for All Occasions: a Treasury of Recipes for Everyday Celebrations. Having already let almost three months pass by without trying any of the recipes from the book, I decided on Monday night to give the Congo Brownie recipe a shot.

Braker's Congo Brownie recipe (after I googled it, I found another blogger who had reviewed the cookbook and printed the recipe here) is a two-layered confection of blondie on the bottom and brownie on top, finished off with a bit of chocolate ganache drizzle.

I was a little distracted as I was putting the bars together (this is what happens when you try to bake and watch Intervention at the same time). You are supposed to make the bottom blondie layer, sprinkle on a cup of walnuts, and then press the walnuts into the blondie batter before baking. I completely forgot about the walnuts until I pulled the partially baked bottom layer out of the oven, so I just mixed the walnuts into the brownie layer instead.

The finished product definitely had more visual interest than a regular brownie -- both because of the differently colored layers, and the ganache flourish. It's quite a looker! However, these bars tasted exactly like... a walnut brownie. I don't think that the bottom blondie layer actually added anything in terms of taste or texture. So while these bars were moist and tasty enough, they weren't really anything special flavorwise. Or, to put it more succinctly, meh.

Recipe: "Congo Brownies" from Baking for All Occasions: a Treasury of Recipes for Everyday Celebrations, by Flo Braker; recipe available online here.

Wedding Plan Checklist: Dress? Check. Baked Goods? Check.

Tom and I are slowly making headway on the plans for our wedding this fall. This week I was able to check one major item off of the list: the dress. Some good friends of my parents who own a wedding dress company based in Orange County, CA, have generously offered to set me up with a dress. I flew out to Los Angeles last week to pick it out.

While I tried on dresses, my parents chatted with their friends Jerry and Esther, who own the wedding dress company. At some point during their conversation, my mother mentioned that I maintain this blog, and apparently they all started browsing through it. When I had finally selected a dress, I came out and Esther half-jokingly said that she was ready to place her baked goods order. I was of course more than happy to whip up a little something to show my appreciation.

Esther expressed a particular interest in sweet scones and macaroons, but when I got back to my parents' kitchen, I realized that the lack of a food processor was going to be a problem. (I should clarify: my mother does have a Sunbeam food processor that is probably somewhere between 25-30 years old; I remember it from my childhood in Lincoln. Amazingly, it still works. But when I pulled it out to take a look, the blade had some seriously caked on ancient food residue that I couldn't wash clean. I decided to take a pass on the food processor.)

Instead, I decided to make a couple of selections that don't require a food processor or a mixer: Cheddar Chive Scones and Chewy Cherry Almond Bars. (I did have to spend about 30 minutes chopping the almonds into the equivalent of a food processor grind, but I was able to get the job done. In comparison, I'm pretty sure that no amount of time and effort would allow me replicate the results of a food processor when it comes to cutting frozen butter into flour for scones, or grinding pistachios and powdered sugar into dust for macaroons.) When my parents sampled the finished baked goods, I was very pleased that they seemed to be big fans. In fact, when it came time to pack up the baked goods for Jerry and Esther (which my parents were going to deliver the following day after dropping me off at the airport for my return to DC), my mother and father briefly debated how many scones and bars they were going to keep for themselves. I did leave them with a good share!

I have to go back for a dress fitting in a few months. Next time I will definitely plan in advance to make sure I can bring a nice baked goods selection to my dress benefactors!

Recipes:

• "Chewy Cherry Almond Bars" from Cookies and Bars by Alice Medrich.
  
• Cheddar Chive Scones from epicurious.com.
  

Previous Posts:

• "Hey, Boo Boo! What's In The Pic-a-Nic Basket?," June 26, 2008.
  
• "Still Stuck On Scones," August 1, 2008.
  

A Tough Cookie To Crack

Continuing my effort to utilize more of the cookbooks that have been sitting dormant on the shelf for a while, I picked up How to Be a Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson a few days ago and starting thumbing through it. When I first get a cookbook, I usually page through the entire thing and use Post-It flags to mark recipes of interest. Even though I hadn't picked up this cookbook in quite a while, all of the Post-Its were still there. I was quickly drawn to a recipe I had flagged years ago (but never made before) for pistachio macaroons. Having made my first attempt at chocolate macaroons only a few months ago (you can read about it here), I thought it was be great to branch out into a new variety. (And it doesn't hurt that I happen to love pistachios.)

The recipe was also wonderfully simple. The macaroons and filling only require a total of five ingredients: pistachios, powdered sugar, egg whites, granulated sugar, and butter. To make the macaroons, you grind pistachios and powdered sugar together in the food processor until the mixture is "as fine as dust." You then beat the egg whites until they are stiff, add some granulated sugar and beat them some more, and fold the egg whites into the pistachio dust. That's it for the batter. I used a #50 scoop to parcel out scoops of batter instead of using a pastry bag as the recipe suggested.

I was slightly panicked as I watched the macaroons baking in the oven; they did not flatten out and crack as I had expected. Instead, they stayed puffed and round, resembling the caps of white mushrooms. I was imagining that these puffy macaroons would form unsightly roly poly spheres when sandwiched together. Instead, the cookies deflated upon cooling and took on an odd wrinkly appearance. While I was very disappointed that they did not have the distinctive cracked appearance typical of macaroons (the photo accompanying the recipe in the cookbook showed traditional-looking macaroons, with pronounced surface cracks), at least they ended up with a flatter shape that could form decent looking sandwiches. The pistachio buttercream filling is nothing more than creamed butter combined with more pistachios and powdered sugar that has been pulverized in the food processor.

While I was not entirely satisfied with the macaroons themselves -- both their unusual appearance and their slightly damp texture left something to be desired -- the flavor combination of the macaroons and buttercream together was outstanding. Very rich and pistachio-ey! In the introductory text to the recipe, Nigella Lawson writes, "Of all the recipes in this book, this is the one of which I think I'm most proud: cookie bliss." I don't have it quite perfected yet, but I think that Nigella was really onto something there!

Recipe: "Pistachio Macaroons" from How to Be a Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson.

Previous Post: "Baking Up A French Beauty," November 18, 2008.

The Problem With the Girl Scouts

Believe it or not, I don't actually eat baked goods all that often. When I bake something I will usually have a taste, but I view that as a quality control requirement. I do have a sweet tooth, but I try to exercise self control and not indulge in sweets too frequently.

Girl Scout cookie season is a trying time for me. I stopped buying Girl Scout cookies a few years ago because I cannot resist those thin mints once I have them in my possession. An open box is an empty box. (And am I such a bad person for harboring a fantasy of inventing a cookie even better than the thin mint so that I can put the Girl Scouts cookie-selling operation out of business and quit my day job?) But my office is a dumping ground of Girl Scout cookies, where my generous co-workers who overbuy to support the Girl Scouts leave out open boxes on a daily basis. It's really horrible.

To counter this daily temptation, I decided yesterday to bake a batch of chocolate chip biscotti that I could stash at my office to nosh on whenever the Girl Scout cookie urge hits. The recipe is from Alice Medrich's cookbook Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts and contains no butter. While the recipe does contain eggs and (obviously) chocolate chips, the biscotti are low-fat and yet deliver the very satisfying flavor of a chocolate chip cookie, with a wonderful crunch.

Take that, Girl Scouts!

Recipe: "Chocolate Chip Biscotti" from Alice Medrich's Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts.

Previous Post: "Hey, Boo Boo! What's In the Pic-a-Nic Basket?," June 26, 2008.