WWHE (What Would Hippies Eat?): Cherry, Honey and Fennel Bread

Last week I was browsing the online version of the Los Angeles Times Food Section, and I noticed a recipe for Cherry, Honey and Fennel Bread (even though the recipe is from a couple of years ago, it was being featured last week for some reason). I'm always looking for new and interesting quick breads, so I decided to give it a shot.

Making this bread is a bit of a pricey proposition. First, there's the pound of cherries (currently $4.99/lb. at my neighborhood Whole Foods). Then, there's the half cup of pine nuts (about 2.5 ounces, currently $22.99/lb. at Whole Foods or $29.99/lb. at Wegmans). As I started assembling the ingredients for this recipe, I was struck that this bread has a very health-food-store vibe: whole grain flour, brown sugar, honey, fennel, pine nuts, cherries, no oil, and very little butter. The entire time the bread was baking (mine took 80 minutes), I joked with Tom that it was "Hippie Bread."

The bread looked great when it came out of the oven, and even better when it was sliced to reveal it was chock full of cherries. However, the bread was an odd shade of orange, basically the color of pumpkin bread.

The taste was just terrible. I had used King Arthur White Whole Wheat Flour, hoping that the texture would not be too heavy, but the texture was overly dense and rubbery. The fennel flavor was overpowering and completely drowned out the sweet cherries. And even though I happen to really like fennel, I got no enjoyment from eating bread that tasted of nothing else. This bread could have easily passed for some vegan health loaf that you might pick up at the Berkeley Bowl (or, as Tom put it, something that might have been available at the Whole Earth Restaurant that used to grace the campus of UC Santa Cruz).

I couldn't even bear to take my loaf to the office. I will be happy to never see this damn hippie bread again.

Recipe: "Cherry, Honey and Fennel Bread," from the June 25, 2008 Los Angeles Times.

Ipso Fatto Instant Photo: Brown Butter Almond Torte with Sour Cherry Sauce

I finished up the last of my sour cherry supply with this Brown Butter Almond Torte with Sour Cherry Sauce. The best part of this cake is definitely the sauce. It's thin and doesn't look like much, but it's full of flavor and really lovely.

Recipe: Brown Butter Almond Torte with Sour Cherry Sauce from epicurious.com.

Previous Post: "Fruit Fest, Phase III: Brown Butter Almond Torte," June 30, 2009.

Hot, Humid, and Hazardous to Baked Goods: Sour Cherry Scones

After the disappointing results with yesterday's sour cherry crumb cake, I was hoping for a better result with my next sour cherry baking project. I decided to try a recipe for sour cherry scones from The Craft of Baking.

The recipe starts out with instructions to put flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, and chilled butter in a mixing bowl, put the bowl in the freezer for 5 minutes, and then beat the mixture on low speed until the butter is broken up into pebble-sized pieces. From my experience with other scone recipes, I decided to take a slightly different approach. I cut the butter into small pieces and froze it first. Then I combined all of the dry ingredients and the frozen butter in a food processor, and ran the processor until the butter was completely incorporated. I really like this method for making scones. You end up with butter so well incorporated into the flour that it's invisible -- the end result just looks like slightly yellow flour. I've found that scones made this way end up with a wonderfully tender, crumbly texture.

After I incorporated the butter, I followed the rest of the recipe as it was written. I mixed in the cherries, followed by heavy cream, and then briefly kneaded the dough until it came together. I shaped the dough into disks, cut the disks into wedges, and then froze the scones for about 30 minutes (a step that was part of the recipe; this helps scones keep their triangular shape during baking). After coming out of the freezer, I brushed the scones with cream, sprinkled on coarse sanding sugar, and popped them in the oven.

Tom and I shared a scone shortly after it came out of the oven, and it was delicious. My only complaint -- and it was an exceedingly minor one -- was that the scone dough might have benefited from a bit of lemon zest to brighten the flavor. But the scone was very tender, lightly sweet, and had a beautiful golden crust with a light crunch from the sugar. The tart cherries were delicious.

Unfortunately, today happened to be one of the most miserable days of the year, at least with regard to the weather. With the temperature hitting triple digits and humidity at unbearably high levels, it was a bad day to be a scone. My scones became soft during the 12 hours between taking them out of the oven last night and getting them to the office this morning. They completely lost the firm texture of the outer crust. A few minutes in the oven probably would have restored the crust and remedied the problem, but alas, we don't have a toaster oven at work. So even though I thought the flavor of the scones was still very good, the overly soft texture was disappointing.

Nonetheless, I would happily make these scones again, so long as the weather isn't humid, or at least if I could serve them right after baking. Unfortunately, with sour cherry season falling in late June and early July, the chance of having low humidity and fresh sour cherries at the same time isn't great around these parts!

Recipe: "Sour Cherry Scones" from The Craft of Baking: Cakes, Cookies & Other Sweets with Ideas for Inventing Your Own, by Karen DeMasco and Mindy Fox.

It's Kind of Crummy, All Right: Sour Cherry Crumb Cake

I haven't had time to make it to the fruit orchard yet this year, but I have the good fortune to have a colleague who not only spent Father's Day picking an enormous quantity of sour cherries at Larriland Farm, but also was willing to share some of his fruit bounty with me (thanks, Michael!).

I flipped through the index of quite a few cookbooks looking for sour cherry recipes. The first one I found was a suggested cherry variation of a blueberry crumb cake recipe from Nick Malgieri's Perfect Cakes. Malgieri says this cake is one of his favorites and he makes it at least half a dozen times each summer, so it looked promising. The cake batter is made from flour, baking powder, salt, softened butter, sugar, eggs, egg yolks, and vanilla. After you make the batter and spread it out in a pan, you sprinkle on the fruit (in this case, three cups of sour cherries) and then a crumb topping made of flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and melted butter.

The recipe yields a small amount of batter, so you can see that the cake isn't very tall. The cherries stayed intact and didn't sink very much; I thought the sliced cake was just beautiful. If only this cake tasted as good as it looked! The cake itself was slightly dry and quite bland, and the crumb topping had too much nutmeg. In short, this cake was pretty crummy and I won't bother ever trying the recipe again. Thankfully, I still have an ample sour cherry supply remaining and I will try to make the most of it!

Recipe: "Blueberry Crumb Cake (Cherry Crumb Cake Variation)," from Perfect Cakes by Nick Malgieri.

A Tall, Cool Drink of Summer Dessert: Raspberry Lime Rickey Cake

Recently I received an email from King Arthur Flour that featured a recipe for Raspberry Lime Rickey Cake. I immediately went to the King Arthur website to check out the recipe; I love citrus and I was captivated by the photo of the cake, which is topped with sparkling sanding sugar instead of frosting.

I won't spend much time describing the recipe inspired by the classic New England beverage, since it's covered in detail on the King Arthur Baking Banter Blog. I made the cake last night with just a couple of deviations from the recipe. I wanted to boost the flavor of the sugar topping but didn't have any lime oil on hand, so I rubbed a tablespoon of zest (one lime's worth) into the sanding sugar until the sugar was damp, before I sprinkled it onto the cake. I think the extra zest in the sugar topping was a great addition -- it boosted the lime flavor overall and added some beautiful color.

For the raspberry sauce, I didn't think that the rather gloppy looking sauce full of seeds from the King Arthur recipe was terribly attractive. Instead, I made the sauce from Marcel Desaulniers' White Chocolate Patty Cake, which is thawed frozen raspberries, lemon juice, and sugar blended together in the food processor and put through a fine sieve.

This cake was incredibly delicious. The top half of the cake was damp with lime-sugar syrup, and the tart raspberry sauce was the perfect complement to the citrus flavor. However, my absolute favorite part was the sugar topping. Since you sprinkle the sugar on the cake right after brushing on the lime syrup, the sugar sticks firmly onto the top of the cake and adds a marvelously sweet crunch. It was slightly reminiscent of the hard caramel topping on a crème brûlée, except that it was even crunchier, and completely limetastic.

The bright lime flavor of this cake was a warm ray of sunshine befitting this summer solstice day!

Recipe: Raspberry Lime Rickey Cake from King Arthur Flour.

Ipso Fatto Instant Photo: Fig and Strawberry Giant Thumbprint Cookies

It's hard to tell from the picture, but the cookie in front is filled with strawberry preserves, and the one in back has fig preserves. Both were yummy!

Recipe: "Giant Thumbprint Cookies" from Butter Flour Sugar Eggs: Whimsical Irresistible Desserts, by Gale Gand.

Previous Posts:

• "A Lasting Impression: Giant Thumbprint Cookies," February 24, 2009.
• "I'll Take Foods That Start With the Letter Q, Alex," August 13, 2009.
• "Did Someone Punch My Cookie in the Face?: Giant Thumbprint Cookies," December 19, 2009.
  

The Not-So-Crispy Crispy Gingersnap Cookie

As the days are becoming more hot and humid here in D.C., I'm trying to make baked goods that will hold up well during my commute. In this vein, I decided to try a recipe for "Crispy Gingersnaps" from Great Cookies: Secrets to Sensational Sweets by Carole Walter. My standard gingersnap recipe, from Sunday Best Baking: Over a Century of Secrets from the White Lily Kitchen, produces delicious and superchewy cookies... but in humid weather they can become soft and a little floppy. I was happy to try a recipe that promised to produce a crispy ginger cookie.

The recipe is unusual in that it doesn't call for any molasses, which Walter credits with creating the crispy texture. The batter contains flour, ground ginger, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, salt, butter, sugar, dark brown sugar, egg, vanilla, cider vinegar, and crystallized ginger. The lack of molasses created a cookie that was much paler in color than other ginger cookies I have made; I thought the finished cookies could easily have been mistaken for peanut butter cookies.

I eagerly waited for my cookies to cool so that I could try one and enjoy the crispy texture. The only problem was, the cookies were chewy! Not uberchewy like my regular gingersnaps, but still, pretty much exactly what you would expect from a ginger cookie and nothing close to crisp. The cookies tasted fine, although I thought their flavor lacked depth (maybe because of the lack of molasses?). Tom almost immediately observed that this cookie would probably be much improved with the addition of some chocolate chips.

I wasn't exactly thrilled with the results, so I decided to see if I could pep up the cookies a bit by making them into ice cream sandwiches. As it happens, I had made some rhubarb gelato over the weekend using a recipe from the Wall Street Journal Magazine. (My gelato was tan colored because the only rhubarb I could find at Wegman's over the weekend was mostly green, with just a touch of red; when I cooked it down, I ended up with a rhubarb paste that was brown, instead of pink.)

I thought that the rhubarb gelato might work well with these cookies because in the past, I've made gingersnap ice cream sandwiches with lemon ice cream, and lemon and ginger are a great combination. Rhubarb is very tart and the rhubarb gelato was very reminiscent of citrus; the pairing was perfect.

I doubt that I would make this cookie again, since I don't think it's better than the other gingersnaps and ginger chip cookies that I regularly make. But I do have to say that they arrived at the office in perfect condition on a very humid day, so in that regard, they turned out to be exactly what I was looking for!

Recipes:

• "Crispy Gingersnaps" from Great Cookies: Secrets to Sensational Sweets by Carole Walter.
• "Rhubarb Gelato" from Jon Snyder of Laboratorio del Gelato, from the June 2010 Wall Street Journal Magazine.
  

Want Coffee with Dessert? Coffee Éclairs

Over the weekend, I decided it was finally time to crack open The Art of the Dessert by Ann Amernick. I've had this book for over a year (Ann was kind enough to sign my copy during my cake decorating lesson last year) but I've never tried any of the recipes. That's because this book is no joke. Many of the recipes are complicated and extremely labor intensive; I would recommend the book for advanced home bakers only. I picked one of the easier recipes to try, "Coffee Éclairs after Robert." Amernick explains that the recipe is named after bread baker Robert de Lapeyrouse, who grew up eating coffee éclairs in France and lamented never being able to find them in the United States.

The pâte a choux pastry is pretty standard: heat up water, butter, sugar, and salt on the stove, and then beat in flour and eggs. I piped out the éclair paste into strips on a parchment-lined baking pan using a pastry bag with a large plain tip. Amernick directs you to pipe out the paste into 5-inch strips, but I wanted to make my éclairs bite sized, so I made short strips and ended up with adorable little 3-inch long éclairs.

After I cut the tops off of the éclairs and pulled out any soft dough filaments inside, I filled them with coffee pastry cream. The pastry cream is made from sugar, cake flour, milk, eggs yolks, butter and coffee extract. Amernick includes a recipe for coffee extract that is 2 parts instant espresso powder to one part dark rum by volume, but I took a shortcut and just bought some Nielsen-Massey coffee extract from Sur La Table. It's not that it would be difficult to make my own extract; it's just that we didn't have any dark rum on hand and buying it wasn't much more expensive than making my own. Coffee extract isn't exactly cheap (I paid $5.95 for 2 fl. oz.), but either is instant espresso powder (around here, about $6 for a cup).

As the recipe is written, the éclairs are supposed to be topped with homemade coffee-flavored fondant, but I took another shortcut and used a bittersweet chocolate glaze (heavy cream, sugar, corn syrup, bittersweet chocolate, and vanilla) that is a component of Amernick's recipe for Chocolate Viennese Cake. The glaze set up nicely, especially after a little time in the refrigerator.

The coffee pastry cream was unusual and delicious (even though the dirty-looking latte color wasn't terribly appealing); it also went well with the chocolate glaze. I was a big fan of the small éclairs, which were incredibly cute. Besides the several hours that were required to make and assemble all of the éclair components, the other downside to making these is that I really felt that I needed my own chicken. I made a double batch of choux paste and a batch and a half of the pastry cream, and I needed 28 eggs total (well, 9 whole eggs and 19 yolks). I don't think I've ever used that many eggs at once before. Then again, I got 60 small éclairs out of it, so the egg-to-éclair ratio was less than 1 to 2, which seems perfectly reasonable.

While I enjoyed the coffee pastry cream, these éclairs would be equally good -- and just as cute! -- with any other flavored filling or glaze.

Recipe: "Coffee Éclairs after Robert" from The Art of the Dessert by Ann Amernick.

Fragile When Frigid: Turtle Bars

Last night I tried Nancy Baggett's recipe for Turtle Bars from The All-American Cookie Book -- a candylike confection of a cookie crust that is topped with a layer of caramel with pecans, covered with a layer of chocolate, and finished with more pecans.

You make the crust for these bars by cutting cold butter in to a mixture of flour, sugar, and salt, and then adding a bit of milk to make a dough just damp enough to stick together. The crust mixture is pressed into a pan, chilled, and blind baked. My crust visibly shrank from the edges of the pan during baking, but it did stay nice and flat. You make the pecan-caramel layer by cooking heavy cream, corn syrup, butter, brown sugar, sugar, and salt to 246 degrees, and then stirring in vanilla and toasted chopped pecans. After you spread the caramel onto the crust, you immediately scatter over a bag of chocolate chips, which melt on the hot caramel. You then spread the melted chocolate over the top of the bars and sprinkle on more pecans.

The recipe instructs you to refrigerate the bars until they are completely cooled before cutting them into bars. Since I made these late in the evening, I left the finished pan in the refrigerator overnight and then tried to slice them right before leaving for work this morning. I found that the cold caramel layer was extremely brittle, and the bars were splintering off into irregular shards as I was trying to cut them into neat squares. The photo above shows one of the few squarish bars I managed to cut, but you can see that the bottom crust border is quite uneven; the crust fractured when the caramel above it broke off as I tried to cut into it. I learned later in the day that the caramel actually becomes soft and chewy once it comes back to room temperature; I think if I had just let the bars warm up a bit before I cut them, I wouldn't have had a problem.

As for the taste, I have never been a fan of caramel turtles and I didn't think these bars were anything special. In particular, I was disappointed by the crust component, which seemed to be virtually flavorless and didn't even contribute that much in the way of texture. However, people seemed to enjoy these quite a bit, and if you are a fan of caramel and pecans, these treats might be right up your alley.

Recipe: "Turtle Bars" from The All-American Cookie Book by Nancy Baggett.