The Fox Fix

Strawberry Lemonade Cake

2011-06-28T07:30:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: I'm feeling nostalgic because I'm currently planning a trip to NYC. Next week we're going on our awesome family vacation to Skaneateles and finishing the week with a couple days in the city! Therefore this post may or may not be mostly about this quintessential summer cake.

I really enjoy exploring on my own. Events are more significant when you don't have to acknowledge them to another person. They seem to be a tailor-made gift just for you.

Maybe if you were with a soul mate of the type where you don't have to acknowledge things to know that they've been absorbed, then you could have the same special feeling. Then months later you could be like "Remember that time...?" and they could be like "Yeah, that was amazing."

I kind of have that relationship with my brother, but it usually only applies to funny-looking people. Later I can say "That man today- he was crazy." and he'll say "I know. I've never seen a beard that color before."

One time when I was living in New York City, I decided to visit Redhook for the first time by myself. Its a long trip that requires taking the metro to a bus and then walking, but its worth it for such wonders as Steve's Authentic Key Lime Pie and Baked.

My train emerged from its tunnel to ride along tracks raised above the streets, and I found that I was sharing the car with only one other person. This young man took out a one-legged stool and sat leaning against a pole in the middle of the aisle. He slowly bowed a cello; fluid, sad and lovely.

It was so precious and tenuous, sitting in that light-filled car at roof-top level as the city buildings shrank and spread below. The air in that bright, music-laden car made my head swim as it seemed to grow thicker and thicker with beauty and impossibility. It was hard to breath for loveliness. We came to a station. The man stood, picked up his stool and instrument, and exited the train.

I was lonely and yearning for the rest of the ride, and it pains me to tell people about it now. I can't say out loud how I felt and so I rush it and it seems like just another part of a bigger story, when really, it was the story.

I won't say that this cake is like that, though maybe you get very emotional about cake, I don't know. But this cake could be part of a experience like that. It could be part of your ideal, sun-filled afternoon with a soul mate. It could you and that person, sitting on the perfect hill, under the most majestic tree, on the loveliest blanket, in an idyllic breeze under a flawless sky, with the coldest lemonade in the ideal glasses, having the best conversation of your life, eating this dreamy cake. Maybe you wouldn't even want to post pictures on the internet later, because that would ruin the perfection. Maybe you'll just keep that day to yourself and never speak of it again, but hold it so, so dearly.

I guess you'll have to make this cake and make it all happen. Because this cake really is worthy of such magic.

The layers are the lemon-drop cake layers from the (awesome) Baked cookbook, paired with lemon curd and a lightly lemon frosting, and stuffed with as many strawberries as you can fit between each layer.

Ingredients

Lemon Layers (from Baked)

2 1/2 cups cake flour

3/4 cup AP flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

3/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, room temp

1/2 cup vegetable shortening, room temp

1 3/4 cup sugar

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

grated zest of 1 lemon

1 large egg

1 1/2 cup cold water

2 large egg whites, room temp

1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar

Lemon Curd (from Baked)

3/4 cup fresh squeezed lemon juice (from 6-8 lemons)

grated zest of 2 lemons

2 large eggs

7 large egg yolks

3/4 cup sugar

optional 1 tablespoon of cornstarch

4 tablespoons butter, room temp

Lemon Frosting (adapted from Baked and Tasty Kitchen)

2 cups whole milk

10 tablespoons flour

2 cups sugar

1 pound (4 sticks) butter, room temp

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1/2 cup lemon curd

Strawberries- chopped. The smaller the pieces, the easier it will be to slice the cake.

Lemon Layers

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Spray with oil and line 3 8-in pans with parchment rounds. If you're using 9-in pans, I'd make the recipe times 1.5.

In a large bowl, sift the flours, baking soda and powder, and salt together.

In the bowl of your stand mixer, or using a bowl and a hand-held mixer, cream the butter, shortening, zest and sugar together for 4 minutes, until light and fluffy. Scrape the sides of the bowl and add the while egg and vanilla, beating until just combined.

With the mixer on low speed, add the dry ingredients, alternating with the ice water, in three additions, beginning and ending the the dry and scraping down the bowl as needed. Mix for a few seconds after the ingredients are all combined.

In a spotless bowl, whisk the egg whites and cream of tartar until soft peaks form. Don't over beat. Gently fold the egg whites into the cake batter.

Divide the batter evenly between the pans, smooth the tops and bake, for 40-45 minutes, or until a cake testing object stuck in the middle of the cake comes out clean. Remove from the oven and place on wire racks to cool for 20 or so minutes. Then remove the cakes from the pan and allow to cool completely before frosting. If you want your frosting to go easier, you can wrap the layers with plastic wrap when cool, then stick them in the freezer for a couple hours before frosting. Believe me, its so much easier to frost a cold cake.

Make the Lemon Curd*

In a small, non-reactive pan, whisk the eggs, egg yolks, and sugar until combined. Add the lemon juice and zest and whisk thoroughly. If you're worried about runny lemon curd, you can mix a tablespoon of cornstarch in the with sugar before combining the ingredients.

Place the pot on the stove over very low heat and whisk constantly until the mixture has thickened.

Pour/scrape the curd through a fine-mesh strainer to remove any eggy bits and lemon zest. Add the butter, cut into chunks and stir until the mixture is homogenous. Press a piece of plastic wrap directly against the lemon curd and set aside to cool. If you're using it soon you can refrigerate it, or if you're using VERY soon, you can set the bowl of curd in an ice bath.

*The ingredients are the same, but my instructions vary slightly from the original Baked ones, most notably, the fact that I don't use a double boiler. Its just the way I do things and it turns out fab.

Make the frosting

Pour the 2 cups of milk into a small sauce pan and set it over low heat. Gradually add the flour, one tablespoon at a time, whisking to incorporate between each addition. Whisk constantly while the gravy mixture heats, until it thickens to brownie-batter consistency.

Set it aside to cool, stirring occasionally.

When the gravy-mixture is cool, place the sugar and butter in bowl of your stand mixer and mix with the paddle attachment on low speed for at LEAST 5 minutes, until the butter and sugar are incredibly fluffy and whipped-cream-like. The sugar should be almost dissolved.

Scrape the cooled (<-important) gravy-mixture though a fine mesh strainer into the bowl of sugar butter and mix for several more minutes, until the whole thing is very fluffy and nice-looking. Add the vanilla and the half-cup of lemon curd and mix until combined. The frosting should taste lightly of lemon and be very smooth and light and delicious. It's even reminiscent of whipped cream, but it will hold up way better.

To assemble, put a thin layer of lightly lemon frosting on the bottom layer of the cake. COVER the thing with as many chopped strawberries as your heart desires and the spoon a layer of lemon curd evenly over the strawberries. Top with the next layer and repeat. Top with the final layer and then spread the remaining frosting over the entire cake. Garnish with more strawberries and lemon rind curls. OR...make cupcakes.

Serve to your soul mate.

Triple Chocolate Bread Pudding

2011-06-14T07:49:00.000-07:00

It's not just because I bake bread and desserts for a restaurant that I find myself making a lot of bread pudding. It's because right now there is no dessert I'd rather eat than bread pudding.

I go through phases like this- flan for awhile, then chocolate pudding, then rice pudding and now bread pudding. (Notice any trends in my dessert obsessions? Apparently I don't like to chew.)

I first made this recipe for Masters Week because one of the caterings we did was for a company that actually brought their own chef. I'm not sure how that situation worked, but this chef was named Nick Stellino. One night the dinner entertainment for the clients was a cooking demo by Mr. Stellino, and he requested a specific dessert be served- his Bread Pudding with Two Chocolates. And it was my job to make it.

I was nervous about how it would turn out with our iffy oven, but I followed his recipe and the bread pudding turned out to be DIVINE. So divine that instead of bringing leftovers back to the restaurant, the servers and cooks ate the rest of it on site. I've made it for the restaurant several times since.

It's dense, moist and chocolatey (as all good things in this world are.) If you want to go nuts on your guests, make additional of the chocolate sauce required for the recipe and serve the pudding in a pool of chocolate sauce. With strawberries or raspberries.

Chocolate Sauce:

1/2 cup heavy cream

6 oz semi-sweet chocolate chips

2 tablespoons sugar

3 tablespoons corn syrup

1/8 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla

Place heavy cream, chocolate and sugar in a small saucepan. Heat on low until cream bubbles and chocolate starts to melt. Remove from heat and whisk until all melted and smooth. Whisk in corn syrup, salt and vanilla.

Bread Pudding with Two Chocolates:

Chocolate Sauce (recipe above)

4 eggs

4 egg yolks

3/4 cup sugar

2 cups milk

2 cups cream

1 teaspoon vanilla

10 cups day-old bread, cut into 2-in pieces

1 cup dark chocolate, chopped

1 cup white chocolate, chopped

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Butter a deep baking dish or individual ramekins.

In a large bowl, beat the eggs, yolks and sugar with a whisk or electric mixer until it forms a thick yellow custard. Add the milk, cream and vanilla and beat for several minutes more.

Add the bread to the bowl of wet ingredients and mix well. Press down the bread often to make sure it's absorbing as much of the liquid as possible. Add the chocolate sauce, white chocolate and dark chocolate and stir so that the ingredients are evenly distributed.

Let the pudding rest at room temperature for 15 minutes, then place in the oven, reducing the temperature to 350 degrees. Bake for 35-40 minutes. It's done when a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Beware of hitting a dark chocolate spot and thinking it's not done when it is. If you're using small containers, the bake time will be shorter.

MMM!! Serve hot or at room temperature with whipped cream, chocolate sauce, shaved chocolate, fruit- whatever suits your fancy. This dessert would go great after an italian meal that has lots of fresh basil and rustic bread. Preferably served outdoors under bistro lights or lanterns. With wine. (Or maybe milk.) Okay, now I need to have a party.

Goat Cheesecake

2011-06-07T07:26:00.000-07:00

photo by Leah Paulette

I made a quick day trip to Savannah this week with my friend Leah*, who came spur of the moment to see me while her husband was off fighting fires for the Forest Service (impressive, I know.) We spent time on the beach reading aloud from Matilda, ran screaming from scary jellyfish water, walked for about 6 hours straight and ate seafood, icecream, bread, and cookies. And free samples of pralines on River Street.

I don't think most people understand my need to visit every bakery in a given city (this is hard in places like New York City, but believe me, I have tried). But Leah understands. She even reminded me about one we'd missed as we started to head home. Eric would've been praying I'd forgotten so we could get out of there- he doesn't really get it.

If you're planning a visit to Savannah, make sure you stop by Leopold's Ice Cream Shop, Harris Baking Company (AHmazing Ciabatta bread) and one that looked cool but we missed (cause it closes at 4pm), Back in the Day Bakery (a little ways from the main downtown area.)

*Leah and I have been officially best friends since 9th grade, when we stood in the bathroom at school and decided it was so. We shared family vacations. We lived together for a while in college. Then we did the whole maid-of-honor thing in each other's weddings. We're BFFs, no big deal.

So Leah came and hung out at work one morning while I baked. I rewarded her patience with bread pudding, which she confirmed is the best she's ever eaten. She even used her mad photography skills to capture images of this Goat Cheese Cake with Lemon Curd. Which, by the way, is DELICIOUS.

This Goat Cheesecake is one of the creamiest cheesecakes I've ever bitten into. Totally Luscious. The goat cheese flavor is subtle at first, then expands as you swallow each bite. The graham cracker crust is spiced with ginger and cinnamon. The addition of Lemon Curd isn't necessary, but the flavors are lovely together and it does bring it up a notch on the dessert-impressiveness-scale. Throw some strawberries or blueberries on the plate, and you have a dessert worthy of some fan fare. It manages to be tart and sweet, pungent and fresh all at the same time- also, people hear "goat cheese" and go nuts for some reason.

This is not your run of the mill NY style cheesecake with sticky berries in syrup, this is:

Goat Cheesecake with Lemon Curd and Fresh Berries. Inspired by Emeril's recipe.

Preheat the oven to 350. Get out a 9-in springform pan and a baking dish large enough to hold the springform pan.

For the crust:

2 cups finely ground graham crackers (or 2 cups gingersnap crumbs. if using gingersnaps, omit the spices) Using a food processor is the easiest way to get good crumbs.

1 teaspoon ginger

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 cup sugar

1/2 cup melted butter

Stir the graham crumbs, spices and sugar together. Slowly add the butter until the crumbs are evenly moistened and stick together when you squeeze them.

Press this mixture onto the bottom and sides of the springform pan, creating the crust for the cheesecake. Use your fingers or a straight-sided glass or measuring cup to make the job easy. Freeze the crust for 10 or 15 minutes. This will help it keep its structure in the oven. After freezing, bake the crust for 10 or so minutes until it is golden brown. Set aside to cool.

Prepare the batter:

3.5 packages cream cheese (28 oz total), room temp

1 cup sour cream

12 oz goat cheese, room temp

2 cups sugar

4 eggs

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

juice of 1 lime

1 tablespoons Gran Marnier, Cointreau or orange extract

In a stand mixer or using a handheld mixer with a deep bowl, mix the cream cheese until creamy. Add the goat cheese and the sour cream and mix until smooth. Add the sugar and mix, scraping down the bowl occasionally with a spatula. Add the eggs one at a time, fully incorporating each before adding the next. Finally, mix in the vanilla, lime juice and orange liquor until the mixture is completely smooth.

Pour the batter into the prepared crust and smooth the top. Wrap tinfoil around the sides and base of the springform pan to make sure no water penetrates the pan during baking. Set the pan into the baking dish and fill the baking dish with very hot water so it comes halfway up the side of the springform pan. This is a waterbath and will ensure the cheesecake doesn't crack during baking.

Bake at 350 for about 1.5 hours (or 2 if you have shady spotty oven like me). The center will move only slightly when the cheesecake is done- the edges will be completely set.

Remove the cheesecake from the water bath and cool on a rack. Once cool, chill in the fridge for at least 3 hours.

While the cheesecake is cooling, make the lemon curd:

1 t finely grated lemon zest

1/2 cup fresh lemon juice

1/2 cup sugar

3 large eggs

1/2 stick of butter

Whisk together the zest, juice, sugar and eggs in a heavy saucepan. Cook over med-low heat, whisking frequently, until the mixture has thickened and is bubbling.

Force the curd through a fine mesh sieve into a small bowl to remove the zest, and any eggy bits. Cut the butter into 1/2 in pieces, and add them to the curd. Stir until the butter is melted. If you're in a hurry, use an ice bath to cool the curd, stirring occasionally. (Simply place the bowl of curd into a larger bowl of ice water.) Otherwise, place a piece of plastic wrap over the top and refrigerate until ready to use.

Serve the cheesecake with a dollop of lemon curd and a smattering of berries.

Strawberry Lemonade Pie

2011-05-24T16:59:00.000-07:00

Summertime in Augusta, Georgia is oppressively hot. Oh, I know it's only May and all, I know it's barely summer, but yesterday was 97 degrees and it feels like August feels everywhere else I've lived. Perhaps that's why it's named Augusta. The air here is pregnant with water- its holding all the water it can without actually raining. Step outside, and it's like stepping into a foggy bathroom after a hot shower.

So what do we do in sticky humidity, when the chocolate chips are melting in the jar on the counter because someone in this family thinks air conditioning is for wimps? We make icebox pie. And because it is strawberry season, and because nothing refreshes like bright, tart lemon, and because Martha was kind enough to publish this recipe in her June magazine, we make Strawberry Lemonade Icebox Pie.

Now to me, icebox pie is something that you don't bake, like a eggless cheesecake or chocolate pudding pie. This pie you bake (and I was very loath to turn on the oven, believe me), so it baffled me where the icebox part came in.

The answer is, you absolutely must refrigerate this thing, or else the butter in the crust and the juice from the strawberries and egg whites (if you go there) make a big soggy mess. We first ate it after letting it sit on the counter for hours, and it was a little soupy, but the leftovers stored in the fridge were the proper consistency. So I wouldn't recommend it for all-day-in-the-sun cookouts, but it would work great for a party where you can keep it cold until eating time.

Strawberry-Lemonade Icebox Pie, from Martha Stewart Living June 2011 Issue

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Get out your 9-in pie or tart pan.

Crust

10 graham crackers, zipped into a ziplock pounded into smithereens with a rolling pin. Or pulsed in a food processor until fine.

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 t coarse salt

5 T unsalted butter, melted

Mix 1 1/3 cup of the graham cracker crumbs with the 1/4 cup sugar and the 1/4 t coarse salt. Add the butter and mix with a fork until moist and thoroughly combined. You can also do all this in the food processor.

Press the mixture firmly into the sides and bottom of the pie dish using your fingers or a dry measuring cup. Freeze for 30 minutes. (Or 15, as the case may be.)

Once chilled, bake the crust for 10 minutes in the 375 oven, until golden brown. Remove the crust and reduce the oven temperature to 325 degrees.

Meanwhile, make the filling.

so many yellow ingredients!

Filling

1 14-oz can of sweetened condensed milk

2/3 cup strained fresh squeezed lemon juice (from 4-6 lemons)

2 large egg yolks (reserve whites for meringue)

1 large egg

Coarse salt

Whisk all these ingredients together and pour into the pre-baked crust. (It's ok if it's still warm). Bake at 325 until the center is set, 25-30 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool to room temperature. Then refrigerate for at least 3 hours (the icebox part).

30 minutes before the 3 hours are up, prepare the topping.

Topping

12 oz (2 cups) sliced strawberries (just use a whole quart).

2 tablespoons sugar plus 1/2 cup and 2 tbs sugar

2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

3 large egg whites, room temperature

Sprinkle the strawberries with the 2 tbs sugar and lemon juice, and let stand for about 30 minutes.

OPTIONAL MERINGUE: While the strawberries are standing, heat the egg whites with the 1/2 cup plus 2 tbs sugar in a heat-proof bowl set over a pot of simmering water, stirring until the sugar is dissolved and the egg whites are warm.

Using a handheld or counter mixer, whip the egg whites at high speed until medium peaks form.

Now assemble! Drain the juice from the strawberries and spoon them over the lemon pie. If you want you can stop here, it will be fab fabby fab. A delectable dessert flavored with the vibrant colors of red and yellow.

However, if you chose the meringue, spread the whipped egg whites over the strawberries. Toast the meringue using a kitchen torch or the broiler in your over. The broiler is RISKY. BUSINESS. Check it every minute AT LEAST. I swear my pie was only in the oven for 3 minutes and here's what it looked like, not pretty:

Still quite tasty though.

Broken Cake Trifle and trippy weekend.

2011-05-17T10:04:00.000-07:00

I was gone for... no real reason. I have an extreme lack of quality pictures because I never seemed to have my camera on me when I was making things, and I just couldn't bring myself to write a post in general. I thought "Hmm, I should post today, that bread pudding is looking moldy." Then I'd click the "New Post" tab, and stare at the blank text box for a few minutes before going off to check my email and google reader instead. I have been making things though, and I aim to be a more responsible documenter as it appears a few of you missed me. And in lieu of pictures, I have words today, so grab some coffee and focus your attention spans.

News Item 1: Crazy Easter weekend.

Easter weekend was a sleepless haze of cream puffs and music like I'd never heard it before.

The restaurant had a catering on Friday night for a French couple's wedding. They requested a Croquembouche for their wedding cake. The croak-am-boosh is a traditional French dessert that is basically a zillion cream puffs glued with hot caramel into a tall cone shaped tower. Time consuming. Dangerous. In addition the wedding cake 'bouche, they wanted 80 individual 'bouches for their guests. No big deal.

And so all Thursday night and much of Friday found me making desserts for the restaurant, 450 cream puffs and gallons of Grand Marnier-flavored pastry cream in an increasingly sleep-deprived and manic state. I didn't get to go to sleep until 1 pm on Friday, but tragically, I had to be at the wedding venue at 4pm to help assemble the dang thing.

This is what 450 cream puffs and several gallons of pastry cream looks like:

Unfortunately I didn't get a picture of the finished product, it was chaos.

I toiled away in my corner, filling cream puffs, trying to avoid the rest of the staff rushing around. (Here's a quick trick for any of you desiring to make this monstrosity: if you have to bake the cream puff in advance, pop them in the oven for a few minutes and let cool before filling them. The toasting will help them keep their shape in the tower and its less likely to topple over...)

Anyway, after a few panicked minutes with some iffy caramel, burning fingers on said caramel, burning foot on dropped caramel (Toms shoes have no place in the kitchen folks), and trying to work around the cheerful and inquisitive wedding photographers who thought they'd capture the process for posterity, we presented one grand, imposing cake and 80 minute cakes to the newly married couple and their guests. Phew, time for some sleep. Not.

I went home to bed at 9 pm to sleep...but then had to be back to work at midnight to bake for the Saturday farmers' market. So I stayed up til the next day at noon, baking and selling bread. Are you keeping track of my sleep folks? Like, how there's really none?

Saturday afternoon I was done with work and feeling strangely powerful, like maybe I'm a super-human who doesn't have to sleep. I happily jumped in the car to drive with Eric to the Allegreen Music festival near Athens, GA.

Now, this Festival was one we got tickets for on Groupon for super cheap, on a whim, without even looking at the bands. We'd been planning on a little trip to nearby Athens anyway.

It wasn't until a few days before the festival that we thought to check out the bands playing, and by then it was too late. The headliner was a band called JACKYL, and I'll let you look them up yourselves. Basically, they are 40 or 50 year old rockers that got their start in the 80s and never calmed down. We're talking flames and yelling and dancing ladies. The lead singer has super-straight brown hair that flows passed his waist. He sings with a wireless microphone attached to a whip and his mic stand is made out of a rifle. Those are probably the tamest details I can share with you. They were the last act of the night, and by then I was wearily determined to sit on the ground in the middle of a hoard of standing/dancing show-goers. Eric thought it best to drag me off to bed, so we only stayed for a couple songs as shocked observers.

Allegreen was a hugely unique experience all-around. It was held at a remote resort called Durhamtown where you can rent ATVs and dirtbikes and zip the around the woods on dirt tracks with jumps. In fact, between shows, guys performed huge as-seen-on-TV-type stunts on a track with a jump that shot them a hundred feet up into the air.

I embarrassed Eric by gasping and covering my face with fear as they twisted and flipped the motorcycles in the air. Underneath it all, a woman gulped lighter fluid or whatever and blew flames into the air, finishing her performance with a flaming hula hoop. (Oh, we also saw some junior fire breaters lurking around later that night. Three teenage boys beckoned us to them and tried to impress us with their pyro skillz while staring deep into our eyes/souls and refusing to blink. One of them had a tail attached to his pants. Another's pockets were stuffed full of straw, which doesn't seem safe to me.)

Anyway, one act there was truly mind-blowing. He's call "That 1 Guy" and he plays a MAGIC PIPE, and occasionally a MAGIC BOOT. These are electronic instruments completely of his own making. He's a one man band and the pipe has strings and buttons and pedals and more. He always wears two Amish-type hats at the same time and has super pointy sideburns. A real weirdo, which I think he'd take as a compliment. That 1 Guy's lyrics and music were extremely complicated (and strange) with excellent beats. Every time he finished a song he'd end with an "AaaROOOOOOO" wolf howl, which at first was off-putting but he was so awesome that half way through the set we were all yelling "AaaaROOOOO" with him. Check out some videos, its the only way to know.

This video is longer and really lets you see what this guy is about:

We slept shivering in our tent next to a family with the Taj Mahal camping set up. The next morning the wife asked me "Were ya'll making a peanut butter sandwich last night? I saw your shadow in the tent spreading something." Um yes, thanks for noticing.

News item 2 to come next time. BUT- In case you wanted some food content in this post, here's a Broken-Cake-Chocolate-Strawberry-Trifle.

I made a Sweet and Salty Cake and a Coconut Cake (recipe coming soon) for our friends Ryan and Laura's wedding. The first batch of chocolate cake came out of the pan in clumps because I thought I could use wax paper instead of parchment paper to line the bottom of the cake pan just this once. Don't try it, it doesn't work.

Well, never one to let cake go to waste, I made a Trifle for a potluck that night. I layered the broken cake with Chocolate Pudding, sliced strawberries and whipped cream.

I didn't even have to go to the store for any extra ingredients- the pudding just takes milk, sugar, chocolate and cornstarch.

Here's a rough recipe- but you can mix and match with whatever you have. Even cool whip and pudding from a box, if you must.

1 layer broken chocolate cake, plus crumbs to sprinkle the top

2 cups cream, whipped

1 quart strawberries

1 recipe chocolate pudding

Layer half the cake, then half the pudding, then half the whipped cream, then half the strawberries. Repeat. Top with cake crumbs.

Enjoy this accolade this brings! The potluck people swooooned over it.

Chocolate Croissant Bread Pudding

2011-04-17T05:49:00.000-07:00

Last week the Masters golf tournament took Augusta by storm. By that I mean the entire city was consumed by golf mania, Bill Murray was in town, and there were tornadoes.

I baked every night from midnight-9am or so, and my sleep schedule was so messed up it was hard for me to do much of anything but bake and lie around pretending to read (but mostly staring out of the window and sighing occasionally.) Forget drawing, screen printing, hanging out or blogging- all that took way too much energy.

Eric and I got to check out the National golf course for a couple hours Tuesday evening. We felt like such impostors walking in the place (I don't even own a polo shirt). I expected-I don't know-the Emerald City of Oz, I guess. A green aura did exist everywhere I looked, from the pristine grass to the sophisticated "bleachers" and grown up "snack bars," but overall...it just looked like a golf course to me. With some very nice azalea bushes, I might add.

I felt sorry for all the hired labor scampering around picking up individual pine needles off the ground...the storm from the night before knocked not a few pine trees and azalea bushes around.

I was baking during the storm, and around 3am the power went out in the restaurant. I started screaming "NO NO NO NO NO NO! Come back! Please! NoooooooOOO...." I am very vocal when I bake, seeing as I am alone and all. I had a horrible vision of the kitchen staff walking in the kitchen and all the unbaked dough taking over the kitchen, with poor Mikaela's feet sticking out from under the mass like the Wicked Witch of the East.

Fortunately for me, the power came back 5 minutes later.

Every day I made about a million croissants for breakfast parties, and by the end of the week we had quite the surplus of old croissants. I cast a glance around the ol' internet, and found this recipe for chocolate croissant bread pudding on the Food Network site. Friends, I tell you: at least 7 people have told me, unsolicited, that this stuff is bliss on a fork. And not all of them what you might call "bread pudding people." I am definitely a bread pudding person, it's actually my newest obsession, so I'll share this recipe with you. It's super buttery and soft, like a croissant. With chocolate!

And in a later post, look forward to yet another BP recipe I made during golf week.

Get some.

Chocolate Croissant Bread Pudding adapted from Food Network site

Preheat to 350.

I made this recipe times 3 in a massive pan, you should use a 9"x13" baking pan.

1 stick unsalted butter, room temperature.

1 cup sugar

1 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

5 large eggs

2 cups heavy cream

1 cup whole milk or half and half

8-12 croissants, depending on the size (you'll want to fill the bottom of the pan with a layer of loosely placed 1-inch-croissant-pieces about 2 inches deep.)

1 cup bittersweet or dark chocolate, chopped small.

I used croissants that were baked stuffed with chocolate, so I skipped the extra cup of chocolate.

In a large food processor or a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, mix the sugar and cinnamon. Add the butter and mix until well blended. While the mixer/processor is running, add the vanilla, and then the eggs one at a time, mixing well between each. Scrape down the bowl and, with the machine running, slowly pour in the heavy cream and milk. Scrape and blend well.

Butter the baking dish and scatter the 1-inch croissant pieces in the bottom, about 2 inches deep. Scatter the chopped chocolate over the croissants and mix gently. Pour the custard mixture over the the croissants and let sit for 10 minutes, pushing the croissants down into the custard occasionally. The custard should cover all the croissants with croissant islands poking up in the liquid.

Cover the bread pudding with foil and bake for 35 minutes. Uncover and bake for an additional 10 minutes. The bread pudding is done when it's puffed up and a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean. Let cool slightly and serve. It's also great reheated later.

Oh, and I pretty much ate only sugar the whole week, because I was surrounded by dessert all "day" long. And while that might sound like your dream diet, I felt lousy every time I ended a shift, and left swearing I wouldn't repeat the sugar binge again during the next shift. So this week I'm trying to avoid sugar and to eat lots of fruits and vegetables. It feels good.

Best Blueberry Banana Muffins

2011-03-16T10:50:00.001-07:00

I always think I can combine two or three recipes to come up with my perfect muffin. So far my attempts at a banana blueberry muffin that has yogurt and oatmeal and whole wheat flour in it have all baked up as little flavorless lumps.

I decided to adjust my sights a little. Banana and blueberry were givens, as those are two things I have in abundance because I cannot survive without an abundance of bananas (brown speckled and ripe) and blueberries (frozen- from my childhood home blueberry farm). Yogurt was in the fridge and whole wheat flour on the counter, so I decided to forego only the oatmeal. Which I suspect was the culprit anyway...

When I first started baking, Martha was my muse, and so it's only fitting that I turned back to her in this moment of need. Thus, I adapted her Healthy Banana Blueberry Muffin and found them AWESOME.

These muffins bake up fluffy with perfectly rounded tops, studded with blueberries and banana bits. They tastes buttery. Complex. Delicious. I ate like 4 within an hour of taking them out of the oven. I wish that was an exaggeration.

Blueberry Banana Muffins

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 stick butter, room temperature

1/3 cup brown sugar, packed

1/3 cup granulated sugar

2 eggs

2 or 3 very ripe bananas, mashed- 3/4 cup

1/3 cup vanilla yogurt

1 tsp vanilla

1.5 cups blueberries (frozen is fine)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Use a spray oil to grease a 12-cup muffin pan. You can also butter and flour the pan or use cupcake liners.

Mix the flours, baking soda and salt in a medium bowl. Mash the bananas and mix them with the yogurt and vanilla. In a large bowl using a hand mixer, or in the bowl of an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugars until fluffy (about 5 minutes). Add the eggs one at a time, mixing until incorporated. Alternate adding the dry and wet ingredients, mixing between each addition until just blended. Don't over-mix. Stir in the blueberries and divide the batter evenly among the muffin cups, filling each to the top.

I made a ripe-banana shrine to these lovely, lovely muffins.

Also, I've been listening to this song non-stop and I thought I'd share. Zach Hurd- Changing Landscapes

Chocolate Turtle Cheesecake

2011-03-04T16:46:00.000-08:00

I think we can all agree that it's hard to know what to get dads on gift giving holidays. And no matter how much my dad actually loves getting socks, I still feel like a schmuck every fathers' day, birthday and Christmas as he opens his gift and feigns surprise. "Just what I wanted! Socks! I was afraid you were going to break from tradition and get me something else this year..."

Which is why it's nice be able to hand him an additional package, one that I can identify with desiring. Dad's favorite candy is the delicious chocolate turtle.

photo from Demet

Chocolate covered-caramel smothered-toasted pecans are dad's idea of a good time. And if we're lucky, he'll gift us with one chocolate turtle each.

photo from Beware the Cheese Photography

We can only assume they're called turtles because of the vaguely turtle shape... although if I ever see turtles that look like this in my local pond, I'm going to have serious questions for our waste management center.

While I'm of the opinion that nuts ruin many a perfectly good dessert, I think this is a pretty winning combination. It's an incredibly easy way to dress up a dessert, too, just add chocolate, caramel and pecans. Plain old vanilla ice cream becomes a turtle sundae! Chocolate cake gets a turtle makeover! Turtle brownies! And the reason we're here today: Turtle Cheesecake.

I think a lot of people are intimidated by cheesecakes because of the long bake time, the longer cool and chill time and the very real risk of crackage. However, a cheesecake is pretty non-fussy when compared to cakes and tarts. After the crust, it's just mix-and-go! The only secrets are planning ahead and a water bath. I now use a water bath every time and cheesecake fissures are a thing of the past. And the beauty of the turtle cheesecake is that even if there are cracks, they're hidden under the turtle topping.

Turtle Cheesecake, recipe adapted from Dorie Greenspan and Emeril Lagasse

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

First, prepare the crust:

2-3 cups finely crushed oreos (depending on how thick you like your crust) (a food processor makes this so easy!)

6-10 T melted butter (don't over-do the butter when it comes to an oreo crust. Add it until it just sticks together when you pinch the crumbs, before it looks all moist.)

Combine the butter and the oreo crumbs, then press the mixture to the sides and bottom of a springform pan. Bake the crust for 10-15 minutes. Let it cool while you make the cheesecake filling.

Filling Ingredients:

2 pounds cream cheese, room temperature

1 1/3 cup sugar

4 eggs

1/2 tsp salt

1 1/3 cup sour cream or heavy cream, or a combination of the two

1 tsp vanilla

1 cup semi sweet chocolate chips or (preferably) roughly chopped dark chocolate

Place a pot of water on the stove to boil for the water bath. Get out a baking or roasting pan large enough to fit the springform pan.

In a stand mixer, using the paddle attachment, mix the cream cheese until smooth. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, add the sugar and mix a minute more (the smoother this batter is, the better). Scrape down the sides and add the vanilla and eggs, blending well between each addition. Finally, add the salt and heavy or sour cream and mix until smooth. Stir in the chocolate chips.

Pour the cheesecake filling into the crust and smooth the top. It's a good idea to put aluminum foil around the bottom and sides of the springform pan to make sure that no water leaks in and makes your crust soggy. Put the cheesecake into the baking pan and pour the hot water around it so that it comes half way up the sides of the cheesecake pan.

Bake the cheesecake at 325 for about an hour and a half, until set. You can tell its set because if you shake it, the whole surface moves only slightly, opposed to the middle still jiggling. Turn off the oven and let it cool with the door propped open, still in its water bath, for about an hour. After the hour, place the cheesecake on a rack to come to room temperature. (When I'm feeling lazy but have some time, I'll take the cheesecake out of the oven after baking and let it come to room temp in the water bath.)

Chill the cheesecake in the fridge for at least four hours, preferably over-night.

Before serving, make the topping.

1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

3/4 cup heavy cream

2 cups pecan halves or chopped pecans, toasted

1 cup caramel sauce*

Pour the cream over the chocolate and microwave for about 45 seconds. Let sit for a minute and then whisk until smooth. Pour it over the cheesecake. Let set in the fridge for 10 minutes. Finally, sprinkle the top with the pecans and drizzle the caramel sauce over the whole thing.

*You can used a jarred caramel sauce, but of course I recommend making your own. Here's a great recipe.

You can find this and more treats over at sweets for a saturday.

Caramelized Bread Pudding with Cinnamon and Chocolate

2011-03-02T05:20:00.000-08:00

Oh my gosh! So many people are getting married this summer! I'm estimating that we will attend at least 6 weddings this spring/summer...it's starting to remind me of the summer after college when all my friends tied the knot. I spent all my savings on gifts and bridesmaid dresses that summer.

Don't get me wrong, weddings are a blast and I'm so excited for all of our almost-married friends, but your boss starts looking at you funny when you tell him you'll need another weekend off for - "Let me guess, Mikaela. A wedding." Yup.

And that's not even the craziness thing that's happening...even crazier is that the first round of friends to get married? The ones from the summer after college? They're starting to have BABIES. Mind-blowing. BABIES. Inconceivable.

We want kids, lots of them even, but as we always say...just not right now. Sorry mom.

That said, I'll tell you what we do want right now, what marrieds and singles and parents and children all want right this very minute, even if they don't know it: We all want BREAD PUDDING.

Specifically we all want this bread pudding, and that is because it has a very high custard-to-bread ratio. Nothing is more disappointing than dry, clunky bread pudding, but I'll give you the secrets to bread pudding nirvana:

1. Chocolate layer on the bottom.

2. Only one layer of bread, smothered with butter.

3. A veritable waterfall of custard.

4. Hints of cinnamon and nutmeg.

5. And...wait for it...a caramelized top. That's right. You brulee the top before serving. Could this get any better? No! I attest it could not.

This layered bread pudding is a FANTASTIC respite from the dense bread puddings that seem to have been made from pureed bread.

The recipe is adapted from Suzanne Goin's Sunday Suppers at Lucques, phenomenal cookbook filled with recipes for entire meals organized by season. Every recipe is pure gold.

There's also a helpful video of Suzanna Goin making this bread pudding at Martha Stewart's website.

Caramelized Bread Pudding with Chocolate and Cinnamon

2 T unsalted butter, softened

5 slices brioche or white bread, crusts removed

3 egg yolks

3 eggs

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 1/2 cup heavy cream

1 1/4 cup whole milk

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp nutmeg

1/4 t salt

1 cup dark chocolate, chopped or chips

plus about a tablespoon of sugar for the caramelizing

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Sprinkle the bottom of a 9x9 baking dish with the chocolate.

Butter one side of each slice of the bread, cut it into quarters, and layer on top of the chocolate. The edges of the pieces should overlap a bit, but there should be only one layer of bread.

Whisk the eggs and egg yolks with the brown sugar, then whisk in the cream, whole milk, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt. Pour the custard over the bread slices, and use your fingers to push down on the bread slightly to make sure it's not dry anywhere.

Place the bread pudding baking dish into a roasting pan and into the oven. Fill the roasting pan with boiling water so the water comes half way up the side of the bread pudding dish. This will help it cook evenly and keep the custard smooth.

Bake for 1 hour 15 minutes until the bread is slightly puffed up and the custard is set. Let cool for 10 minutes, then sprinkle the top of the bread pudding with sugar and caramelize with a torch or under the boiler. If using the boiler, watch it carefully so it doesn't burn and the custard doesn't curdle.

Scoop out of the pan with a large spoon to serve, making sure you get all of the yummy chocolate on the bottom.

Mmmm, enjoy. Seriously, this is so good I want some right now...I know what I'll be making at the restaurant tomorrow!

New Fox Navigation Buttons!

2011-02-27T15:40:00.001-08:00

Wooohoo! Please take note of the shiny foxy new buttons over there on your right! You may now take a stroll through my site via little foxes! If you're viewing this post in a reader, please take this opportunity to come to thefoxfix.blogspot.com to view the new site design.

It turns out I was complicating things for myself. I was googling questions like crazy, trying to mess with the html- when blogger had me taken care of the whole time. They offer the option of placing images on your sidebar with links attached. Instant buttons! I just drew my images, scanned them, sized them to 125 pixels across, and installed them as gadgets with links to my different pages. Easy peasy.

If you're having any trouble with this aspect of your blog, you can shoot me a question in the comments- I'll try to answer.

Blackout Cake

2011-02-25T16:51:00.000-08:00

Hello! I'm sure returning readers will notice the dramatic change in header. As much as I liked my ravenous fox, I wanted something simpler, and I was kind of sick of the lettering. Also no more "magical" bakeshop. Sorry folks, seek your elixirs and concoctions elsewhere.

For posterity's sake, here is the old header:

I'm fiddling around with the design of the rest of the blog, trying to figure out how to replace the words/links in the sidebar and navigation bar with little hand drawn words and foxes. I'll let you in on a secret: I'm no great shakes at computer stuff. (I'm 25, btw, I guess I should be good at computers.) So if anybody knows how to do the custom buttons, for heaven's sake please let me know- its proving difficult.

So soon I'm going to gift you with a post that includes a list of the frostings you should definitely have in your repertoire. Silly me, I used to think frosting was just powdered sugar and vanilla and butter beaten together, (this was after I realized that there is life beyond canned frosting, which I am not knocking- rainbow chip frosting is soooo gooood). It turns out that there are so many options and techniques when it comes to frosting! I've written about most of them before so I can just link to those posts, but there's one I've neglected to tell you about. I've been holding out on you, it's true, but no more I say! I'm here to tell you about BLACKOUT CAKE with DENSE SMOOTH DELICIOUS Blackout frosting.

The point of a blackout cake is to be incredibly dark like impenetrable night. It's often called a "Brooklyn" blackout cake, presumably because there are blackouts in Brooklyn...? Hold on, let me google this.

Oh, there's lots of info on this. Apparently the cake was developed by Ebinger Bakery in Brooklyn, NY during WWII when there were, in fact, blackout drills. Every residence had to cover their windows so no light escaped and enemy planes couldn't see where to bomb-specifically where to bomb boats leaving the harbor. It was a chocolate cake with chocolate pudding filling and frosting finished with chocolate cake crumbs on top. Yum, right? Info came from this site.

This frosting is not pudding, it's much denser, with an intensely chocolate flavor. It's made with eggs, so it's very rich and the frosting stays soft even when kept in the refrigerator. This is a plus at the restaurant because all the cakes are kept in a chilled case. Basically, its brownie batter without the flour. So it tastes freaking AMAZING. I first saw it on the Oprah website, a recipe from the Chocolate Room in Brooklyn. Which I've been to and had hot chocolate, by the way. Here is my version of a Blackout Cake.

You will make the Martha One Bowl Cake from the Mocha Chocolate Cake post while the frosting is cooling.

Blackout frosting, adapted from the Chocolate Room cafe via Oprah

20 oz dark chocolate, chopped. (or chips)

3 1/4 sticks butter, cut into 1/2 inch pieces

1 1/2 cups sugar

dash salt

8 eggs

instant thermometer or candy thermometer.

Pour a couple of inches of water in a pot and heat over medium heat. Place the chocolate and butter in a heat-proof bowl and set it over the simmering water, stirring occasionally, until the butter and chocolate are melted and completely combined. Set aside.

Crack the eggs in another heat proof bowl, then add the sugar and salt and whisk thoroughly. Place the bowl over the same simmering water and heat, whisking constantly, until the temperature reaches 160 on an instant thermometer. This is the only tricky part- keep whisking or it is HIGHLY LIKELY that the eggs will start to curdle. If the eggs do curdle a little, all is not lost- you can blend the eggs with a blender or an immersion blender to make them smooth again.

Strain the egg mixture into the chocolate mixture using a fine-mesh strainer. Whisk to combine. Let the frosting cool slightly (it will be very runny) and then put it in the fridge for 2 hours, stirring occasionally, until it is thick and spreading consistency. Taste it often- this frosting is finger-lickin good.

Swirl onto your cake and enjoy every bite.

Lunch

2011-02-15T09:44:00.000-08:00

Mmm... West African Groundnut Stew with Tartine Bread.

Stew from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant, recipe found here. My subs: carrots instead of okra, add 1 t coriander, 1/2 t cumin, 1/4 t of cinnamon, tumeric and cardamom. DIVINE. So good for winter, served over brown rice or with rustic bread. (although this week it's in the 60's and 70's here, what???)

Mocha Chocolate Cake

2011-02-11T09:39:00.000-08:00

Today, dear readers, you will receive two very valuable recipes. I use these recipes at least twice a week at the restaurant, so pay attention please, and you will produce some pretty amazing cakes in the future.

I've found that some of my favorite chocolate cake recipes in look, texture, ease and flavor have been cakes made without butter. (Shocking, I know.) Extra points if the cake includes sour cream. One fave is the chocolate layers from the Triple Fudge Cake from Sky High, and then there's the sour cream chocolate cake from Sky High. (I highly recommend both of these.)

However, more often than not, I turn to Martha's One Bowl Chocolate cake. (Absolutely. Fool. Proof. The other day, I accidentally left out 1/4 of the flour- it still tasted great.)

I usually pair this type of ultra moist, dense cake with peanut butter, caramel or mocha frosting, but it its the last of these we are here to talk about today.

Friends, do I have your attention here? This is important. This will be one of the most important frosting recipes you will ever make. It's incredibly light and creamy, and not too sugar or buttery.

Let me explain this way: you know the kids who lick the frosting off the top of their cupcake? Maybe you were/are that kid. Well, those kids always disgusted me. There's nothing I hate more than an imbalanced cake/frosting ratio- too much frosting and it's not worth eating. If ever I go to Gigi's cupcakes, I have to knock off half the frosting before I begin. Have I made my point? Not yet, because here it is- if that sugary buttery nasty frosting was replaced with this frosting, the one I'm about to tell you about, then I would be the first person to be holding a bald cupcake- licked clean.

It's that good. Really the only "white-type" frosting you'll need, because you can flavor it with pretty much anything- vanilla, mocha, mint, lemon, almond, jam, coconut, whatever. I think that, with a very few exceptions, you need a good chocolate frosting recipe (maybe two), a cream cheese frosting recipe, and this frosting recipe. Then you're set for life.

Okay, enough talk, here are the recipes:

One Bowl Chocolate Cake

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups unsweetened cocoa powder (I love the Hershey's dark chocolate cocoa)

3 cups AP flour

3 cups sugar

1 tablespoon baking soda

1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1 1/2 teaspoon salt

3 large eggs, beaten

1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups buttermilk (or pour 1 1/2 tablespoons vinegar in the bottom of your measuring cup, fill up to the 1 1/2 cup line with milk, stir and let sit for 5 minutes- voila! buttermilk!)

3/4 cup vegetable oil

1 1/2 cups warm water

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Spray 3 8 or 9-in round cake pans with cooking spray and line with parchment rounds.

Sift together the flour, sugar, cocoa, salt, powder and soda. Stir to make sure the ingredients are evenly distributed. You can make this recipe with your mixer or with plain ol' elbow grease.

Stir in the buttermilk, vanilla and eggs until there are no lumps and the batter is the consistency of brownie batter. Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Next stir in the oil and finally, the water. Stir, mix, whatever, scraping occasionally, until smooth. It will be thinner than most cake batters, but fear not- it bakes up wonderfully.

Divide the batter evenly between your three pans, and bake until a knife inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean. For 9-in pans this will take from 25-35 minutes, 8-in will take a little longer. Let the cakes cool for 20 minutes before removing them from the pans to cool completely on racks. Confession: sometimes I let my cakes cool completely in the pans. I do what I want, pow.

Time for that frosting. It's rather unconventional in its method, which for me makes it that much better. It's like a secret formula- like alchemy. I found the original here, on Tasty Kitchen. Here's my version, which is just doubling the original and adding expresso.

Ingredients:

2 cups milk

10 tablespoons flour

2 cups sugar (granulated- NOT powdered)

1 pound (4 sticks) butter, room temperature

1 teaspoon vanilla

Approx 6-9 tablespoons espresso, to taste. You could use instant espresso, or very, very strong coffee, too. It can be lukewarm, but not hot.

Pour the milk in a small or medium saucepan and place over medium heat. Whisk in the flour, one tablespoon at a time, trying to avoid clumps. Whisk constantly until the mixture thickens. It will be quite pasty, thicker than cake batter. (Don't take it off the heat before its ready- of the mixture is too thin the frosting will FAIL.) Remove from the heat and let cool, stirring occasionally.

flour/milk paste/gravy

While the paste is cooling, put the butter and sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. (you can also use a hand held mixer but it will take longer.) WHISK that butter and sugar like CRAZY. On medium-low speed. WHISK LIKE MEDIUM CRAZY! This will take at least 5 minutes- you want the butter and sugar to be super fluffy, one entity, not grainy.

whoa, crazy

When the paste is completely cool and the butter is creamy, slowly add the paste into the butter with the mixer running. Now, mix like crazy again until the frosting is crazy fluffy, like whipped cream. It should be smooth and luxurious, with no hint of wanting to separate.

Once frosting nirvana is achieved, add the vanilla and taste it. Taste the possibilities. Now, add the espresso, a little at a time, until the taste you want is achieved. You may have to stop and scrape down the sides occasionally.

When the cake layers are completely cool, join the cake with the frosting in wedded bliss and enjoy. If you make this divine frosting, please let me know how it turned out for you in the comments.

Do you have any secret, colossally awesome cake or frosting recipes I should know about?

Perfect Rice Pudding

2011-02-04T11:03:00.000-08:00

Hello friends, and welcome to Pudding Time with Mikaela. I mean...welcome to the Fox Fix. Because we make other things besides pudding here. Sometimes.

I don't mind telling you that I love rice pudding. In the vast world of rice pudding, I hold two puddings in very high esteem: Kozy Shack for its chilled custardy goodness, and Rice to Riches, for its mod decor and abundance of flavors. The thing these two puddings have in common are a creamy consistency with enough structure to allow piling of rice pudding high on the spoon.

And now for a shocking confession: I have never encountered a home-made rice pudding that meets these standards. They're always a little dry for my taste. In college, I went through gallons of milk and tons of rice in search of pudding perfection, puzzled at my roommates' pleas for health food. "What on earth is unhealthy about milk and rice?" I asked. Half the world survives on it, after all.

And so I'll say it again: I have never encountered a home-made rice pudding that met my standards of excellence.

That is...UNTIL. NOW.

Bumbadummmmmmmm! I'm so very excited to reveal that I have met my pudding match! After countless hours grueling over hot stoves stirring simmering pots of sweet rice, of tempering eggs and counting rice grains, I have found you rice pudding.

Recently I have been thinking that the secret to perfect pudding would be gobs of egg yolks and excessive cream, and while that didn't bode well for my fitness goals, I was willing to make the sacrifice just to finally know the answer. Well, fortunately for you and me, the answer is much simpler than that. And less caloric. It turns out grandma really did know best. See, I realized my problem was a matter of ratios- I was trying to cook waaaayyyy too much rice in my milk, which is why the leftovers always hardened into a solid mass in the fridge. Don't underestimate the power of the rice. A little goes a looooong way.

It's important to choose the right kind of rice- the wrong kind won't have the right texture and even worse, won't thicken the milk. Use a medium or short grained rice- arborio or sushi rice are perfect. I use sushi rice because it's easy to find in the international aisle of the grocery and is cheaper than arborio. I love the results.

After much experimenting, I present you with the recipe. It takes a bit, but it's soooo worth it.

4 cups whole milk (surprisingly, with this recipe, even lower fat milks will work, though I wouldn't use exclusively skim. Because we have both in the house, I usually use 3 cups whole, one cup skim)

1/2 cup sugar

1 beaten egg

dash salt

1/3 cup sushi rice (or arborio or other short or medium grained rice)

1 t vanilla extract

optional cinnamon stick or ground cinnamon.

Combine the milk, sugar, beaten egg and salt in a large saucepan and mix thoroughly. Heat over medium heat until the milk is almost simmering. Then add your (seemingly measly but actually perfect) 1/3 cup rice. Stir. Reduce heat to very, very low. You want the surface of the mixture to be moving faintly but not boiling. Now you wait. And stir.

Continue cooking the mixture, stirring about every 5 minutes, for 45 min to an hour. It usually takes me about 50 minutes. Remove the pudding from heat when it is thickened but not to the point you'd like it to be when you eat it. It still needs to be a little loose. I tried to take a picture of the perfect consistency:

Still a little liquidy, but you can see the rice grains holding their own on the surface when you stir it. Once you remove it from the heat, it will continue thickening. After about 15 minutes just sitting on the counter, this is what it looked like:

Eat your pudding warm or place it in a covered container in the fridge. It won't chunk up on you! It's delicious cold too! This picture was taken the day after I made the pudding:

Still creamy, amazing deliciousness. Perfect consistency. Even better than when I first made it, actually. Simple ingredients were the key.

Also, it's amazing how much milk those rice grains suck up, they practically triple in size.

Also, it's totally doable to double the recipe, but beware doing that, because you may eat all of it.

Go make it! Tell me how it turned out! Did it change your life?

The Fox Fix in Life. Styled. Australia

2011-01-30T14:31:00.000-08:00

Hey Readers, great news:

The Fox Fix has found its way to Australia! The Golden Summer Cake has been featured the Life. Styled. online magazine, and called "Cake of the Year," can you believe it? Life. Styled. is a gorgeous site that features fashion, beauty, DIYs, vintage inspiration and more, edited by Paula Joye. Right now I'm loving a cool feature/documentary I saw on the site about Studio 54.

Go check out The Fox Fix on Life. Styled.

http://www.lifestyled.com.au/do/golden-summer-cake/

Lemon-Basil Creme Brulee

2011-01-25T19:13:00.000-08:00

A man eating at the restaurant said that this is the best creme brulee he's ever had. Its faintly herbaceous, and in this way it kind of reminds me of the fresh mint ice cream I made all summer. The flavor is subtle but complex, and definitely a worth detour from your every day vanilla.

I made this batch with some of the last of the basil that came out of the garden at the restaurant. We're lucky with late freezes here in Georgia (this was in December).

Lemon Basil or another variety would also be great as flavoring for creme brulee, and fresh please, preferably picked from your garden. (I realized for most of this is difficult because it is January)

For 6 servings...

6 ramekins

Casserole dish for water bath

3 cups heavy cream

3 oz (about a tad less than 1/2 cup) sugar

6 eggs yolks

Grated zest of two lemons

1 cup packed basil leaves

extra sugar for caramelizing the tops of the brulees

Heat the cream in a medium saucepan. Wash the basil and stir it into the cream, then let steep for an hour to meld the flavors.

Towards the end of the hour, preheat the oven to 350 degrees and gather your ramekins. You will need approximately 6. Prepare a water bath for them to bake in- a 9 x 13 baking dish works well. Place the ramekins in the pan and pour very hot water around them, half way up their sides.

Strain the cream to remove the basil leaves. Reheat the cream until quite warm. In a medium bowl, whisk the yolks with the sugar, until the yolks are pale and fluffy.

Gradually add in the hot cream, whisking constantly. If you move too fast through this stage you will have little bits of cooked egg in your creme brulee, and nobody wants that. Slowly add the cream until it is all well combined. Try not to make too many bubbles on the surface of the custard mixture as you do this.

Pour the custard mixture through a strainer (to remove rouge egg bits) into a spouted container and divide the custard mixture evenly between the ramekins.

Bake for 30 plus minutes until the edges of the brulees are set and the centers are still a little loose. Sometimes, in certain ovens, my creme brulees take closer to an hour. However, even if they look a bit loose when you pull them, they will firm up better than you'd guess once chilled.

Cool the custards completely before refrigerating (in the water bath if you're worried about them setting, out of the bath if you're confident they're good to go). They won't completely set until they've been chilled in the fridge.

When ready to serve, caramelize the tops of the brulees. Pour about a tablespoon of sugar on the surface of the brulee, shake it around to cover it completely, then dump off the excess. With a kitchen torch, blast that sugar from 2 or 3 inches away, until evenly browned. You can do this in two layers if you want a thicker crunchy top.

If you don't have a propane or kitchen torch, you can use broiler in your oven, but watch them carefully.

"The Best Bread Ever" or "The Tartine Rustic Country Loaf"

2011-01-21T10:58:00.000-08:00

This was the most exciting week of my bread-baking life. I feel like I've been let into a secret world where fresh, rustic, crusty bread exists just for the taking.

This is all thanks to the book Tartine Bread, written by Chad Robertson. He who owns Tartine bakery in San Francisco with his pastry chef wife. Awesome.

I am so enchanted by his bread baking journey. He apprenticed with artisan bakers in both the US and France, stoking wood-fired ovens and tweaking and developing his bread until he came up with what some people say is the best bread in the United States. Apparently Tartine Bakery sells out of bread within an hour of baking every single day. I would really love to apprentice to a small-operation baker with a wood oven sometime in the next year or two.

Like many sourdough breads, the bread is 100% naturally leavened (no commercial yeast), but unlike sourdough, Tartine Bread is made with a "young" started, one that hasn't developed a very sour flavor. This bread has the rustic appearance, crispy crust, and a lovely spongy inside full of big holes that I've been searching for ever since I started making bread over a year ago. This isn't gimmicky make-it-in-five-minutes bread, it's the real deal. From start to finish, it takes around 20 hours to make, not to mention feeding your starter every day. I've kept my starter since last April, but I was keeping it in the refrigerator and only feeding it once a week. Keeping it on the counter and feeding it every day has made all the difference in the flavor and leavening power.

Here's how to make the best bread of your life....you'll need some sort of pot with a lid that can go in the oven, ideally a cast iron pan with fitted cast iron lid. I have the pan but not the lid, so I invert a glass pie-plate over my pan. You'll bake the bread in this chamber to help retain heat and mostly to retain steam that will create a good crust and facilitate expansion during baking.

I'm going to assume you have a starter that you feed. If you don't, check out this Peter Reinhart recipe- here, here and here. Martha Stewart also did a spread on Tartine Bread, and all the instructions are in her article here. The main thing is that the starter has to have enough strength to make your bread rise, so you should be leaving it covered at room temperature and feeding it every day. When you feed it, discard (or give away) about 80% (for me this leaves about 1/4-1/2 cup in the bottom of the bowl), and then feed it with a 50/50 mix of whole wheat and flour mixture (for me this is 1/2 cup of each), and an equal amount of cool water (1 cup). Mix thoroughly and re-cover the bowl.

This is what my starter looks like just before I feed it every day: Separated and strong smelling.

This is what it looks like right after I feed it:

This is what it looks like after a few hours:

So once you've got a really vivacious starter on your counter, you can make the leaven (what will make your dough rise.) You should do this the night before you want to make the dough, because it needs 8-12 hours to mature (depends on the temperature and strength of the wild yeast). To make sure the flavor of your bread isn't too sour, you don't want your leaven to be too mature, meaning the wild yeast in the leaven hasn't eaten all the new food you gave it. So to make sure this leaven is "young" when you want to use it, you use a very small ratio of starter to food so it can snack all night and be strong but not sour.

CREATE THE LEAVEN 8-12 HOURS BEFORE YOU WANT TO BAKE: Mix 1 tablespoon starter with 200 grams warm water and 200 grams of 50/50 flour blend. Cover with a kitchen towel and allow to rise at about 65 degrees over night.

My leaven after about 10 hours:

Test to see whether your leaven is ready by scooping up a small spoonful and dropping it into a glass of water. If it floats- its ready! If it sinks- give it some more time. Careful not to degas the little piece when you do this- if you do it won't float even if its ready.

Not ready:

Ready!

It's best to use this leaven before it's over-ripe, or too mature. It should smell sweet and almost like wine, but not like vinegar. If it does smell vinegary, discard half and replace with 100 grams of water and 100 grams of 50/50 flour blend. Check it again in 2 hours.

It's time to mix the dough.

DOUGH AMOUNTS:

Warm water (abotu 80 degrees) 700 plus 50 grams

Leaven 200 grams

White Flour 900 grams

Wheat Flour 100 grams

Salt 20 grams.

MAKE THE DOUGH:

Combine the water and the leaven. Squelch the leaven with your hand to mix it into the water. Make sure you've still got some of your starter left somewhere- you need to keep feeding that for future uses.

Add the flour and mix thoroughly into the water mixture.

Make sure there are no bits of flour left. Now you must let the dough rest for 25-40 minutes before you add the salt and the rest of the water. This "autolyse" helps the flour absorb the water, relax the gluten and develop the dough. Very important, so don't skip it.

After the rest period, sprinkle in the salt and the water, and mix thoroughly. The dough will seem to separate and then come together in a sticky lump.

Now starts the BULK RISE, where the dough develops much of its strength and flavor. It will last 3-4 HOURS. Cover the bowl and keep in a warm place, preferably around 80 degrees. To achieve this temperature in the winter, I put my pizza stone in my oven and turn it on for a few minutes. After I turn it off and when its cooled down a bit I put the covered bowl in the oven on one of the racks. The stone helps retain the heat and keeps the oven an appropriate temperature. You can also put a pot of boiling water on the floor of the oven to keep it warm.

Now, you'll notice you haven't done any hardcore kneading yet. Well, sorry to disappoint, but there's none of that happening here today. Instead, develop the strength of the dough by folding it. Folding aligns the strands of gluten.

You'll FOLD the dough once EVERY 30 MINUTES for the FIRST 2 HOURs. Notice how it gets stronger, stretchier, smoother and more cohesive every time you do it. Magic, I say.

To fold, pull up the right side of the dough and plop it over the center. Pull up the left side and place it over the right. Do the same with the top and bottom. Then pick up the whole thing a turn it over so the folds you just made are now on the bottom. As you enter the third hour, you can fold less often, and also be more gentle. You want to keep some of the gas in the dough.

You'll know the dough is properly risen when it holds its shape and ridges in the bowl after you fold it. It will have increase 20-30%. At this point, its time to divide and shape the dough.

Turn out the dough on a clean (unfloured) counter. Cut it in half with a knife or bench scraper and sprinkle the tops lightly with flour. Form each half into a round shape, creating tension on the outside by folding the non-floured half onto itself. Leave the rounds on the counter, flour-side down to relax. This is the preshape. Let the dough RELAX for 20-30 MINUTES.

After the rest period, come back and do the final shape. Have a couple of bowls and kitchen towels nearby to hold the finished product. Look at your preshaped rounds: if they are all flat and drippy on the edges, the dough isn't strong enough and you should do another folding/preshape and rest before the final shaping.

For the final shape, use flour as needed but try not to get it on what will be the inside of the loaf. Keep it on what will be the crust. I used a mixture of cornmeal and whole wheat flour, but the book recommends a mix of rice flour and wheat flour.

Fold the bottom of the dough up to the middle. Repeat with the sides. Pull the top of the dough up and over the bottom, then pull the bottom part up and over, pinching it all closed on the bottom of the loaf, creating a nice round shape and a tight outer "skin."

Flour a kitchen towel and place it over a medium bowl. Place the dough round in the bowl with seam side you pinched closed facing up. Cover the dough with the flaps from the towel and LET RISE in a warm place (back in the oven) for 3-4 HOURS.

If you don't want to bake right away, you can place the dough in the fridge for up to 12 hours. This will create a slightly sour loaf.

I baked one of my loaves right away, and I left the other in the fridge over night and then on the counter for 3 hours, and I didn't notice too much difference between the two.

The dough after rising: Slightly puffy. If you poke lightly with a finger it doesn't spring back.

20 minutes before baking, place the cast iron pan and lid in the oven and preheat to 500 degrees. (Remove the dough if its in there.) After it's thoroughly heated, remove the hot pan from the over and set it on the stove. (PLEASE don't burn yourself, and remember not to grab the handle when its on the stove top!) Uncover the dough and carefully turn it out into the hot pan. Using a sharp knife, made several shallow slashes in the top of the loaf. This will help the loaf expand evenly in the oven and they look really sweet.

Place the pan back in the oven and cover it with the lid. Turn the temperature down to 450 degrees. Bake for 20 MINUTES, and then remove the lid. The bread needs a moist environment at first, but later needs dry heat. Bake for an additional 25-40 minutes until the loaf is deep golden brown and beautiful. If you want the crust to be extra crispy, bake it extra dark. Don't be timid.

Oh, the picture of loveliness! Place the bread on a cooling rack so air can circulate around it. Try not to tear into it for an hour so it can finish the baking process.

Slice! Gasp at the gorgeous caverns and tunnels in the interior! Munch!

This bread will last longer and taste better than breads made with commercial yeast instead of the starter.

We've been enjoying it many ways, but my favorite way to use it after day one (when I eat it straight up or with jam) is to butter a slice and fry it in a pan- the spongy bread soaks up the butter and it tastes AMAZING with jam or used for a BLT or torn up in a salad.

So admittedly it is close to midnight and I'm cutting this Friday post very, very close. But it was a long one and I wanted to do it justice, so there. Now go make some bread.

Vanilla Creme Filled Doughnuts

2011-01-18T16:17:00.000-08:00

I could definitely use some routine and regularity in my life. I am not one of those people who need to loosen up...

I am the person who is puzzled when her friends apologize for their messy house- they always look perfectly clean to me.

I am the person who will survive the blizzard stuck in her car on the side of the road, layering on the random bits of clothing in the back seat, eating granola bars and other bits of food that fell in the crack by the console and drinking from the countless water bottles littering the floor.

I am the person who doesn't know how to iron clothes properly, but it doesn't really matter, because I don't own any clothes that might require ironing.

Poor Eric didn't get much of a housewife out of this marriage deal.

In view of all this and certain New Years Resolutions involving productivity and organization, I, Mikaela of The Fox Fix, do impose a blogging schedule on herself for the year 2011. Hereafter, I promise you that you will find a post here every Tuesday and Friday, with the possibility of extra posts on special non-scheduled post days. If I fail, you can yell at me in the comments section. I hope this will encourage you to put your faith in The Fox Fix. Every Tuesday and Friday.

Phew, here it goes: the first Tuesday of the new regime.

Eric's brother Micah gave me a fantastic new baking book for Christmas. Flour, by Joanne Chang (who owns a bakery in Boston also called Flour), is a recipe-liscious, information-packed, picture-licking gem of a find. Not only are the American-classics-but-better recipes superb, but the book is full of tips and tricks and technical help. Its explains why over-beating egg whites is a problem. (desserts won't rise in the oven because the eggs' cell walls are already stretched to their limit) It finally made me care if my ingredients were all the correct temperature (for example, if the butter used for creaming is too warm, the sugar won't create the little holes in it that are necessary for a light cake. If the liquid is much colder than the creamed ingredients, it will create tunnels and holes and tough spots in the finished product.)

But mostly...Flour contains a recipe for Vanilla Creme Filled Doughnuts that made me melt into a puddle of delirious happiness on the floor. Whipped cream lightened pastry cream? Yes please. Preferably quickly and in large quantities.

It's a many-stepped recipe, so make sure to read the whole thing before you start, but if you've got a lazy weekend ahead and have a hoard of sweet tooths (teeth?) to satisfy, then step right up to the mixing bowl!

For the yeasted doughnut dough:

2 1/2 (1 package) instant yeast

2/3 cup (160 g) milk, room temp

3 1/2 cups (490 g) AP flour

1/3 cups (70 g) sugar

2 tsp kosher salt

3 eggs

7 tbs butter, room temp, cut in 7 pieces.

In the bowl of a standing mixer, or using a hand held mixer, combine the milk and yeast. Add the flour, 1/3 cup sugar, salt, and eggs, then mix on low speed using the dough hook until the dough comes together, about 1 minute. Continue mixing for 2 or 3 minutes. When the dough has developed a bit, add the butter, a few pieces at a time, and mix for 5 or 6 more minutes until the butter is fully mixed in and the dough is soft and elastic.

Remove the dough from the bowl and wrap in plastic wrap. Refrigerate the dough for 6-15 hours.

Sometime during those 6-15 hours, make your vanilla pastry cream (adapted from Flour).

1 1/4 cup milk

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 t kosher salt

4 egg yolks

1/2 stick unsalted butter, cut into 1/2 inch pieces (my addition)

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2-3/4 cup heavy cream (original recipe called for 6 tablespoons, but I prefer more)

Heat the milk in a saucepan over medium-high heat until very hot but not boiling. Look for bubbles forming around the edge, stir, and wait for them to reform. While the milk is heating (watch it, milk boils over very easily), whisk together the sugar, flour and salt in a small bowl. In a medium bowl, whisk the egg yolks until combined and then slowly whisk in the flour-sugar mixture to form a thick paste.

When the milk is heated, whisk it into the yolks, a very small amount at a time. You want to heat the yolks, but not too quickly or they may curdle. When everything is combine, pour it back into the saucepan and heat over medium heat. Whisk constantly for a few minutes until the pastry cream is boiling constantly and thick. Whisk like crazy for 30 seconds or so once its boiling to smooth it out and cook the flour.

Push the pastry cream through a fine mesh strainer into a medium bowl set over a larger bowl filled with ice. Stir in the vanilla and butter until melted and combined. Stir every so often until cool. Press a piece of plastic wrap to the surface of the pastry cream and refrigerate until fully chilled and set, 1-2 hours and up to 3 days.

Before using the pastry cream to fill your doughnuts, whip the heavy cream until soft peaks form. Stir the pastry cream to loosen it, then fold the whipped cream in the pastry cream, 1/3 at a time. YUM. Whipped Cream-lightened pastry cream is SO. FREAKING. TASTY.

Next step for the dough:

On a floured work surface, roll out the dough to a 12-in square and 1/2 in thickness. Using a biscuit cutter or a glass or other container, cut out circles about 3 1/2 to 4 inches in diameter. You'll get about 9 doughnuts, rerolling and cutting the scraps. (My photo shows more because I made the recipe times 1/3...because im complicated like that.) Arrange the circles on the greased and floured baking sheet, cover with plastic, and allow to rise for 2-3 hours until they are almost double and feel puffy.

Set up your frying station. You'll need canola or vegetable oil for frying- buy one of the second to largest bottles at the store, I think mine was 64 oz. You'll also need a small bowl of about 1 cup of sugar for rolling the doughnuts. Place a thick layer of paper towels on a baking sheet on which to place the fried doughnuts.

Choose a large, heavy bottomed pan with sides of about 3 or 4 inches. Pour the oil in the pan to make a depth of 2 or 3 inches. Heat the oil over medium-high heat until it reaches 350 degrees on a instant read thermometer. An easy way to tell if its hot enough is to throw a pinch of flour into the oil- if it sizzles, it's ready. If you try to fry your doughnuts in too-cool oil, they will just soak up the oil instead of frying, which is disgusting.

When the oil is heated, carefully place a few doughnuts in the pan. Don't over crowd the pan. Fry the first side 2-3 minutes until brown, then flip them, and fry again for 2-3 minutes until brown. Take the doughnuts out of the oil with tongs or a slotted spoon and place on the paper towel-covered pan to cool. Repeat until all doughnuts are fried.

When doughnuts are cool enough to handle, roll in the sugar to coat them.

Let the doughnuts cool completely before filling with pastry cream. To do so, either cut them in half and spoon on the cream, making a doughnut sandwich, or fill a pastry bag with the pastry cream and pipe it in. You can kind of dig out a space for the cream with a knife if all you have is a garbage bag with which to do the piping, as I did.

Next time, I'm going to dip the tops of my doughnuts in chocolate.

These doughnuts made me instant friends... and I think it will work for you too.

2011 Calendar and reminiscing about 2010

2011-01-11T13:58:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year! I meant to say that to you on January 1st...how is it January 11th already? There hasn't been enough time to fit everything I want to do in, but let me show you what's been taking up the bulk of my time:

The Hungry Fox 2011 Calendar!

Each month is hand drawn, lettered and then screen printed. Screen printing involved pulling the ink for each color individually across each poster, so each month is a fine art print.

To see close ups and details of every month of the calendar, check out The Hungry Fox blog. You can also purchase the calendar on Etsy for a mere $35. That's 12 framable art prints for less than $3 each.

So the calendar is looking forward to 2011, but let's take a second to look back at 2010.

I baked a lot of bread...

I went on a lot of trips, like to Florida, Lake Skaneateles, Virginia, and Ithaca!

check out that frozen waterfall!

and baked a lot for Sara's wedding in October! All the gorgeous photographs are by Ruby Sky Photography.

check out the recipes: Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake

Golden Summer Cake

Lemon Blueberry Cheesecake

Sweet and Salty Cake

Lemon Raspberry Cake

Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes

My New Years Resolutions are pretty typical for me... organization, time management, eating healthy, blog more...I haven't made that much progress yet, but that's pretty typical too. Do you have any New Year's Resolutions?

We spent New Year's in Outer Banks, North Carolina at our friend Fred's beach house. We're talking sumptuous home-cooked meals, puzzles, walks on the beach, karaoke bar, bad movies and beach football...all the best components of a lazy, relaxing vacation.

The part of Outer Banks where we were staying was called Rodanthe, and it was such a lonely, lovely place. Several of the houses on the beach were almost falling into the ocean. The waves were swirling around the supports underneath the houses, the wooden stairs touching nothing, dangling just above the water. Apparently the top part of the island is slowly eroding away, and the sediment is being deposited at the bottom of the island. It's like the place is trying to creep south. The sky was always gray and hazy, making it impossible to see much beyond the next curve of the beach. Winter on the beach is so peaceful.

What are you looking forward to in 2011?

Chia Chocolate Pudding

2010-12-26T06:37:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas!

Here we are in Ithaca, NY with Eric Husband's family. I love vacation time with his family because everyone's a great cook and the food is superb. We always have an "Iron Chef" competition with specific ingredients we have to use in our meal. It gets pretty heated, quite viscous, everyone trying to out-do each other. This year the ingredients to incorporate are Cardamom, Potatoes and Fish. Challenging, I know. My night to cook is tonight, so I'll let you know how it goes.

This is the final installment in the Healthy Fixes series, at least for now.

Ok, remember Chia Pets? The set came with chia seeds to plant in grooves on ceramic animals or cartoon characters. When the seeds sprouted, the leafy greens looked like fur or hair.

Now- this blew my mind- not only are chia seeds edible, they are mega nutritious. Not only that, but when stirred into liquid, chia seeds form a gelatinous goop that is super fun to eat. It texture reminds me of...pudding. If you are a texture person in a way that prohibits you from eating things that are slimy or lumpy then maybe skip this recipe. But if you like bubble tea and tapioca then you just may love this.

First, a word about Chia Seeds. Chia seeds can be ground into powder and used as an egg substitute in vegan baking. They're also gluten free. They are high in dietary fiber (42% of the day's requirement!) and Omega-3 fatty acids. They also include antioxidants, vitamins, calcium and protein. Chia seeds stabilize blood sugar and fill you up, giving energy for hours, making them a good diet food. They include good fats, and for 145 calories and 9 grams of fat in 1 oz, there's tons of nutrition to be had.

The recipes:

Chocolate Chia Pudding

Sprinkle 2 tablespoons chia seeds into 1 cup chocolate almond milk, and stir until all the seeds are wet. Place in fridge and let soak at least 2 hours, overnight is good. Stir them occasionally at first to make sure all the seeds are soaking up the milk.

That's all! Eat with a spoon or slurp with a straw.

Vanilla Spiced Chia Pudding

Sprinkle 2 tablespoons chia seeds into 1 cup of milk. Add dash of cinnamon and cardamom, with a squirt of agave nectar or honey. Let soak in the fridge for at least two hours, overnight is good. Stir occasionally at first to hydrate the seeds.

Spiced Whipped Oatmeal

2010-12-13T05:59:00.000-08:00

I now present you recipe two from the healthy fixes series. It reminds me of oatmeal pudding. And we know that I'll eat anything that reminds me of pudding.

I was inspired to make whipped oatmeal by the blog Katheats. This girl is a serious oatmeal lover- check out her oatmeal tribute page; it's epic.

The Basic formula is this:

Make oatmeal with thin slices of banana, whisking like crazy during the second half of cooking.

Once you've mastered the (extremely complicated) basic formula*, the dish is highly customizable. You can use any kind of milk you want to prepare the oats and then add extras like spices, nuts, granola, peanut/almond butter, dried fruit, fresh fruit, yogurt or chia seeds.

* Its not extremely complicated, that was a joke.

Now, Why Oatmeal? I'll tell you.

Oatmeal boosts energy without adding a ton of calories and fat. It is a complex carbohydrate, which means you feel full longer and have energy longer than you would if you'd just eaten cake and icecream, or even something like a peach. This means the oat/banana combination packs a one-two punch: Energy spike from the banana, sustained energy compliments of the oatmeal.

Oatmeal contain more soluble fiber than whole wheat, rice and corn. The soluble fiber helps eliminate heart-clogging cholesterol, and reduces the risk of heart disease. Oatmeal also contains goodly amounts of vitamins A, B and E, protein, iron and calcium.

What's more, when you choose oatmeal for your breakfast, you are totally in control of what you put in your mouth. Unlike cereal, the only ingredient in rolled oats are OATS. Stay away from the flavored instant varieties... they're full of sugar and it really doesn't much longer to prepare the real thing.

Here is my super tasty decadent version:

SPICED WHIPPED OATMEAL

1/2 cup oats

1 cup vanilla silk almond milk

1 medium banana

1/2 t cinnamon

1/4 t cardamom

There's no sweetener even needed, because the banana and the vanilla almond milk is sweet.

Combine the almond milk and oats in a pot over low heat. Thinly slice the banana into the pot and let the oats warm, stirring occasionally. Once you start seeing some simmering action, get out your whisk and whisk until the banana is dispersed and unrecognizable as banana and the oats are at your desired consistency. Stir in the spices. Mmmm fragrant and spicy. After writing this post, I definitely know what I'm having for lunch today.

If you want to really mix things up, instead of spices, try adding 1/4 cup chocolate chips when the oatmeal is still hot and stirring them in to melt. You could also add a little bit of cocoa powder and a sweetener like agave nectar or honey instead of the chips.

Calories: 340 Fat: 2.5 g Sugar: 30 g

Hooray for healthy fixes!

2010-12-06T17:47:00.000-08:00

Do you imagine me as a gargantuan-sized woman who never leaves the house but only bakes, eats and blogs, bakes, eats and blogs? Despite appearances, you mustn't believe that it's all dessert all the time for me. I do have a concept of healthy eating and I confess only to you that I'm more than slightly obsessed with spinach.

image by paramount pictures courtesy getty images

Dear readers, this is a bit of a break in tradition, but I am here today to tell you about health food. What's more, it's health food that still gives you that Fox Fix we've all come to love. Food that feeds your body with essential nutrients but can still satisfy your cravings for SUGAR. And even CHOCOLATE. Because lets be honest, we're all addicted to sugar and chocolate here.

And I'm not talking about pure health food fluff- food that is only a substitute for the junk food. This "fluff" might not be as bad for you as the real thing, but it's not helping you out much either...I'm thinking of my brief foray into the "eating raw" realm, when I'd mix almond butter with agave nectar and cocoa powder and eat it every night with strawberries and pretend I was being healthy. Maybe it was better for me that Nutella, but it shouldn't have replaced real meals.

No, these dishes make great breakfasts or snacks and are even worthy of every-day-eating.

And while we're talking, I'd like to address all you lurkers out there. I know I'm not talking to myself here at The Fox Fix; the blog stats reassure me that I'm not. Some of you are even lurking from far away places like Canada and the Netherlands. Therefore, I'd like to encourage all of you to introduce yourselves- say hi in the comments and we can all have a dialogue; a real repartee if you will. I'd love to know my readers.

And those of you that I already know, please feel free (or even obligated) to comment away :) Thank you.

Because they are full of nutrients and easy to use, I find myself eating bananas and spinach most days. I also eat a lot of oatmeal, and I would like to eat pudding every day, though I do my best to quash that desire. Pudding every day is ridiculous.

And so, inspired by these food items, I bring you three delicious snacks in the next three posts:

First up,

GREEN CHAI MILKSHAKE

I drink a lot of smoothies because they're easy to mix up with different frozen fruit and juices. I always, always, always throw a large handful of spinach in the blender, too, because you can't taste the addition and spinach is one of the most nutrient dense foods in existence. One (packed) cup contains only 14 calories, and loads of vitamins A and K, as well as magnesium, iron, fiber, calcium, etc. It protects against cancer, heart disease, cataracts and more. With stats like that, why wouldn't you throw it into everything you eat?

Recently, Eric and I have been going ape for Banana Milkshakes, a drink his mom made a lot when he was growing up. It's simply frozen banana blended with milk, and I swear it tastes exactly like a creamy vanilla milkshake. It's truly equal to milkshakes made with ice cream. I crave banana milkshakes, and you will to once you join the club. Bananas are fat free and contain lots of vitamins c and a, potassium and fiber. It is also one of few fruits that contains the entire range of B vitamins. Freeze the bananas in chunks in ziplock freezer bags when they're very ripe for best flavor.

All this to say, I combined the green smoothie and banana milkshake concepts, added a dash of my love for chai lattes, and came up with the GREEN CHAI MILKSHAKE.

Blend until smooth:

1 frozen banana

1/2 cup liquid chai latte mix

1/2 cup skim milk or almond milk

large handful spinach

You may have to adjust the amount of liquid based on how big your banana is. Feel free to skip the chai and double the milk or add other flavorings, even cocoa powder.

According to my calculations, this milkshake has about 200 calories, zero fat and 46 grams sugar (plus loads of nutrients.) If you compare this to a chik-fil-a vanilla milkshake (640 calories, 26 grams fat, 88 grams sugar) you're doing great to stick to the green chai milkshake.

Snickers Pie

2010-12-02T19:23:00.000-08:00

Hooray! Another heavenly peanut butter dessert!

I'm feeling in a bit of a baking rut; I'm kind of sick of baking mass quantities of the same old things, kind of sick of getting up early to do it.

I take my job very seriously, and I'm used to receiving praise for it. I love watching customers approach the dessert case with wide eyes, clutching their friend's arm and gasping "look...just look at all that..." I love when they find out I'm the baker and they sigh "I just love your desserts!"

Buuut, recently I heard about some customer complaints, and I have no idea what could have gone wrong. It makes me feel extremely insecure. I'm going in to bake in the morning and I'm actually nervous. I'm an approval suck, it's true. It's funny how one bad comment can wipe out the memory of all the good ones. That's true about everything in life, I suppose.

Anyway, this weekend is the Holiday Market downtown (8th st and Reynolds) from 12-6 and it should be good. Santa will be there and live Christmas trees and FREE chik-fil-a sandwiches. I'll be there with loads of good bread and baked goods like sourdough, ciabatta, rosemary, black olive, mediterranean stuffed loaf, bleu cheese stuffed loaf, cinnamon rolls, brownies, oat fudge bars and more! If you're in the Augusta area, make sure to stop by.

Now, on to this luscious snickers pie, which is a winner guaranteed to improve any bad baking day. There's several steps but they're not hard and the result is phenomenal.

Snickers Pie, Adapted from Martha Steward

Oreo crust:

1 9-in springform pan.

about 2 cups finely ground oreos (a food processor does the job in a jiffy, but you can also crush the cookies in a heavy duty ziplock bag with a blunt object like a rolling pin)

3/4-1 stick melted butter

Caramel Layer:

1 1/4 cup sugar

1/4 cup water

3/4 cup heavy cream

1/4 cup sour cream or 1/2 stick butter

1 cup roasted salted peanuts

Peanut Butter Mousse:

8 oz cream cheese, softened

1/2 cup powdered sugar

1 1/4 cup smooth peanut butter

1/2 t vanilla

1 cup heavy cream, whipped into medium-stiff peaks

Chocolate Ganache Layer

8 oz semi-sweet chocolate

1 cup heavy cream

Directions:

1. Make the Oreo Crust. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Combine the ground Oreos with the butter and press the mixture onto the bottom and sides of the springform pan. I like to use the side of a measuring cup to do this. Use your fingers if necessary. Bake the crust for 10 minutes so its nice and crispy. Remove from oven and let cool.

2. Make the Caramel. Combine the water and sugar in a saucepan and heat it over medium-high heat on the stove. It will take about 10 minutes to turn amber, but watch it carefully, swirling the pan occasionally, because it can burn easily. Remove from heat once a dark amber color and carefully whisk in the 3/4 cup heavy cream. It will bubble and steam and be very hot, so watch your hands. If there are any caramel lumps, reheat the caramel until smooth. Whisk in the sour cream or butter. Transfer to a heat proof bowl and cool, about 45 minutes. Once the caramel is fairly cool, fold in the 1 cup of peanuts. Spread the mixture evenly in the bottom of the oreo crust. Refrigerate while you make the Peanut Butter Mousse.

3. Make the Peanut Butter Mousse. In a stand mixer or with a hand held mixer, beat the cream cheese until smooth. Add the 1/2 cup powdered sugar and beat until smooth. Add the 1 1/4 cup Peanut Butter and the vanilla and beat until smooth.

Whip the 1 cup heavy cream in a clean bowl until medium-stiff peaks form, and then fold 1/3 the whipped cream into the Peanut Butter mixture to lighten it. Fold the rest of the whipped cream into the Peanut Butter in two additions.

4. Spread the Peanut Butter Mousse evenly on top of the caramel layer, taking care that the two don't mix. Refrigerate for 30 minutes.

5. Make the Chocolate Ganache. Pour the final 1 cup heavy cream into a microwave safe container and microwave for about 40 seconds, depending on your microwave. You can also heat it on the stop until bubbly around the edges. Dump the 8 oz chocolate into the hot cream (or pour the cream over the chocolate) and let sit for 1 minute to melt. Whisk until smooth. Pour the Chocolate Ganache over the peanut butter mousse and spread evenly.

Refrigerate a final 30-45 minutes and you're done! Slice and enjoy!

tell me you can relate to this.

2010-11-23T05:49:00.001-08:00

Occasionally I've wished to find out I'm pregnant, but only to have an excuse for my inexplicable weight gain, which is not actually inexplicable but completely explicable because I make dessert for a living.

Sweet and Salty Brownies by Baked

2010-11-20T19:16:00.000-08:00

GUARANTEED TO BE YOUR MOST INCREDIBLE BROWNIE EXPERIENCE, OR YOUR MONEY BACK AND YOUR WASTED TIME REFUNDED.

Or at least that's what I wrote on the sign at the restaurant. There were no dissatisfied customers. Here is why:

1. Outrageously fudgey brownies

2. Thin crust on top of brownie

3. Salted caramel center

4. Sea salt and turbinado sugar topping

One of my favorite bakeries (and baking book) has added a new addition- Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented. In it, they release the recipe for their famed Sweet and Salty Brownies, as well as many other delicious takes on dessert, like a Mississippi Mud Pie, Grasshopper Bars and Buckeyes.

The point is, if you want to be very popular with your friends or impress friends you hope to have or simply boost your reputation as a comfort food genius or convince your children/husband that boxed brownies are not all there are in the world, I suggest you make these relatively easy brownies.

Sweet and Salty Brownies, adapted from Baked

Make the caramel first.

1 cup sugar

1/4 c water

1/2 cup heavy cream

1/4 cup sour cream

1 t fleur de sel (sea salt) or other coarse grained salt

In a saucepan, combine the sugar and water, stirring over high heat until the sugar is dissolved. The let it cook without stirring, swirling the pan occasionally, until the caramel is deep amber in color. Be ready at this point to whisk in the cream- the caramel gets dark very quickly at the end and continues cooking even after you turn off the heat. Whisk in the cream, being careful of the steam and bubbling that will occur. Then whisk in the salt and the sour cream. Set aside.

And then the Brownies

1 1/4 cup flour

1 t salt

2 T cocoa powder

11 oz dark chocolate, chopped (or chips)

2 sticks butter, cubed

1 1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar

5 large eggs

1 t vanilla

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and prepare a 9 x 13 baking dish by lining it with parchment paper and buttering it or spraying it with cooking spray. You can skip the parchment if need be.

In a metal bowl set over a pan of an inch or two of simmering water, combine the cubed butter and the chocolate. Stir occasionally until the two are melted together.

While the butter and chocolate are melting, whisk the flour, salt and cocoa powder together.

When the butter and chocolate are melted and combined, remove from the heat and stir in the two sugars until the mixture is homogenous. Whisk in 3 of the eggs until just combined. Add the vanilla. Whisk in the remaining eggs until just combined. Finally, sift the flour mixture into the chocolate mixture and fold the two together until just combined. If you mix it too much at this stage, your brownies will be cakey.

Pour half the brownie batter into the pan. Drizzle one cup of the caramel over the batter, avoiding the edges (any caramel touching the edge of the pan or exposed to the air during baking will get very hard.) Pour the rest of the batter over the caramel, spreading and smoothing it to cover it completely.

Bake for about 30 minutes, rotating the pan once. You can stab the middle with a knife to make sure it's done, but be aware that if you stab where there is caramel, it may look undone even if its not.

Sprinkle the top of the brownies with fleur de sel and turbinado sugar (or other coarse salt and sugar). Let cool, slice and start looooving life!

Lemon-Ginger Creme Brulee

2010-11-15T18:57:00.000-08:00

I make Creme Brulee at least twice a week at the restaurant. Until recently I stuck to chocolate and vanilla, but I've branched out and results have been fantastic.

The cool thing about creme brulee is that you can flavor it with pretty much anything you can steep in cream. You can use anything from ground spices and liquors to herbs and fruits. Try thyme, citrus zest, mint, lavender, cardamom, mocha, etc!

I've also recently found out that there is a cart in San Francisco that sells really creative flavors of creme brulee on the street. Next time I'm in San Francisco (which will be the first time I'm in San Francisco), I definitely plan on braving the streets and the lines to try this creamiest of desserts.

The flavor is courtesy of David Lebovitz, in Ready for Dessert, who tells us that ginger contains an enzyme that will prevent the custard from setting unless you parboil it first. Good to know, David! I would've wasted a lot of cream and eggs with out that valuable information.

The base recipe is divine, it's from the Le Cordon Bleu Professional Baking book, and you need look no further for your use-for-everything creme brulee recipe. It's very similar to Lebovitz's.

Lemon Ginger Creme Brulee Recipe (makes 6 servings, half of the recipe I make at the restaurant)

3 cups heavy cream

6 egg yolks

3 oz sugar (a tad less than a half cup)

pinch salt

3 oz thinly sliced ginger plus the grated zest of two lemons*

extra sugar for caramelizing the tops of the brulees

Slice ginger thinly and place in a medium saucepan. Add enough water to cover the ginger and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 2 minutes, then pour off the water.

Add the cream and the lemon zest to the ginger. Heat until warm again and then let steep for an hour to meld the flavors.

Strain the cream to remove the ginger and much of the zest. Add the salt. Reheat the cream until quite warm. In a medium bowl, whisk the yolks with the sugar (you can also add the salt at this stage instead of adding it to the cream), until the yolks are pale and fluffy.

Pour the custard mixture through a strainer (to remove rouge egg bits) into a spouted container and divide the custard mixture evenly between the ramekins.

You can cover the whole thing with aluminum foil if you're worried about the tops of the brulees browning, but I've found if you cook them in the low-middle of the oven, you don't need to worry about foil. Bake for 30 plus minutes until the edges of the brulees are set and the centers are still a little loose. In the whackadoo oven at the restaurant, this takes over an hour, but in normal ovens it should be closer to 30 minutes.

* for vanilla creme brulee, omit the lemon zest and ginger, adding half of a scraped vanilla bean plus the pod to the cream (You will strain the pod out later) Heat the cream and let steep for only a few minutes (opposed to an hour) before adding it to the yolks. A slick trick to avoid clumps of vanilla seeds in the milk is to rub them into some of the sugar that you are using, then put both rubbed sugar and seeds in the cream. If you have no vanilla bean, use about 1 teaspoon good quality vanilla extract...but the resulting brulees won't have exciting flecks of vanilla bean in it.

For serving, grab your kitchen, brulee or small propane torch. Guess what we use at the restaurant? Thats right, the propane torch.

Sprinkle the top of the brulee with sugar and knock off the excess. Blast with the torch until melted but not brown. Sprinkle on another layer of sugar and blast this layer until the sugar is brown and caramelized. Do this step carefully, you don't want black tops to your carefully baked dessert. Nobody wants that.

Let's be real, not all of us have access to a torch. There are other options, but you must choose one because custard with no caramel on top can never be called creme brulee (which I suspect means something to do with "burnt" in french, the sugar being burnt in this case.) (Yep, I was right, it means burnt. Thanks Google.)

You can either sprinkle with sugar and use your oven broiler to try to caramelize the tops, or you can make caramel (with only sugar and water or even just sugar) and pour a thin layer on top of the brulee, swirling it to make it even. Be careful not to burn yourself. Nobody wants that.

Caramel Cake with Apple Filling

2010-11-10T17:29:00.000-08:00

Apples often seem pretty plain jane to me. It was a fruit we always had in the house growing up,* and so I never thought it very special. This could be because I kind of hate red delicious apples, and pretty much any other apple that is sold at the grocery store in a plastic bag with ten other of its fellows. Not very special at all.

However, I declare Fall 2010 the Apple Revolution! Let us rejoice with the bounty of autumnal boughs hanging heavy with the crisp, sweet-tart fruit that is the apple!

And caramel. Everything I make has caramel in it these days.

Apple Revolution started a couple weekends ago when Eric and I went to Greensboro, NC for a wedding (shout out to Haley and Dave! Hooray!). We found there, surprisingly near our hotel and the highway, the absolute biggest farmer's market I have ever seen. It had three massive awnings that housed vendors selling everything from pumpkins to bread to flowers to apples. So many apples. I bought a very large bag filled with one of every kind I could find. We're talking Winesap and Arkansas Black and King Luscious and Duchess and Honeycrisp (aren't apple names just wonderful!)

Therefore...you will be seeing a lot of apple related desserts around here in the coming weeks.

The inspiration for this cake came from Honey and Jam, but I couldn't make the frosting from that recipe set. It stayed a caramel goo mess. Fortunately, I found a delicious recipe on Epicurious from Bon Appetit. If you beat the frosting a little, you get this dark, thick frosting that reminds me of caramels. If you beat it a lot, the frosting becomes lighter in color and very fluffy. Both are tasty, but I like the way the darker one looks better.

This combination is awesome, by the way. Truly awesome. The cake is a rare vanilla cake that stays moist for many days in a world full of dry cakes. The individual components take some time (mostly cooling time, so don't try to make this on a tight schedule), but you can spread out the making of the cake and it's not bad.

Vanilla Cake from Cakelove (it's best if you can weigh the ingredients, and so much easier)

I make this times 1.5 to come up with a three layer cake.

Preheat the oven to 350 and prepare two 9-in cake pans with parchment rounds in the bottom and butter or spray.

Dry Ingredients:

AP Flour, 7 oz or 1 1/4 cup plus 2 tbs

potato starch, 2 oz (you can sub cornstarch if necessary)

baking powder, 1 1/2 tsp

salt, 1 tsp

Wet Ingredients:

half and half, 1 cup

brandy, 2 tbs (can sub more half and half for this)

vanilla extract, 1 tbs

Creaming:

unsalted butter, room temp, 6 oz or 1 1/2 sticks

extra-fine granulated sugar, 14 oz or 1 3/4 cups (you can food process regular sugar to make extra fine.)

eggs, 4 large

Start by mixing the butter and sugar with in an electric mixer with the paddle attachment. Mix on med-low for at least 5 minutes, the more time the better. It will be very fluffy.

Meanwhile, whisk the dry ingredients in a bowl and sift together. In a separate container, combine all the wet ingredients.

After the butter and sugar are sufficiently creamed, add the eggs one at a time, blending well between each.

Finally, add the wet and dry ingredients in 5 alternating additions, waiting only until the ingredients are just incorporated before adding the next addition. Scrape the bowl and mix on medium speed for 15-20 seconds.

Divide the batter between the pans and bake for 25-28 minutes, until a cake tester inserted in the middle comes out clean. Cool completely before frosting.

Apple Filling adapted from Honey and Jam

I doubled this for a triple layer cake.

2 large granny smith (or other baking-type) apples

1/2 t ground cinnamon

1/2 cup sugar

2 tsp lemon juice

Peel the apples and grate with a box grater. Combine all the ingredients in a saucepan and cook until the apples are tender and there is little liquid left. Cool completely.

Caramel Frosting from Epicurious

1 cup sugar

1/4 cup water

1/2 cup cream

2 egg yolks

1 stick unsalted butter, room temp

1/8 t salt

1 cup powdered sugar

Stir the sugar and water together and cook over med-high heat, swirling the pot occasionally (not stirring). Cook until the caramel is deep amber; watch it carefully, it will continue to darken a little after you turn off the heat. Remove from the burner and whisk in the cream (watch out for steam and bubbles). Stir until the caramel is smooth.

Whisk the egg yolks in a bowl, and gradually whisk in the hot caramel. Cool the caramel mixture.

In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat the butter and powdered sugar together until smooth. Beat in the caramel mixture. Let stand at room temperature until thick enough to spread, about an hour.

Spread the apple filling between the cake layers and frost the outside of the cake with caramel frosting. If you have time to freeze your cake layers, it makes frosting easier.

Go, enjoy this quintessential fall cake.

* Oddly enough, we also always had bananas around too when I was growing up, but that apparently had the opposite effect on me than the ever-present-bagged apple, because now I am slightly obsessed with the banana. Really, its the perfect fruit.

October was great.

2010-10-31T17:39:00.000-07:00

Remember the Chocolate Bread?

It made fantastic french toast. I made mine a sandwich with bananas (the perfect fruit!) and peanut butter and whipped cream.

And now, I will tell you that October was great because:

1. It finally feels like fall here in Augusta, GA.

2. It was my birthday. (Yes, the whole month- October is my birthday. Except for October 10, because that is my mom's birthday.) Poor Eric- I was raised to believe that birthdays are really, really important, so he is having to take a crash course in the whole birthday song and dance.

He did great. There was a very surprising party with pumpkin carving and fruity pebble treats and a pinata!

3. Sara and Andrew's wedding.

4. Eric and I dressed as mimes and went to a Halloween 80s dance party. We've decided to get really good at miming for next year.

5. The Farmer's Market (which I've been baking for and selling at almost every weekend since April) finished with a bang this month. Yesterday, in fact. I love baking a ton of bread and spending time at the market.

And I'm looking forward to November because:

1. Camping at Tybee Island with friends!

2. We're playing in a soccer tournament in Hilton Head, the place of our engagement.

3. Harry Potter 7 part 1 November 19! My generation grew up with HP, and I am proud to love it.

4. Thanksgiving with my family on the farm in Virginia!

5. No more farmer's market every weekend!

Fantastic Ciabatta Bread

2010-10-31T17:10:00.000-07:00

You don't know this, but I have been trying in vain for the past few months to make a ciabatta bread that looks attractive, has a crunchy crust, and a soft interior with the large holes that make ciabatta, ciabatta. I've tried Peter Reinhart's recipe so many times. I've tried random recipes off the internet, I've tried the no-knead bread recipe, and I've tried the "Artisan Bread in 5 min a Day" recipe, all to no avail. They produce pretty tasty bread, but none with the holes I was looking for. Very frustrating, let me tell you.

WELL, I HAVE ARRIVED. I could tell just from the dough that this recipe was the one. It was wet, but still had structure. Even when I turned it out onto the table to divide it, it didn't deflate. The dough was strong, but still developed the gas holes. Killer. Thrilling. I'm beside myself with joy. Thank you King Arthur Flour. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

In a selfish way, I'm almost reticent to share this with you, considering what I went through to get here...bu I've decided to save you pain. And King Arthur has tons of baller recipes.

I made only a few changes to this recipe, noted in the ingredients.

Ciabatta Bread, by King Arthur Flour

First, you must stir up a pre-ferment that will sit overnight, developing flavor. Mix these ingredients together and let sit for 10-15 hours until very, very bubbly.

1 1/2 cups (6 1/4 oz) bread flour or King Arthur AP flour

1 cup (8 oz) cool water

1/16 t instant yeast

When ready to mix the dough, combine the pre-ferment and the rest of the ingredients in the bowl of a mixer.

all of the starter (pre-ferment)

1 t instant yeast

1 1/2 cup (6 1/4 oz) bread flour or King Arthur AP flour

1 1/4 tsp salt

1 tsp sugar

1 tbs nonfat dry milk*

1/4 cup (2 oz) water*

2 tbs (7/8 oz) olive oil

(*instead of the dry milk and water, I just used 1/4 cup milk)

It's important you use a mixer because the dough is so soft (basically impossible to knead by hand).

These pictures show the recipe multiplied by 8

Beat at medium speed using the paddle attachment. I had to switch to the dough hook after a few minutes because the dough climbed up onto the paddle and clung there like a frightened monkey. When sufficiently mixed, the dough will be gorgeously smooth and elastic. It took more like 10 minutes in my big mixer.

Look at that gluten development! See how stretchy and shiny it is!!

Place the dough in a greased bowl and set aside to rise. After one hour, stretch each side and fold over the middle, then turn the whole thing upside-down so the seams are on the bottom.

folded dough

Let rise one more hour (two hours total rising time, with the folding in the middle)

fully risen dough

Gently turn the dough out onto a floured surface (no need to go nuts with the flour. This dough isn't as sticky and gloppy as some of the no-knead recipes).

Use a knife to divide the dough into 2 loaves, or smaller bits for sandwiches. (K.A. website says for the two loaves, you should have two fat logs, about 10"x4").

Gently transfer the dough to a baking sheet, stretching them out slightly, leaving about 4" between them.

Allow to rise for 60-90 minutes, dimpling with your fingers halfway through. You can push your fingers almost to the bottom of the loaves, the holes will fill partially back up. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees about 20 minutes before baking time.

Spritz the loaves with luke warm water (to help create steam) and bake until golden brown, about 18-20 minutes. You can also create steam by placing a rimmed baking sheet in the oven during preheat and pouring hot water onto it just before loading the loaves in the oven. Steam is necessary to facilitate proper "oven spring" (the sudden burst of yeast activity and loaf expansion when hit with the heat of the oven) and the development of a proper crust.

Great Scott this is good bread! Eric and I cut it in half lengthwise, toast it and eat bruschetta on it practically every Sunday. We're about to eat some now, in fact. Just combine diced tomatoes, minced garlic, lemon juice, olive oil and fresh chopped basil, then spread it on the toasted ciabatta bread. Add some mozzarella if you like. The crust gets crunchy and the interior stays soft. YUM.

Flan de Naranja

2010-10-16T05:31:00.000-07:00

I love chocolate as much as the next girl, but I promise you that I will choose desserts from the custard/pudding family first every time. The texture! I love the smooth creaminess that holds its shape but yields the second it's placed on your tongue...

The only problem is desserts of this nature are usually comprised almost entirely of cream, egg yolks and sugar. Aka, not health food as we usually define it.

Which is why, dear readers, I was positively THRILLED to find this recipe for "Orange Flan." Which is as close to health food that custard will ever venture. Which is why I bought a large bag of oranges the very next day.

In general flan, unlike creme brulee or other egg custards, is not worth eating without the caramel topping, and this orange flan is no exception. Make the caramel. It will hit your tongue first, giving way to a mysterious orange egginess. If you think this is a puzzling set of flavors, you are correct- but you'll be completely satisfied mulling them over as you take the next bite...and the next...

The custard is incredibly easy to prepare, so save your worry for the caramel, which can be tricky.

Flan de Naranja (Orange Flan), adapted from Apple Pie, Patis and Pate

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees, and get out 4 ramekins and a baking dish that will hold all of them.

Have 4 6-oz ramekins at the ready. Combine 1/2 cup sugar with 2 tablespoons of water in a sauce pot. Heat over medium-high heat, stirring only until the sugar is dissolved. Once the syrup boils, watch it carefully and swirl the pan occasionally to make sure the mixture is heating evenly. Cook until the caramel is deep amber- but be careful! It cooks some after you take it off the heat, so you may want to take it almost there and have some cool water in the sink to stick the bottom of the pot in to make sure you don't burn it. Burnt caramel is inedible.

Working quickly before the caramel hardens, pour a little into each ramekin, coating the bottom. I swirled mine to get the caramel on the sides too, but it's not necessary, and hot caramel is VERY HOT. And STICKY. And DANGEROUS. (or, because we're dealing with a Spanish dessert here- PELIGROSO!)

Make the custard:

6 large eggs

5 T sugar

1 1/3 cups fresh squeezed orange juice (about 4-5 large oranges)

1 t orange zest (from one orange)

In a large bowl, lightly beat the eggs with a fork. Try not to incorporate too much air into the eggs. Mix in the sugar, and then slowly mix in the orange juice while beating the eggs. Strain to remove pulp or seeds. Add the zest and stir.

Get out the baking dish and line with a tea towel. Place ramekins in the dish and distribute the custard mixture evenly among them. Pour hot water in the pan so it comes half way up the sides of the ramekins. This will help the flans bake evenly.

Bake in the preheated oven for 45-55 minutes until the centers are set. Once done, remove the ramekins from the water bath and let cool at room temperature. Chill in the fridge for at least an hour. Run a knife around the edges of the flans and invert onto plates to serve.

I figured it out- each flan only has about 1.5 eggs and less than 2 tablespoons of sugar. Not too shabby.

Pumpkin Spice Cake with Maple Cream Cheese Frosting

2010-10-05T05:35:00.000-07:00

Hooray for pumpkin dessert season! I'm so pleased to be able to pop pumpkin muffins in my mouth every day now, telling myself they're healthy despite the chocolate chips I add liberally.

And it's great to have fall options for non-chocolate cakes at the restaurant. I'm sure sick of lemon-berry combinations. It's on to pumpkin and apples and cobblers and caramel apples and spicy things!

Also I need to figure out what tree is blooming in my yard that smells like apricots.

On a side note, this past weekend was Sara and Andrew's wedding. It was one of the very best weddings I've ever been to- so creative and delicious and visually stunning. Her mother and relatives picked and arranged the flowers themselves. They were lovely, jewel toned and wild-looking bouquets. Sara wanted a dessert spread on tree stump cake stands, so we baked non-stop from thursday to saturday and made 10 different cakes, pies and cheesecakes. Best of all, Sara and Andrew are so utterly perfect for each other, I want to hold them at arms' length and just grin at them, ending with a nice cheek pinch.

Um so anyway, this cake is very moist and spicy and divinely delicious. Make it this weekend for your favorite person.

Many, many bloggers have posted this cake, but the original is from David Leite and can be found here.

For the pumpkin cake (I made the original recipe times 1.5 to come up with a three layer cake. Here, it is already multiplied for the three layer.)

1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, softened

1 1/2 cups dark brown sugar, packed

1/2 cup granulated sugar

3 cups cake flour

3 tsp baking powder

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1 1/2 tsp ground ginger

3/4 tsp ground nutmeg

1/4 tsp ground cloves

3/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp fresh ground black pepper

3 large eggs

3/4 cup buttermilk

1 1/2 tsp vanilla

1 7/8 cup canned solid-pack pumpkin.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Spray with oil and line 3 8 or 9-in round cake pans with parchment paper.

Cream the butter and the sugars in a stand mixer on low speed for about 5 minutes, until fluffy. While this is going on, sift the flour, baking powder and soda, salt and spices together in a medium bowl.

Add the eggs one at a time to the butter mixture, scraping down the sides of the bowl after each addition. Mix the butter milk and the vanilla, and alternate adding the buttermilk and the flour mixture to the butter/eggs in 5 additions, beginning and ending with the dry ingredients. Add the pumpkin and mix until smooth, scraping down the bowl as needed.

Divide the batter between the pans and smooth the top of the batter. Drop the pans onto the counter from a height of a few inches to jar out any air bubbles lurking below the surface. Bake the cakes for about a half an hour, until a knife or toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool the pans for 15 minutes and then turn the cakes out onto racks and cool completely.

Make the frosting (adapted slightly):

16 oz (two packages) cream cheese

2 sticks butter, room temperature

1 pound confectioner's sugar

1/3 cup pure maple syrup, or to taste

Beat all the ingredients with a mixer until smooth and fluffy. (add the confectioner's sugar slowly while beating).

This cake might need to be refrigerated after frosting for about 30 minutes to set before cutting. I sprinkled cinnamon on mine. Mmmmmm.

Ah, Sourdough.

2010-10-04T05:28:00.000-07:00

this was a good loaf.

Pane al Cioccolato

2010-10-03T05:11:00.000-07:00

Chocolate Bread! What bliss is this?

As I drove these loaves, fresh from the oven, to the farmer's market last Saturday, my entire car filled with the most delicious melted chocolate smell. I lovingly assigned these loaves to the front of our booth; a prominent position next to the cinnamon rolls. It was very hard to stop myself from caressing the dark brown crust dusted with streaks of flour in front of the customers.

I cut a loaf open under the pretense of offering a taste to customers (but really, I couldn't help myself any longer.) And chocolate bread is exactly what this is. I know, I know, I'm being obvious here- but it wasn't so chocolately that it seemed like dessert, and it was definitely bread texture- but all chocolate taste.

Let's talk about the possibilities for chocolate bread, people:

1. Toasted for breakfast with coffee or chai. (oh, go ahead, spread on some butter.)

2. Peanut butter sandwich! (banana optional)

3. Spread with Nutella and sprinkle with berries.

4. If (unlikely) some of this bread should be left after a few days, make chocolate bread pudding!

The recipe is from an amazing blog I found called Apple Pie, Patis and Pate. The author of the blog creates amazing international dishes, and (most impressive to me) bread with beautiful irregular holes and lovely slashes.

kneaded final dough

Chocolate Bread, from Apple Pie, Patis and Pate.

Make the wild yeast starter first:

1 oz sourdough starter (50% hydration)*

1/4 cup (1.125 oz) bread flour

.625 oz water

Stir thoroughly and let ferment at room temperature for 8 hrs.

*If you need to make a sourdough started, here is a link to Peter Reinhart's instructions.)

Make the Final Dough:

All of the wild yeast starter, cut into pieces

3 cups (13.875 oz) bread flour

1 1/8 cup (8.75 oz) water

4 Tbs (2.5 oz) honey

1 Tbs vanilla

4 Tbs (.875 oz) cocoa powder

1/4 tsp instant yeast

1 Tbs (.375 oz) kosher salt

2.75 oz chocolate chips (don't add these until the end of the kneading, after the gluten is developed. Add too early, and the gluten will be inhibited and the chocolate chips will melt into the dough)

Mix everything (but the chocolate chips) together, and knead for 8-10 minutes. Rest for 5 minutes. Add the chocolate chips and knead until evenly distributed. If using a mixer, knead by hand for a minute at the end.

shaped chocolate loaves; i quadrupled this recipe

Place the finished dough in a large oiled bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise for two hours at room temperature.

At the end of this time, divide the dough into two pieces, about a pound each. Shape each into a loose ball and let rest for 20-30 minutes.

Next, shape into the final loaf- either a boule or batard. (here is a nice video on batard shaping) Finally, proof at room temperature for 3 hours on the pan you plan to bake on.

partial truckload of bread for the market

About 30 minutes before the end of proofing, preheat the oven to 400 degrees. When ready to bake, take a sharp knife or a razor blade or lame, and make two or three slashes down the length of the bread. Load the bread into the oven and create steam by pouring a cup of hot water into a separate pan, or by spraying the walls of the oven with water. Bake for 35-40 minutes, rotating the loaves once. Let cool for an hour before slicing.

Chocolate Bread Madness!

Toasted Coconut Cake

2010-09-28T13:50:00.000-07:00

I have never made a coconut cake before last week, and since then I have made three. I've never made one before this because, while I love the flavor and smell of coconut, the texture of shredded coconut makes my skin crawl and my teeth itch.

this cake was made with the Bon Appetit recipe x 1.5

My new friend Laura likes coconut cake, though, and it was her birthday so I gave it a shot. I used this recipe from Bon Appetit magazine, and it was very good. I loved using cream of coconut in the cake- it kept it very moist for days while the leftovers sat on the table slowly being nibbled away. It featured cream cheese frosting flavored with a bit of cream of coconut. (not to be confused with coconut milk).

I used farm fresh eggs from Eric's friend at work for Laura's cake.

But then, inspired by the whole coconut bit and an article in my new Food and Wine magazine, I tried out another coconut cake for the restaurant. This cake was more angelfood-like, but was brushed with rum syrup (slurp!), and had light and airy italian meringue buttercream frosting.

I'll leave to you coconut fanatics to decide which cake is better, because both got rave reviews. It probably depends if you go for light and airy or dense and moist.

Towering Coconut Layer Cake adapted from Tyler Florence for Food and Wine magazine

Layers:

10 eggs

1 1/2 cups sugar

1 tbs vanilla extract

1/2 cup plus 1 T vegetable oil

1 1/2 cup AP flour

1/4 cup cornstarch

1 t kosher salt or 1/2 t regular salt

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter or spray 4 9-in cake pans and line with parchment rounds.

Using an electric mixer, mix the butter, sugar and eggs on high until the mixture is fluffy and tripled in volume. Gradually beat in the oil until fully incorporated.

In another bowl, sift the flour, salt and cornstarch. Fold these dry ingredients into the egg mixture until smooth.

Spread the batter evenly between the 4 cake pans, smoothing the top, and bake for about 20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean. Let cool on racks.

Make the Rum Syrup:

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 cup water

2 tbs spiced rum (i used white rum, it still tasted good)

Stir the sugar and water together in a small saucepan over high heat until the sugar is fully dissolved. Let cool then stir in the rum.

Make the Coconut frosting:

1 1/2 sugar

1/2 cup water

6 large egg whites

4 sticks (1 pound) butter, room temperature

1 1/2 tbs coconut extract

2 cups coconut flakes (I used sweetened), toasted.

In a saucepan, stir the water and sugar together over high heat until the sugar is dissolved. Then stop stirring and let boil until the syrup reaches 228 degrees on a candy thermometer. If you don't have such a thermometer, just boil until you can see the faintest tinges of gold starting in the syrup. This as always worked for me.

A few minutes into the boiling, start whipping the egg whites in a perfectly clean stand mixer bowl with the whisk attachment. Beat until stiff peaks form. When the syrup is ready, while running the mixer on medium high, gradually beat in the hot syrup. When it's all in, reduce the speed of the mixer to medium and beat until the egg whites have cooled to room temperature.

At this point, beat in the butter, a couple tablespoons at a time until it's all encorporated. If the mixture looks like its curdling, power through, it should come together in the end with enough beating. Mix in the coconut extract.

To assemble to cake:

Brush each layer with the Rum Syrup, spread each with about 1 1/4 cup frosting and stack. Frost the outside of the cake and then press the toasted coconut to the sides of the cake. If desired, you can also sprinkle toasted coconut between the layers, too. If you like coconut, that is.

If you don't like coconut flakes, you can just eat the interior like I did.

Buttermilk Ice Cream

2010-09-22T07:15:00.000-07:00

It is my fantasy to someday soon make ice cream with fresh, local eggs with fresh, local, non homogenized cream. Eric has been getting fresh eggs from a man at his work, so that part's covered. Sometimes we get cartons full of little bitty eggs, half the size of normal ones, and it's so fun to eat tiny fried eggs with tiny toasts. I'll keep you updated on my mission for fresh cream.

This ice cream is another recipe that I made while spending the week with Eric's Family at the Lake in New York. It went great with all our desserts for the end of the week- like Micah's mixed berry pie and my mother in law's fantastic thin-but-tender-heart-shaped-waffles and currant sorbet/syrup

It has a custard base, so it stays smooth and creamy in the freezer. It tastes sort of like frozen yogurt, but with the buttery richness of buttermilk giving it that je ne sais se quoi- that indescribable quality that makes something irresistible.

Don't be fooled by the looks- this is not vanilla ice cream by anyone's standards.

Buttermilk Ice Cream, from The Last Course via Smitten Kitchen

2 cups heavy cream

1 1/4 cups sugar

8-12 egg yolks (I used 10)

2 cups buttermilk

2 t vanilla

pinch of salt

Heat the cream and one cup of sugar to simmering in a large pot on the stove. Meanwhile, whisk the egg yolks with the remaining 1/4 cup sugar.

Temper the egg yolks by whisking little amounts of hot cream into the yolks at a time, and so gradually raising the temperature of the yolks so they don't curdle. Once most of the cream has been added slowly and the eggs mixture is hot, you can whisk the rest in all at once.

Cook the egg yolk mixture over the stove until it can coat the back of a spoon (and thus becomes custard). Don't, DON'T, DON'T boil, or the eggs will curdle. However, if they should curdle, carefully blend the custard in a blender until smooth again.

Strain the custard into the buttermilk and stir in the salt and the vanilla.

Cool the mixture for several hours until completely cool, then freeze according to your ice cream maker's instructions.

It will be very soft at first (which isn't bad at all, just melty), but a few hours in the freezer makes it just the right consistency.

One of the best meals of my life- those waffles with currants and gooseberries and buttermilk ice cream and currant sorbet. Oh, and fresh whipped cream. Enjoyed on a cliff by a impossibly blue lake.

Apple Butter

2010-09-21T13:39:00.000-07:00

Even though it is still 96 degrees here, it is officially fall and I am going to behave as such.

My mother and father planted an orchard when we first moved to the farm in Virginia when I was in middle school. They planted it up on the great tall hill behind our house. It was a beautiful location, but the deer ravished the young trees every year, stripping them of leaves and tender branches. Finally, it was necessary to up root the entire orchard and plant it closer to the house (and our dogs) to prevent the deer from eating it all up! This set the trees back a few years on their path to maturity.

So it is now, about 11 years later, that the trees are bearing fruit. Two weekends ago, I picked buckets full of apples with my mother- finally enjoying the (literal) fruits of her labor. I made it home with two large bags full of Rome, Fuji and Golden Delicious apples. It is strange and quite nice to use fruit that is smaller and more blemished than you ever see in Kroger.

Apple Butter runs through my family's veins; every fall the relatives on my mother's side all join together and take turns stirring a massive pot over a bonfire in the Missouri countryside and come away with gallons and gallons of the smoothest, spiciest apple butter.

I wasn't quit up to an epic outdoor fire apple butter session with my two grocery bags of apples, but my friends Sara and Andrew (who are getting married in less than three weeks!!) told me about a fantastic Apple Butter recipe that they found on Simply Recipes, so I gave it a shot. Andrew added a secret ingredient that maybe I'll be able to share here eventually...

Yesterday I saw a pumpkin stand in town, and this morning I had apple butter on toast. Maybe fall will come to Augusta after all.

Apple Butter, adapted from Simply Recipes

4 pounds of apples, chunked, damaged parts removed (but not cored or peeled, because those parts add pectin and flavor.)

1 cup apple cider vinegar

water

2.5-4 cups sugar (1/2 cup for every cup of puree the apples produce)

salt

2 t cinnamon

1/2 t cloves

1/2 t allspice

zest and juice from 1 lemon

large pot for boiling apples and then jars

large deep pan for boiling down apple puree

canning jars and lids

blender (optional)

sieve

tongs

canning funnel (optional)

clean towels

cup measure

Put the apples in the large pot, add the apple cider vinegar and enough water to cover them. Cover the pot and bring to a boil. Boil until the apples are soft, about 20 minutes.

Mashed the apples and press through the sieve, or puree in a blender or food processor and then sieve. Measure the cups of puree into the large deep pan and add 1/2 cup sugar for every cup of puree. Add a dash of salt, the spices and the lemon juice. Adjust spices to taste.

(Other spice idea: I have recently read about cardamom apple butter, which I am definitely going to try next time I make it, because cardamom is pretty much the best spice ever.)

Cook uncovered on low heat for 1-3 hours until desired consistency is reached. Stir very often. I probably cooked mine down more than I had to (after only an hour); mine is very thick and I only got 2 and a half half-pint jars. You might even get double that if you stop sooner. The more you stir, the faster the apple butter will thicken because it will help the moisture evaporate.

Make sure to prepare your canning set up well before the apple butter is done cooking down.

I would read though proper canning techniques as improperly canned foods can make you sick or dead.

this is a good link:

http://www.freshpreserving.com/pages/step_by_step_high_acid_foods/34.php

Because Apple Butter and jams have such a high sugar I use a method that involves sterilizing my jars in boiling water that completely covers them for at least ten minutes and quickly pouring hot jam into hot jars and quickly lidding them with hot lids (making sure to wipe the top of the jar with a clean towel before lidding it.) As the jars cool, they will seal themselves.

I would research canning thoroughly before deciding what method to use, but I've never had any problems canning jam in this way.

Somehow, apple butter tastes both deep and spicy, but also super fresh. Kind of like apple cider. I think this is best way to use apples, maybe even better than pies and tarts (but you be the judge, I'm posting an apple pie recipe soon.)

My excuse for a post today.

2010-09-14T07:49:00.000-07:00

Is the world's longest watermelon sitting on my kitchen counter?

A google search for "longest watermelon" proved fruitless (ha. ha.), but here is the world's LARGEST watermelon:

http://www.hopemelonfest.com/largestmelon1.htm

Hope, Arkansas: Home of the Bill Clinton, Mike Huckabee and the world's largest watermelons.

grown right here in North Augusta, SC

Lemon Raspberry Cake

2010-09-12T15:06:00.000-07:00

This cake is a real hit at the restaurant; I make it once a week. I love how the red raspberry filling pops with color next to the white frosting and cake. Eating this cake feels like summer, so make it soon as a farewell tribute to this hottest of seasons.

And really, though those of you up north may be mourning the end of summer, I am still dying from heat here. Last weekend we stole up to North Carolina and Virginia for a few days, and the crisp air there hinted at fall in a way that is torturing me still. I am so ready for the trees to change color, for the necessity of cardigans, for halloween, for my birthday, for woodsmoke, for pumpkins...

Excuse me, what was I talking about? Oh yes, back to the summery Lemon Raspberry Cake. It's very good. The frosting is fluffy and and not too sweet, the same one that's on the Golden Summer Cake, with the addition of lemon juice.

Lemony Layers (from the Baked cookbook)

2 1/2 cups cake flour

3/4 cup AP flour

1 T bakng powder

1 t baking soda

3/4 t salt

1 stick butter, softened

1/2 cup vegetable shortening, room temp

1 3/4 cup sugar

1 T vanilla extract

grated zest of one lemon

1 large egg

1 1/2 cups ice water

3 large egg whites, room temp

1/4 t cream of tartar (or lemon juice or vinegar)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter and line three 8 in cake pans with parchment rounds.

Sift together the flours, baking powder and soda, and salt.

Cream the butter and shortening together in an electric mixer using the paddle attachment on medium speed, about 3 minutes. Add the sugar, vanilla and lemon zest and beat another 3 minutes. Scrape the bowl and add the egg, beating until just combined.

Using low speed, alternate adding the flour mixture and the ice water. Scrape the bowl and mix for a few more seconds.

Using a spotless bowl, whisk the egg whites and cream of tartar until soft peaks (not stiff peaks) form. Fold the egg whites into the batter.

Divide the batter among the three pans and bake for 30-40 minutes (keep an eye on it, if your pans are 9 in instead of 8 then they'll bake faster). Test with a toothpick or thin knife. Let cool for 20 min and turn out onto racks to cool completely.

Lemony Frosting:

1 pound butter, softened

2 cups heavy cream

1/2 to 1 pound confectioner's sugar, to taste

juice from three lemons

Combine the first three ingredients in the bowl of an electric mixer and whip the the whisk attachement for at least ten minutes, until the frosting is smooth and creamy and light. Add the lemon juice and whip until combined.

To assemble cake, spread the lemon frosting on each layer, topping each one with raspberry jam or filling. Finish with swirly peaks of lemon frosting on the top.

It's the perfect birthday cake for those who don't care for chocolate. (Whoever those people are).

Cherry-Peach-Blueberry Cobbler

2010-08-28T08:15:00.000-07:00

We eat a lot of fruit salad around here. We're quite indulgent that way. I chop the fruit, squirt some lime or lemon juice, sprinkle some sugar and call it a meal. I could eat the stuff pretty much all the time, and I cringed at the thought of baking all that delicious fruit into something syrupy and mushy, suffocating under dry biscuits. I needed a company dessert, however, and the peaches were pretty soft, so I gave cobbler a shot.

I saw a recipe on Smitten Kitchen for a cobbler with cornmeal biscuits, which sounded promising, and I chose my fruit carefully, because as a rule I do not like cooked fruit. I hate mixed berry pie with raspberries and blackberries, and for gosh sakes keep the hawaiian pizza away from me.

I realize I am not starting off with a tempting description of this amazing cobbler, but I wanted you to understand what it was up against first. In my mind, the only thing going for it was that it could be eaten with ice cream.

HOWEVER, I am please to announce that this fruit cobbler is delicious. It is warm and homey, with the added interest of cornmeal and with juices that complement ice cream just perfectly. In fact, I think I am won over to the cobbler camp. I think I'm even going to try again soon, maybe with an oatmeal topping next time!

Cobbler recipe adapted from Smitten Kitchen.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

I doubled the cornmeal biscuit topping recipe below, and if you want to know what I'd do next time, I think I'd only 1 1/2 it instead.

Use whatever berries or stone fruits strike your fancy. I used:

3 cups blueberries

2 peaches, cut in dice

1 cup cherries, cut in half

Mix the fruit with:

2/3 cup packed brown sugar

2 T flour

2 T lemon or lime juice

1/2 t ground cinnamon

1/4 t salt

Place fruit mixture in the bottom of a baking dish. Make the cornmeal biscuit topping:

3/4 cup flour

1/4 cup cornmeal

2 T brown sugar

1 1/2 t baking powder

1/4 t salt

2 T cold butter, cubed

1/2 cup buttermilk

Mix together the flour, cornmeal, brown sugar, baking powder and salt. Rub the butter into the flour mixture, then stir in the buttermilk. The dough will be sticky.

Plop the dough onto the fruit. I know my entire cobbler is covered with topping, but I think it's more aesthetically pleasing if the fruit can bubble up in gaps between the biscuit, so leave some spaces.

Bake until the fruit is bubbly and the biscuit is browned on top. This will take 20-30 minutes. Let it cool for a few minutes before scooping into bowls and serving with ice cream. You can tell people it is your grandmother's secret recipe when they inquire about the origin of this heavenly cobbler.

Blueberry Mango Whole Wheat Muffins

2010-08-19T08:01:00.000-07:00

Bad news: I am down to the very last of my frozen blueberry supply. As it is blueberry season, this would not normally be a problem, however, I am in Georgia and the blueberries are in Virginia. At least, the blueberries I'm committed to for life are in Virginia. I'm hoping to make a trip in a couple of weeks to see friends and come back loaded down with enough berries to sustain me for another year. I'm almost out of jam, too! Oh, the horrors.

And so, let it be a testament to the power of these muffins that I would bestow the last of my precious blueberries on them.

There are chunks of sweet mango, dark blotches of blueberry, spices like ginger and cinnamon and half whole wheat flour to add substance, complexity and health.

I feel that, in light of the millions of muffin recipes floating out there on the internet, its going to be hard to convince you that

THESE ARE THE BEST MUFFINS I'VE EVER EATEN.

And that you should

GO MAKE THEM NOW. NOW. NOW.

but let me know when you do and we'll talk about how good they are.

Blueberry Mango Whole Wheat Muffins, adapted from Dorie Greenspan's Fresh Mango Bread, found in Baking: From My Home to Yours.

3 large eggs

3/4 cup vegetable oil

1 t vanilla extract

1 1/2 white flour

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 cup sugar

1 t baking powder

1 t baking soda

1 1/2 t ground ginger

1 t ground cinnamon

1/4 t salt

1/2 cup packed light brown sugar

1 3/4 cups diced mangos (these muffins are about 50 times better if you use fresh mangoes. You could also use peaches, and I've also made these muffins with only blueberries)

3/4 cup blueberries (frozen or fresh. if frozen, dust with flour so the batter doesn't turn blue)

Finely grated zest from one lime

Preheat the oven to 350. Grease a 12-hole cupcake or muffin tray.

Whisk the eggs, vanilla and oil together.

In a large bowl, sift the dry ingredients - both flours, powder, soda, salt and spices. Rub the brown sugar between your hands over the dry ingredients to make sure there aren't any lumps. Stir the brown sugar in.

Pour the wet ingredients over the dry ones and stir until completely mixed. The batter will be very thick, but persevere until there's no dry stuff at the bottom of the bowl.

Stir in the mangos, blueberries and lime zest. Divide evenly into the muffin tray. If desired, sprinkle the tops of the muffins-to-be with some sugar.

Bake at 350 for 30-35 minutes, until a knife stuck in the center of a couple muffins comes out clean. Remove from oven and wait a few minutes before taking the muffins out of the tray and cooling on a rack.

Enjoy alone or with butter or with friends.

Peanut Butter Ice Cream

2010-08-17T08:28:00.000-07:00

I've been on SUCH a peanut butter dessert kick lately.

Ahahah, can you picture me swerving through traffic trying to get a picture of the peanut butter cookie ice cream sandwich in my hand? It wasn't easy, especially since I kept taking bites between shots...

Really, that ice cream sandwich was stupid good. I used Lebovitz's Peanut Butter Ice Cream recipe from The Perfect Scoop, which is incredibly easy. (No custard necessary because the PB keeps things soft and non-icy. And it uses half and half instead of heavy cream so its good for you...right?) And I used the double chocolate peanut butter Levain cookie recipe by Lisa at Parsley, Sage and Butter. I used all regular chocolate chips instead of PB ones. Find the cookie recipe here.

And here is the Peanut Butter Ice Cream Recipe:

Makes about 1 quart

3/4 cup smooth peanut butter

3/4 cup plus 2 T sugar

2 2/3 cup half and half

Pinch of salt

1/4 t vanilla

Puree all the ingredients in a food processor or blender until smooth.

Chill in your ice cream maker according to manufacturer's instructions.

...yes, that's it! Go make it!

Oh, and here are a few other peanut butter desserts from The Fox Fix if you, like me, are obsessed with them as of late:

Chocolate Cake with PB frosting

Peanut Butter Torte

Peanut Butter Cup Cheesecake

The King Cake

Lets just say I feel like this when I eat Peanut Butter desserts.

Golden Summer Cake

2010-08-17T04:42:00.000-07:00

When we were at Lake Skaneateles in the Finger Lakes, Eric and I stumbled upon a library book sale. We dove in head first and came away with tons of books (books that made lugging our bulging carry-ons around the airport miserable.)

While browsing through the cookbooks, I found such gems as The Microwave Bible, 1,000 Microwave Recipes and Dinner from the Microwave. I like my microwave as much as the next person, but I had no idea that we required such extensive instruction for using it. I guess in the 1960s when it was marketed to the public, things like microwave dinners and steam-able vegetable packets didn't exist, so people really were cooking from scratch with their microwave. Unthinkable!

(confession: I know microwaves have dubious effects on health, but I can't help but stare inside and watch my food cook! Eric is often horrified to walk into the kitchen and find me with my nose almost touching the microwave door.)

Back to the book sale...

One of the books I picked up is called Rosie's Bakery: All-Butter, Fresh Cream, Sugar-Packed No Holds Barred Baking Book. Excellent, I know.

In this book is the absolute best vanilla cake recipe I've encountered yet. It's texture, flavor and look are unparalleled. It also had an idea for a "Summertime Cake," which I've adapted to create my Golden Summer Cake. Lemon Curd fills the delicious yellow cake, and it's topped with fluffy vanilla frositng. It's divine.

Golden Summer Cake (doesn't that sound nice?) adapted from Rosie's Bakery Book.

Vanilla-Sour Cream Cake (makes two 9 or 10 in layers to be cut in half. You could also make three layers from this recipe)

3 3/4 cup cake flour (make sure to pour into the cup measure and scrape the top- don't just scoop)

1 1/4 t baking powder

1 1/4 t baking soda

3/4 t salt

3 1/2 sticks butter

2 cups sugar

2 t vanilla extract

6 egg yolks

2 eggs

1 1/4 cup sour cream

Preheat to 350 degrees.

Grease and line 2 or 3 pans with parchment rounds.

Sift the flour with the baking powder, baking soda and salt into a medium bowl.

Use an electric mixer to cream the butter and sugar until very fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the yolks and eggs one at a time, blending each well and scraping down the bowl as needed.

Alternate adding the dry ingredients and the sour cream in 2 or 3 additions. Mix only until incorporated before adding the next addition. When everything is added, turn the mixer to low and blend until the batter is very smooth. It tastes so good at this point :)

Divide the batter between your pans and smooth the top. Drop the pans a few times from a few inches up to get the bubbles out. Bake for about 35 minutes, until the cake springs back when you touch it and a knife stuck in the middle comes out clean.

Cool the layers completely before cutting in half. Take a long serrated knife and work around the sides of the layer to make sure it's cut evenly.

While the cake is baking, make the Lemon Curd Filling

2 t finely grated lemon zest

1/2 cup fresh lemon juice (from about 4 lemons)

1 cup sugar

4 large eggs

1/2 stick of butter

Mix the zest, juice, eggs and sugar in a saucepan and heat, stirring very often, over medium heat until it boils and is thickened. Pour through a strainer into a medium bowl. Cut the butter into small pieces and stir into the lemon curd until melted. Set the bowl into an ice bath and stir occasionally until cool. When cool, put into the fridge for at least an hour.

Finally, make the vanilla buttercream. Rosie's book introduced me to adding significant amounts of cream to the butter when making buttercream. When mixed long enough, the cream actually turns into butter itself. Pretty cool.

1 lb (4 sticks) unsalted butter, softened

2 cups heavy cream

2 t vanilla extract

1 pound or 6 cups powdered sugar

Mix all the ingredients with the paddle attachment in a stand mixer. You can do this with a hand held mixer, but the frosting takes at least 10 minute to come together, and thats a long time to stand there, hand vibrating.

Mix on medium-high until the frosting is light and fluffy, at least ten minutes, scraping down the bowl as needed. At first some of the cream might want to splash out, so I recommend wrapping some plastic wrap around the open part of the bowl.

This frosting is great because you can flavor it with just about anything. So far I've used espresso to make mocha frosting, I've added white chocolate, and I've added raspberry jam.

To assemble the cake, take your split layers and stack, spread about a 1/2 cup lemon curd between each. Spread a thin crumb coat of vanilla buttercream all over the cake and stick in the fridge for 10 or so minutes before completing the cake. For an easy garnish, I like to cut thin slices of lemons and slit them on one side to make little lemon curls as seen in the above picture.

Easy Chocolate Icecream

2010-08-09T13:32:00.000-07:00

Here I am, talking about David Lebovitz again. Get used to it- I'm on an ice cream kick.

This is not ice cream as we know it- it is incredibly easy to make, requires no ice cream maker, and I am going to claim that it's healthy. It has very little dairy and a lot of banana. And chocolate. And a wee bit o alcohol.

The alcohol keeps the ice cream from freezing solid and the banana (which as we discussed in the last post, is an emulsifier) keeps everything suspended and homogenous. And the chocolate makes it delicious.

I made this ice cream a lot while we were going through the moving process. It was just too easy to whirl the ingredients around in the blender, pop it in the freezer and come home later to something refreshing after a long day of painting and packing.

This ice cream does not have the creamy ice cream texture we expect from ice cream, but offers mucho refreshment for very little effort.

Ingredients:

1 banana, peeled and chunked

2 oz semi-sweet chocolate

6 T milk

7 T liquor (you can use pretty much any type- though some will taste better than others. I've found combinations of rum, baileys and kahlua to work well. Also, I've used a bit less liquor before and it turned out fine- but the less you use the more icy the ice cream will be.)

That's it! Now put the milk in a cup and put the chocolate in the milk. Microwave for 30 seconds and stir to melt the chocolate. Put all the ingredients in a blender and blend til smooth. Pour the chocolate mixture into a bowl or tupperware, cover and freeze for about 4 hours.

Be sure to let me know how many times you make it this week!

Banana-Lime Jam

2010-08-04T07:44:00.000-07:00

Recently, some friends confessed that they are loathe to eat a banana in any less than perfect condition. They are so averse to banana bruises, strings and speckles that it even deters them from buying bananas at all. "What's the point?" they sigh in resignation.

I do not fear brown bananas. In fact, I usually buy massive bunches of bananas in the hopes that a few will dodge consumption and become soft, mottled and sweet.

I have no shortage of uses for these imperfect perfect fruits*, the easiest of which involves breaking into pieces and freezing in ziplock bags for use in smoothies or banana soft serve. My favorites are Hummingbird Cake and Blueberry Banana bread.

When I ran across this Banana-Lime Jam recipe in Cooking Light, I just happened to have some lovely ripe bananas on my counter. It was one of those times when I moved without thinking- I grabbed some limes and started squeezing.

Combine:

3/4 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

1/4 cup fresh lime juice

in a saucepan. Bring to a boil.

Add:

Three peeled and sliced over-ripe bananas.

Reduce heat to medium and cook for 45 minutes, occasionally stirring and smashing the bananas with the back of the spoon. When thickened, remove from heat and stir in two tablespoons of butter. The jam will thicken more as it cools.

This jam is utterly delicious and reminds me of caramelized bananas. It would be fantastic on english muffins, and I really like it on whole grain breads. All the sugar preserves it very well, and mine's still doing fine in a jar in the fridge after a couple weeks. Ah! I just thought about banana jam on pancakes! Mmmmmm.

*My thoughts on the banana:

What an odd and lovely fruit. It requires no washing. No juices dribble down your arm when you take a bite. No messy fingers- it's got a built-in wrapper. Just grab and go. A perfect package of fiber, potassium, vitamin c and more.

Bananas are emulsifiers- they keeps ingredients from separating, keep things suspended, which is why they are so good in breads and cakes and smoothies, and you can often cut down or exclude eggs or butter because of this. What's more, they are the only fruit I can think of that is really opaque. Could bananas save the world?

Homemade Bomb Pops

2010-07-29T18:55:00.000-07:00

Eric's current popsicle obsession is Bomb Pops. His taste in popsicles has self-admittedly matured over the years, moving from a "quantity over quality" stance (think mountains of skinny and oh-so-cheap freezer pops) to an appreciation for the finer things in life (aka Edy's Strawberry Whole Fruit Popsicles).

As a gift one day I decided to surprise my man with delicious and healthy home-made Bomb Pops.

But first, dear Readers, a question:

Why the name Bomb Pop? And why is it red, white and blue? The flavors are cherry, lime and blue raspberry, so the obvious color combo there is red, green and blue. Which came first? The shape, the name or the colors? And why should the makers assume that the three go together? America = bombs?

A quick google search revealed not much information about the origins of the bomb pop except that they were first produced in the fifties by Blue Bunny. That's during the Cold War, folks, when everybody had bombs on the brain. Clearly it made sense to reinforce the nation's dominance and paranoia in the minds of children with patriotic popsicles.

On to the subject at hand!

To make these bomb pops, I simply pureed strawberries with a little simple syrup (half sugar, half water, heated in a saucepan until the sugar is dissolved), and poured it in the bottom of my popsicle molds. If you don't have popsicle molds, you could always use small paper cups.

Next I added a bit of vanilla yogurt, but you could try lemon or limeade as well.

Finally, I pureed some blueberries with simple syrup and used them to top off the molds.

Add the popsicle stick/plastic knife/mold caps and freeze away!

In a few hours, you can enjoy your Bomb Pop with the knowledge that you are eating real fruit. And for your information, National Bomb Pop day is celebrated the last Thursday in June. Missed it this year, but I'll be ready next year. We'll have a party, ok?

To unmold, just run hot water around the outside of the mold or cup for a few seconds, and slide the popsicle out.

Obviously, the popsicle is a very adaptable frozen treat. Try different fruits or flavors of yogurt- even frozen pudding!

Cinnamon Oatmeal Praline Chocolate Chunk Ice Cream

2010-07-21T04:10:00.000-07:00

That name is quite the mouthful, eh? Let's add on to it and make it Smooth-Crunchy-Creamy-Chunky-Luscious-Cinnamon-Oatmeal-Praline-Chocolate-Chunk-Incredible Cream.

And after all that I have to admit that string of descriptors goes nowhere in describing how utterly divine, just how perfect it is. Thank you, David Lebovitz, for equipping me with the tools to make it.

disclaimer...this absurd number of egg yolks is for a double batch

This ice cream has three components: 1. A custard base, which means it uses a ton of egg yolks and remains soft and creamy in your freezer, rather than getting icy and hard like ice creams that use only cream and milk. 2. Oatmeal Pralines- toasted old fashioned oats tossed with hot caramel an sprinkled with sea salt, cooled in a sheet pan and smashed to bits with a heavy object. 3. Chocolate chunks- I recommend chopping up bar chocolate in slivers and chunks. I used ghiradelli baking dark, but I think semisweet would be just as good, if not better.

Order of prep:

1. Make custard, place in ice bath in fridge.

2. Make Oatmeal Pralines, set out to cool.

3. Chop chocolate, place in bowl in the freezer.

4. When custard is totally chilled (at least three hours later), churn in ice cream maker.

5. While churning, smash the praline to bits and place in bowl in freezer.

6. When ice cream is churned, put it in a bowl or tupperware and fold in the praline bits and the chocolate.

7. Cover bowl. Freeze for several hours (I recommend overnight) to soften pralines and firm ice cream.

8. Enjoy your hard earned ice cream. Try to share with your friends and family, and try not to stick your whole face in the bowl when you take it out of the freezer. Feel free to sneak a spoonful every time you pass the freezer.

Cinnamon Ice Cream, from The Perfect Scoop

Makes about 1 quart. I doubled it, and it still only lasted 2 days. There were 7 people though.

1 cup whole milk

3/4 cup sugar

Pinch of Salt

Ten 3-in cinnamon sticks, broken up. I used 2 tablespoons of Saigon Cinnamon instead.

2 cups heavy cream

5 large egg yolks

Warm the milk, sugar, salt, cinnamon sticks and half the cream in a pot. Once warm, let steep for an hour to infuse the milk with the cinnamon. If you're using ground cinnamon, skip this step.

Heat the milk mixture, remove the cinnamon sticks and discard. Prepare your icebath- fill a large bowl with ice and a bit of water, and put a smaller bowl inside the big bowl. Pour the remaining cream in that smaller bowl. Have a strainer on hand to make sure there are no eggy bits in your ice cream.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg yolks. Whisk the hot milk into the egg yolks a little bit at a time until the egg yolks are the same temperature as the milk mixture. Whisk the hot egg mixture into the milk mixture.

Stir constantly over medium heat until the mixture thickens and coats the spatula. DON'T BOIL. You can also tell it's done when you can feel it starting to coat the bottom of the pan. If you think its coating the spatula, it probably is.

Pour the custard through the strainer into the cream in the icebath bowl. Stir until cool. Cover and refrigerate until thoroughly chilled, then churn according to the instructions that came with your ice cream maker.

Oatmeal Pralines, also from The Perfect Scoop

3/4 rolled oats (not instant)

1/2 cup sugar

Pinch of coarse salt

First, toast the oats. You can either do this on a sheet pan in the oven, or, if it's a hot summer day and you don't feel like turning on the oven, you can toast them in a wide skillet on the stove top, stirring constantly. Like so:

Place a sheet of aluminum foil on a baking sheet.

Spread the sugar evenly in the bottom of a medium, heavy bottomed pan. Cook over medium heat and cook attentively. When you see the edges liquify, stir carefully to get the rest of the sugar to melt. Be aware that if you don't stir, the bottom can burn while the stop is still white. Once the caramel is deep golden, remove from heat and dump the oats in. Stir the oats to coat with the caramel, then scrape them onto the aluminum foil on the baking sheet. Spread them out as evenly as possible. Sprinkle with salt and let cool and harden.

Once cool, break up into pieces and put in a heavy duty plastic bag. Whack them into bits with a rolling pin or other heavy blunt object.

The pralines will be very hard, but will soften in the ice cream. I recommend mostly small bits, like the size of a fingernail.

Stir together ice cream, pralines and chocolate, freeze for a bit and enjoy!

Make it this weekend and tell me how you liked it!

Lake Skaneateles Vacation

2010-07-13T07:51:00.000-07:00

We just got back from the best vacation. We were in the finger lakes area of New York, spending time in Ithaca and with Eric's family on Lake Skaneateles. They just bought a Geodesic Dome-Home on the lake; a lovely little absurdly shaped cottage, full of bright light and perched on top of a cliff. Tilting steps make their way down to the water where there live two kayaks, a row boat named Lyng (which means flower in Norwegian), a dingy, and- the pride of the place- a sailboat.

We're sailors now!

Our favorite thing was to stand up at the front of the boat while Mr. Fuchs expertly caught the wind by zig-zagging the boat across the lake. Every time he "tacked" or made a turn, we had to move back and duck down to avoid the jib sail flying across the deck to the other side of the boat. At these times he loved letting the boat lean far over the water while we were perched precariously, our feet dragging in the water.

I'm steering the boat. Right is left and left is right.

Behold! The Dome-Home in all it's glory!

The water of Lake Skaneateles is a breathtaking blue and shockingly clear. Doesn't it look like water that belongs in Tahiti?

The dome-home's water comes straight from the lake, and the towns nearby get their water from it, too. It's one of the cleanest lakes in the US.

Leah and Drew came through Ithaca on their Northeastern road trip. You can see more pretty pictures of the lake on Leah's blog.

BFFs!!

Eric's brothers, Isaac and Micah, are into food and restaurants and cooking...so this week was the week of delicious food. And the week of David Lebovitz, actually, because Micah brought his new cookbook, Ready for Dessert (which I cannot wait to obtain), and I brought his ice cream book, The Perfect Scoop. And there was much rejoicing.

Micah, crimping the edges, and his mom's hand demonstrating the proper position for the thumb and forefinger

We grilled out almost every night, every thing from porkchops and chicken to pizzas and sandwiches to corn on the cob and watermelon. Mrs. Fuchs used her home grown black currants to make sorbet. Isaac made Lebovitz's chocolate chip cookies and Micah made his double crust mixed berry pie. And I made two batches of truly stellar ice cream (one adapted from Lebovitz)- and I will gladly share the recipes with you.

i said, "Christine, make it look like you're enjoying it."