Two duds in a row

I must be losing my touch: two duds in a row. The first was an attempt to create something called "Cinnamon Caramel Bundt Cake." I made up the name for a treat to be consumed by characters in my novel in progress. Future plans include posting recipes for foods from the book on an author website someday--assuming I get a publishing deal and create a website--and I've begun the mess-around-in-the-kitchen stage.

CCBC was supposed to be a pound-cakey kind of a thing, with some brown sugar, cinnamon, pecans layered in. Don't know what I did wrong, but for starters using a half-recipe seems to be a terrible idea with the KitchenAid mixer. I think it's just too small a quantity to process well, and the batter gets overworked. It's also possible that my baking powder has lost its umph. It's not near the expiration date yet, but the tin has been open for a while. The cake is okay -- hard to go wrong with butter, brown sugar, eggs, and flour -- but the flavor's a bit flat and the cake is, too. Hasn't stopped me from enjoying some with my coffee in the morning, but it's nothing to be proud of.

The pumpkin cake turned out a little better, but also didn't rise well , which lends credence to the wimpy baking powder theory. I followed my recent pumpkin muffin recipe, omitting the raisins and struedel topping and -- where I went wrong -- tossed in some no-longer-all-that-fresh pineapple that was in the fridge. Which threw the moisture ratio way off. So, that one's a little damp and dense. Tasty, and good for breakfast (pumpkin, organic eggs, whole wheat pastry flour, oat bran, yogurt, pecans, unsweetened coconut, pineapple... the only not very healthy thing about it is the light brown sugar). But a long way from a baking triumph.

The nice thing about baking is that so long as you don't mess up something truly crucial (like confusing salt for sugar), even the duds are edible.

I think I'll give up on the CCBC, though. It's occurred to me that I could hold a reader contest and get other bakers to send in their recipes, and pick the best one to post on my future author website. That's the mark of a master, right? To get someone else to do the work?

Pumpkin Muffins

It looks like we're moving (again) in late May or early June. Only to the other side of town, but still, moving is always a hassle. It's a great house, though, and I wish I could move in tomorrow... instead we're hanging around waiting to hear from the owner when his current tenant will be out (still not certain) so we can set a definite move date and sign a lease.

It's a little too soon to start packing things up in boxes, but I've begun to look at my pantry and freezer with an eye to eating up as much as possible before then. Every frozen pea we don't consume before the move is gonna add to a cooler full of stuff to be hauled across town.

One item found in the pantry: a large can of pumpkin puree (the two-pie size). Making these muffins only used up some of it. In other words, I turned one can in the pantry into a batch of muffins and two 1-cup containers in the freezer, which feels like one step forward and two steps back on the "use it up" road. That's okay, 'cause these are yummy and I won't mind at all making them again two more times before we go. They're as delicious as cake, but a bit more healthy.

Pumkpin Muffins
Loosely based on the Apple-Zucchini Muffin recipe in Moosewood Restaurant New Classics. (makes one dozen)

Preheat oven to 350. Line a 12-muffin tin with fluted paper cups. Mix up the Streusel Topping (at end of post) and set aside, ready to go.

In a large mixing bowl, sift together or mix up well with a fork:
1-1/2 C whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 C oat bran
1-1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cinnamon

Stir in:
1/2 C chopped pecans (or 1/2 C pecans, chopped, either way; it matters in some recipes, but not this one)
1/2 C golden raisins
1/4 finely shredded unsweetened coconut
Set aside.

In the bowl of a food processor, combine the following and blend well:
2 eggs
1/2 C yogurt
1/4 C safflower oil
3/4 C light brown sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 C pumpkin puree

Scrape the wet stuff into the bowl with dry ingredients, and stir to combine (briefly with a fork, then with a rubber spatula to make sure the dry stuff at the bottom is all mixed in).

Spoon batter into muffin cups (they will be full) and top with Struesel topping (below).

Bake for 35 minutes or until done, rotating pan half-way through cooking time. Cool in pan on a rack for a few minutes, then remove muffins from pan and allow to cool to room temp on rack. (If you don't wait for the muffins to cool, they'll fall apart when you try to peel off the paper liners. Guess how I know.)

STREUSEL TOPPING
1/3 C all purpose flour
2 T cold, unsalted butter
2 T brown sugar (light or dark)
1/4 C chopped pecans
2 T finely shredded unsweetened coconut
1/4 tsp cinnamon

Place all ingredients in bowl of a mini-food processor and pulse to combine well.

I've been eating these for breakfast the past couple of days. My husband (a die-hard oatmeal fan in the breakfast department) thinks they make a fine dessert. If dessert's your plan from the get-go, I suggest you skip the topping and go with a cream-cheese frosting instead.

Two wheat-free weeks

I've been eating, and cooking, lots of everyday food lately. Things like chicken soup with white beans and swiss chard (and misc. other veggies, whatever's in the fridge) that I don't use recipes for. You haven't seen a new post from me lately 'cause although plenty of good food has come forth from my kitchen, not much of it has been (to my mind) blog-worthy. It's all been tasty and healthy food, sure -- I'm a good cook, and we eat well -- but I'm guessing that if anyone besides me ever reads these posts, they might be more interested in a new idea or two, or a delicious recipe they can follow.

My only culinary adventure lately has been a two week wheat-free experiment, which I undertook for no good reason than I was curious to see what it would be like and how I'd feel. Hubby's been patient with it (he's a brown rice consumer, mostly; so long as that's always on his plate, he's fine), but I'm gonna need to get back to bread-baking soon to keep him truly happy at the table.

I thought I'd miss bread horribly, and I am feeling nostalgic for whole grain toast with peanut butter (my usual breakfast until two weeks ago) but the big surprise from this adventure was that it's the convenience of bread that I missed most, even more than the consuming of it. Toast is soooo much quicker and easier to make than a pot of brown rice!

Mostly I've just been avoiding wheat, eating more rice, and making do without bread, toast, or crackers (not as hard to do as I thought, but wouldn't wanna keep it up forever). I did get creative and make a brown rice and zucchini pizza crust one night, which was... interesting. Not horrible, or even bad. But not something I'll rush to repeat, although I might not be able to resist the challenge of seeing how much closer it can get to memorable (in a good way). And not anything you'd want me to share the recipe for, at least in that first rendition.

So anyway, this is my long-overdue post, the wheat-free weeks are up, and I'll be making bread (and toast!) again soon, but tomorrow I'm off to the Left Coast Crime conference (held right here on the Big Island this year, so yippeee!), so I'll be eating restaurant food until next Thursday. Oh boy: Pacific Fusion Cuisine, here we come! We're planning to eat at Roy's -- at least once -- and Sansei, and maybe check out Merriman's Market Cafe dinner menu (we enjoy lunch there) as well. That will blow our dining-out budget for a good long time to come, and be worth it.

Chocolate Coconut Surprise Cake

Given any choice of what he'd like for dessert, my husband can be relied upon to choose chocolate cake above all other options every time. This makes it easy to decide what to make each year when his birthday rolls around: some variation on chocolate cake with chocolate frosting is required.

This year I wanted to try the "Devilishly Moist Chocolate Cake" on page 121 of The Cake Book. The final result has been rated "best birthday cake ever," although some improvising took place along the way.

I was a little hesitant about a recipe that calls for pouring an entire cup of boiling water into the batter as the last step, but the author appears to know her cakes so I gave it a go. I even followed the recipe exactly, which I hardly ever do, even with baked goods.

The batter, after that cup of boiling water was mixed in, was so runny I thought surely there was some horrible typo in the recipe. I used a 9" springform pan and took the precaution of wrapping it in aluminum foil, because I thought for sure the batter would leak out (it didn't).

This bakes for quite some time: close to an hour at 325. And for most of that time it did not look promising. And then, at the end, suddenly it puffed up and looked like cake. Yay.

Well, almost like cake. Here's what the top looked like when it came out of the oven:

That rumpled bit in the center appears to have formed from convection currents in the batter as it warmed at the sides and drifted toward the center. You can see where I flicked a bit off with a fingernail: it's crisp and strange. Didn't matter, as I flipped the cake onto the plate top-side down in order to remove the pan bottom and peel off the parchment paper circle.

The bottom is fine. Mmmmmm, so moist and dark and it smells scrumptious...

The problem with this cake is it only makes one (generous) layer. Which I'd planned to split into two layers, but it really is devilishly moist. So moist that there's no way layer-splitting was going to happen in my kitchen. A professional pastry chef could probably handle it, but I know my limits.

A one-layer birthday cake, though, didn't seem sufficiently grand. I was inspired by another recipe in the book (Chocolate Almond Coconut Cake, p. 206). Here's the photo that got me thinking (red circle):

(Yes, I want to make the luscious Creamy Coconut Cake on the right, too. Another time.)

Anyway, the coconut topping for the Choc-Almond cake calls for light corn syrup, which isn't the kind of thing I keep around. So I browsed some more and came across Whipped White Chocolate Ganache (p. 318). Hmmm, cream and white chocolate melted together, cooled, and whipped. Why not add some coconut to that? Organic unsweetened shredded coconut is the kind of thing that lurks in my larder.

The Whipped White Coconut Ganache was another potential uhoh. Even chilled for almost six hours, it did not firm up the way a dark chocolate ganache does. And whipping it, even with chilled beaters, did not seem to work. (I would have chilled the bowl, too, but there wasn't room in my freezer after a recent Costco stock-up.) I almost tossed it as a dud, because the recipe warns against over-whipping, and I'd let the mixer run for a while. Then, just as I was about to give up on it, it suddenly came together and firmed up, just like whipped cream only more abruptly:

So, yippee for that. I folded in 1/2 cup of finely shredded coconut and topped my single chocolate cake layer with it.

The coconut topping is only about 1/4 inch thick, but that's plenty, as it's very rich. And exceedingly delicious:

It went into the fridge to chill up while I made a frosting.

Rich and Creamy Chocolate Frosting

This is my basic chocolate frosting method. It makes plenty for a two-layer cake, but extra freezes beautifully so I always make a large batch even when I only need a little. To make a darker choc version, use twice as much ganache or half as much butter frosting. It's very flexible. I usually don't even measure quantities, I just eyeball it. It always turns out fine: butter, sugar, cream, chocolate. How can you go wrong?

Step 1:

Make a dark chocolate ganache.Place 8 oz. of dark chocolate chips (preferably bittersweet; 70% cacao content or higher) in a small stainless steel mixing bowl. Heat 1 cup heavy cream over medium heat until just at a simmer. Pour it over the chocolate chips and let sit for 30-60 seconds. Stir it all up vigorously with a whisk until the chocolate melts and it all comes together into a smooth dark satiny deliciousness. Set aside to cool to room temp. It will firm up a bit.

Step 2:

Make a basic butter frosting.Put 2 sticks soft unsalted butter in the bowl of your stand mixer. Use paddle to beat in 3 cups sifted confectioner's sugar (about a cup at a time) and 1 tsp vanilla extract.

Step 3:

Mix 'em together. Add the cooled ganache to the mixer bowl and beat well until chocolate and butter mixes are thoroughly combined and a uniform light brown color.

I used this to frost my coconut-topped cake layer. I then melted about 4 oz. more of dark choc chips and blended them into about a cup and a half of the frosting to make a slightly darker, more chocolately variation that I used to pipe decorative rosettes around the edge of the cake. I didn't do a fabulous job with that, 'cause I'm not an expert piper plus it was a warm afternoon and everything was on the verge of goopy and I was in a rush to get it done and into the fridge.

The result: not the most spectacular cake ever, but fine for a family birthday. And delicious. Really, really delicious. The white choc-coconut topping is heavenly with the rich, dark, moist choc cake. I love how the coconut layer is a surprise reveal when you cut into the cake. (See first photo, up top.)

Let me say again that this combo is wonderful. Like a cake version of a Mounds candy bar. I did wonder, when I was done, if I should have used just a straight dark choc ganache glaze instead of frosting. But the cake is so dark and so rich and so moist that my lighter frosting is a perfect counterpart.

We enjoyed our cake with Roselani "Haupia" (coconut pudding flavor) ice cream. Creamy and subtle and perfect. A bit like vanilla, but not vanilla. If you are ever in Hawaii be sure to seek out some Roselani ice cream while you're here. Especially if you can find haupia flavor and some dark chocolate coconut cake to go with it.

I'm already thinking of other things I might use that coconut topping on. Sweet Potato Cheesecake, anyone? I've never made it, but have enjoyed the Hilo Hawaiian Hotel's version, for which the Queen's Court restaurant is justly famous. I bet it would be even better with coconut topping.

First, though, we need to eat up leftovers of the b'day extravaganza. Then we'll need to go on a diet for a month.

Pear Coffee Cake

It's been a busy 2009 so far. I've had little time for baking, and even less for blogging. Here's the first of what I hope will be several catch-up installments: the Pear Coffee Cake I made for Christmas breakfast. It admirably met my requirement for a delicious treat that would function equally well as both breakfast and dessert.

I adapted this from the recipe for "Buttermilk Peach Coffee Cake" I found in this delightful book:

The Cake Book, by Tish Boyle

The Hilo Public Library has closed for three months for roof repair and renovations, so any books borrowed the last week in December aren't due back until the end of March, which is cool, so I grabbed some cookbooks while I was stocking up. The Coffee Cake is the only thing I've made from this book so far, but I've been browsing (and drooling) a lot, and hubbie has a birthday coming up, so stay tuned.

You'll find the original coffee cake recipe on page 108. Here's how I made my pear version. As usual, I used some WW flour, yogurt instead of buttermilk, used a little brown sugar, added some cinnamon and cardamom (so good with pears), and so on. I used some rolled oats and spices in the topping, too, and pecans instead of almonds 'cause that's what I had lying around.

The original peach version (probably also delicious) calls for a drizzle of white sugar glaze, which I skipped because at that point I was tired of being in the kitchen and this looked like it was going to be sweet and fattening enough without it. Which it was.

Pear Coffee Cake

2 bartlett pears

3 tsp lemon juice (divided)

1 C all purpose flour

1 C whole wheat pastry flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

1/4 tsp ground cardamom

3/4 C unsalted butter (12 T; 1.5 sticks), soft

3/4 C sugar

1/4 C brown sugar

2 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 C plain whole milk yogurt

1/4 C whole milk

Preheat the oven to 350 and butter and flour a 9" round baking pan or springform pan.

Peel, core, and dice the pears, and toss in a small bowl with 2 tsp of the lemon juice. Set aside.

Sift together the flours, baking soda and powder, salt, and spices. Set aside.

Mix the yogurt and milk with the remaining tsp of lemon juice (it will curdle; that's okay). Set aside.

In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugars until very light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Add the vanilla extract and blend in.

Beat in half the flour mixture at low speed, then the yogurt mixture, then the rest of the flour mixture.

Spoon half the batter into the baking pan and smooth the top. Top with the pears (scattered evenly over the batter) and half of the crumble topping (below). Cover with the rest of the batter and then the rest of the crumb topping.

Bake 50 minutes or until done. Cool in the pan on a wire rack. If using a springform pan, remove the sides after cake has cooled for 20 minutes.

Crumble Topping/Filling

1/2 C all purpose flour

1/2 C rolled oats

1/2 C brown sugar

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1/4 tsp ground cardamom

pinch nutmeg

2/3 cup pecans

4 T butter (soft)

1/4 C milk

Put all ingredients in the bowl of a food processor and pulse until well blended and the nuts are chopped. This will be thick and sticky, not dry Use a fork to drop clumbs of it all over the top of the coffee cake before baking.

NOTES

I followed the recipe's instructions to place 1/2 the batter in the pan, then add the fruit, sprinkle with half the crumble topping (that's what the odd-looking dark bits in the middle are, in the photo, above), then top with the rest of the batter and the rest of the crumble. Next time:

1) I'll use a little more pear (some of mine was mushy and had to be tossed, so I ended up with less than expected) and fold it into the batter rather than putting it all in the middle.

2) I'll make less crumble topping and only use it on top.

3) I'll use a metal baking pan. I used my large, glass, deep-dish pie pan for this, 'cause something else was in the metal pan I should have used (don't remember what, but the glass pan was option #2). This meant it baked longer, even at a slightly higher temp, and the bottom and top got darker than they probably should be by the time the middle was done.

This coffee cake was delicious, though. I ate way too much of it, without a single regret. I'll definitely consider making it again, when a year or so has passed and I've forgotten the damage it contributed to my end-of-year weigh-in.

Lemon Cupcakes - first attempt

The long-awaited Lemon Cupcakes turned out quite tasty (lovely lemon flavor), but too dense/heavy to be worth sharing the recipe yet. Not sure what the problem is. Could be:

~ too many ground almonds weighing the batter down?

~ too much whole wheat pastry flour?

~ overmixing? I used the KitchenAid stand mixer, but was only making a small batch (six cupcakes), and the quantity of batter was too small for the machine/bowl. I had to run it longer to get things mixed in.

I'll try again, and post when/if I get it right.

The frosting is nice and lemony, but again, no recipe, as I started with a small bit of leftover cream-cheese honey icing I found in the freezer, added some butter, lemon juice, more conf. sugar and whipped it all up until fluffy. It was too cold to come through the piping star tip well, as you can see, but that didn't interfere with our dining enjoyment.

We'll be eating the last two of these tonight as we ring in the New Year in our usual low-key, at-home, early-to-bed way.

I've probably done the least holiday baking of any cook in blogland, BTW, one reason it's been so quiet here. I didn't make even a single batch of cookies this year. Things I have made have been mostly thrown together with no recipe at all, like the apple crisp I made for Thanksgiving, using some stale multi-grain pancake mix that needed to be used up, plus some rolled oats, a little butter, an egg, and a couple of big spoonfuls of yogurt. It was quite tasty, too, and achieved my goal of being equally good as either dessert or breakfast. But I forgot to take a picture of it before it was gone.

XMas dessert was also a dual-duty effort: pear coffee cake. I do have a snap of that, and it's on my list of blogging topics to catch up on (here and elsewhere) as we get into the new year. First, though, hubby and I are heading to Waikoloa for a long weekend, hoping to see some sun (22" of rain since Christmas!) and hit the beach.

(Don't know what's up with Blogger today, have tried to insert paragraph spaces three times with no success. Sorry it's all run together, but fixing it appears to be beyond my power.)

Chocolate Cupcakes

It's been a long time since I made cupcakes, but a new era may have begun. The post-birthday week celebrations weigh-in was a setback--not a monster one, but indulgences did show up--and I'm refocusing on my goal to be 10 pounds thinner on Jan. 1, 2009, than I was at the beginning of this year.

I figure cupcakes are the way to go if I want a small indulgence of the cake kind without derailing my late-year slim-down efforts. These little beauties are not much more than half the size of a modest piece of snack cake, and delicious. I frosted them with mocha buttercream leftover from my birthday cake (which I have not yet blogged about, but will get to eventually), yum:

Chocolate Cupcakes

Steps 1-3 can be done ahead of time, which makes final prep quick and easy. Makes one dozen, double the recipe if you want more.

Step 1)

Melt together and set aside to cool to room temp (slightly warm is okay):

6 T unsalted butter

4 oz. semisweet or bittersweet chocolate

Step 2)

Sift together and set aside:

3/4 cup flour (whole wheat pastry or all purpose, or a combination)

1/4 cup cocoa powder (unsweetened)

1 T cornstarch

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

Step 3)

Combine and set aside (it will curdle, that's okay):

1 tsp instant coffee dissolved in 2 T hot water

2 T plain yogurt

1 tsp vanilla

Step 4)

Beat together at high speed until very light and fluffy:

3 large eggs

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1/4 cup dark brown sugar (do not pack down)

When the eggs and sugar are nice and fluffy, reduce mixer speed to medium and slowly add the cooled butter/chocolate, then half the dry ingredients, then the coffee/yogurt mixture, then the rest of the dry stuff. The batter will be runny.

Divide batter evenly among twelve cupcake cups with paper liners, and bake in preheated 350 oven until done (about 18 minutes).

Cool on a rack, and frost as desired.

I'm thinking lemon cupcakes would be good for the next batch. But first I have to go buy a new cupcake tin. I threw the old one out, because after years of exposure to ocean-side air it was looking pretty funky (thank god for paper liners!). One reason the chocolate cupcakes are on the small side is I very carefully did not overfill them (I got 15 from the recipe): I wanted to be absolutely sure that no part of the batter had any kind of contact with anything other than the paper liner.