Hot crossed buns for Easter
7 comments March 23rd, 2008
Posts filed under 'dolce'
Vinegar Pie: by happy cricket
I found this when Barbara asked the other day if I had a recipe. I didn’t even know what it was! America is a big country.
It comes from a site I hadn’t seen before, “The Instructables“, but I am happy to have found it because a person can always use a lighthearted approach to things.
1 comment March 21st, 2008
Hot Uncrossed Buns
The other day I was discussing the many traditional Carnevale and Lenten sweets that people make around me. I think they are supposed to quit making them once Lent starts, but they don’t. You almost can’t walk into a home this time of year without the perfume of hot oil and sugar winding around you and wrapping you up for the fat farm.
Everybody is making them and posting about them except me. I am cajoled and teased and blackmailed into tasting them constantly and I can’t bear to have them at home as well. I’m asking around for someone who is willing to be followed and photographed so I can publish it for you, but if you look around the blogging world for Cenci, Castagnole, Fiochi, Chiaccherare, and the hundreds of other words used to describe the hundreds of versions up and down the boot, you will definitely find them.
I remembered then that I loved a seasonal sweet traditional to my culture. The mighty Hot Cross Bun! I was immediately told that it is not the season until Good Friday. Uh! Something that good eaten only three days of the year? Not in my world! I decided that if I didn’t put the frosting crosses on until Good Friday I could have them right away and even take them to my hosts this weekend for an easy breakfast.
I looked at loads of recipes on line and in old cookbooks. The cookbook recipes were way too simplified for me. They wouldn’t produce what I remembered from decades ago. Delia of British fame has a good looking recipe, but my scale is broken so I needed a US recipe that doesn’t need weighing.
The recipe I used in the end was from Bella Online where they also have the nursery rhyme and the story behind this old fashioned sweet roll. If you agree that mine are prettier than theirs, it’s because I added an egg yolk wash before raising the formed buns. I think mine are a bit too big, too. I would make 16 of them from this recipe instead of 12.
The above is how they look in the very welcome sunshine that is pouring over my counters today. I have already eaten two and given one to Olga. We are agreed that these are the best we’ve ever had– mind you she’s never had them before.
7 comments February 7th, 2008
A kitchen Sunday
I did cook quite a bit today, but I didn’t photograph anything nor write about anything in particular. Today was a day when I prepared for future dishes. I roasted a leg of lamb and the bones are all simmering for stock right now. The meat is safely sealed up and in the refrigerator.
I made lentils and they were delicious, but meant for another day, other than those I spooned down.
I made up two dessert sauces but I didn’t make a dessert to use them on.
What a great day, tucked into the fireplace corner of the kitchen, getting up for a nibble of this and of that. I read an interesting and very atmospheric mystery called “Savage Garden” by Mark Mills, which I found very well written. It’s set in 1958 and only a few miles north of here. My only disappointment was a general clean-up, happy ending that I thought was a bit screwy.
I was conscious of happiness today in the way we rarely are. I wouldn’t have changed places with anyone unless they had their own sunny island. Let the rain fall.
4 comments February 3rd, 2008
In the kitchen…
Underway are experiments using white chocolate. Need volunteers to eat same.
Classes are forming in April, May and June. I’m looking for an interactive calendar that will show the days that are available. Any suggestions?
4 comments February 1st, 2008
Tartuffi: truffles of the chocolate kind
If there are real truffles around, you can count on me. I can’t sniff them out underground like a dog, and I don’t have any favorite patches where they can be found every year, but I am never at a loss as to what to do with them once they get past that stage and into someone’s pocket.
This is another kind of truffle and one which I rely on when there must be a sweet and I’ve no time or oven space to make one. The chocolate truffle can be made anytime and kept sealed in the refrigerator or the freezer until you need it. No one has ever felt neglected by being given a chocolate truffle.
They are not difficult to make, but you do need patience and a bit of spare time. I wouldn’t start them after dinner on a week night, but might shape them then, after having made up the chocolate earlier. I also recommend thin surgical gloves for shaping. Most say to use a bain marie, or double boiler, for melting the paste. I use a super heavy copper pot, moving it onto and off the heat as needed. I suppose that works best if you’ve done this enough to know when the heat is needed. Use a double boiler!
These are all the same inside, but the beige ones have been rolled in hazelnut meal and the white ones in dried coconut. They need to be rolled in something so they won’t formlessly fall into a big chocolate puddle as they were before you shaped them. I made them from a 75% bittersweet chocolate by Perugina because it was on sale. My usual 65% Valrhona is better, but I am almost out of it.
Ingredients:
Equal weights of heavy cream or panna da cucina and bittersweet chocolate
butter
liqueur (I used coffee liqueur this time, but will try raspberry grappa the next time.)
something to roll the truffles in, which can be finely chopped nuts, superfine ground espresso, cocoa or anything fine, dry and edible.
This batch was about 4 ounces each of the chocolate and cream. I used 2 ounces of sweet butter for that amount, and 2 tablespoons of liqueur.
Chop the chocolate up so that it will melt more readily. A big knife will do this just fine. Put the cream into the warmed double boiler and heat it, then add the chocolate, stirring it while it melts. Just as the last small bits of chocolate are melting away, add the butter and stir in off the heat entirely.
Add the liqueur, stirring it in. Allow the mixture to cool to room temperature, stirring once in a while, then refrigerate it. Remember to stir it occasionally while it is chilling. Eventually, it will become a firm, shiny paste and it is ready to shape.
For each thing you want to roll the truffles in, get a soup plate and fill it partway. You will not want to touch things once you begin rolling truffles, so be prepared. Prepare a plate or a platter on which to put the finished truffles after rolling them. Get a teaspoon, the kind you set the table with. Put on your latex surgical gloves. You don’t have to wear them, but it will save you half an hour of cleanup time if you do.
Using the teaspoon, scoop out a small amount of the truffle paste and put it into your palm. Make it about 3/4″ in diameter. Using both hands, roll the paste between your palms, then drop the ball into the soup plate, rolling it around to get it covered, then lift the truffle away and onto a plate. Just keep doing that until you run out of material. Then strip off the gloves and toss them away. Put the pot into the sink with the teaspoon and soap and hot water. Put the plate of truffles into the fridge for a few minutes to firm up well.
When the truffles are thoroughly chilled, put them into a sealable container and keep them either in the refrigerator for up to several weeks, or in the freezer where they will keep almost forever. Take them out and bring them to room temperature to serve them. A small glass of grappa or brandy followed by a cup of espresso, and no guest will ever think you took it easy on dessert.
Buon appetito!
8 comments January 30th, 2008
Top recipe 2008 (so far)
This is Fudge Pie as made by Barb, of Barb and Art Live in Italy. I made this again and took it out of the oven sooner, which gave me a creamier, fudgier center. (Barb, I don’t actually measure either the salt nor the vanilla!)
When I started a blog, I read a lot of opinions about blogging. The first and most important thing said was usually to be original. I decided to be rigorously original. I took that to mean that everything I put on the page had to be my own work, including the recipes. Over time, I started looking around the rest of the blogging world and I realized that most people who blog about food use recipes from cookbooks and report on their experience with that recipe. (I say that left them more time to become good photographers and that’s why many of them are much better than I.)
So then I knew how original ‘original’ needed to be, but by then I had the habit of posting new recipes of my own invention or traditional recipes updated with modern ingredients and a few dishes I’d copied from eating experiences around my world. It’s been a habit I’ve been unable to break, and besides to me cookbooks are more like biographies than instructional manuals.
Sometimes, however, I do cook something I’ve found somewhere else. Sometimes I point you at the source, vis a vis the macaron. Today, I am going to give you a recipe just as I found it, because it is fabulous. It is not someone’s original work, but something from a cookbook, unnamed, that her grandmother used to make.
No competition, this is the best thing I have made in 2008. It’s one of the best things I have eaten this year too. It would be the best thing, if it were nutritionally a little more healthy and a little less addictive.
I ran into the recipe at Group Recipes. Simple, quick, it doesn’t take any exotic ingredients. I cooked it less than 12 hours after reading it the first time. I would point you at it, but you’d have to join to see it.
I made only one real change. I didn’t have 1.5 cups of white sugar, so I used 1 cup of white sugar and .5 cup of brown sugar. I left out the 1 teaspoon of milk, because I couldn’t imagine what 1 teaspoon of milk could possibly do for it that would be worth washing the spoon. Other than the little pan in which I melted the butter and chocolate, and the pie plate in which it was cooked, it took one bowl and one whisk to make and was easy to clean up. In about 10 minutes it was in the oven.
Fudge Pie
Ingredients
* 1/2 cup butter (130 g burro)
* 3 squares unsweetend chocolate (85 g cioccolato amaro)
* 3 large eggs, beaten
* 1 1/2 cups sugar
* 1/4 cup flour
* 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
* 1/2 tsp salt
* 1tsp. milk
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees
2. Melt butter and chocolate and cool slightly
3. Gradually mix chocolate and eggs
4. Add rest of ingredients and stir until just mixed
5. Spread into a buttered 9 inch pie plate
6. Bake 40 minutes
7. The center will be soft, but it will firm as it cools
8. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream
I’ve carried it all over the neighborhood, giving tastes and samples. I didn’t serve it with ice cream because I didn’t have any and besides it seems really rich all by itself. You can’t eat very much before you say enough. The first bite was just otherworldly.
Tomorrow I will give you a picture.
5 comments January 4th, 2008
Sweetly in haste, desserts you don’t cook
I am not a pastry chef. I like savory foods better and I dedicate my time to working on them, rather than dessert. There comes a time for all of us when we want to make a great dessert without using kitchen resources or a lot of time.
I’ve been working on exactly that: desserts that look and taste great, but are no trouble at all. This is the first that’s ready to show you. I don’t even have a name for it and I am open to suggestions from you, because that certainly worked with the “Phone Home” expat cookies.
This cake is made out of things you can buy and keep around the house, if you have to. If not, you can probably get them together with little effort. You don’t have to buy my version of the ingredients, but I’m sure you can get a suitable alternative near you. It’s not really cooking, but more assembly.
The finished cake you see today is not as pretty as the one I started with last summer for two reasons. I’d had the whipping cream stored in the freezer for months and for some reason it just wouldn’t whip stiffly. In the summer I used two packages of fresh raspberries and covered the top completely with them in concentric circles. For the winter version, I bought late summer raspberries, froze them separately and then bagged them. They wept as they thawed. One person really liked that effect, but I liked the original non-weepy cake better.
You need:
Sponge cake layers. The original cake was made of packaged layers that come in threes and are wider than this cake. If I were somewhere else, I could have ordered them from a grocery store with a bakery, from a bakery or made them myself, and any of them could be kept wrapped in the freezer. With these normal 9” layers, I used a bread knife to split them into four thinner layers. They were a little too fresh, really. They cut poorly and I was able to use less liqueur, because they would have shattered and slid apart if I’d generously dampened them.
Raspberry liquor of some kind. I looked for a French white raspberry eau de vie, and there was none, so the vintner convinced me to try raspberry grappa and it was fabulous. It was just grappa poured over raspberries in a bottle, and the berries gave up their perfume and a slight pinkish tinge.
Raspberry jam. There was only one brand in my shop and fortunately it was good.
Chocolate mousse mix. You can see what I used. That’s it here. As instant things go, it’s pretty good.
A pint of whipping cream and a little sugar.
Raspberries.
Make the mousse according to directions. You don’t cook it, you just whip it. Stick it in the fridge to firm up. You could get this far a day ahead.
Put the first layer on a large plate that will hold it. Sprinkle it with raspberry liquor, generously if you have the drier layers. Spread the jam sparingly over the cake, covering it, but not thickly at all. This is important.
Spread a light covering of mousse over the jam. Keep doing this in series until the top layer goes on and that one you just sprinkle with liquor. Spear the cake with three long skewers to stabilize it and put it in the fridge. This is when you’ll be happy you weren’t excessive with the jam and mousse, because if you had been, the layers would be so unstable that you’d never get it to stand on it’s own.
Just before serving time, whip the cream, being stingy with the sugar so the pronounced flavor will be cream and not sweet. There’s enough sweet in there already. Arrange the raspberries on top, and serve.
Look! Matching hostess.
If I use the drier bought layers, it serves 12 to 16 people, easily. With four smaller layers, it serves 10 to 12 people. Although there’s just as much cake each way, the very tall one just can’t be cut into narrow slices.
My favorite dog likes this too, in a virtual way, because although I sent him a generous piece, he never got it.
The two pictures of the finished cake were shot by Barb of Barb and Art Live in Italy.
9 comments December 9th, 2007
More great blogging
Three cheers for Smitten Kitchen. Go have a look at her apple tart post, which is absolutely terrific. It’s accessible to amateurs and beginners, and different enough to appeal to veterans.
Add comment November 9th, 2007
