Tag: baking

Lemon cupcakes with blueberry cream cheese frosting

I had some lemons I wanted to use up and decided to make cupcakes for the departmental meeting. While I had another recipe I frequently use and it’s quite popular, it called for sour cream and made about 24 cupcakes. Sometimes it’s nicer to just have a smaller batch. So I decided to try this New York Times recipe which only made a dozen. I like lemon cupcakes with a berry frosting. I prefer strawberry, but what I had on hand was blueberry. The trick to berry frosting is to use some freeze dried fruit. Otherwise, by the time you get enough flavor from the berries, your frosting is watered down. Take the berries and turn them into powder and a food processor and then mix them in with the powdered sugar. I usually do add some fresh as well, but the color and flavor comes mostly from the freeze dried. I just adapted the cream cheese frosting recipe that came with the cupcake recipe and added the blueberries. You can see what a vivid color the berries give the frosting.

The nice thing about taking them to work is I got to bake and I only ate one cupcake and the rest just disappeared to compliments.

Lemon and Blueberry

What finer spring flavor combination is there than citrus and berry. So when a departmental get-together arouse, I decided to try the King Arthur Double Lemon Thumbprint cookies. They recommended either lemon curd or raspberry jam for the filling. with an optional lemon glaze drizzled over. My first thought was to make it a blueberry glaze for contrasting flavor/color, using powdered blueberries. But then I thought, what about a blueberry curd?  So I tried this recipe.

The first step was to boil the blueberries with lemon juice and zest to release the juice. 

The you strain it to remove the skin bits etc. You can see the strainer and bowl in the upper right of the right hand picture. I had a moment of temptation to buy blueberry juice, but the resulting “juice” was a thicker concentrate and I don’t think store bought juice would work, although it would have produced smoother results. Perhaps if one reduced it down by boiling. Once you have the juice, you cook it with the sugar, eggs, and a bit of salt, then pour the hot liquid over the butter. Nice taste but not as thick as I would like for this purpose, so I’d either try a different recipe or tweak this one should I make them again.

I made lemon curd to go on the other half the cookies and did contrasting glazes on both. You might be able to see below the difference in thickness between the blueberry curd chilled over night and the slightly still warm lemon curd. The lemon glaze ended up absorbed by the blueberry curd, but the blueberry glaze remained as pictured below. But both were quite tasty.

A little weekend baking

From the NYTimes comes this recipe for ridiculously large lemon rosemary cookies. As advertised, they had crispy edges, chewy centers, and a sense of polenta to them. They were quite enjoyable. But they’re ridiculously large. I weighed them out to the suggested 85 g and kept it to 3 to 4 cookies on a sheet pan, and they either grew together (not too badly) or went over the edge (I had some floor of the oven cleaning to do) or both. If I try them again, I am going to downsize them a little and see how they turn out at say 50 g per cookie. They also left quite the sheen of butter, both on the baking sheet and on the spatula I used to remove them after they cool five or so minutes. But my card group quite enjoyed them.

BTW, I recommend a good giant spatula for this sort of cookie. Also useful when moving large swaths of raw dough, such as a shaped or braided loaf from a work surface to a baking sheet. 

A little holiday baking

I love the NYTimes Cooking section. I’ve had this pistachio-almond cookies on my to-do list for awhile.  I made them with pasteurized egg whites (I had leftovers from making marzipan – indeed, this cookie is akin to a lighter, less sweet, baked marzipan; 66g egg whites = whites from 2 large eggs). I did whip the egg whites to frothy, but otherwise made it all in the food processor. Easy-peasy. Although the recipe says tablespoon-sized scoops, my teaspoon-sized scoop was the one that came out to 14 g. and matched better the cooking time (1st time I had done it with the tablespoon-sized; 2nd time, I weighed because I suspected the smaller was called for). Second time I also added 1/8 tsp. rosewater along with the almond extract (no vanilla). A fantastic cookie. A friend became a cardamon convert based on this cookie.

A little St Paddy’s Day baking

I thought about actually going Irish and baking a rye soda bread that I love, but was really in the mood for pistachios. So I made some homemade pistachio marzipan and used it to decorate a cardamon-rose cake (since the measure-for-measure GF flour is supposed to sub for AP flour without any adaptations, I figured the reverse was true, so this time I didn’t make it GF). I took it to my monthly card game. The cake was a delight, although the game didn’t go my team’s way this time month. Ah well, still fun to visit with friends. 

If you’re curious about the Marzipan, I basically adapted this recipe from an almond one, using pasteurized egg whites for safe eating without baking. 

Ingredients

  • ca. 450g raw unsalted pistachio nuts (unshelled)
  • 100g sugar (superfine would have been better, but I went regular golden sugar — like white sugar only less processed/vegan)
  • 350g confectioner’s sugar
  • 65 g pasteurized egg whites 
  • 1/8-1/4 teaspoon rosewater

Instructions

  • Add the pistachios and golden sugar to a food processor and pulse until they’re powdery. Add the confectioner’s sugar and pulse to mix, scraping the sides as needed.
  • Add the egg whites and rosewater and pulse until it comes together into a thick paste.
  • Ready to use immediately, or wrap well and store in the fridge until ready to use – up to 10 days.

Panettone!

Panettone has been my baking white whale. This year, however, with the help of a proofing box, I’ve finally done to my satisfaction (not quite perfect, but pretty damn close). You can read about it on my baking page, but here are a couple of photos.

The bread structure is so light and delicate that you have to hang it upside down to cool so that it doesn’t collapse.

Cookie Season: Also not a cookie..

One last sweet for the season: Peppermint Crunch Marshmallows. They make great gifts with hot cocoa mix. They don’t toast well (I tried), but are beautiful in cocoa or by themselves. I’ve also added a little cocoa powder to the marshmallow or substitutes Red Hots and cinnamon oil for the peppermint to do a cinnamon crunch variety. 

A New Bake: Yuletide Bread

A nice, seasonal quick bread, recipe from KAB. The spice blend (cardamom, coriander, allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon) lends nice flavor to the bread. It’s loaded with a mix of almonds, cranberries, golden raisins, and candied lemon and orange. I plan to go for a panettone next week, but in the meantime this was a good bake. It did take longer in the oven than predicted. I tented foiled over the top, but the bottom was a touch browner than I would have liked (despite a sheet underneath). If I make it again, I may try the alternative 9″x5″ pan to see if I can get it baked without overcooking the bottom.

Cookie Season: Apple Cider Caramels

Well, not actually cookies. I do love to make these apple cider caramels from King Arthur Baking. You can buy the “boiled cider” – a thicker and more flavorful reduction of apple cider or you can just reduce down the cider yourself.  Sometimes I sprinkle pecan pieces on top when still warm. I do recommend a digital candy thermometer – it will even beep as you approach target temperature!

Cookie Season: Ginger Molasses Amber Ale

 This is one of my favorite ginger cookies. The recipe is from the King Arthur Baking site. You take the amber ale and reduce it from 12 oz. to 1.5 oz. It becomes almost syrupy and truly bitter, but then provides a marvelous under flavor. Golden raisins are added and you don’t really taste them per se (people with whom I’ve shared the recipe with have asked me if I skipped them) but I think add a lot to the chewy texture. I had been using a different recipe for years (with some balsamic and black pepper among other things – this one too has black pepper) but haven’t baked it since discovering this recipe.