Tag: NYTimes Cooking

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.

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.

Cookie Season: Chocolate Chip Oatmeal with Ras el Hanout

It’s cookie season, so I thought I would start posting a few of my favorite repeats. Ras el hanout, if you aren’t familiar with it, is a SWANA spice blend. Every ras el hanout blend is different (like chili spice blends). And like chili spice blends, ras el hanout is normally used in savory dishes. But this NYTimes recipe adds it to cookies and it really works. It adds a subtle warmth to the cookies and a complex under flavor. I used the blend from Stock and Spice in Portsmouth, NH. Here’s a gift link to the recipe (anyone by the paywall for a few weeks after I post).