I love it when I can do several things at once.  For example, blog about a chocolate cherry bread for Bread Baking Day (BBB), and that same bread uses ingredients that I had on hand (for Frugal Fridays), and closes out my week of chocolate!  For BBB #22, our challenge is Sweet Breads hosted by Hefe und mehr.

I tried chocolate bread for the first time about three years ago, and I wasn’t too impressed.  A year or so later, I gave it another shot and bought a loaf from Wegman’s.  Now, that bread was really good – it tasted of chocolate with a faint sweetness in the background.  They produce it seasonally, I think from December through February, and I decided to make some one day so that I could have a good chocolate bread whenever I wanted it.

Enter Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking, by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë Francois.  I’ve had the book sitting on my bookshelf for over a year, and it is full of post-its marking the breads I would like to try.  But it was not until recently that I finally made something out of this wonderful book.  Of course, I chose the Chocolate Bread for Chocolate Week.

I had never made a no-knead bread before, so I had to mightily resist the Urge to Knead.  You see, I like kneading, but I like learning about different breads and techniques even more, so when I caught myself stirring a bit too much with a wooden spoon I stopped immediately, even though there were still a few streaks of white through the dough.  You see, this dough as a LOT of chocolate – 9 ounces of chocolate and a full cup of cocoa, so it’s pretty dark, and unincorporated flour really stands out.

My thoughts on the bread: the chocolate flavor really comes through, so pick one that you like.  If you prefer milk chocolate, this bread may not be for you – it has the true intensity of bittersweet chocolate.   I think using chocolate chips instead of the 5 ounces of chunks would work out fine.  The bread was a tad too salty for me, so next time I might use just one tablespoon of salt.  The cherries that I added were a nice bright counterpoint.  As for the texture, the the loaf was tender and very rich – I could eat only small slices.  The crust was not chewy at all.  I liked the bread with butter, and Nutella was fabulous on it.  The original recipe says to bake it for about 35 minutes, but mine took 65 minutes to reach an internal temperature of 190 F. The loaf is on the repeat list, and I look forward to playing with the recipe a bit more.

I was really amazed at how quickly and easily this bread came together, and I’m looking forward to trying more recipes out of the book.  And be sure to check out Susan’s weekly YeastSpotting roundup every Friday – it’s a great source of inspiration and instruction for me and a lot of other bakers.  Next Friday, Nick of imafoodblog will be hosting for Susan, so be sure to check out his blog.

continue reading "Chocolate Cherry Bread – Day 5 of Chocolate Week, and Bread Baking Day!"

These may not look like much, but boy, were they good!  My usual go-to scone recipe is one by Dorie Greenspan, namely her Cream Scones.  But, cream has a lot more calories than buttermilk, and I wanted to expand my repertoire, so I dug up this recipe and fiddled with it a bit.  I added lemon zest, white chocolate, and dried cherries, plus a little extra sugar.  I am not a big fan of really sweet stuff (usually), but I increased the sugar because I served these with a brunch and I needed something sweeter than these scones would have been had I followed the recipe exactly.

Two tips:  leave the white chocolate in big chunks or it will melt into the batter, or use white chocolate chips, which will hold their shape better.  Finally, these scones rise quite a bit, so if you make 8 scones out of the recipe, as I did, they will be big.  These are definitely on the repeat list!
continue reading "White Chocolate Cherry Scones – Day 3 of Chocolate Week"

I didn’t think I’d be able to get something in this month, but due to our hostess’s, Susan of She’s Becoming Dougmesstic, unfortunate stomach bug, we got an extension to post our pies.  This month, we had to bake a “Resolution Breaking Pie.”

Now, under normal circumstances, for me that might be a fudge and nut filled ice cream pie.  But these are not normal circumstances.  I’m so burned out on chocolate, cream, and chocolate cream yule logs, that nothing tempted me.  I had to think long and hard, but I came up with one thing:  a sour cherry pie.

In heaven, I will have sour cherry pie on a regular basis, I assure you.  I love fruit pies, and this has to be one of my favorites.  I bought the cherries at our farmers’ market last summer, pitted them (hours, people, hours of work), then froze them.  To make the pie (or crostata), I thawed eight cups of frozen cherries overnight, then I mixed the drained fruit with 1/4 cup of tapioca FLOUR (not the pearls),  1 Tbsp. of all purpose flour, about 1 cup of sugar, and 1/2 tsp. of almond extract.  I tucked the mixture into my adaptation of  Dorie Greenspan’s Good for Anything Pie Crust, substituting cream cheese for the shortening.  I brushed the crust with an egg wash, sprinkled on some sugar, and baked the whole thing for about one hour at 400 F, until the top was golden brown and the juices were bubbling.  The whole thing fit into a deep dish, 10-inch pie plate.  If the crust starts to get a bit too dark, before the juices bubble, just cover the whole pie with a sheet of foil.

What can I say?  Yum.  Resolutions broken, you dastardly pie bakers.  Be sure to check the You Want Pies With That? website in a couple days to see what great pies other pie aficionados came up with.

Between David Lebovitz and Dorie Greenspan, I could easily spend three hours a day, seven days a week at the gym.

Sigh.

Back in June, David blogged about a simple “recipe” for cherry jam. Being a sour cherry fanatic (it rivals my obsession for passion fruit), I found a couple quarts at my local farmers’ market and got to work.  I didn’t stress, I didn’t worry if it would gel.  I knew that, at worst, I could use it as a topping for ice cream or yogurt.

Making a small batch of jam is the way to go – it sets more quickly, and does not try my patience. For the most part, I followed the directions, but cut up the lemon rind, tied it in a muslin bag, and let it cook with the cherries. I added a couple drops of almond oil at the end.  And, unlike my orange marmalade, I did not overcook this batch of jam.

At first, I thought it wouldn’t gel at all, but as the jam cooled on the counter, it thickened nicely, though it was still a “soft” set. Of course, I couldn’t find my canning lids, but I’m not worried. You see, I predict that we will rapidly consume this jam. Why? This stuff is out of this world! In the photo at the top of this post, I added it to some organic yogurt, in keeping with my optimistic philosophy that healthy stuff would cancel out all the sugar or fat, as the case may be.

For more posts on cherry jam, check out these bloggers:

Wandering Knits
The Amateur Gourmet
Real Baking with Rose

This week’s recipe, Cherry Rhubarb Cobbler (p. 415 of of Baking: From My Home to Yours), chosen by Amanda from Like Sprinkles on a Cupcake , uses only 3/4 of a stick of butter, and includes fruit and some whole wheat flour.  Health food – that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

I didn’t make many changes this week, except to use crystallized ginger in the recipe instead of the ground ginger.  If you mince crystallized ginger very finely, it just melts into the filling, adding a nice background note to a cobbler, or even to pumpkin pie.  I’d stashed some rhubarb from earlier this year in the freezer, and used some locally grown sweet cherries.  I did not peel the rhubarb (didn’t want to lose the color), just sliced in 1/2-inch thick pieces.

I thought that the recipe as written was sweet enough, and I’m glad I didn’t add any extra sugar, although some of the other TWD bakers had a different experience.

For more on the experiences of the group this week, check out the Tuesdays with Dorie blogroll. 

Sorry the photo above isn’t too good – the others mysteriously disappeared from my hard drive. After shelling out $600 last year to “repair” our desktop, we are coming to terms with the sad reality that we are going to have to replace it. The good news? We are going Mac!

Now, about the strudel. Pulling my own strudel dough has mesmerized me for years, the way making macarons has affected other bloggers. I read a ton of cookbooks, and even watched videos on You Tube (this one is humorous and instructive). The night before I made the dough, I dreamed all night that I was making strudel. I practically worked myself into a tizzy. Finally, I turned to Carole Walter’s fabulous book, Great Coffee Cakes, Sticky Buns, Muffins & More: 200 Anytime Treats and Special Sweets for Morning to Midnight.

Unlike Ivonne, of Cream Puffs in Venice, I did not have much luck pulling the dough, despite my best efforts (but I’m not giving up!). Instead of a twenty-inch strudel, I ended up with a ten-inch stump:

Note the filling explosion on the bottom, left.

This little strudel endeavor triggered the loss of my baking mojo, much to my dismay. I tore the dough repeatedly, and finally decided to stop while I had something left in which to roll up the tasty filling. And tasty it was, folks: a cherry cheese filling from Ms. Walter’s book, a filling that I made using sour cherries that I had pitted and frozen last year. I was eating the stuff with a spoon, and had to restrain myself. Luckily, the horizontally challenged strudel was too short to accommodate all the cheese filling, so I was able to eat that for breakfast the next day. What’s a few thousand calories among bakers?

Needless to say, I’m going to tackle this again, but with a different dough recipe the next time. If any of you are interested in making your own dough, here are some books that have recipes and instructions: A Baker’s Tour: Nick Malgieri’s Favorite Baking Recipes from Around the World;A Baker’s Odyssey, includes DVD: Celebrating Time-Honored Recipes from America’s Rich Immigrant Heritage;A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking;Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague;Indulge: 100 Perfect Desserts; and Desserts by the Yard: From Brooklyn to Beverly Hills: Recipes from the Sweetest Life Ever.

Well, I’m back. It has been a busy summer on so many levels, and my blogging has suffered for it. For those of you who read my humble blog, I’ve been working on so many projects (including me), that something had to give, and it turned out to be this blog, not to mention my favorite hobby – cooking.I decided that my body was starting to creak a bit too much, so I did something about it. I started exercising more vigorously, and finally had some injuries looked at; it it appears that I may need some knee and wrist surgery, not to mention physical therapy on a shoulder. On a brighter note, in the past month I adopted a low-sodium, high fruit and veggie approach to eating known as the DASH “diet.” It’s purpose? To lower blood pressure. I must say, mine has plummeted. Diet and exercise never did much for my blood pressure before, but this “diet” has – on medication, my BP was 150/100 a month ago. Now, it is 106/68. I am stunned, and so is my doctor. For an easy-to-read yet thorough explanation of this approach, check out this link (pdf file, so you’ll need Adobe).

But before my summer heated up, I managed to bake a fresh sour cherry pie. I adapted this recipe from one I found in Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Pie and Pastry Bible. I added 1 Tablespoon of fresh lemon juice to the filling, because the sour cherries I had were a bit on the sweet side. And, for a change, I followed Rose’s recipe exactly when I made my favorite crust, her Perfect Flaky & Tender Cream Cheese Pie Crust. The result was the best sour cherry pie I have ever made, and one I plan to repeat this winter because I froze several pounds of berries! If you can find frozen sour cherries, or have some on hand, I encourage you to try this recipe.

This ebelskiver did not survive long after this photo was taken.

I received and ebelskiver pan for Christmas, much to my delight! Williams-Sonoma had a luscious-looking recipe in its latest catalog, so I dusted off the pan and put it to the test.

Ebelskivers are little, round Norwegian pancakes made in a special pan. They are usually filled with fresh fruit or a jam. Here is another photo of the cooking process. Er, or should I say the overcooking process:

Surprisingly, these little briquets still tasted delicious, a testament to the rich batter!

Some thoughts: Ebelskivers are tricky to make, but boy-oh-boy are they tasty. Flipping them over, without making a mess, is not easy and, even on medium heat (as instructed), they overbrowned. For some reason (the excitement of trying a new recipe??), I was so distracted that I forgot to add the beaten egg whites to the batter until I made my second batch. Not much of a taste difference, but the egg whites do lighten the batter considerably, and allow the center to cook through.If you use a jam filling, use a good one. I chose Bonne Maman cherry preserves. I also added extra lemon zest to my batter.

The entire cooking process is kind of messy and fast-paced . . . but did I mention these little gems are really tasty? Oh, yes, I see that I did. They’re worth the effort, and I think worth the practice to get them right!

Ebelskivers

Adapted from Williams-Sonoma’s Recipe

• 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 3/4 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1 1/2 Tbs. granulated sugar
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• Zest of one lemon
• 3 egg yolks plus 5 egg whites
• 1 1/3 cups buttermilk
• 3/4 cup ricotta cheese ( used part skim)
• 5 Tbs. unsalted butter, melted
• 7 Tbs. jam, as needed
• Confectioners sugar for dustingWhisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, granulated sugar, salt, and lemon zest. Set aside.

  In another bowl, lightly whisk the egg yolks. Whisk in the buttermilk and ricotta. Whisk the yolk mixture into the flour mixture until well combined; the mixture will be lumpy. Set aside.

  In another bowl, whisk the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Using a rubber spatula, gently stir the whites into the batter in two additions.

  Put 1/2 tsp. butter in each well of a filled-pancake pan. Place over medium heat and heat until the butter begins to bubble. Pour 1 Tbs. batter into each well, place 1/2 teaspoon jam in the center of the batter, and top with another 1 Tbs. of batter. Do NOT use more batter.

  Cook until the bottoms are golden brown and crispy, 3 to 5 minutes. Using 2 wooden skewers, turn the pancakes over and cook until golden brown and crispy, about 3 minutes more. Transfer to a plate. Repeat with the remaining batter and jam. Dust the pancakes with confectioners sugar and serve warm. Makes about 30.