Baking

Tangelo Tart: Not just an amazing stripper name.

~ wellfedemily ~ 3 Comments

Okay, so, I’ve been trying to mostly eat locally and sustainably and good crap like that, at least as far as meat and produce are concerned, but sometimes the city kicks my ass and the clouds are so dark and dense that I’m all, “ALL I WANT IS AN ORANGE IN MY MOUTH!” Already the Olympics are starting to make my neighbourhood really annoying, and no one has seen the sun for days. Wouldn’t you want a tangelo? Me too, and so I tumble off my high horse and tear savagely into as many tangelos as I can get my hands on at once.

And it’s worth it.

In addition to juicing them, and gnashing at their flesh with my menacing fruit fangs, I also turned them into a gooey orange tart, which was shared with Nick and Paul and Grace at Grace’s dinner party last night. I am literally still full after Grace’s succulent roast leg of lamb, buttery lemon potatoes, and creamy spinach and gailan gratin. But since my only contribution to the night was a bottle of Riesling and the tart, I am going to tell you about that. One day perhaps Grace will guest post. I will work on that.

So here you are: Tangelo Tart.

Tangelo tart

Crust

  • 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup ground almonds
  • 1/2 cup butter
  • 1 egg
  • 1 cup flour

Custard

  • 3 large eggs, plus 3 additional egg yolks
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 tbsp. tangelo zest
  • 1/2 cup fresh tangelo juice
  • 2 tsp. lemon juice
  • 1/2 cup butter, cubed and chilled

Preheat your oven to 350°F.

In a large bowl, cream together butter, almonds, and sugar until light and fluffy. Add egg, and beat until thoroughly combined.

Add flour, and stir until a crumbly dough forms. Press dough into a 9″ tart pan. Line the crust with a piece of parchment weighted with pie weights or dried beans.

Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until golden brown around the edges. Remove from heat to a wire rack to cool.

Check your large bowls against your pot tops. Find one that fits nicely.

Into that fitting bowl, whisk eggs, yolks, sugar, zest, and juice. Place bowl over a pot of simmering water, and whisk, almost continuously, until mixture has thickened. At first, the mix will seem frothy, as if there is a layer of foam atop a layer of juice, but don’t worry. Your constant attention will ensure that the bottom layer joins the top layer in yellow creaminess. You’ll know it’s done when the mix is of a uniform thickness and texture, and when it coats the back of a spoon.

Remove the bowl from the heat, and whisk in butter, one cube at a time, until the butter has melted into the mix. Pour into a different bowl, cover with plastic wrap (make sure the wrap covers the surface of the custard or else a skin will form and it will look gross). Refrigerate until cooled.

Pour cooled custard into cooled pie crust. At this point, you will notice that you might have made too much custard, and you may find this annoying. But there’s a reason. Turn oven to broil.

You see? This is where it gets tricky, especially if you are easily distracted.

Place tart in oven under broiler, and allow top to brown slightly.

Operative word: SLIGHTLY. You want it to be a marbley kind of goldenness, not unlike creme brulée. If you get distracted and singe the top of the tart, the extra filling will come in handy as you scrape off the ugly bits and try again. It did for me. If you’re not a broiler failure, save the extra custard and either drizzle it over the whipped cream you’ll serve with the tart, or store it in a ramekin and eat it on your own later. There should be about one cup extra.

Chill tart for four hours before serving. Serve with whipped cream. Sigh heavily over its punchy fruitiness, its ooey-gooeyness, its “I can’t believe it’s not August” splendor.

Another easy pizza crust, perfect for something unpleasant like Wednesday.

~ wellfedemily ~ 2 Comments

So … burdock will have to wait until tomorrow. When you see prosciutto on special, you jump on it, and then you maximize its salty porkiness by cutting it into strips and baking it onto a pizza.

I make this foccacia bread that contains potato, and it’s quite delicious and always very moist. Sometimes I stretch the dough out and turn it into pizza, but it’s not a thing to make on weeknights, when I need to eat now-if-not-sooner the moment I get home. I thought tonight I’d try shredding potato into pizza dough and baking it that way, because it’s quicker than foccacia, and I might be onto something. Something awesome.

I topped the pizza with a sauce of a crushed bulb of roasted garlic and olive oil and some basil, strips of prosciutto, and a half-pound of mushrooms cooked in olive oil and garlic. And cheese, but not that much, actually, because even though it seems counter-intuitive not to load the thing up with an excess of cheese, on a pizza like this it’s better to use only what you need.

I’m only going to give you the recipe for the crust, because you can top it with whatever you want. But if you top it with roasted garlic and basil and prosciutto and mushrooms, I promise, you’ll be ecstatic upon eating it.

Potato pizza crust

(Makes one large-size pizza crust.)

  • 2 tsp. dry yeast
  • 1/2 tsp. sugar
  • 3/4 cup warm water
  • 1 medium potato (such as Yukon Gold), grated
  • 2 cups + 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 tsp. salt
  • 1 tsp. olive oil
  • 1 tsp. cornmeal

In a large bowl, combine yeast, sugar, and water. Let stand about five minutes, until yeast is fluffy.

Add potato. Stir to combine.

Add two cups of flour, salt, and oil, and mix until a slightly sticky dough has formed. If your potato is bigger and causes an excessively moist dough, add a bit more flour. Turn out onto a floured surface, and knead in the additional quarter cup of flour.

Preheat your oven to 400°F. Cover dough and let stand for 20 minutes, as close to the oven as you can. Let it feel the warmth and grow just a bit.

Roll dough out into a relatively round sheet, a bit less than a half-inch thick, and lay onto a baking sheet sprinkled with the teaspoon of cornmeal. Top with whatever you like, and bake for about 25 minutes.

This is a bit unusual, and probably not what you want if you’re a die-hard thin-crust fan. It’s fluffy, because the potatoes get steamy as they cook, foofing up the flour and making this perfectly moist.

The other thing about it is that it’s filling, which is perfect for weeknight dinner, but it’s unexpected, and so you’re surprised around slice number three that you don’t even want dessert anymore, and you’re tempted to change into pajama pants if you haven’t already. Which I guess is good? Well, maybe the n0-dessert thing. Nick keeps mentioning my pajama pants, and how other wives wear skirts or sexy yoga pants, and he can shut right up because I feed him better than the other wives feed their Nicks, and they’re less fun and can’t hold their liquor. My pajamas are a point of contention around here.

Anyway, make this. It’s delicious. And soon, I promise, something about burdock root, which is not actually a very good hook if I’m hoping to get you to come back.

Lazy Sunday muffins.

~ wellfedemily ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday was non-stop, and I had a bijillion things to do and I was exhausted at the end of it, so much so that I decided it would be appropriate to change into footie pajamas mid dinner party, and then went to bed early, while all the guests were still here. As of right now, I am still in the footie pajamas, on the couch. It. Is. Awesome.

I got up briefly, because breakfast is important and I like baked goods. You know, something you can eat while you sit on your ass in front of the TV? That’s all I wanted, and so: Muffins. Lemony coconut muffins – little breakfasty bites – perfect for a pleasantly aimless Sunday morning.

Lemony coconut muffins

  • 1/2 cup butter (at room temperature)
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1/2 cup coconut milk
  • 1 lemon (1/2 tsp. lemon zest, juice of whole lemon)
  • 1/2 tsp. vanilla
  • 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/4 tsp. salt
  • 1/2 cup toasted unsweetened coconut

Preheat oven to 375°F.

In a large bowl, cream together the butter and the sugar until light and fluffy. Drop in eggs, one at a time, beating thoroughly after each egg. Add coconut milk, lemon zest and juice, and continue beating until batter is smooth.

Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt into the mix. Add in coconut as well. Fold the dry ingredients into the batter until just moistened.

Fill a muffin pan with 12 muffin liners, and then divide the batter between the 12 cups. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the centre of one comes out clean. Muffins should be yellow and lightly golden.

Remove muffins to a wire rack to cool, but serve warm, preferably with butter and a cup of tea or milk. These little muffins are so nice – softly coconutty, with a pop of lemon in every bite. Sweet, fluffy, and unexpected – I think I’ll make these next time we host brunch here. I bet they’d be nice with lime instead of lemon, if you wanted to switch things up. Lovely, and I tested them on the couch and they were perfect there too.

Quiche is nothing to sneer at and is plenty manly, thanksverymuch.

~ wellfedemily ~ 4 Comments

I made quiche for Nick.

In a different time, I’ve heard, it wasn’t so manly to eat quiche, never mind to want it. I met Nick in poetry class. The generations, how they gap. He wrote very long poems about damp shorelines and dead horses, and he wore scarves and I was convinced there was something wrong with him because he wasn’t madly in love with me. I thought he was the kind of guy who’d like quiche, you know?

It’s just as well: I was never interested in the kind of  boy who’d frown at quiche. And as it happens, that kind of boy was never interested in me either.

And here we are, a couple of years later and that’s all, and I mentioned quiche the other day and he kept reminding me I’d mentioned it. Nick wanted quiche. So I set out to buy some seasonal greens and a bit of whole milk for ricotta, and I made Nick an eggy pie for dinner.

I wanted to tell you about the quiche that had the chard in it, but my market was out and I was too lazy and too high up in heels to try another store, so I guess I’ll tell you about the spinach quiche, though I’d like for you to imagine it with chard. It’d be easy enough to substitute the chard for the spinach, just blanch the chard first. You don’t have to do the same with the spinach, because it’s wimpier.

Nick would have liked the quiche with chard better, I think, because chard is a manlier green, probably. (It’s perfectly lovely with spinach too, I’m just being unpleasant.) I suppose we’ll try again next week, maybe Monday when the shelves have been restocked.

Ricotta and greens quiche

Crust

  • 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
  • 8 tbsp. cold butter
  • 1 large egg plus 1 egg yolk, beaten
  • 3 to 5 tbsp. ice water

Filling:

  • 1 tbsp. butter
  • 1 shallot, minced
  • 1 cup fresh ricotta cheese (this is a very good recipe, and I keep wanting it, even now after it’s gone)
  • 1 1/2 cups milk
  • 2 large eggs, plus the white left over from the crust
  • 1 tsp. Dijon mustard
  • 1 1/2 tsp. Kosher salt
  • 1 tsp. freshly ground pepper
  • 1/4 tsp. nutmeg
  • 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
  • 1 1/2 cups packed fresh spinach leaves or blanched chard (my estimate is two bunches, chopped and lightly packed once blanched; this is what I would use, but please correct me if I’m wrong)

Assemble pastry in the typical way, crushing the butter between your fingers into the flour, salt, and Parmesan. Stir in beaten egg and ice water until dough forms. Wrap in plastic, and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Roll the dough out with a bit of flour, and press into a nine-inch tart pan. Roll the rolling pin across the top to trim away the extra dough. Line the pie crust with parchment and fill with dried beans or pie weights. Bake at 400°F for 20 minutes.

Remove pastry from the oven. Cool slightly, remove beans and parchment, and continue to cool. Until cool. Meanwhile, leave the oven on.

Sauté shallots in butter. Remove from heat and set aside.In a large bowl, whisk together your ricotta, milk, eggs and egg white, mustard, salt, pepper, Parmesan, and nutmeg. Add your shallots and butter to the mix, and whisk again.

Taste now, and adjust your seasonings as needed. Stir in your spinach or chard, and pour into the pie crust.

Bake mixture in shell for 4o to 45 minutes, until golden and slightly puffed. Cool in the pan on a wire rack for 20 to 30 minutes before serving. Remove from tart pan to slice and serve.

Enjoy. It smells so good, and is the creamiest quiche in the history of ever, because of the fresh ricotta and because when you’re making something like quiche, you just sort of will it to work, and those happy thoughts make it into the oven with the pie. Serves four for brunch or dinner, or more if you’re cutting it smaller to make it an hors d’oeuvre.

Nothing dainty about it. Isn’t it nice that anyone can have this sort of thing now? Yes. Yes it is. And besides, I wouldn’t serve something like this to anyone who’d sneer at any sort of homemade pie. We don’t take kindly to those types around here, poets or not.

Gingerbread? Don’t mind if I do.

~ wellfedemily ~ 2 Comments

Oh! Hello. It’s been ages and ages. Actual time, one week. With the arrival of the Shaw Cable guy this morning, we have now clawed our way back into the 21st century, and these feelings of connectedness and calm are very reassuring.

Today marks the beginning of the week before Christmas, that frantic time of shopping and trying to remember who you have to buy for, who you haven’t bought for, and which bills should be paid right now lest you find yourself without heat, hot water, or car insurance. I don’t know about you, but I don’t handle stress very well. Fortunately, the one thing you can control, the one thing that can bring you inner peace like nothing else, even if you have forty-thousand relatives to visit in not nearly as many hours, is your kitchen, and you can whip it into submission and fill your home with wondrous holiday smells and end up with a cake that goes very well with rye and ginger ale. Which you probably also need right about now. Yes?

This is a strong-tasting sucker, crammed full of molasses and maple syrup and raw ginger. It’s grown-up gingerbread, and you can serve it with ice cream if you want to but I like it straight out of the pan, plonked onto a plate with a little icing sugar and a cold beer. It’s also packed full of good stuff, so you can even take this with you as an on-the-go breakfast, since you’re going to need to leave early to avoid traffic hell.

Grown-up Gingerbread

  • 1/2 cup butter, room temperature
  • 1 tbsp. grated fresh ginger, packed
  • 1/2 cup dark brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup fancy molasses
  • 1/2 cup maple syrup
  • 1/2 cup sour cream
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 1/2 cups whole-wheat flour
  • 1 tsp. dried ginger
  • 1 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp. baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
  • 1/4 tsp. salt

Preheat your oven to 350°F.

Cream together the butter, ginger, and sugar. Once smooth and creamy, beat in the molasses, maple syrup, sour cream, and eggs.

In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, dried ginger, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt. Stir into liquid mixture. Inhale. Sigh.

Pour into a greased 8″x8″ pan. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out relatively clean. This is a moist cake, so you may notice moist crumbs. That’s okay. Desirable, even.

The cake’s pretty good hot out of the oven, but believe you me, you’ll like it much better after it’s sat for awhile. There’s a lot of stuff in here to keep it moist, so if you want to bake it the night before, let it sit, then grab it and go in the morning, it would likely be at it’s flavour-zenith then. I’m not sure that phrase worked. Oh well.

You can frost it if you want, but I wouldn’t.

Now, you relax. And maybe buy yourself something nice, wrap it up, and put it under the tree, “From: Santa.” I won’t tell.

Red velvet cupcakes: Handfuls of holiday spirit.

~ wellfedemily ~ Leave a comment

I am still having problems here with photos: Something about an IO Error, and now I can’t upload photos anywhere and my computer caught the herp and I don’t know where it got it but I am displeased. If I ever get it to work again, I’ll show you my pretty cupcakes. Soon, I hope!

You know that scene in A Christmas Story where Ralphie snaps and finally beats the crap out of that ugly ginger kid, buckets of delicious obscenity spewing from his mouth as he pummels the bigger kid’s writhing face? That’s how I feel this week, except I don’t have anything to take it out on. Butter, I guess. I could take it out on butter and maybe make some shortbread this weekend. But it isn’t the same, and besides, if I punched anything in real life it wouldn’t even notice. I have abnormally small fists. Also, the effect of me spewing obscenity would be lost because I killed the novelty of that when I was somewhere around Ralphie’s age.

I’ve been mulling over a post for red velvet cupcakes all week, because I made them on Monday for Tuesday and they were festive, even if my mood hasn’t been. Unfortunately, I ran out of red food colouring, so they were less red-velvet and more “red-violet,” like that Crayola crayon you always thought would be red but always turned out to be a funny sort of pink instead. That’s okay though. People got the gist. I made them for a work thing, even though nobody’s all that excited about work or work things these days – the stress in the office is palpable, and my boss is distracted almost all the time. Someone cried the other day. I don’t know why.

Around here, we’re in need of a serious dose of Christmas spirit.

I thought red cupcakes with white frosting, the occasional one topped with green or red sprinkles, would help. When have cupcakes not helped? Never, that’s when. It’s impossible to feel Grinchy when you’re eating a cupcake, and that’s a fact I’m pretty sure even science can prove. So here. Cupcakes, adapted from Joy of Baking.

Red Velvet Cupcakes, adapted from Joy of Baking

(Makes 14 to 16 cupcakes.)

  • 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 2 tbsp. cocoa powder
  • 1 tsp. baking soda
  • 1/2 cup butter, at room temperature
  • 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 1 cup buttermilk
  • 2 tbsp. liquid red food coloring
  • 2 tbsp. raspberry jam
  • 1 tsp. white vinegar

Frosting:

  • 1/2 cup butter, melted
  • 1 vanilla bean, scraped
  • 3 cups confectioner’s sugar

Preheat oven to 350°F. Line muffin tins with cupcake wrappers.

Whisk together flour, salt, cocoa, and baking soda. In a separate bowl, cream butter and sugar until smooth, then beat in eggs and vanilla. Combine with flour mixture, adding buttermilk, food colouring, raspberry jam, and vinegar. Mix well.

Pour batter into lined muffin tins. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until cake springs back when pressed gently with a pointer finger.

Cool on wire racks, and then frost, using recipe above (mix stuff together … when it resembles frosting, use it; adjust consistency with confectioner’s sugar or cold milk as needed).

Purists will be all, “jam in red velvet? Regular old icing? The hell?” But that’s okay. Real red velvet cake would be frosted with cream cheese icing. But I didn’t have cream cheese, and this ended up working well enough that I am not going to steer you in a different direction just for tradition’s sake, though you’re welcome to go there if you’d like. Also, pretty as it is, I am just too hippified to dye something red without it tasting like red also … so I added the jam. You don’t have to. But make these cupcakes. They are light and sweet and unusual, with cocoa used more as a spice than as something to turn something else into chocolate. They’re perfect treats that fit into eager little hands, and they’re pretty and will certainly stand out on a dessert table.

Well, there you have it. I am now going to make a large pot of tea and consider my holiday moves. Should I wander down Granville Street, looking into the sparkly windows? Wrap presents and listen to Christmas music until I puke? Or bake something? Maybe I will write my Santa letter, in the hopes that he brings something fantastic, like another year’s worth of vanilla beans, or a high-paying career in food writing. In France. The elves can do anything, you know. Happy holidays!

Rainy night, rice pudding.

~ wellfedemily ~ 9 Comments

Oh, the weather. The weather in this city is always worth mentioning, because it’s impossible to overlook. When it’s sunny, it’s glorious, and you can smell the ocean and everything sort of glitters. And when it’s rainy, it’s not just rainy. It’s damp, sinister, dark. We live in a rain forest, here on the west coast. And today, we’re filling our reservoirs.

Also, our apartment is stacked up like a poorly played game of Tetris.

Grace came over tonight to help us pack, which she volunteered to do. She also volunteered to bring a pot of sausage stew, which was spicy and cinnamony and filled with chickpeas and carrots and flecks of green. And salad, with homemade blue cheese dressing and perfectly boiled eggs. And I couldn’t just not make something, and the rain.

Don’t forget the rain. Rice pudding is what you want when it’s like this, outside and in, when you’ve got to pack your life and the contents of your fridge into boxes, and you want to bring with you as little as possible.

Vanilla and coconut rice pudding

  • 3 cups cooked, cold long-grain white rice, such as basmati
  • 1 14 oz./398mL can of coconut milk
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1/2 vanilla bean
  • 1/4 cup flaked, unsweetened coconut, toasted
  • 2 tbsp. melted butter
  • 1/4 tsp. salt

Preheat your oven to 350ºF.

In the same container that your leftover rice is being stored in, add the coconut milk, eggs, and sugar. Stir to combine.

Scrape the seeds from the vanilla bean into the pot, and add the pods as well. Stir in the toasted coconut and butter. Taste, and if you need to add the salt, then add that in as well and stir. Pour into a small casserole dish, about a quart-and-a-half in size.

Bake for 60 to 70 minutes, until bubbling and golden on top.

Serve warm, with a spoonful of cold jam. If you get a vanilla bean pod, don’t eat it. Nick said that it would be a good thing to have for breakfast, and I think he’s right. We’ve got leftovers, so we’ll eat it again tomorrow. I think it will be even better, warm and slightly sweet, and not goopy. And because there’s no cinnamon in it, it’s not the colour of cardboard. So it’s even kind of nice to look at. Delight.

When we get to the new place, and we get the little things like the Internet set up, I’d like to start thinking about the holidays, and cooking for them, because right about then it will be just about time. Don’t let me forget. I want to hear about what you’re doing as well. I won’t let you forget either! But for now, packing. And pudding. And bedtime. Good night!

Cranberry scones, and good morning to you!

~ wellfedemily ~ 4 Comments

Can you believe we’re a month away from Christmas? I can’t believe how long it’s been since I thought about tomatoes. I’m thinking about cranberries these days, and maple syrup and shortbread cookies and root vegetables and squash and foggy-skinned red local apples. American Thanksgiving is this week. I keep seeing commercials for Black Friday, hearing Christmas music in every little store I duck into, and finding egg nog and candy cane ice cream on grocery shelves where neither was before.

You may wake up early this week with a to-do list to fit the season and a hankering for something warm, and when you do, could I recommend scones? Cranberry scones, with maple syrup and brown sugar. Not too sweet, and very nice with a hot cup of tea.

Cranberry scones

  • 4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar
  • 1 tbsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp. salt
  • 3/4 cup cold butter, cubed
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1 cup chilled whole milk
  • 2 tbsp. maple syrup
  • 1 cup fresh cranberries, chopped

Preheat oven to 400°F.

Combine the flour,  sugar, baking powder, and salt in a bowl. Squeeze the butter between your fingers, as if you were making pie crust. I seem to say this a lot. Maybe I talk too much about baked goods? You don’t want to crumble the butter into nothing – think of peas scattered among crumbs.

In a separate bowl, beat the eggs, and add the milk and the maple syrup and the cranberries. Stir the liquid into the butter-flour mix, and press gently to form a dough. When the dough is a single mass that holds together well, turn it out onto a floured surface, and cut into four equal pieces. Form rounds of each quarter, and cut each quarter further into four pieces, making sixteen scones in total.

Bake on an ungreased cookie sheet for 15 to 18 minutes, until puffed and golden. Cool on a wire rack, but eat warm, slathered in butter and drizzled with a bit of maple syrup. Good morning, and happy holidays!

Rustic pear tart: A thing you can make without a pie plate.

~ wellfedemily ~ 4 Comments

We’re doing our best to save money, and one of our great ideas was that we would make our own wine. Rather fortuitously, at the same time we had the idea, my parents’ friends, John and Loretta, were cleaning out their basement and purging all the stuff they call Crap. Awesome score for us, and now we have almost 30 bottles of “wine.” I put it in quotations because it’s not good.

But it’s not bad.

Nick and his little helper prep the bottles.
Nick and his little helper wash the bottles.
The dress code for bottling night was brown shirts and hats.
The dress code for bottling night was brown shirts and hats.

We went to Nick’s sister’s and brother-in-law’s place last night to bottle our wine – they live in a house with a basement, so we made our wine there – and I brought pie. You know what’s weird? I don’t own a pie plate. I can’t really explain the oversight, but in the interest of saving money, which we have to do, I’m not going to buy one. You can make pie without a pie plate, and it looks rustic and homey, like you’re better than pie plates, like you’re crazy and clever and do what you want. And I think that comes out in the end result, as the pie is tasty and badass.

Rustic pear tart

  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1/4 tsp. salt
  • 1/2 cup cold butter, cubed
  • 5 tbsp. ice water
  • 1 lb. firm-fleshed pears, whatever you’ve got (four or five large)
  • 4 cups water
  • 1 cup dark brown sugar
  • 1/4 cup brandy
  • 1/2 vanilla bean, split

Make your dough. Combine flour and salt, and drop each cube of butter in, squishing them between your fingers. The end result before you add the water should be a crumby mixture with larger chunks, some as large as kidney beans or peas. Stir in water, a bit at a time, to form the dough – you may not need all of the water … you want the dough to be just moist enough to hold together. Press into a disk and wrap in plastic wrap. Refrigerate until pears are done.

In a large pot, dissolve sugar in water and brandy. Drop in vanilla bean, and bring to a light boil. This is inspired by David Lebowitz’s recipe for poached pears, and is, in fact, very similar.

Stir in the pears, and bring back to a boil, boiling gently for 15 minutes. Remove from heat and cool in the pot, 30 minutes.

Pears!Roll out dough on a floured surface until about 1/4-inch thick. Roll the flat dough around the rolling pin, and then unroll onto a parchment-lined cookie sheet.

Lay the pear slices in a circle in the middle of the dough stacking up to two inches high, leaving about an inch and a half border – you’ll want to be able to fold the dough over the pears all rustic-like.

SDC12123Fold the dough over the pears. Optionally, you can paint the edges of the crust with a little egg and water – that’ll make it golden and lovely. But I’m lazy and forgot. Bake in a 375°F oven for 40 minutes.

Serve warm with whipped cream or ice cream.

Pie!

Pie, sliced.

Cake … again? Or, “How to get ‘curvy’ for winter.”

~ wellfedemily ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday morning Nick, whom I am now referring to as Fruit Fairy, left two lovely red anjou pears on the counter, evidently some sort of gift from people he works with. Earlier this week, he brought home the biggest carrot I’ve ever seen, one that, at its top, was as thick as one of the trees outside.

Heeheehee.

I was going to make a carrot risotto out of it, but we’re kind of too poor to afford cheese at the moment and are rationing what little we have left. And yesterday it looked like this outside:

Red.

Yellow.

Grey.

And Nick hates it when I put landscapey outdoor pictures on here because he says they’re boring, but he only likes photos of meat and Megan Fox anyway so I don’t have to listen to him, and I wanted to show you why I decided it’d be a good idea to bake another cake. I don’t think I need to defend making two cakes in as many days, but this way you understand my motive. Gigantic produce. Incessant rain. You’d want carrot cake too.

And I made a little carrot cake awhile ago, but this recipe is a little different. It’s based on that recipe, but this one is bigger because that carrot was gigantic and I had different stuff in the fridge and was too lazy and warm to go back outside. These recipes evolve and grow and change, so I don’t think it’s slacking off to post a recipe for something that’s already on here. Maybe it is. No gold-star sticker for me.

Carrot pear cake

  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 1/2 cups sugar
  • 2 tsp. baking powder
  • 2 tsp. baking soda
  • 1 tsp. salt
  • 2 tsp. cinnamon
  • 1/2 tsp. nutmeg
  • 1/4 tsp. cloves
  • 1 tbsp. finely minced fresh ginger
  • 1 lemon, zest and juice
  • 1/2 cup vegetable oil
  • 1 cup grated pear (you don’t have to peel the pear if you don’t feel like it)
  • 3 cups grated carrot
  • 1 cup of the chopped nut or dried fruit of your choice (optional)

Preheat oven to 325°F.

Whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, spices, ginger, and lemon zest.

Once combined, stir in liquids to form a batter, and then stir in grated pear and carrot, and fruit or nuts, if you so desire.

Pour into a greased and floured 9×13 baking pan, and bake for 40 to 45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean. Cool on a rack.

Cake on rack.

Once cool, frost with:

Cream Cheese Frosting

  • 1 cup cream cheese (at room temperature)
  • 4 tbsp. butter
  • 2 cups confectioner’s sugar
  • 1 tsp. vanilla extract

Combine the cheese, butter, sugar, and vanilla in a mixing bowl. Beat well, until perfectly smooth and spreadable. Put on cake.

Cake!

Then, pour yourself a big glass of something potent, shove the cake into your mouth, and dance around your warm, nice smelling kitchen, possibly in your underpants (which is how I do it), preferably to something really terrible that totally tickles you and that you’re simultaneously kind of embarrassed about liking (*ahem* Taylor Swift *ahem*). This is how cake is best enjoyed. Don’t choke.

Handful of cake + mouth = happy!