Successfully avoiding a trip to the grocery again

You know the scenario: You're pressed for time to get that dish done by dinnertime or in time to leave with it for someone else's house and you realize you don't have as much of one ingredient as you thought you had. The recipe won't turn out the way you have come to expect. You're not sure whether you can fudge it with using less, but you have to try anyway because you've already started mixing the other parts.

This recipe is about embracing the unexpected and foisting it off on your friends at a potluck, which I did. And about avoiding a trip to the grocery for which there is no time, which I also did and made it to that potluck on time. And it's about finding another tasty use for backyard rosemary and other gardeners' summer tomatoes that show up unannounced at our place or appear in our Henry's Farm CSA box.

Running-Out-of-Cornmeal Cornbread (with bell and whistles)
alterations to Cook's Illustrated "All Purpose Cornbread" recipe
at least 6 servings

5 ounces unbleached all-purpose flour
4 ounces whole-wheat flour
3 ounces cornmeal
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp table salt
1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
3 1/2 ounces fresh cooked corn kernels (or thawed frozen corn)
1 cup unsweetened kefir (or buttermilk)
2 large eggs
8 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
large pinch dried rosemary, crushed (this is the bell from my backyard plant)
one to two ripe garden tomatoes (this is a whistle)
a pinch of kosher salt or sea salt (this is a whistle)

Heat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Spray 8x8-inch glass baking dish with nonstick cooking spray. Whisk flours, cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda, salt in a bowl until combined and set aside.

In food processor or blender, process sugar, corn, kefir and eggs until combined. 

Make a well in the center of dry ingredients and pour in wet mixture. Fold together for a few turns of the spatula/spoon. Add melted butter and rosemary and fold until dry ingredients are just moistened.

Pour batter into baking dish. Smooth the top. Slice the tomatoes thinly and lay the slices on top of the batter so they just touch each other. Sprinkle with kosher/sea salt.

Bake about 25 to 35 minutes until golden brown and a toothpick inserted it the center comes out clean. Tomato slices will look as if they have sunken into the top. Take directly from oven to potluck and serve cornbread still warm out of the baking dish.

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Mushrooms roasting on an open fire

On my birthday, I invited some friends over for a patio party, featuring food cooked on sticks over the fire in our chimenea. Of course, we roasted marshmallows and made s'mores, but we were also pleasantly surprised by how well some less-obvious foods turned out. People were holding their skewers both down at the usual front opening and also over the top of the chimney part. We discovered both spots are at the right temperature for cooking foods.

Experiment 1: Mushrooms
Thread several whole washed white button mushrooms on a skewer, brush with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Patiently hold over an open fire, turning frequently, until they start to exude some liquid and get browned. I ate several skewers of these.

Experiment 2: Rather large beef kebabs
Big chunks of marinated beef, held at the right distance from the fire and frequently turned, cooks up to a juicy medium-rare right around the same time as the vegetables start to really soften. Careful not to hold so close to the hottest part of the flames that things scorch before the meat is cooked.

Experiment 3: Halloumi cheese
The label on this cheese claimed it was "the grilling cheese," so I decided to take it at its word and cut it into cubes to toast on my skewer. It does not really melt, so that keeps it on the skewer long enough to brown the outside and make the cube puff up a little. Crispy texture on the outside contrasts with fluffy center.

Try these yourself the next time you're building a fire!

In other fantastic flame-cooking news, the indoor barbecue grill is working great!

 It was a huge success for making s'mores and toasting strawberries and angel food cake bits at a party on a rainy day the week before my birthday. Hooray for whoever installed that ventilation system when the outdoor barbecue was enclosed in the addition!

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Schwarzwälder Kirschtrifle and a bonus cocktail

Now that the cherry bounce I made in May has had several months to mellow out in the bottles, its character has changed greatly. In June, it was very harsh and pretty tart, especially if I ate one of the cherries that had been steeping in the liquor. Now, it's sweeter and has the full flavor of cherries in it, but it still packs a boozy punch.

A boozy punch is exactly what's on order when making a Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (Black Forest Cake). The cherry filling in the traditional German preparation includes a couple shots of Kirschwasser (a schnapps made with cherries), also known as just Kirsch.

This story starts back a couple Saturdays ago, when I decided instead of Kirsch to use my homemade cherry liquor to make a Torte to take to a housewarming party. I also figured it would be something productive to do with the strained-out whiskey-soaked cherries.

I was using a recipe for the cake that I'd never tried before, one that had fewer ingredients than the one in my baking cookbook from Germany and seemed to have a promise of being less dry than the traditional recipe that included almond flour in the cake. I was excited while watching it bake to see it puff up, since it was a cake leavened mostly by beaten egg yolks and whites, and I feared it might fail to rise. I beamed proudly as I pulled the finished cake from the oven, then cried out in wordless shock as the pan slipped from my hands and hit the floor. The cake fell out of the pan and folded in half, leaving a smear of chocolate everywhere it touched.

A few unkind words and a few minutes of cleaning up the floor later, I decided there was nothing else better to do with the quart of whipping cream in my refrigerator, so I'd better get started on a new cake. Another hour later, I was pulling out Cake Number Two at the end of its baking time. It wasn't quite as tall as Cake Number One, but I hoped I could still manage to get two layers out of it.

As it sat on the cooling rack, the cake looked more and more discouraging as the center of it kept sinking. When the time came to cut the layers, it was very clear that the center of the cake was an underbaked, gooey mess that wouldn't have anything to do with layers. I had a two-layer doughnut on my hands with chocolatey sludge for a doughnut hole. Tasty sludge, but not suitable for Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte.

What to do now? The eggs are gone, there's still a quart of whipping cream that needs to go into something for this party, the filling made with whiskey-steeped cherries is ready and waiting, there's not enough time to bake and cool another cake, and the one I've got is fantastic around the outside, but impossible to use the inside. What else uses bits of cake and has pretty layers with fruit and whipped cream? Trifle! The Schwarzwälder Kirschtrifle was born.

Here it is, complete with the garnish of chocolate shavings and chocolate chunks, ready to go to the party. Those who grew up with trifle, please excuse the Pyrex bowl standing in for a proper trifle bowl, which I don't have and never thought I would ever want.

Both layers of cake have cherry filling, I soaked the cake with a bit more cherry bounce, and of course there are thick layers of whipped cream on top of each cherry layer.

This solution to cake disaster was a big hit at the party. This past week, the partying with boozy cherries continued with an experiment to use the leftover cherry juice I had from making the filling and the Kirsch I've had hanging around the house since a trip to Vom Fass in Madison, WI in June but hadn't had occasion to use yet.

Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (Black Forest Cake), a cocktail

1 part Kirschwasser/Kirsch
2 parts Mocha Kahlua (perhaps another chocolate liqueur would work, this is what I had around)
2 parts cherry juice (100 percent tart cherries, and not a juice blend)

Mix Kirsch, Kahlua and juice and serve out into glasses. To finish off just like the traditional cake, garnish each glass with a dollop of whipped cream and sprinkle with chocolate shavings.

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Crisis averted: apple cake

Problem: Potluck is in two hours, I have no idea what to make, and the only food of large quantity in the house is apples.
Solution: Apple coffee cake, chock full of organic Cortland apples sold by Teresa Santiago of Sunny Lane Farm and Teresa's Fruit and Herbs, from her family's apple picking in Wisconsin at an old orchard (hence why it's organic -- no one has sprayed for years because no one has been tending the crop for commercial sale)

Second problem: The recipe I found uses lots of apple, but has a few flaws, starting with having more than a cup of sugar for a little 8x8-inch cake.
Solution: Make up a new recipe, changing everything except fat (maybe I'll change that next time) and leavener.

It occurred to me while creating this recipe for a baked item that my creative efforts in the kitchen usually tend toward cooking instead of baking. It's in cooking where I feel I can be more flexible, whereas I'm not as easily able to tweak a baking recipe and still get a good outcome. However, much as I liked the recipe I started out with for this dish, I knew that if I didn't change some things I'd find this coffee cake sickeningly sweet and sticky. I figured I'd feel bad about eating it instead of something with more fiber.  Also, I didn't have the nuts called for in the recipe for the topping. I had to buck up and believe that l wasn't making a huge mistake and making my friends eat it.

I'm very happy with the results of this experiment, as were the eaters at the potluck lunch to which I took the cake, straight out of the oven. It's moist enough to be great even without the side of coffee, it's at just the right level of sweetness, and I found another use for the almond flour waiting in my fridge for me to pay it some attention. I could probably get away with using less fat in the cake next time, perhaps even substituting some homemade applesauce.


Potluck Pleaser Apple Cake
at least 8 servings

Dry ingredients:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup white whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon

Wet ingredients:
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup softened unsalted butter
1 beaten egg
2 cups finely chopped peeled apples

Topping ingredients:
1/3 cup sugar
2 Tbsp butter
handful of roasted salted almonds, chopped
1/3 cup almond flour (finely ground almonds)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease 8x8-inch baking pan. Mix dry ingredients in one bowl. Use another larger bowl to cream butter and sugar, then add egg. Mix dry ingredients into wet, then fold in apples. Spread batter into baking pan. Rub topping ingredients together until butter is well incorporated. Sprinkle topping over cake batter and bake 35 to 45 minutes until cake is baked through and topping is golden brown.

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Yup, I'm definitely not from around here

(repost from my other blog, http://hbevert.livejournal.com/)

This week's example: until this week, I didn't know what a Texas sheetcake is. I also don't know how it's different from a sheetcake when I'm talking to a customer at work who wants to make a special order of salads and cake for a party. My locally-raised co-worker insists that all sheetcakes are Texas sheetcakes, but I know that the sheetcakes on our price list are the kind I'm used to and not what the customer is describing. I tell the customer that I'll ask the baker to call her back the next day.

When I ask the baker, "so what's a Texas sheetcake anyway?" the next day, other co-workers filtering in and out of the kitchen during the conversation all indicate that for them, the Texas sheetcake is a family-gathering staple. I get this feeling everyone in Illinois and Indiana knows what this thing is except me, and they can't wait for the next time they'll eat it after this conversation. Clearly this is yet another Southern dish that didn't make it across the Cheddar Curtain (the border between Illinois and Wisconsin).

Here's a description for any of you readers who have never heard of Texas sheetcake either:
1. Texas sheetcake is very flat because it is made with a pretty runny cake batter.
2. This cake is usually a chocolate cake made with cocoa.
3. The frosting is a cooked frosting a la Red Velvet cake, but once again it is chocolate. (Yeah, I had no idea what Red Velvet cake tasted like or how to make it before I got here either, but I'd at least read about it.)
4. There are actually baking pans sold as "Texas sheetcake" pans. They are basically just a larger-surface-area jelly roll pan, perhaps slightly deeper.
5. Very important for a proper Texas sheetcake: spread on the frosting when the cake is straight out of the oven. It will melt all over and make the cake fudgey.

Illinois is a place where the northern smelt fry meets the southern cheesy grits, where the local tastes may vary in the same town on whether hockey puck-style or fluffy biscuits are the vehicle for the sausage gravy, where you have to ask whether the tea is "sweet" or "unsweet" because it could be either. Where we are just far enough south to grow peaches but just a little too far north to see many black-eyed peas. It's a place of regional food fence-sitting, where the sheetcake is from Texas, and the fried cheese curd is from Wisconsin.

I don't have to always feel like an out-of-sorts northern transplant who likes weird "foreign" foods. My Canadian-American co-worker and I can wax poetic about the joys of the Nanaimo bar or poutine. One of the owners grew up in Minnesota, so she knows what I mean when I talk about hotdish, krumkake and lefse. She brought me back some smoked trout from her trip to the North Shore of Lake Superior this summer. It's divine on an English muffin for breakfast. Reminds me of Fischbrötchen Andrew and I ate on the Baltic Sea shore on our honeymoon.

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Sour-sweet springtime treat

One of the tastes of spring I get very excited about is rhubarb, that crunchy and tart stalk that adds so much vibrancy to desserts. I still fondly recall a spring and summer childhood snack, dipping the end of a cut rhubarb stalk into a cup of sugar and eating it raw like a sugar-tipped celery stalk.

While visiting the Dane County Farmer's Market last weekend on my birthday, I bought a pound and a half of fresh, hot-pink rhubarb stalks to take home. I was dreaming of pie (like the one my grandmother said she made for my grandfather for his birthday, also last weekend), but I recalled that I had a bunch of cake flour left over from Easter and that I had powdered buttermilk in the refrigerator that needed to be used up, so I changed course and went for upside-down cake instead. The cake recipe is mostly taken straight from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything (10th Anniversary ed.), but with modifications to accommodate rhubarb, which was not one of the fruit options he gave, and the fact that I don't own a cake pan of the correct size for his original recipe.

Rhubarb upside-down cake
12 pieces

2 sticks unsalted butter, melted
1/4 cup brown sugar mixed with 1/4 cup granulated sugar
1.5 pounds rhubarb stalks, sliced
additional granulated sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Pour a few tablespoons of butter into a 9 x 13-inch rectangular cake pan. Keep the rest in a bowl for next part of recipe. Sprinkle the sugar mixture over the butter. Scatter rhubarb slices evenly over the sugar. Sprinkle the rhubarb with about 1/4 cup more granulated sugar.

8 Tbsp powdered buttermilk, reconstituted with water
4 eggs
1 cup granulated sugar
4 cups cake flour
scant 2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Whisk together melted butter, buttermilk, eggs and sugar until mixture lightens in color. Butter may turn to small bits instead of staying liquid. In a separate large mixing bowl, combine dry ingredients. Add the egg mixture and whisk until well-incorporated. Spread the batter over the rhubarb in the cake pan, using a spatula to evenly distribute batter. Bake in the center of oven for 50 minutes or until cake is golden and toothpick inserted into center comes out clean. Cool a few minutes in the pan and serve pieces directly from the pan or invert cake onto a serving platter. Cut into 12 pieces.

Readers may wish to add more sugar to the rhubarb-in-the-pan phase if they like the rhubarb sweeter and with less of its original astringent nature than I do.

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Chocolate frosting, versions 2 and 3

I made a nice chocolate frosting for my Osterlamm (lamb-shaped German Easter cake) a couple of years back, but didn't write it down and didn't remember it well. This week, I wrote a frosting recipe down, but it didn't work. Here's the failed recipe and the way I fixed it.

Chocolate Frosting, version 2

1 stick unsalted butter
1 package semisweet chocolate chips
about 1/2 cup cocoa powder
2 Tbsp powdered sugar

Melt butter over medium heat. Turn off heat and whisk in small batches of chocolate chips until they melt. Whisk in cocoa and powdered sugar. Cool in separate container.

I should add to these instructions "do not put the bowl of frosting in refrigerator" because when I went to look at it the next morning, I had a large, solid truffle instead.

How to rescue it to frost a cake before taking it to a party later that day? Break the truffle into pieces and whisk in 3/4 cup hot milk (in my case, I used almond milk). This turns the truffle back into something more like fudge sauce. Whisk in a bit more cocoa powder to stiffen it up a little more and cool to room temperature for frosting. The end result is a cake covered in ganache, which is kind of like turning the Osterlamm into the best-tasting chocolate bunny ever.

Once again, if stored in the refrigerator, this will turn solid again (although much softer with the liquid milk in it). It needs to come back to room temp again to be at all spreadable. Warmer than room temp would be easier to frost with. I just ended up putting slightly warmed "version 3" in big globs on chunks of leftover cake yesterday. A chocoholic's dream.

Next time, I'm using cream for a proper ganache frosting, or I'm making chocolate buttercream. None of this fence-sitting butter-ganache, delicious and decadent as it may be.

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Cupcake party photos

For a friend's birthday, the theme was a cupcake contest. A wide variety of cupcakes showed up, from box mixes with packaged frosting to sweet and spicy to the winning display of artistically laid out cupcakes with props and dyed sugar/salt rims like margarita glasses (see below).

I didn't win the contest with the "Irish car bomb" cupcake, but I thought it was mighty delicious because it combined some of my favorite things: double chocolate with Guinness and whiskey. It received honorable mention from the birthday girl, our contest judge, for most chocolaty cupcake and best use of beer in baked goods.

For the recipe, see http://smittenkitchen.com/2009/01/car-bomb-cupcakes/
I didn't bother with making the extra Irish cream frosting because there was more than enough whiskey/chocolate filling to also frost the cupcakes.

And here's a shot of the chile/chocolate cupcakes -- which were my second-favorite and the ones that I most enjoyed taking home (mine were all gone at the end of the party) -- and the s'mores cupcakes, with broiled marshmallow topping.

The birthday girl was thrilled with the cupcake turnout for her birthday bash. I had a noticeable sugar rush after the initial tasting, a feeling that I put lower on the enjoyment scale than a rap on the knuckles with a ruler. But the company was fun and so was the contest.

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Easter dinner and other springtime foods

Mmmm, I like serving springtime food at Easter. There is always a fun mix of stuff that has kept over the winter and new spring produce.
Here are some photos of our Easter foods.

The food above is called Osterbrötchen in German, and they are a yeast-raised bun with dried fruits. I serve them as a breakfast food about every other year, alternating with a German cake (which is not served for breakfast), Osterlamm. The cake is baked in a lamb-shaped mold. Here I am with last year's cake, which has homemade chocolate frosting for a black sheep.

At this year's Easter dinner, the first course was a deceptively "cream"-y soup (soymilk thickened with a little roux) filled with carrots, spinach and peas, accompanied by blanched asparagus with a faux bernaise sauce. I found another application in which Ener-G egg substitute is a terrible idea. The sauce texture was sticky and elastic, meaning that it acted a bit like melted cheese when we dipped asparagus in it. It had a lot of lemon juice, which tasted nice on the asparagus, so at least it was edible. Here's the table shot before we eat the soup and asparagus. Daffodils are from the backyard. The wine is Beaujolais.

And for the main course at Easter dinner, I had planned something that wasn't an Easter ham, but did have ham in it. I had some minced ham left over in the freezer after ham pie, and I wanted to add it to fried potatoes. I boiled sliced potatoes in salted water, then fried them, and although they tasted fully cooked and well-salted like I wanted them to, I had to adjust to a new textural reality from what I had in mind. The potato slices fell apart when I turned them in the pan, so now I had potato hash. No big problem. The hash tasted great with the ham bits and a generous sprinkling of fresh-ground black pepper.

Also wonderful in springtime are mangoes and the new crops of berries. Of course, none of these items grows anywhere near here in April, so they are an occasional indulgence until the local fruit appears in May or June. This week, Andrew mixed blackberries with the banana slices I had in the freezer for an impromptu fruit salad.

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