Mulberries, Fava Beans, Farm Shares and Crisps

We got a new farm share this year. Last year we didn't get a CSA because the farm we'd been at for over a decade suffered from drought and chose to not offer the CSA. I missed it. This year it became clear they weren't going to restart the CSA program, so I needed to find a new farm.

There are several farms that deliver shares to our area and I found one, Siena Farms, that delivers to the ice cream shop in the next town which we visit often. Conveniently, we can buy ice cream when we pick up the veggies! A small share weekly seems to be just enough for us. We started with some good salads and are moving toward sautéed and stir fried vegetables with various proteins. Tonight will be shabu-shabu, as I have carrots, napa cabbage, shitake mushrooms and garlic scapes from the farm. 

Today I'm blanching some fava beans although I have to decide what to do with them, maybe marinate?
But at least they'll be ready to eat. 

Also today, I made a batch of mulberry jelly. This wasn't the best mulberry year, because we had some rather windy storms come through so a lot of the berries got shaken off before I could get to them. Not to mention, I am always competing with the birds, squirrels and chipmunks for berries. I got just enough to make 9 cups of mulberry-lime jelly.

Last project of the day is a berry crisp - for the 4th the youngerchild made a chocolate cake that was decorated with whipped cream frosting and berries in an American flag motif. There are a lot of berries leftover, even with me making raspberry-blueberry muffins this morning and us all just eating a bunch. So I tossed the rest of them with cornstarch and sugar and made a crisp that I'll bake for dessert. 

Buche d'Automne

For the elderchild's birthday, I wanted to make something very different. We'd been talking a lot about all the interesting mushrooms that had been cropping up as the weather cooled and I was reminded of making meringue mushrooms in culinary school and how fun that was. So I set about thinking of a project that would highlight mushrooms and yet still be an appropriate autumn themed birthday cake.

I hit upon a Buche d'Automne.

First, I made the mushroom parts first with a simple Italian meringue and let them sit in a cooling oven overnight. The stems and shelf mushrooms were white and then I added some brown food coloring to make the tops. 

The next day I made the pumpkin pastry cream, by adding pumpkin purée to a pastry cream recipe and then mixing in cinnamon, clove, allspice, ginger and nutmeg. That was kept chilled until it was time to assemble the cake.

A day later I made a joconde - a sponge cake with almond flour, cooked in a very thin layer in a sheet pan. This was then soaked with a ginger simple syrup. To make a pumpkin mousseline, I whisked the pumpkin pastry cream and then folded in whipped cream. This was spread over the joconde and then it was rolled and chilled. I also hand painted sugar paper with food coloring and cut out oak and maple leaves.

Finally, on the big day, I made a maple Italian meringue by substituting maple sugar for white sugar. I frosted the rolled cake with the meringue, used a torch to make it look more like a birch log, and then decorated the cake with the mushrooms, leaves and some fresh daisies. 

The elderchild was pleased!

Eldritch Horror

Elderchild and youngerchild teamed up with my husband to make my birthday cake. I asked for Boston Cream Pie. 

They decided that they would double the recipe, so they could have 3 cake layers instead of 2 and therefore more cream filling. The cream custard was excellent. They also doubled the chocolate, which they didn't need to do. Since there still was only one top layer, and all. 

There was a lot of chocolate. 

After coating the cake, the elderchild dubbed the cake an "eldritch horror," so they attempted to give it some character. 

I present to you, my birthday cake, quite possibly the best I've ever had:

It certainly made me laugh the hardest!

Boozy Birthday

Generally, on my husband's birthday, I make something with chocolate. This year is no exception. It's a time to test out new recipes that I find, and to play around a little with my baking skills. However, I have actually made this particular cake for him before. Sometimes a recipe is just that good. 

This Irish whiskey and Guinness cake is just that good. I made the cake part a couple of days ago and refrigerated the cake until it was time to make the frosting. It's easier to cut the cake layers when they are cold. The recipe says to serve immediately after frosting but that isn't necessary. I made the frosting and frosted the cake several hours ahead of time and put it back in the fridge. The cream cheese and mascarpone in the frosting firm up in the cold and it holds the cake together well.

When I made this cake the last time I did separate the frosting and make part of it with whiskey and part of it with Bailey's. The whiskey was so strong the kids couldn't eat it. This time, I just made all of the frosting with Bailey's. It was still very strong. My husband licked the frosting bowl and felt dizzy for a while afterward. It is a rich, boozy cake that should definitely be eaten in moderation! The Bailey's flavor for the frosting throughout the layers was, in our opinion, a better choice. 

Fair in the Rain

We went up to the Fair two days ago, the weather was rainy but not super windy. It was the little bit of Hurricane Ian that reached New England, I guess. Generally, I prefer to be at the Fair in the rain because fewer people go so it doesn't feel as crowded. 

From the canning perspective, I won first place for sauerkraut and for tomato (pizza) sauce, and second place for the mulberry jelly, raspberry jam, and salsa verde. I didn't bake anything for the baking competition, but I did spend Friday baking a cake for the elderchild's birthday. More on that later.

One of the most fun parts for us is seeing the rabbits, and this year we spent some time watching the judging of some larger rabbits. There are these little stalls with wire doors that flip up so the rabbits are put in one side and the judge takes them out the other side and examines them. The rest of the rabbits, though, are all trying to get out of the stalls, and so every so often a rabbit's head pokes up above the stalls and a person has to hurry and push it back down before it jumps out. It's like whack-a-mole, but gently and with rabbits. It was so funny to watch!

After about four hours, we headed home, and I spent the rest of the afternoon frosting the cake I'd made and making chile rellenos for dinner.

Ah, the cake. The elderchild requested a red velvet cake like the one on this season's Great British Bake Off (the technical challenge). I looked up their recipe and, after making a run up to Saugus to get 6" cake pans which I discovered I needed right when I was about to start preparing the ingredients, followed the recipe to the letter. It SANK. I'm not sure why. So I cleaned up, went back out to the store to get more red food coloring and cocoa, and used a different recipe, which worked. And tasted really good, I might add. I did use the frosting from the GBBO recipe, which tasted great, but it was so runny. I had to put a skewer in the cake to keep it upright while I tried to frost it. There was a lot of cursing. 

Ultimately, the cake tasted fantastic, even if it was not as smoothly frosted as the ones on TV. 

Happy Birthday!

Picnic Lunch

Yesterday, on a whim, I made a pound cake, with zest from a blood orange. So I made a blood orange glaze, which came out rather pink, as blood orange juice looks like red wine. 

Today, on a whim, my husband and I are going on a bike ride. I haven't been on my bike for about a year, certainly not since I got my knee brace last summer. I am not very daring when it comes to bikes and, after a series of pretty impressive bike accidents as a kid, I don't like riding in traffic. I will suffer through traffic to get to the bike path and that's where we're headed today. With a picnic lunch. Which includes pound cake. 

Nouruz Birthday Combo

Nouruz, the Persian New Year, is celebrated on the first day of spring. It's not often I do something special for it, but my husband's birthday falls around then as well. After wondering what to do for his birthday cake, and getting a little inspiration from the kids, I decided to pull out the stops and have a Persian-themed meal and dessert.

For the meal, I made a version of Khoresh Ghormeh Sabzi: lamb stew with greens. And beans, but I left those out. My recipe uses dill and cilantro, and is one of two similar recipes I found written on scraps of paper in my first cookbook binder from when I learned to cook in college. Apparently, prior to this week I'd made it exactly once. I generally go to the tomato based basic Khoresh which does not have the greens. I also made boorani (spinach and turmeric with sour cream or yogurt), and Zereshk Polo, rice with barberries that have been slightly candied with saffron. For the first time, I tried to make tadiq with bread rather than rice or potatoes, it didn't come out well at all, so apparently that's a thing I need to work on. 

Dessert was a baklava cheesecake. I used a honey cheesecake recipe which is literally just cream cheese, honey and eggs, and made a crust of two layers of baklava in the springform pan. After pouring in the cheesecake, I put another two layers of baklava on the top, and baked it at 325˚ for 30 minutes and 350˚ for 35 minutes. Likely it could have used another 15-20 minutes as it was a little soft in the middle. When the cheesecake came out of the oven I immediately poured rosewater syrup on it and decorated it with more of the sugar and almond mixture and then some dried rose petals.

We've spent most of the week working through the leftovers. I'm not sure why, but many Persian dishes taste even better the second day. These were no exception!

Cheesecake and baklava layers, mmm

Raspberry Cheesecake

I have a rare weekend off and had some time, so I made a cheesecake. This time, I took some of the batter and mixed it with raspberry purée and then swirled it back in. What I need to remember is that it needs a little more time in the oven and that my notes are correct - in other words, don't second guess what I've already written!

I also made a raspberry coulis

Now You're Thinking

For the elderchild's birthday, something made me think about the video game they all used to play called Portal. There were these blue and orange portals that one creates to solve puzzles, with a promise of cake at the end. It's been a long time since anyone played Portal in this house, but when I mentioned making a Portal-themed cake to the elderchild the response was, "Ooh, I'd love to see that!"

It took me a couple of tries to make the portals. I knew I was going to make them out of sugar, and after a few experiments I used Jolly Ranchers melted in the oven in my cake rings on greased parchment. 

After that, it was a relatively simple matter to make a chocolate cake and cream cheese frosting. After we got back from the Fair today, I frosted the cake, pressed Cocoa Krispies on the sides, and topped with cherries. Then for the hard part - cutting the cake to make it look like it was passing through a portal.

And that is how we served it, with the appropriate number of candles spread out on both parts. The elderchild was quite pleased.

Did I mention the Fair was today? It actually started yesterday and will go through the 11th, but we always go on the first Saturday since I can never wait longer than that to find out how my entries did. I only entered 4 classes this year, but got first place in 2 (elderberry jelly and salsa verde) and second in the other 2 (dill pickles and bread and butter pickles). I do wish we got more specific feedback about our entries so we can improve, but still, I'm happy with the results, of course! We checked out the rabbit, bird, vegetable and flower competitions, watched a stunt show, ate a bunch of Fair food, and oohed and aahed over all the beautiful crafts on display. The bee house was PACKED so we didn't really go through it, but that was alright. We had plenty to do. 

Establishing a New Rhythm

Much like moving into a new home, moving back into a kitchen feels strange. After all, everything is turned around compared to how it was before - the stove is on the opposite wall, the fridge in the opposite corner. The only constants are the sink/dishwasher and this computer. I've been trying to get settled, slowly moving my things into the cabinets, figuring out where they should go only after I try to look for them the first time. 

Perhaps, if I'd been cooking all winter, I would already know about The Great Canning Lid Shortage of 2021. No, I'm late to that party, but thankfully had some canning lids left over from my last big shipment over a year ago. I was out of chicken stock and needed to make some. 

This is where the new patterns come in to play. I have to start figuring out where everything can sit while I work, since my countertops are not generally where I expect them to be. It's weird. I did finally get seven pints of stock into the pressure canner and, despite the "TINK" I heard while it was going, none of them broke. 

The other thing this week was my husband's birthday cake. He wanted a chocolate cake like Worf got in the episode "Parallels" - super soft crumb and covered in spikes of chocolate. Apparently he and the youngerchild have been watching a lot of Next Generation while I've been at work. I made a cake using this recipe although, personally, the frosting was too rich. I think I'd try something different if I were to make it again. Then I melted dark chocolate, spread it on parchment, and broke it into shards for the spikes. 

Graduation Party

The elderchild graduated from high school yesterday. Given the whole pandemic thing, it's a bittersweet time. The Dean of Students made a special drive out to deliver the diploma in person, about 600 miles each way. We had a small picnic in the backyard with the Dean and her daughter to celebrate. Socially distancing as best we could, of course!

I made lasagna, which is always a little different each time I make it, but the basics are the same: make a sauce with ground meat (lately it has been turkey), sautéed onions, and a jar of marinara sauce, make a box of noodles, mix 1 large tub of ricotta with 3 eggs, salt, pepper, basil and oregano, and layer all this with shredded mozzarella. Bake at 350 or 375 until it's done.

We also had a quick fruit salad and, for dessert, peach mousse cupcakes!

The cupcakes themselves were the easy part: white cake cupcakes. I was also making some for a friend who also has a graduate to celebrate so I made a double batch. Then I made peach mousse from this recipe, and it did NOT WORK. You're supposed to make a peach purée and add gelatin and maple syrup and then let it set and fold in whipped cream. I ended up with peach jello and the whipped cream didn't blend in. (I can't tell you how much heavy cream I've gone through in the last 3 days.) So I made it up, sort of, in that I made another peach purée with a lot less gelatin and folded the whipped cream in and filled the cupcakes. Good thing I had extra peaches. It did eventually set while the cupcakes chilled overnight. Yesterday morning I got up early and made this whipped cream frosting with mascarpone cheese. At least this worked as advertised! I tucked a little piece of peach on top of the cupcake under the frosting to add to the otherwise subtle peach flavor.

It was a lovely sunny day, not like today which is overcast and cooler and with a little rain. Congratulations, elderchild. We're so proud of you and all you have accomplished!

Breakfast Kuchen

Last night over dinner we were talking about European plum tortes and how there are so many variations and they all depend on local fruit. Well, I don't have any plums on hand, but it did get me thinking, and so this morning I made a peach kuchen as a variation of this recipe for a plum kuchen that uses buttermilk.

The variations were: I used all purpose flour, and I used canned peaches with ginger I made last year. So I didn't coat the peaches in butter, allspice and sugar, since they were already sugary. This did affect the bake, since they're wetter than fresh plums, so it was a little runny in the middle. I made a modified chai-spiced whipped cream (cardamom, cinnamon, and ginger) and we had nice warm cake for breakfast!

Birthday Chocolate Bliss

About a month ago, my mother sent me a link to a recipe for Ebinger's Blackout Cake. Apparently, this was a thing she used to get when my parents lived in NY in the 60's. I read the recipe and decided it was the perfect thing for the youngerchild's birthday. I made plans.

This used: 4 of my 5 mixing bowls, both my stand mixer bowls, 3 spatulas, every measuring spoon and cup I had except for the 1/3 cup measure, several pots, 4 different kinds of chocolate, almost a pound of butter and very little flour. Which is good, because I can't find flour in the store and I'm saving as much of it as possible to make bread. Oh, and about 3 hours. And one full dishwasher load for all the bowls/pans/utensils. This is definitely a cake in which you can understand that making it in bulk quantities is easier than making just one.

I'm not really sure if there were technical difficulties. The filling wasn't completely gelled when I got it out of the fridge, but it was close, even though it leaked out a little between the layers. The frosting was also really runny, but also firmed up once it was in the fridge for a while. I moved it from a cake round to a plate, to another plate, and finally to the cake stand, all in an effort to have the edges of the plate not be drowned in chocolate.

It was a success: rich and dense and overwhelmingly filling but not overly sweet. You really can't each much at one time, though. Which is good because there is more for tomorrow!

Redeeming Myself

After the macaron debacle I purchased better parchment paper. It's amazing how much variation there is for something that most of us who bake would think is a standardized product. The paper arrived the other day, just in time for me to make a birthday cake for my husband.

Note the bread, which I made yesterday, for our cheese fondues. 

In the fabulous cookbook, Marbled, Swirled, and Layered, is a recipe for a pistachio chocolate cake with a brown sugar buttercream. I decided to try my hand at making it. It most definitely required high quality parchment paper to make the thin chocolate cake required for rolling with the filling. Essentially, it is a jelly roll, on its side. It's been a while since I've done anything this complicated, that is for sure!

And yet, despite all the swearing, somehow I managed to make it look almost as good as the photo. Even if I was a little heavy-handed with the buttercream.

Happy Birthday! 

Chocolate-Orange Marbled Cake

Guess what! It's birthday time again. And, as usual, my husband's cake needed to be chocolate. But what else? I consulted the elderchild who suggested orange. After tossing a few ideas around (chocolate-orange mousse filling?) I settled on a marbled cake. I warned my husband I was making it up and got to work.

First I made two batters: Orange cake, from this recipe, but I scaled it down to 2/3 of the recipe. And I made half of my usual sour cream chocolate cake recipe. Then I spooned everything into two cake pans and swirled them with a knife.

Since I wasn't sure how long they'd need to bake I checked on them frequently. Ultimately they baked for 35 minutes. After they cooled, I made ganache: 10 oz of cream, 10 oz of 60% chocolate (bittersweet), 2 T. butter.

Once everything was cooled and the ganache was the correct consistency, I assembled the cake. Since the layers were very rounded on the top I cut off the excess on one layer and that became the bottom. I used ganache and orange zest between the layers and then put the intact, rounded layer on the top. Then I poured the rest of the ganache and allowed it to enrobe the cake. I topped it with more orange zest and then some orange curls - I used a peeler to get strips of zest and curled them on a chopstick before placing them on top.

One thing I should not have done - refrigerate the cake. Unfortunately, the ganache cracked slightly. But not too bad.

This experiment was a success! After a birthday outing to an escape room, we had take-out Chinese dumplings and then, cake!

So Retro

A friend was coming over today and I got it in my head to make a pineapple upside-down cake. I've never made one before, in all this time! I remember my mother making one once or twice, back when I was a kid. It feels very retro to me. It was very easy. To be fair, it would have been easier if I used a cake mix, but I wanted to make it from scratch and this recipe fit the bill. It's a separated sponge cake and that was definitely fun to make. I even made sweetened whipped cream to serve with it. Mmm.

So I'm making a note of this because I definitely want to keep this recipe link!

Side note: I used my homemade maraschino cherries. Even better!

Fair-ly Successful

Today we went to the Fair.

Yesterday I spent all afternoon making a Brazilian carrot Smith Island cake, following my notes from last year when I discovered I needed to make 1.5 batches to get 8 layers for the cake. Actually, I made 9, but that's because one broke and I had enough to make an extra. Each set of two layers takes 12 minutes to bake. I made the fudge frosting with bittersweet chocolate instead of semi-sweet, that way it wasn't as cloying. When I was getting it ready to go in my cake tupperware thing, I discovered it was too tall. Whoops! I found a plastic "crystal" plate and transported it on that, covered in plastic wrap. It worked.

After dropping off the cake, I checked out the canning competition. Of the 9 categories I entered, I placed in all of them! I got first place in pickled beets and in the conserve category (pear almond), second place in strawberry jam (for the balsamic strawberry jam), other jelly (rose petal), other jam (caramel pear), salsa, and other pickled vegetables (carrots), third place for bread and butter pickles and an honorable mention for the hot pepper sauce/chutney. I'm just grateful they didn't disqualify it for not being a standard chutney. Anyway, I think that's what I won; sometimes the ribbons are on groups of things and it's hard to tell. I'll find out for sure on the 9th when I pick everything up.

Next stop was the beekeeping department, where I was very excited to discover that my honey lavender cheesecake won in the cheesecake category! Consider I'd never made the recipe before, I'm so pleased. I visited briefly with my beekeeping mentor and then we moved on.

After exploring the fair with friends and checking out the bunnies, eating turkey legs, and otherwise just enjoying the really nice, sunny day, we went back to watch the judging of the "Favorite Dessert" category which is really basically cakes. There were seven entries and I could tell my 8-layer cake had done well when the judges fought over the piece. When they read the recipe and saw how I'd made the layers one said, "I'm intrigued." The other said, "That's really good," as they were moving on to the next one. After the judging was complete there was a tie for first place, my cake and another which was a peach crumb cake with bourbon caramel sauce. I think I can understand, without even tasting it, why that also won. I spoke with the judges a bit, the one who is a caterer said he planned to take my cake home with him. I'm not sure if he was joking? But they were impressed with the tiny little layers and the overall flavor.

We spent a little more time looking at all the fair things: the giant pumpkin (2,114 pounds!), the produce displays, the chickens and other poultry, and briefly stopped at a hot dog eating contest as one of the youngerchild's friends was interested. We did not watch the entire 10 minutes of that, everyone was kind of grossed out.

Now we're home and all of us are exhausted. I think I may take a nap!

Chocolate and Pears

For my birthday I put together a variation on a few cakes from school. I had a chocolate almond genoise layer in the freezer so brought that out and soaked it in pear syrup from a jar of canned pears I'd made last summer. Then I made chocolate mousse.

First, I placed the soaked cake in a ring and topped it with the caramel pear jam from last week. As an aside, the canned pears and the pears in the jam were from the same tree, just different seasons! Anyway, I topped the jam layer with some chopped pears, like so:

Then I put some mousse in, added more chopped pears, and then finished with more mousse. Voila:

After chilling this for a while and then removing the ring, I'd hoped to top it with actual chocolate curls. Unfortunately, the chocolate I bought wasn't cooperating, so I had chocolate shavings instead. To compensate, I coated the cake with the shavings and served it:

Since I had a fair amount of chocolate mousse and meringue left over, I made little pots of mousse which, when toasted and with the addition of graham crackers, made nice little s'mores themed desserts for the next night. Yum!

A-worthy

Each of my children did really well on their report cards this year (straight A's!) so each got to pick how they wanted to celebrate. The elderchild chose ice cream so we had an outing to the local ice cream parlor. The youngerchild wanted, you guessed it, cheesecake.

I was worried I was running out of graham cracker crumbs so when my husband went to the store I asked for some kind of cookie I could use instead, in case I ran out. He came back with ladyfingers, the dry and crunchy kind. I wasn't sure that would work for crumbs. As it turned out I had enough crumbs, but I decided I could still use the ladyfingers:

Then, once the cheesecake was baked, I had this:

Finally, I made chocolate sauce and poured it over the top. After letting it run through the gaps between the ladyfingers, I chilled it for a few minutes to let it set before I put cut strawberries on top. (The last of this week's strawberries from the farm share.)

Congratulations to both of you for a great school year!

Birthday Cakes, 1 and 2

The youngerchild has turned 13 and celebrated twice, once with each set of grandparents. Who live in different states, so that meant two cakes. Never a problem, as the youngerchild has been asking for both these cakes for a long time.

First off, with my in-laws, I made a Brasilian Carrot Cake. I used the recipe I posted before but instead of fudge frosting I made a simple chocolate ganache. When I first poured the ganache on the warm cake, it filled the pan. I turned my head for a second and then looked again and the ganache had sunk about 1/4". Where did it go? It soaked into the top of the cake! That made the already rich and moist cake even richer and moister. Yum. We had a second piece each for breakfast before we hopped on a plane and came home. Our flight was delayed by over an hour, so I'm glad we had a filling breakfast.

Last night, for today's celebration, I made a New York Style Cheesecake, with strawberry topping. This was a recipe from school; the full recipe makes two 10" cakes and so I cut the recipe into 1/3 so I could make one 8" cake. (18 ounces of cream cheese, 3 eggs, a little sugar and flour, and some cream.) The batter was even run through a sieve to get out all the lumps, that's how much of a labor of love this was! It chilled overnight and today was served with the strawberry pie filling as a topping. The only other change I made was that the crust was chocolate wafer cookies crumbs rather than graham crackers.

And, with that, I think the youngerchild has been properly ushered into teenager-dom.