Aeble-what?

I happen to own, because I am that awesome, an æbleskiver pan.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?” you ask.

Æbleskiver.  It’s a Danish treat using apple slices (it’s Danish for ‘apple slices’).  They’re like small spherical pancakes/popovers with stuff in them.  It’s a food traditionally served with glogg during Advent.  You might be reminded of the commercial knock-off, Pancake Puffs, which have recently come on the market.  ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTIONS!

I have the pan because my mother gave it to me.  She found it at a second-hand store.  Hers came from a relative.  We use ours to make the family recipe for Molasses Gems (don’t worry, I’ll give you the how-to for those later).

Anyway, I figured I might as well experiment and see if I could put the pan to its intended use.

Peel two apples and chop them into 1/2″ pieces.  I found this made me end up with quite a bit of extra apple, but better to be safe than sorry and you can always serve it on the side.

Your æbleskiver pan is cast iron, and will take a little while to heat up thoroughly.  Put it on the burner at medium high heat and leave it while you do other stuff.  Just remember that the handle will also get very hot, so be careful.  We have these handy silicone sleeves we slip onto our metal handles.  You can pick them up pretty much anywhere.

In another pan, sauté the apples in two tablespoons butter until softened but still firm.  Sprinkle them with cinnamon and set aside.

In a clean bowl, whip two egg whites until soft peaks form and set aside.  The eggs will fluff up the best if you bring them to room temperature first.  To do this I put my eggs in a bowl of warm water before separating them.

In another bowl, whisk together your two egg yolks and one tablespoon sugar until creamy.

In yet another bowl, sift together two cups flour with one teaspoon baking powder.  Slowly add this, alternating with one and one-half cups buttermilk, to the yolk mixture.

Gently fold the egg whites into the batter.

Test your æbleskiver pan to see if it’s hot enough.  Butter should sizzle on its surface.  Reduce the heat to medium and drop about one-eighth of a teaspoon butter into each little well to grease.  Use a pastry brush to cover all the sides of the well.

Spoon enough batter into each well to fill it halfway.  Drop in an apple piece and press it down bit. Be careful not to burn yourself.

Fill the wells to the top.

Allow to cook until the edges of æbleskiver turn brown and begin to pull away from the sides of the pan.

Run a metal or wooden knitting needle (traditional method), skewer, or fork around the edges to loosen the æbleskiver and flip it over inside the well. 

It takes a little bit of practice to do this without getting batter everywhere.  By the end of it, though, I had it down.  Allow to cook through until you can give it a poke and nothing comes out stuck to your skewer.

Remove the æbleskiver to a plate and sprinkle with (or roll in) icing sugar or dip in jam to serve.  Maybe try maple syrup.  Or home-made fruit sauce.  You can of course experiment as well with what goes in the æbleskiver – try other forms of fruit, like mango or strawberry or perhaps something savoury like a nice hard cheese.  Here we have it with whipped cream, lemon curd, strawberry jam, and leftover apples.

Make sure to repeat the buttering process each time you put batter into the wells of the pan.  You can keep the cooked æbleskiver warm on an oven-safe plate in the oven at 250°F while you’re making the other batches.

This recipe makes about 28 æbleskiver, which is four batches in my 7-well pan.

Pound for Pound Cake

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a pound cake.  Nothing.

I have this recipe written in the beginning of my magic book.  From my handwriting I would guess I was about nine when I wrote it.  My mother gave me the recipe, and she told me that traditionally, one would use a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of eggs, and a pound of flour, and that’s what made it a pound cake.

I of course haven’t tried this recipe since I wrote it down nearly twenty years ago so we shall see how this goes.

Preheat your oven to 350°F.

In a large bowl, cream together 1 cup butter and 1 cup sugar. 

Add in 2 teaspoons vanilla.

Beat in 3 eggs, one at a time.

In a measuring cup, mix 2 1/2 cups flour with 2 teaspoons baking powder.  Have ready as well 1/2 cup milk.

Alternating between them and adding a bit at a time, combine your flour and your milk with your butter mixture.

Spoon into a greased loaf pan and bake for an hour and a half. 

Tip out on a rack to cool.

Slice it up and serve with hot fruit sauce spooned over top.  You can ice it too, if you want.  Pound cake is made to be messed with.

Coconut Bimini Bread

I am heavily into reading the international culinary exploits of Sasha at The Global Table.  The idea of making a full meal from every single country in the world tickles my anthropological aesthetic.

Sasha’s venture into the food of the Bahamas caught my eye, and I decided to try her Coconut Bimini Bread.  The Pie is a huge bread fan and I love cake, so this could be a very good thing for our little household.  I don’t have a bread maker, which is where she mixed her dough and had it rise, so I had to make do with my stand mixer and my frigid Newfoundland kitchen.

I don’t fail as much these days, but it does happen sometimes.  This was such an occasion.  Here is how my version turned out.

Take yourself 2 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast, 4 1/2 cups unbleached flour, 1/4 cup dry milk powder (a handy thing to keep around the house), 1/3 cup sugar, 1 cup coconut milk (warmed, to help activate the yeast), 3 tablespoons honey, 3 tablespoons softened butter, 1/3 cup vegetable oil, and 3 eggs.  Chuck those in the bowl of your mixer in the order given.

Give it a stir in the mixer.  It takes only a few seconds to mix it all up.  Add a bit of extra flour if your dough is too wet.

I popped the dough in another bowl, covered it with a towel, and put it in a warm spot to rise for an hour and a half.

Then the Pie made me a grilled cheese sandwich.  I ate it.  It was good.

After an hour and a half, nothing had noticeably happened to the dough.  Nonetheless, I proceeded.

Sasha says the dough is enough to fit in one Pullman-sized loaf pan or two regular bread pans.  Pop your dough in an oiled pan or two and leave it to rise for another 30 minutes and preheat your oven to 350°F.

After rising, slash the top with a sharp knife (oops, I forgot the slash) and then bake for 35 minutes or until brown on top and cooked through.  I had sincere doubts about this bread.  It hadn’t risen at all.  Maybe I need to knead it a bit first?  Perhaps my dough was too wet.  Probably the latter.

My loaf didn’t brown, but I’m not offended.  My oven isn’t the kind of oven that browns things.  I also failed to get either loaf out of the pan in one piece.

We had it hot with butter and a bit of honey and it was pretty good, though a little heavy.  We also made it into French toast and it was kind of awesome.  I’d definitely like to try this one again and see if I can’t get it right.

Yes! We have no bananas Banana Bread

There are so, so very many bananas in my freezer.  I swear that the Pie doesn’t eat the fresh bananas simply so I will chuck them in the freezer in anticipation of me having a banana bread fest.  He loves banana bread.  More than he loves me. Honest.

This recipe comes from my magic book, though I think Kristopf actually gave it to me, ages ago.  Who knows where he got it from.  I was about ten or twelve at the time, which would put him at about fourteen or sixteen.  What teenage boy makes banana bread for fun?

Anyway.

Me being me, I of course have modified the original recipe, and I generally use more bananas than is really necessary.  It makes the finished loaf a little more crumbly but it ups the banana-y-ness to the max.  I also generally make these loaves in bulk, usually three at a time (I have three pans) but sometimes more, and then I wrap what we don’t eat tightly in plastic wrap and freeze it for another day.  Or give it to KK.  Or both.

I thawed the bananas in a bowl on my counter overnight and they were nice and blackened and soggy.  Today I made the recipe below, but I did it in triplicate.  If you make the single version that I’ve outlined below you should end up with two loaves.

The Pie, having nothing to keep him occupied, decided to help me today.  He has never made banana bread before.  He absolutely refused to touch the bananas in their black skins.  He promised me he would do all the raw chicken touching for the rest of our lives if I would do the banana stuff.  I’m okay with that.

Preheat your oven to 350°F.

You’ll need 5 defrosted or very ripe bananas. Peel those gooshy suckers into a bowl.

Dissolve 1 tablespoon baking soda in 3 tablespoons hot water.  Of course, it doesn’t really dissolve, but if you keep stirring it you can get a temporary suspension.

Pour this into the banana mixture and mush it in with a fork until the bananas are all separated into small pieces.  The Pie helped me with this part, but under duress.  Set them aside for the nonce.

In a large bowl, beat together 2 eggs, 1 cup room temperature butter (that’s half of one of those 1-pound blocks), and 1 1/3 cups granulated sugar until fluffy.

In yet another bowl or measuring cup, whisk together 3 cups all-purpose flour and 2 teaspoons baking powder.  Set that aside, too.

Pour your banana mixture into your egg mixture and stir that up as well. 

The mixture should look slightly curdled at this point, and weird tendrils of banana fibre will stick to your mixing utensil and may gross you out.  The Pie said, at this point, “This – making banana bread for the first time – is kind of like seeing a woman give birth.  It’s something that you can’t un-see, and it will always affect how you see it in the future.”

Fold in your flour mixture, a little at a time.  If you want to put in chocolate chips or walnuts or whatever, now is the time to do so.  The Pie is a purist, however, so we have ours plain.

If you are following my lead and doing more than two loaves, do all your batches separately (in case of measuring mistakes) and don’t mix your wet and dry ingredients together in the other batches until you are ready to bake them.  Don’t want no chemical reactions to start too early.

Divide your batter between two greased loaf pans and smooth the tops.  I’ve been having trouble getting my extra-crumbly loaf out of the pan in one piece, so this time I decided to line them with parchment paper to ease the passage.  It was an experiment that worked out really well because it was a snap to use the edges of the paper to lift out the cooked loaves.  Then I just peeled off the paper and left the loaf on the rack to cool.

Bake for 60 minutes until dark brown and a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean.

Turn out and let cool on a wire rack.

This stuff is good hot, it’s good cold, and as I said above, it freezes really well.

Italian Pot Pies

Because the weather outside refuses to cooperate, I wholeheartedly reject the idea that it is actually spring out there.  Accordingly, I’m still making the steamy comfort food characteristic of the winter months.  These little pies come out of the oven molten hot, and the tart flavours of the sauce really accent the classy biscuit topping.

This is a Martha Stewart recipe, and it’s quick and easy and a great way to use up leftover spaghetti sauce.  Normally the Pie and I use stuff we make ourselves, but tonight I was lazy and so I followed the recipe (shocking, I know).  I apologize in advance for the lighting in the photographs.  It was late in the day and it’s been a rainy week.

Preheat your oven to 450°F and position your rack on the lowest or second-lowest possible level.

In a saucepan or large skillet over medium heat, warm up about 1 tablespoon olive oil.  Add in 1 medium onion and 2 carrots, finely chopped.  Season with salt and pepper and cook, stirring often, until tender (about 8 minutes).

Add in 1 pound or so of lean ground beef.  Break up the meat with a utensil and cook until no longer pink (about 5 minutes).  You could also definitely do a vegetarian version of this, just omit the meat and ‘beef’ up your sauce a bit.  I suggest cheese.

Pour in 2 cups tomato or spaghetti sauce and bring to a boil.  Reduce to a simmer until slightly thickened.  Remove from heat and set aside.

In a small bowl, whisk together 1 cup flour, 1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese, 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/4 teaspoon dried crushed rosemary, and a pinch of salt.  As an aside, I got the above mortar and pestle for about 2 bucks at IKEA.  It’s a very handy thing to have around.

Make a well in the centre and pour in 1/2 cup milk and 4 tablespoons melted butter.  Stir just until dough comes together.

Set 4 8-ounce ramekins on a baking sheet.  Spoon in the meat mixture.

Mound spoonfuls of dough on top.

Bake until the topping is golden and you can stick a toothpick in it and have it come out clean (about 12 minutes).

Be careful, it’s hot!

Classic Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

These are the Pie’s favourite variety of cookie, though he won’t kick any other kind out of bed, either.  This one comes from the Joy of Cooking (1997 edition, page 822).  It’s easiest to do this one outside the stand mixer, as the oats tend to tax the motor a bit.

Preheat your oven to 350°F.

Whisk thoroughly until well combined, 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour, 3/4 teaspoon baking soda, 3/4 teaspoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon, and 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg.

In another bowl, beat 1 cup softened butter (2 sticks), 1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar, 1/4 cup granulated sugar, 2 eggs, and 2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla until well blended and thick.

Stir the flour mixture into the butter mixture until well blended and smooth.  You will get quite a workout, I promise.

Gradually add 3 1/2 cups rolled oats.  At this point I generally give up the spoon and mix everything in with my hands.

Stir in (or knead in) 2 cups raisins. Alternately, you can add in a cup of raisins and a cup of nuts.  But that’s your choice.

Drop the dough in heaping teaspoons (or a small spring-loaded ice cream scoop, like I do) onto a greased baking sheet, spacing the drops about 3 inches apart.

Squish them down a bit with a fork or your hands.

Bake 6-9 minutes in the centre of the oven or until the cookies are lightly browned all over and almost firm when pressed in the centre.  Rotate your sheets halfway through to make for even baking. 

Let them firm up a bit on the sheet out of the oven for about 2 minutes before transferring them to a rack for cooling.  Makes a couple dozen.

Don’t forget what I told you yesterday – you can also freeze the cookies in tightly sealed plastic bags before they’re baked to save time later.  Just defrost them fully before baking them according to the instructions.

Devil (‘s Food Cake) Made Me Do It

I have designated certain days in my life as chocolate cake days.  You know, those days where things tend to go wrong, and you end up with FLOOR PIZZA.  That kind of day.  Normally I turn to the convenient comfort of cake-in-a-box (similar to garlic-in-a-jar but probably not quite as good for you), but recently I’ve been more interested in the process of making one from scratch, and doing it was way easier than I expected.  You, my lovely readers, get the benefit of my experience here.

Seeing as I had recently made an angel’s food cake, it was only fitting that I make a devil’s food cake as well.  You may not know this but traditionally the angel’s food and devil’s food were made concurrently, as the angel’s food used all the whites of the eggs and the devil’s food used all of the yolks.  Modern devil’s food cakes are much lighter affairs these days and generally use whole eggs (and less of them), but I think they would be a nice accompaniment to each other even without the egg symbiosis.  I still have the yolks from the other cake, but I’m going to make them into a masterful pudding sometime soon.

I got this recipe from David Lebovitz, and this is his American-in-Paris masterpiece.  I picked it because of his pictures of the icing on the cake.  I’m such a sucker for chocolate frosting, especially a ganache.  I also thought this recipe had an interesting improvement of putting coffee into the mix.  Coffee and chocolate are always a good combination.  His recipe calls for unsalted butter and salt, but I just use salted butter and I rarely add salt to anything.

Okie dokey (never really sure how to spell that).

Put your oven rack in the centre of the oven and preheat it to 350°F.

Butter up two 9″ x 2″ cake pans and place pretty circles of parchment paper (not to be mistaken with waxed paper, that would be a bad idea) in the bottom of each.  I used a compass because I have a good attention to detail (the Pie called me a nerd for doing so but HE’s the one who wrote a remote sensing exam today).  Put those pans somewhere and work on the other stuff.

Sift together 9 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder, 1 1/2 cups cake flour (I used all-purpose because that’s what I had), 1 teaspoon baking soda, and 1/4 teaspoon baking powder in a bowl and set that sucker aside for a spell.

In yer mixer, beat together 1/2 cup butter (or a stick, or 4 ounces) and 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar until creamy and fluffy and stuff.

Add 2 eggs, one at a time.  Don’t forget to scrape down the sides of the bowl on occasion.

Mix 1/2 cup strong coffee and 1/2 cup milk together in a measuring cup (or some other form of vessel).

Add half your dry mixture to the creamy butter goodness in the mixer and stir.  Don’t forget to keep scraping down the sides of the bowl.

Add in the milky coffee and stir that up.

Finally, add the second half of the dry mixture to your bowl and mix that up as well.

Divide your batter between the two buttered and papered pans, smooth it flat, and bake for 25 minutes.

You can tell it’s done when you stick a toothpick in the centre and it comes out clean.  I found that mine took an extra five minutes.  Make sure the cake is completely cool before you think about icing it.  When removing from the pan, run a spatula around the edge to loosen the sucker. Due to time constraints, I actually made up the cake part the day before, then wrapped it tightly in plastic over night, and made the frosting the next day.

While it’s cooling (or sitting politely in plastic wrap) you can make your lovely ganache frosting.

In a double boiler or a bowl set over (but not touching) a pot of barely simmering water, melt 10 oz good quality chocolate (your preference for the type) in 1/2 cup cream.  Just so you know, an ounce of chocolate is one of those squares in the boxes of baking chocolate.

Be very careful removing the top of your double boiler, as escaping steam can burn.

Remove from heat and cut in 3/4 cup butter.  Whisk until butter is thoroughly melted and mixed in and the mixture is smooth and velvety.  Let your ganache cool until it’s spreadable, which could take up to an hour (your cake will take probably this long to cool anyway).  Be sure to give the cooled ganache a good whisk to fluff it up a little.

Pop your cooled cakes out of the pans and remove the paper. 

Put one half of the cake on the plate of your choice.

I made another modification here.  I took the leftover frozen glaze from the previous angel’s food cake and decided to put it on this one as well.  It seemed fitting.  All I did was defrost the glaze and whisk it up a little.  It was slightly lumpy after its time in the freezer but it tasted the same.

Smooth a generous amount of your cooled ganache over the top of the first cake. 

Plop the second cake on top of that frosted layer and go nuts covering the whole thing with luscious ganache (or, in my case, glaze it first, then go nuts). 

The cake was very moist and I didn’t do a crumb coat, so you’ll notice a few crumbs here and there in the frosting. 

I also decided to jazz it up a little by drizzling melted 2 oz white chocolate over it.

As with most cakes, you should eat it the day it’s made but it’s pretty good the next day as well.  And the day after that, and the day after that.  Just keep it wrapped up.  Om nom indeed.

Roasted Garlic and Mushroom Soup

If you know me, you’ll know I don’t like soup.  Seriously.  Considering the number of soups I make I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s true. If I wanted to sip hot liquids I would rather have a cup of tea.  Blended soups, however, are a different story.  To me they’re like hot, savoury pudding.  Plus they look uber-fancy when in reality they’re not, which is a good way to easily impress your dinner guests.

I do like mushrooms, however, and I like garlic.  If you like mushrooms as well, perhaps you will enjoy this.

This one I made up, having never made soup with mushrooms before in my life.  But it turned out okay.  The Pie doesn’t like mushrooms all that much, so I don’t have any real objective feedback at the moment, but I will shunt some of this off to The Lady Downstairs (Kª) and see what she and Kº and Il Principe think.

Slice up about a pound or some other ridiculous amount of mushrooms.  Don’t worry about getting them too thin – after you sauté them you’ll be mushing them up anyway.

Visit Massive Mushroom Mountain!

Melt a bit of butter in a pan and add a drop of olive oil to keep the butter from burning.  Sauté up your mushrooms.  I did it in three batches, because if I’ve learned anything from watching Julie & Julia, it’s that butter is one of the greatest innovations known today, and that you don’t crowd the mushrooms.

Always cook butter with a bit of olive oil to prevent burning.

While you’re at it, why don’t you go ahead and sauté up a sliced onion?

In a pot, bring about 4 cups of stock to a boil.  I used chicken broth, but of course you can use vegetable stock as well.

Plop in your mushrooms, onion, and a couple heads’ worth of roasted garlic.  Splash in some red or white wine and leave to simmer for about half an hour.

Wine is optional, yet encouraged.

Remove from heat and allow to cool.  Using an immersion blender, food processor, or stand blender, blend your soup until you have a fine mushy mass.  I love my immersion blender.  My mother calls it the ‘brzzht’, because that’s the noise it makes.  She’s an artist.

Pour in whipped cream or coconut milk as desired and heat to serve.

Stir in the cream if desired.

Then you eat it!

Serve with stuff that goes with soup.

*** EDIT: Kª called it a ‘soup-tasm.’  I’m not sure I want to know. ***

Steamed Asparagus with Lemon, Tarragon, and Toasted Almonds

I usually make this recipe with green beans, but I couldn’t find any good ones so I used asparagus instead.

Take about 1/4 cup slivered or sliced almonds and toast them briefly in the oven.  Put a shallow layer of them  on the bottom of a pan or baking sheet and bake in a preheated oven at 425°F for 5-10 minutes, or until the almonds are the desired colour of brown.  Be careful not to burn them (because I totally did the first time).  Remove from oven and set aside to cool.

Strip the leaves from 4-5 stalks of fresh tarragon (or frozen) and set aside.

Cut the tough bottoms of a bunch or two of fresh asparagus off and bash the lower ends of what’s left with a rolling pin.

Chuck the stalks into a wide frying pan or wide shallow sauce pan and cover halfway with water.  Add a splash or two of lemon juice.  Steam gently for a few minutes until the stalks are bright green.  I was doing other things and accidentally overcooked mine a bit, as the photo shows.  You want them nice and firm.

Drain the asparagus and put it in a serving dish. Top with a generous dollop of butter, another splash of lemon juice, and sprinkle with the tarragon and almonds.  Toss until the butter is melted and serve.  Two bunches of asparagus makes enough for 7-8 people.

Carrot and Parsnip Butter Mash

This is a modified version of a recipe in Easy Vegetarian, edited by Sharon Ashman, which Kª gave me for my birthday.  It’s total comfort food.  The original recipe calls for mixing spinach with the carrots, a surprising and tasty innovation, but as Kª was bringing a spinach salad on this occasion I replaced the spinach with parsnips.

Making this recipe is super easy but it goes against my principles of vegetable nutrition.  I have always been taught that you gently steam vegetables and you leave their skins on if possible, and that way you get all the good stuff the veggies have to offer.

Boiling the crap out of your vegetables, especially once peeled, means all the goodness goes down the drain when you pour out the water.

In this particular case, however, we will forgo the goodness for the tasty buttery-ness.

Peel up some carrots and some  parsnips, probably on a ratio of 3:1, as parsnips have a stronger flavour and you don’t need as many.  Slice ’em up into little discs and put them in a pot with enough water to cover them.  Boil the crap out of them FOR EVER, or at least until you can mash the carrots against the side of the pot with the back of a spoon (the parsnips will be super soggy by this point already).

Drain all the water out and, with a potato masher, mash up what you’ve got.  Add generous amounts of butter and some salt and pepper to taste.  Serve hot, obviously.  I used 7 carrots and 3 parsnips and it served about 8 or 9 people.