I made these yesterday, but you know I’m not one to plan ahead and, like, blog these in advance so you could maybe make them yourself on that special day. They’re still a cute thing to make though, even if it’s not Valentine’s Day.
My big brother Krystopf came over to help me paint what’s going to be the baby’s room (which hopefully I’ll get finished within the next week or so), and we fed him dinner for Valentine’s Day as his family is currently away on the other side of the country.
These are based on my original macaroon recipe, which is always a crowd-pleaser. Start by bringing some stuff to room temperature: here I have 3 large eggs sitting in a bowl of warm water, and about 12 frozen strawberries, defrosting in the morning sun.
While you’re waiting, preheat your oven to 325°F and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
Blend up the thawed strawberries into a glorious red purée.
Separate the eggs, and save the yolks for something else (for me they’re going in a meatloaf later on).
Tip the whites into a bowl together with a teaspoon or two coconut extract.
Give them a whirl until they’re foamy and then add in 1/2 cup granulated sugar. Whiz that up until it’s white and thick-looking.
Tip in 5 cups shredded coconut (I used unsweetened, but you can use sweetened) and your strawberry goo.
Fold that together until fully combined.
I decided to try to mould the cookies, which I’ve never done before, so I grabbed a heart-shaped cookie cutter and used a teaspoon to fill and pack the coconut down.
Some careful wiggling and pressing down with the spoon freed up each one quite nicely.
I kept going until I had 21 coconut cookies and an empty bowl.
Shove those cookies into the oven for about 15 minutes, rotating halfway through, until the bottoms are browned and the cookies are solid. Let cool completely.
While they’re cooling, grab some dark chocolate and huck it into a double-boiler to melt. Let that cool as well.
Then tip the cooled chocolate into a bag with the corner nipped off and squeeze it out on your cooled cookies. Let that set.
There was a day a couple weeks ago where it was absolutely pouring out and it was a super-depressing, totally un-summery day.
So I went grocery shopping and found that fresh figs were on sale, as well as some reasonably local strawberries. So of course I bought a whole bunch.
And then I had to figure out what to do with all this gorgeous fruit.
But I had some puff pastry and some good ol’ custard-in-a-can. So let’s make a tart — or two!
So I sliced up all the figs and strawberries, nice and thin, about 1/4″ thick.
And then I drooled a little bit, because look at all that awesomeness.
I’ve never baked with canned custard before, so I wasn’t sure if it would solidify after cooking. Just to be on the safe side, I decided to beat one whole egg into the custard for insurance.
I also spilled a few drops of Grand Marnier orange liqueur in there and it tasted amazing already.
I created a quick glaze by mixing some honey with some egg white I had sitting in the fridge.
Then I preheated the oven to 375°F and rolled out my two sheets of pastry onto parchment paper.
I added a few spoonfuls of my custard mix and smoothed it out with the back of a spoon. Not too much – you don’t want it spilling everywhere once it heats up.
Then I laid out the fruit. This one was all fig.
This one I alternated fig and strawberry.
Then I took a silicone brush and smoothed the egg white glaze over the fruit. I shoved those in the oven, one at a time, for about 25 minutes. Keep an eye on them to make sure the glaze and the custard aren’t burning.
Let those puppies cool almost completely before cutting them up.
I still had some glaze and strawberries and custard left, and there was a cup of that delightful rhubarb curd I made earlier. What should I do?
I decided to whip together a wee bit of shortbread (butter, sugar, flour), which I pressed into a pan and baked at 375°F for 15 minutes.
Then I mixed that gorgeous curd into the custard I had left over.
Poured it into the pan on top of the shortbread.
Then lined it with the strawberry slices.
Glazed it with what was leftover.
And then I baked it for about half an hour. It’s kind of like a rudimentary flan. It was so tasty!
As you may have figured out by now, my birthday gifts to my friends and family members usually end up being the birthday cake of their choice – no cake too elaborate, no tower of layers too high. We have had a few memorable ones over the years, but this one sticks out because when I asked Atlas which cake she’d like for her birthday a couple weeks ago, she said she wanted a strawberry shortcake. And I realized that I had never actually ever made this classical and simple dessert delight. So I decided to go right back to the cake’s roots and make it as classic as possible, following this recipe from Fine Cooking.
Strawberry shortcake, in its traditional form, is not really a cake at all. It’s more of a sweet sandwich in a biscuit (“short” cake indicating that the cake isn’t really made with any leavening agents and ends up pretty dense and flat). This recipe also doesn’t really lend itself well to making ahead, as it must be assembled immediately before cooking, but it’s simple enough that this is not a huge deal.
Let’s start with our dough, shall we? I did make the dough ahead of time, and kept it in the fridge, wrapped in plastic, until I was ready to bake it. Grab 2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour, 1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon granulated sugar, 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, and 1/4 teaspoon baking soda (leavening agents, I know, but give me a break). Whisk those around in a bowl until they’re nice and mixed.
Now grab yourself 1/2 cup cold butter and cut it into little cubes. Tip the butter into the flour and use a pastry cutter to blend it all up until you have a mess of coarse-looking flour with pea-sized bits of butter throughout.
In another bowl, mix together 1/4 cup whipping cream, 1/4 cup buttermilk (why oh why don’t they sell buttermilk in smaller cartons?), and 1 large egg.
Make a well in the centre of your flour/butter mixture and pour in the wet ingredients.
Stir that around with a fork until you get a shaggy dough.
Then knead it a little bit with your hand until it all comes together.
At this point I wrapped it tight in plastic wrap and shoved it in the fridge overnight, but if you want to bake it right away you totally can.
Ideally the biscuits are made so that they’re still slightly warm when you assemble them with the strawberries, but you can make them up to four hours ahead of when you need them. Just make sure to col them completely and then shove them in an airtight container until they’re needed. So when you’re ready to bake, preheat your oven to 425°F, line a baking sheet with parchment paper, and lightly flour a nice surface to work on. Grab your rolling pin as well.
Roll the dough out into a rough rectangle about 3/4″ thick. The original recipe calls for making six biscuits from this dough but those seemed absolutely ginormous so I cut the rectangle into eight biscuits instead and even then they were pretty big.
Lay the cut biscuits on your baking sheet and brush with a tablespoon of whipping cream and sprinkle with a bit more sugar.
Bake those for 10-15 minutes, until golden brown.
While they’re baking and cooling slightly, you can do your strawberries. You can prepare the strawberries a couple hours ahead of time as well, because they need to macerate (i.e. sit cut up in sugar) for at least 30 minutes. The recipe calls for 1lb fresh strawberries, but I probably used about 1 1/2lbs, and we all agreed later that I could have used the whole 2lbs that I bought. You can never have too many strawberries in strawberry shortcake.
Anyway, wash and hull the berries, and then take about one third of them and use a potato masher or pastry cutter to mush them up in the bottom of a bowl.
Slice the rest of the berries and plop them in the bowl with the strawberry mush.
Tip in 2 tablespoons granulated sugar and give that a stir. Leave that to sit at room temperature for at least 30 minutes. At this time you might as well also chuck a bowl for whipping cream into the freezer, along with whatever beater you are going to use. Cold utensils make for a better whipped cream.
Now you’ve finished your lunch or dinner and it’s time to assemble the cakes. Grab your bowl and beaters out of the freezer and pour in 1 1/2 cups whipping cream. Add vanilla and sugar to taste. I don’t have any photos of this because the Pie did it while I was doing other things.
Use a serrated knife to cut all the biscuits in half horizontally and set the bottoms of the biscuits on your serving plates.
Spoon on a generous amount of strawberry goo. It’s okay if it spills off the edges – it looks all artistic that way.
Add a generous dollop of whipped cream to the mix.
Then plop the biscuit top on.
Add another scoop of strawberry goo, followed by more whipped cream.
What do you do when you have a big party coming up that requires lots of yummy baked goods, but you know that on the weekend in question you’re going to be way too busy to do anything as involved as make a pie? You take advantage of your freezer, of course.
First you make up your favourite pastry dough. I always love the original Joy of Cooking version that you can find in a previous post here. The Joy also has some great information on how to make pies ahead of time by freezing them before baking.
Then you make up your fillings. Here we opted for a vanilla peach and a strawberry-blueberry version. As long as you have about five cups of fruit, and then a couple tablespoons each of sugar, butter, and thickener (flour or corn starch), plus a few drops of lemon juice, then you can make any pie you want.
We had a tool that Cait called a “strawberry effer-upper” (though she used a stronger word than “effer,” if you catch my drift) which handily slices your strawberries into several neat pieces. Cait’s sister Jules was very happy to take on the effer-upper role. She’s a little sadistic like that.
Cait also made the error of purchasing clingstone peaches for our pies instead of freestone peaches, so getting the flesh of the fruit off the stone was a bit of a challenge. Eventually I discovered that if you cut wedges into the peach then it’s easier to pry off the sections.
Once your fillings are made and mixed, leave them at least fifteen minutes to macerate.
Ideally your dough has been chilling happily all this time and you’ve had a chance to roll it out and let it chill some more. The difference between a regular pie and a freezer pie is that when you plop the bottom shell into the pie dish, you leave a piece of plastic wrap on the bottom between the dish and the pastry. Honest.
Then you fill your pie that is sitting on top of a layer of plastic wrap. This pie is quite tall.
Seal it in with more pastry. Do not glaze your pastry at this point, if you’re into that kind of thing. You gotta wait on that.
Now wrap the rest of it up in plastic wrap so it’s tightly sealed. Wrap again in foil and shove that into the freezer.
When you’re ready to bake, haul the frozen pies out of the freezer. Preheat your oven to 425°F.
I stored the strawberry/blueberry one on an angle so I did have a bit of leakage.
Pry the pie out of the dish and peel off the bottom wrap.
Plop the pie back into the dish (you can glaze it now if you wish) and pop it in the oven for 10 minutes.
After ten minutes, haul it out and cut steam vents in the pastry.
Then shove it back in the oven (this time at 350°F) for a further hour, until the pastry is light brown and crusty and the insides are bubbling out.
Let those cool completely (or nearly completely) before eating. Yum!
Mrs. Nice’s birthday was back in November and the Pie and I wanted to make her birthday cake a little more personal this year. Papa John and Mrs. Nice now live next to a farm and so their backyard faces a huge field full of very curious cows. At a craft fair recently, Mrs. Nice picked up this gorgeous painting of a cow named Molly, and so the Pie and I tried to re-create at least the sentiment of it as best we could, considering our utter lack of artistic skill.
My frame of reference. NAILED IT.
Start at the beginning first. Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. Bring 3 egg whites to room temperature in a decent-sized bowl. You can drop in 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar too, while you’re at it. Leave that alone for a while.
Grab yourself some frozen strawberries. This is from a 1kg package frozen strawberries, which is about 5 cups’ worth.
Plop those in a pot with 1/2 cup granulated sugar and stew them over medium heat until they’re all melted and gooey and lovely.
You can purée them at this point if you wish but I wanted some strawberry chunks in the cake batter so I mashed the goo with a potato masher instead.
Now you can turn your oven on to 350°F and butter and parchment up your cake pan(s). I used my trusty 17″ round cake pan but there is enough batter here if you wanted to use 3-8″ round pans instead and create a layer cake.
Sift together 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, 1 tablespoon baking powder, and 2 teaspoons baking soda and set that aside for a minute.
In the bowl of your electric mixer, beat together 1/2 cup butter and 1/2 cup vegetable shortening until fluffy and amazing.
Next, beat in 1 3/4 cup granulated sugar until it’s also fluffy and amazing. Then you can add in 2 teaspoons vanilla (I used vanilla bean paste, my new favourite thing).
Now scrape down the sides of the bowl and plop in 1 egg. Just one. It looks so lonely. Beat it up. Show it who’s boss.
Okay now we put all this jazz together. Take your strawberry goo. And your flour.
Starting with the flour, add about a third of it to your mix and stir to combine.
Add half the strawberries, then another third of the flour (mixing it all in), then the final half of the strawberries, and the last of the flour.
I decided to disobey my normal rules about colouring food and added a bit of red gel paste colouring to the batter to make the strawberries pop.
Then stir in 1 cup sour cream.
Look at that gorgeousness.
Beat your room temperature egg whites until stiff peaks form. Yay, meringue!
Ever so gently fold those fluffy whites into your batter. This batter is pretty dense and produces a pretty thin cake so you need all the fluff you can get.
Smooth the batter into your cake pan(s) and bake for about 45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the centre of the pan comes out clean.
Set the whole shebang on a wire rack to cool completely.
Now, if you’re not making a giant cow out of your cake, you can skip this whole segment. If you are making a giant cow out of your cake, then I hope yours turns out better than mine because you are less terrible at art.
So with the giant cake laid out on a board, I cut out the shape of the cow’s head, and then from what was left I cut out the horns and the ears. It’s all symmetrical.
Then I laid it out.
I had to move everything around on the board to get it to fit, and the cake was so sticky it was a hard job to do it without disaster. And now it looks like the Chicago Bulls logo (GREAT GIFT IDEA FOR BULLS FANS FOLKS!).
The Pie thought we should add a bit of extra cake at the snout. Now we need some frosting.
I needed two colours of icing, so in two double boilers I melted 4 oz dark chocolate and 4 oz white chocolate, respectively. If you’re just doing one colour then obviously just use one double boiler and 8 oz chocolate. When that’s all melty and smooth, set it aside to become less horribly hot.
In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat 2-250g packages plain cream cheese (room temperature) until they’re silky smooth. Remember, the warmer your cream cheese is, the less lumpy the frosting will be.
Beat in as well 1 tablespoon vanilla (again I used the paste because I love it), 3/4 cup heavy (whipping) cream, and 3/4 cup icing sugar.
Then I split the frosting between two bowls. Hello, beautiful. Look at those little flecks of vanilla seeds.
Then I poured the now-cooler white chocolate into one bowl, and the now-cooler dark chocolate into the other and stirred them up.
Ready to decorate!
I started with the white, because … well, I just did.
Then I filled it in with the dark chocolate. The nostrils are wonky because I dropped a huge gob of icing accidentally and so that’s just how it had to be. TADA! Not fine art, but highly tasty, and Mrs. Nice loved it.
D’you remember, a while back, where I had leftover puff pastry and leftover cream cheese icing, and I made a thing? Well. I did it again. I had some leftover cream cheese icing from the Pie’s Spider-Man spice cake, which I had chucked in the freezer to keep. There’s almost 2 cups of this stuff.
I had also chucked in there some strawberries that I had stewed when they were on their last legs, so they were pretty much freezer jam. There’s about 3 cups in here I think.
Then I bought some puff pastry. So this thing had to happen. First, I preheated the oven to 375°F and lined some baking sheets with parchment paper. Leave your puff pastry in the fridge until you need it or it will be soggy and hard to work with.
Then I cracked 2 eggs into the cream cheese frosting (you can find the recipe in here) and beat it until it’s smooth.
I laid out the puff pastry (pre-rolled, woo!) and cut it into 9 squares.
I put a teaspoon of the cream cheese batter in the centre of the square and followed it up with one of fruit.
Then I pinched the corners together and sealed it as best as I could (which turned out to be not very well) and bunged them in the oven for about 12 minutes, until the pastry was golden and the innards were solid-ish.
I set them on a rack to cool. This made 18 of them.
I still had plenty of cream cheese and strawberry stuff left and the oven was already on, so I added them together and chucked in about half a cup flour plus 1/2 teaspoon baking soda.
I scooped that into cupcake cups, and baked those for another 12 minutes, until the centres came out clean when tested with a toothpick.
Those also went on the rack to cool.
And now I have dessert for our softball team, made from stuff I had in the freezer! One of the people I fed it to dubbed the pastry bits “Jammy Fantastics,” which I kind of like.
Because General Zod has now figured out how to crawl around his parents’ condo, Atlas had to do some quick reorganizing to get certain things away from his little graspy fingers, and as a result, she unloaded a number of pantry items on me when she ran out of room. One of these items was a box of cake mix. I don’t normally use cake mix, but I hated to waste it, so I came up with these cheater cupcakes the other day. They were both a success and somewhat of a failure, as I’ll show you in a minute.
I started by chopping up some delightful fresh local strawberries, about 2 cups’ worth.
Then I preheated the oven to 350°F and lined my sole muffin tin with cupcake liners.
I only have the one muffin tin at the moment, though, and the cake box makes 24 cupcakes, so I decided to experiment. I put the other 12 liners in a 9″ x 13″ baking pan and wedged them together with parchment paper. I figured they’d come out slightly misshapen, probably more square than round.
Then I prepared the cake batter according to the box instructions. I did add an extra shot of vanilla, just for flavour.
Then tipped in the strawberries as well as a package of white chocolate chips.
I scooped the batter into the cupcake liners and baked them for about 24 minutes.
They came out nice and brown.
And the others came out like this. Whoops.
While they cooled I whipped up some cream cheese icing: 1 cup butter, 1 250g package plain cream cheese (both at room temperature), a dash of vanilla, and 2 cups icing sugar.
Then I used the icing to cover up my mistakes!
I sprinkled on a bit of coloured sugar I had lying around, and gathered some fresh lemon balm from my herb garden. A half strawberry on top adds the finishing touch.
And this is my attempt at the other ones. NAILED IT. At least they tasted good.
I wasn’t going to post about this, because I do it so often and it’s so simple that I never even think about it. But the Pie suggested it might be a good idea to let you in on the deal.
Gren also gets hot in the summer.
I get dehydrated really easily in hot weather and summer in Ottawa is very, very HOT. Hot and long, temperatures often going up as high as 50°C (122°F) on humid days. And when I get dehydrated I tend to faint and that is super embarrassing. Therefore, I drink a TON of water. But water gets so boring after a while, so I dress it up a little and then I can pretend I’m at some fancy spa.
We have to keep the curtains shut to keep out the afternoon sun. It makes the shadows very interesting.
I have a pretty glass bottle that I keep in the fridge full of water, and it’s a simple thing to just add a bit of natural flavouring to it. My go-to refresher is lemon water. I just cut the ends off a lemon, and slice the rest of it small enough to fit in the mouth of the bottle. Then you just leave it for a few hours and BOOM. FLAVOURED WATER.
Another good refreshing option is adding a sprig or two of freshmint from my mini garden to a handful of fresh raspberries.
For something more subtle, try cutting up half a cucumber and sliding that into the water.
And the extra fancy option is a few sliced strawberries and some fresh basil leaves. I think this one is actually my favourite now.
I find that I can keep topping up the bottle for a couple of days before the vegetable matter in it starts to get squishy and needs to be composted, and the water starts to lose the flavour.
This is another cleaning-out-the-pantry post, but it’s a little less nuts than the one we had on Monday. At least this one is a bit more common. It’s only got five ingredients and it’s super simple, and perfect for a hot summer day when you really don’t want to do any baking. Like when there’s a forest fire in Québec and the smoke has smogged up the whole island and the sun is a little pinky orange ball. Those kinds of days.
I have a ton of unflavoured gelatin packets in my pantry, as well as many cans of condensed milk. There are lots of things you can do with gelatin, making aspics and whatnots, but I like the idea of creating a terrine of happily suspended fruit. This one is a nice pretty example. Then, if you want to get super adventurous, you can try layering your gelatin, and create a lovely contrast by adding sweetened condensed milk to gelatin to create a nice white alternating layer. Beautiful, right? And then you can sort of combine the two techniques by creating stained/broken glass jello. So I’m gonna put all that together. Because I CAN.
Also I keep thinking of this, every time I make something with gelatin: I AM MADE OF JELLY.
Start with some juice. I like cranberry juice. Tart and tangy and a lovely colour. Pour half a cup of room temperature juice into a bowl and sprinkle 2 envelopes unflavoured gelatin on top of that (each package contains 2 1/2 teaspoons gelatin granules). Leave that for 5 minutes to “bloom”.
Here I have most of a container of strawberries that I picked up at the grocery store. I think it’s about 2lb worth of fruit. Anyway, wash that and cut it up to a manageable size. Use whatever fruit you want, but I’m going with strawberries because they’re pink and that’s what I have.
Take another 1 1/2 cup juice and huck that in the microwave (because I didn’t want to turn on my oven in this heat). Heat that until it boils, which will be a few minutes depending on the type of microwave you have.
Slowly pour the boiling juice over your bloomed gelatin. Stir that like a crazy person until all the jelly goodness is dissolved throughout the liquid.
Add in 1 can sweetened condensed milk. Stir to combine. It will curdle a little bit, but don’t fret. If you want your gelatin to remain clear, leave the milk out of the equation.
I also added in a splash of grenadine syrup, for more colour. Let that cool to just warm.
Toss your fruit into a loaf pan. You can layer it if you want to get fancy, with different fruits, but that’s a little too high-falutin’ for my tastes today. Plus my gelatin is opaque so you won’t be able to see the layers anyway.
Drizzle the gelatin mixture over your fruit, careful not to pour too hard (if you’ve got layers that could be disturbed). If you don’t want your fruit to float to the top (which will end up being the bottom when you flip it), drizzle only half your mixture in and chill that for at least 15-20 minutes first before adding the rest of the liquid. This will gel your fruits into the places you want them to be.
Chill that sucker for at least 4 hours (preferably overnight).
To serve, set the loaf pan in a sink full of warm water for a few seconds.
Wipe off the pan, and invert it over your serving dish to release the gelatin. I need a bit of practice with my dismount it seems.
Slice it up like a loaf of bread. I suggest you use a warm wet knife for this, as you can see that mine kind of fell apart a bit when I didn’t do that.
Fussellette asked me to make “something light” for dessert following our Easter meal of a traditional Jiggs dinner. What is lighter than a cloud? Not much. This sharp lemon foam is a great palette-cleanser and went smashingly with some post-prandial tea. And, as most things gluten-free tend to be (with the exception of doughy things of course), it was easy and quick to make. I made it the day before to allow the flavours to really concentrate themselves.
Start with some fresh strawberries, 2 cups. Wash them, cut the tops off, and slice them into quarters. Drop them in a bowl.
Sprinkle 2 tablespoons sugar over top.
Grab yourself some fresh mint, 2 tablespoons. Chop that up and drop it on top of the strawberries.
Give that a stir, then chuck it in the fridge to chill.
Preheat your oven to 350°F. Spray a 1 1/2 quart soufflé dish (I didn’t have one, so I used this steep-sided oval bowl) with cooking spray and dust with 2 tablespoons sugar. The recipe said to shake out the excess but I left mine in the bottom in the hopes it would get all crusty and lovely, and I was right. Set the dish on top of a baking sheet.
Separate 4 eggs and bring the whites to room temperature. You’ll only need two of the yolks. I had three whites left over from eggs Benny so in actual fact this recipe used 5 whites.
Grate the zest of 2 lemons and squeeze out their juice as well. You want to end up with 2 tablespoons lemon zest and 6 tablespoons lemon juice.
In a small saucepan, whisk together 1/2 cup sugar and 1 tablespoon corn starch.
Add in the lemon juice, zest, and the 2 egg yolks and stir until smooth.
Heat on medium, stirring constantly, until thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon. Transfer to a large glass bowl and allow to cool to room temperature.
Take your 4 egg whites and plop them in a bowl with a pinch of salt. Whisk until foamy.
Gradually add, a little bit at a time, 1/4 cup sugar, and continue to beat until stiff peaks form.
Take about 1/4 of the egg whites and fold it into the lemon curd in the glass bowl.
When that is fully incorporated you can fold in the rest of the whites.
Transfer the mixture to the soufflé dish and smooth the top.
Bung that in the oven for 25 minutes, or until the eggy mess is puffy and slightly browned on top. Haul it out and put it on a wire rack to cool.
Now watch it fall. Don’t fret — it’s supposed to fall.
When it’s cool cover it with plastic wrap and chuck that in the fridge as well to get chilly. When you’re ready to eat, take it out. Or you could sit in your fridge and eat it. Whatever works for you. Scoop some out, top with your strawberry compote, and you’re golden.
Ali Does It Herself 