pizza rustica

I am in love with fresh ricotta. I can't believe that I have never tried cooking with it before now. I found this recipe in Baking with Julia. It is essentially a savory deep-dish pie with a shortbread lattice crust and a ricotta-prosciutto filling. I was nervous that the ricotta would be overwhelmingly rich, but it was lightened nicely by the addition of a few eggs. The filling puffs up as it cooks and cools to a dense custard. The crust is slightly sweet from the addition of 1/3 cup sugar and is the perfect compliment to the salty creaminess of the filling. This recipe would be perfect for dinner with a nice salad, or for brunch. By the way, although this dish looks complicated, it is SUPER easy and really only takes about an hour from start to finish (not including cooling).

jumbo homemade cows tails

I have discovered the BEST candy recipe ever. Anyone who has tried Goetze's cows tails or caramel creams, will love this recipe. It is as simple as melting some caramels with butter and 10x sugar, spreading the mixture out on parchment, laying down marshmallows, rolling it up into a 16 inch log, cooling the log for a couple of hours, and slicing into bite size pieces. yum yum.

You can download my PDF version of the recipe here.

This is a test

I am doing a test to see if I can create a link to my recipes. Let's see if this works!

Recipe Downloads:
PDF

the (almost) perfect pink cupcake

So I made these cupcakes. They were going to be the quintessential cupcake: a moist, golden buttery cake with a fluffy hurt your teeth sweet pink buttercream. The cake part was an absolute success. It was as yummy and buttery as one of those Duncan Hines boxed butter cakes that I grew up on with none of the chemical aftertaste. The success of the buttercream depends on where you come down on the dessert debate. For those who claim they don't have too much of a sweet tooth, this buttercream was perfect. It was light, voluminous, and on the lighter side of the sweet meter. But, for those of us, myself definitely included, who like desserts to have a knock-your-socks off sweetness, this was not it. My sweet tooth and I have come to realize that we need to find a buttercream that pretty much mimics the dense, overly sweet, vegetable shortening buttercreams that can be found on grocery store sheetcakes. If anyone has any recipes they care to share, let me know!

You can download my PDF version of the recipe here.

almond pound cake

My tendency with baking is to try recipes that are to the extreme either in size or in sweetness or in ingredients. Today I decided to try a classic, simple pound cake. I found this particular cake in Sweet Maria's Bakery cookbook. The recipe calls for one stick of almond paste that is mixed in with the batter. I decided to save a little of the paste, roll it out, and layer it in with the batter. The cake was moist and almondy, and the extra layer of almond paste was just the thing to give the cake a little extra flavor punch. If I make this cake again, I think I will definitely layer more almond paste and maybe even sprinkle a little on top.

You can download my PDF version of the recipe here.

canning and pickling

My mom and I made a trip to the farmers market this weekend and picked up 30 pounds of beautiful roma tomatoes. We spent all day Sunday chopping, sauteing, simmering, and canning to turn them into a DELICIOUS tomato sauce. On the side, we put up a pickle of spicy dilled okra and dilly wax beans. Now, all we have to do is wait for two long weeks until the pickles have reached their full potency. Hooray for the summer harvest:)

bigger is better

My newest obsession is jumbo-size cookies. These two cookies, a sugar cookie from a recent Martha Stewart Living and a "cowboy cookie" from the El Paso Chile Company cookbook are my first attempts. The recipe for the sugar cookie actually called for lemon juice and zest, but I chose to use vanilla and cinnamon sugar instead. Not only were they wonderfully ENORMOUS, measuring six inches across, but they had satisfying buttery sweetness with a chewy texture that was nicely offset by the slight crunch of the cinnamon sugar coating. The cowboy cookies contained a mountain of ingredients: shredded coconut, golden raisins, chocolate chips, granola, and chopped pecans. The texture of the cookie was good, as was the cookie itself. I found however, that having so many add-ins in one cookie meant that my taste buds didn't know what to focus on. I think that in the case of add-ins, simpler may be the way to go.

You can download my PDF version of the recipes here.

pear brioche bread pudding

This is one of the most elegant looking desserts I have ever seen. Unfortunately, the taste is utter disappointment. Ideally, bread pudding should be rich, eggy and tender; a magical process through which stale bread is transformed into one of the most comforting of desserts. This bread pudding, however, failed on all counts. It may have been the technique: the recipe called for putting the bread and pears into the muffin papers and then pouring the custard over. This meant that the bread did not get the good soaking that it should have. It could have also have been the composition of the dessert itself. While the bread and pears look striking stacked up against one another, this stacking prevented them from melding together as a good bread pudding should. Eating this pudding was like taking bites of two separate desserts: baked pears, and crusty/semi-soft brioche, neither of which was very good. FYI- this recipe comes from Little Cafe Cakes by Julie LeClerc.

ginger pumpkin cupcakes

It rained all day today and I needed to cook up some comfort food. The warm, spicy smell of the baking cupcake was just the thing to chase the chill away. Topped with a light cream cheese frosting, the cupcake tasted as good as it smelled! FYI: this recipe can be found in Cupcakes by Elinor Klivan. I am going to try and set up links to the recipes of all the treats I have baked so far, but until then...

basic white bread

It has been a long time since I last made bread and I am hooked again. This recipe came from Baking with Julia, based on Julia Child's PBS series. It was a rather quick process, only about 2.5 to 3 hours from start to finish including kneading, both rises, and baking. The only difficult part was that because I used straight high-gluten bread flour (instead of a combo of bread and all-purpose), the bread was extremely difficult to knead by hand. The recipe allows the option of doing all the kneading with the dough hook, but I feel that kneading by hand adds a certain uniformity to the crumb and it allows you to more closely monitor how well the gluten is developing. The finished product was a dense, golden loaf, rising to over 4.5 inches and smelling of warm, toasted butter. Perfect for sandwiches or toast with jam and butter.