Bakin-n-Bacon

Birthday Results and More Puff Pastry

I've been playing with the puff I made the other day. I am learning a few things, like that you have to cut cleanly with a cookie cutter and not rotate at all. Here are a few little cookies that I made yesterday and filled with blood orange curd. They were devoured in no time.

I promised folks I would tell them about the birthday bash for which I cooked up a storm. (Yep, I cook and bake on my birthday. But I want to!) My friend and I have birthdays very close together (unfortunately he's a lot younger than I am), and this year we had a joint party at his place. I wanted to do pulled pork on the grill, but my husband broke a rib and I wasn't about to stand in 10 degree weather tending a fire. Someone suggested I do the crockpot pulled pork from Cook's Country. Since I already had the pork, I thought I would give it a try.

To dry to duplicate the smoky flavor that a long roast over hardwood provides, Cook's has you season the meat thoroughly, let it sit in the rub overnight, then place it atop two smoked and cured hamhocks in a crockpot. Additionally, liquid smoke is added to the sauce at the end of the cooking.

Although everyone at the party liked it very well, I was underwhelmed. While it tasted okay, it was definitely flat when compared to our usual pulled pork. It'll do in a pinch but this recipe won't be added to the repetoire.

In addition to the pulled pork, I made a sweet and sour slaw (yummy), chicken wings with my favorite wing sauce (I was afraid I would trip a breaker in their kitchen with 2 crockpots and a deep fryer - but it all worked fine), a sausage queso dip, chips and homemade salsa. My friend provided a cheese tray, veggie tray and dips. It was a BYOB affair, so I didn't have to worry about that, although I did bring some community beer.

As to the birthday cake, since this wasn't a big dessert crowd, I decided to make cupcakes instead of a fancy decorated cake. OK, the real reason was that I ran out of time due to unexpected visitors on Friday night. So I made one of my favorite cakes (it was my birthday after all!), Rose Levy Berenbaum's Cordon Rose Banana Cake, into cupcakes and iced them with her equally scrumptious Sour Cream Chocolate Ganache. A lot of people wrinkled their noses when I said I made banana cupcakes. However, upon trying them, most people decided that they liked banana after all. Many found the icing to be too rich and dark, and I didn't even use my darkest chocolate! I used Trader Joe's bittersweet chocolate, which I think is only about 56% cocoa solids. I saved the 72% for another project - although it's a little dark for most of my friends' tastes. The cocoa percentage has to be above 80% before I find it too intense.

Unfortunately, I captured none of this with my camera. Sorry, no photos of darling little cupcakes or drool-worthy fried chicken. But I had a great time and managed to avoid a hangover, so I was pretty happy with the outcome.

The Incredible, Deadly Egg

I read a lot of different cooking websites nearly every day. (Luckily for me my boss can't tell a cooking website from a Word document.) Invariably, discussions arise like "How safe is it to leave butter and eggs at room temperature overnight?" or "I only cooked my pork to 140 degrees - am I going die?"

The U.S. food supply is safe, although people do occasionally get sick and yes, even die, from outbreaks of e. coli, salmonella, listeria, and other nasties. But do we overreact to media reports of these outbreaks? I believe the answer is yes. (Let's save discussion of our food production and distribution system for another time.)

There are many people who will not eat cookie dough or runny eggs, won't eat pork unless it's been nearly incinerated, use hand sanitizer so much their hands are chapped and dry, and in general live in eternal fear of everything they eat, drink or touch.

So how real is the risk? Am I just living dangerously? After all, in my house no cookie dough goes uneaten, runny eggs are consumed with abandon, the chicken is juicy and (horrors! horrors!) the pork is pink! So what are the chances that I am going to kill someone I love?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that there are 76 million cases of foodborne illness every year. That would mean 1 in 4 people gets sick every year from food. That sounds scary. However, this is just their guess - they have no statistics to back this up. They also report that over half of these are "Norwalk-like" viruses, with nothing at all to substantiate this number. They estimate 38,000,000 cases of "Norwalk-like" viruses. WTF?

Let's stick to actual reported cases. The CDC reports 5,000 deaths per year attributable to ALL instances of foodborne illness.  Of these, 1,500 are salmonella, listeria and toxoplasma with the rest being all other types. So, 1,500 deaths possibly caused by cookie dough. Again, this sounds scary. But consider that heart disease kills 700,000 people every year. There are over 40,000 deaths per year due to automobile accidents. Over 17,000 people die from falls every year, yet we still climb ladders! Influenza and pneumonia kill almost 70,000! Heck, lightening strikes over 1,000 people each year (with about 70 deaths). And let's not forget that those who die are almost always the very young, the very old, or those with compromised immune systems.

The following is from the Art of Drink website, quoting the FDA and National Safety Council. The conclusion they draw is what I live by.

"...they state that only 1 in 20,000 eggs has the salmonella bacteria. The odds of getting salmonella from an egg are extremely remote and you have a better lifetime chances of dying from accidental drowning (1 in 1,000), storm related (1 in 3,000) or slipping (1 in 6,500). Nowhere does the National Safety Council's data state that raw eggs are a common risk, however, death from choking on food is rated at 1 in 5000 odds...The general consensus should then be; eating raw eggs do not expose a normal healthy person to any more risk than regular day-to-day living." (emphasis mine)

Eat the cookie dough!

But even in the face of these statistics, my friends say they don't want to take any chances. Yet they drive cars while talking on the phone, which I see as a bigger risk than eating cookie dough. More for me!

Oh, and in case you think that if I had experienced severe foodborne illness I would never eat cookie dough again, I have had food poisoning before (from a fast food burger. I won't name the chain but it rhymes with lardees). I was hospitalized for two days - at Christmas. Nothing says Holiday Cheer like lime Jello! Although it was an experience I don't wish to repeat, I will continue to eat my pink pork, thank you very much. Life is too short, and too precious, to waste it by foregoing all pleasure and excitement in the interest of safety. Life is to be savored, like perfectly cooked (pink) pork. 

Braising - Perfect Winter Cooking Method

Braising may be the best winter cooking method. Hearty dishes cooked slowly and gently for hours, reaching tender perfection, seem to warm the soul along with the body. My favorite braises involve beef (Beef Burgundy, Beef Carbonnade, Guinness Beef Stew), but pork braisse well too. On Monday I made a pork braise from Molly Steven's book, All About Braising, called Country-Style Pork Ribs with Mango, Lime and Coconut, which sounded delicious. I like all of these ingredients but what pushed me over the edge for this recipe is that it also called for rum. I'm a sucker for any dish that involves alcohol. My mother must be so proud.

This recipe follows the standard braising format: browning meat and/or vegetables, deglazing the pan, and adding enough liquid to the meat/veg so that it will cook gently in the liquid but won't be submerged. If you have too much liquid, you end up just boiling the meat and diluting its flavors (at least in my opinion).

At right you see half the pork browning away in the Le Creuset (hey that rhymes - if I'm pronouncing Le Creuset correctly). While the pork tanned to George Hamilton perfection, I assembled the rest of the ingredients. I didn't have fresh mango, but assumed that frozen would be an acceptable substitute. I was a bit disappointed in the flavor of the mango chunk that I ate, though. The ones I've had fresh seemed to have more floral and tropical notes than these bagged mangoes. I wonder if they were perhaps a different variety. But look at the rest of these yummy ingredients. What's not to love? Coconut, mango, freshly grated ginger, lime zest, lime juice, cardamom (in the mortar), onion, gaaaahlic, and jalapeno. Oh, and don't forget the rum. Hmmm...maybe I need to make a pina colada with the leftover coconut milk and rum. That might just hit the spot tonight after work. Can 'o' pineapple and we're all set! I even have a silly little paper umbrella to use - although I did finally throw out the coconut halves that I always imagined I would serve fru-fru drinks in. They wouldn't sit flat, and there was all that "hair" on them that made drinking out of them unpleasant. I guess I'll just have to use a goblet.

But I divagate. Onions sweated after the pork browned. I tossed in the garlic, ginger, lime zest and cardamom for the last minute of onion sweating. (Gee, couldn't we use a better word? Sweating sounds so distasteful. How about "glowing?" Yeah, the onions were glowing.) By this time, a lot of fond built up on the bottom of the pan. You can see it peeking out beneath the onions. I don't recall my mom getting a fond when making anything when I was young. I'll bet she didn't want to make the pan all icky. It wasn't called fond, but "crust."  As in "make sure to scrub all that crust off the bottom of the cast iron." Sigh. (I'm really not dissing my mom's cooking. It improved steadily over the years. She became a mom at a young age, so she wasn't an established cook while we were little. And she has always been a great baker - there were home-baked goodies around the house all the time. It's a wonder we kids didn't turn out like Jabba the Hut. But I digress. Again. Focus, Darcie, focus!)

The pan was deglazed with the rum. [Homer Simpson] mmmm....rum [/Homer Simpson]. I scraped the lovely tasty bits from the bottom of the pan, added the coconut milk, lime juice, and mango, and nestled the ribs into the sauce. The ribs simmered on low heat for about two hours. By this time the mango had broken down and perfumed the sauce. We served the ribs (see photo at top) with a spicy peanut slaw and jasmine rice. The meal was definitely in danger of being another BHH meal, so I sprinkled some finely chopped flat leaf parsley over the meat. I thought the slaw would brighten the plate, but the peanut sauce tinted the cabbage brown so that didn't quite work out as planned.

After all that, I wasn't really thrilled with the results. It was good, but somehow I expected more. I guess I have a beef braise prejudice that's difficult to overcome.

Puff Pastry

At a gathering of food nuts last year in Boston, my BBB Marilyn demonstrated how to make puff pastry. Since I splurged on Plugra (European style butter - lower water content than supermarket butter) in Cleveland last week, I wanted to make something that would showcase it. Puff Pastry seemed a natural choice.

I followed Marilyn's well-written instructions and began by measuring the ingredients. Puff pastry is an astounding creation - it contains only butter, flour, lemon juice (or vinegar), water and salt. There are no chemical leavenings or yeast. The magic of its rise has to do with the many layers that are creating by folding, rolling and repeating for six full "turns" (to be explained later). When baked, steam from the water in the pastry pushes against these layers, lifting them up. When you measure the ingredients, you reserve some of the flour to mix in with the butter, and mix in some of the butter with the flour. Doing this helps the two ingredients play nice with each other.

Using a pastry cutter, I cut the butter into the flour until it was like coarse cornmeal. I think a food processor would incorporate the butter more evenly, but I didn't want to make a lot of noise since it was a quiet Sunday afternoon. I made a well in the flour and poured in very cold water mixed with a little lemon juice. Using my hands, I gently lifted the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, working from the outside of the bowl to the center. The instructions tell you to mix it together until it looks like rags - I hope what I did was close enough. I had to use a little more water than the recipe called for, but it's been so dry here that doesn't surprise me. I gathered the dough into a ball and formed it into a disk, then refrigerated it to make sure the butter remained cool.

While the dough was chillin', I incorporated the remaining flour into the rest of the butter. I'm sure my husband wondered what I was doing as I repeatedly whanged a rolling pin into the parchment-covered, flour-coated butter slabs. I pounded them, folding them over and redistributing the flour between the butter sheets, until all of the flour was incorporated into the butter brick. All of the flour, that is, except for what blew out of the sides of the parchment and onto the floor. That is one drawback to baking at home  - it can get messy.

The next trick was to get the two masses to the same temperature. If the butter is too warm, it will melt and not form layers. If the butter is too cold, it can tear the dough. So in search of Goldilocks' "just right," I kept taking the temperatures of the butter brick and dough. The recipe says 60 degrees is the magic number, but since our house was only slightly warmer than that, I settled for 58 degrees.

Once both mixtures reached the magic number, I patted the dough to a square roughly 8 inches per side. The butter brick was shaped into a 6 inch square. I placed the butter brick diagonally on the dough and marked the edges of the brick with a bench knife. I removed the butter brick and rolled out the "flaps" beyond the marks. The butter was replaced and the flaps folded back in, making a cozy cocoon for the butter. I made sure that there were no gaps in the seams, and returned the package to the refrigerator, again looking for that 60 degree mark. It didn't take long because it was very cool and the dough and butter didn't warm up appreciably while I was working with them. I'm sure that if I were making this in August it would take longer for all of the ingredients to reach that temperature.

One nice thing about this recipe is that you can make it over a couple of days if you like. The hands-on time isn't that extensive, and you can stick it in the fridge for several hours at a time. At this point in my puff project, I needed to make dinner so I let the dough rest for a few hours before coming back to it.

 The next step is where the magic happens. The dough is rolled, folded, and rolled again six times. Each time you roll and fold it is called a "turn." It is named such because you roll the dough into a long rectangle, fold it up like a business letter, then turn the dough 90 degrees, because you always want to be rolling along the longer side of the folded edges. When you fold it like a letter, it's called a single turn. If you fold the dough in four parts (two flaps to the middle, then fold in half) instead, it's called a double turn. This recipe calls for single turns so that's what I did. Since you don't want to heat up the butter and risk it melting, the turns can't be completed all at once. I've read that doing 6 turns results in 729 layers. Ooh, sounds like a fun math exercise! Let's see...first turn it is folded into thirds, so 3 layers. Second turn, 3 layers folded into thirds = 9 layers. Third turn, 9 * 3 = 27 layers. Fourth turn, 27 * 3 = 81 layers. Fifth turn, 81 * 3 = 243 layers. Sixth turn, 243 layers * 3 = 729 layers. Wasn't that fun? I wonder what would happen if you went 7 or 8 turns. Do you start running into diminishing returns or even ruin the other layers? Maybe I can experiment with another batch.

The first fold went swimmingly, and I popped the dough back in the fridge for a bit. I was pleasantly surprised at how easily the dough rolled. It didn't shrink back much, and required very little flour to keep from sticking to the silicone mat. It also had a luxurious texture that is difficult to describe. It was smooth and soft yet firm at the same time. I kept wanting to caress the dough (I am SO weird).

Since it was ever so cool, a 30 minute rest was plenty between folds. The third and fourth folds could be done without refrigerating between them (by this time most of the butter was fully incorporated and thus less likely to melt out); same with the fifth and sixth turns. After the last turn, the dough rested for 2 hours while I made dinner.

I decided to use part of the dough for dessert. I made a pear "Tarte Tatin" only the crust wasn't baked in the skillet; I baked it separately. I took 1/4 of the dough and rolled it to approximately 1/8 of an inch thick. I pricked it with a fork (I guess so it rises evenly? I don't fully comprehend this step) and slid it into the oven. Something seemed wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on it. While the dough was baking I simmered pear quarters in butter and sugar, watching as they began to caramelize. Boy that smelled good.

It was while the pears were simmering that I had a DOH! moment. I remembered what was wrong! After I rolled out the dough I was supposed to cut the edges, since the dough needs a clean cut to rise properly. Oh, crap. It was too late to take it out, so I just had to cross my fingers and hope for the best.

Luckily, nothing could stop those flaky layers, not even my gross incompetence. Behold the power of steam!

Look at those flaky layers - the middle didn't puff as much, but it still rose dramatically. I topped the dough with the caramelized pears and a combo of cream/sour cream that was whipped to soft peaks. Three of us ate the whole thing - my stomach hurt! But it was worth it. I can't wait to see how well it turns out when I actually do it the right way.

Happy Pie Day!

Today is National Pie Day, according to the American Pie Council. I always thought that March 14 was National Pie Day but I guess I'm just too much of a geek.

No matter what the date, I dutifully celebrate this holiday and this year I celebrated by having pie twice for dinner. First up were empanadas, which are little meat pies. Chicken pot pie nearly made an appearance but I was too darn lazy - the empanadas were already in the fridge.  Here's a shot of them with a mixed green salad. Sorry about the photo quality, but I left my camera at work and had to resort to my cell phone camera.

Now on to dessert, the star of this holiday. During work I thought long and hard about what type of pie I wanted. (Whoops, I was supposed to be working. Maybe tomorrow.) My husband always wants apple pie, but I am not a big apple pie fan. Un-American, I know. But nonetheless, apple pie was not going to be the winner.

After much reflection, I decided to use the ingredients at hand and make coconut cream pie. I already had the coconut milk opened so it was an easy choice. Plus it's one of my all-time favorite pies.

I opted for a pastry crust instead of a graham cracker crust because I fondly recall the coconut cream pies, made with a pastry crust, at a now-defunct restaurant in my hometown. Maybe it is defunct because they used the wrong crust for the pie. Naah, I don't think so. Also I had pie dough already made. Just for fun, I sprinkled some toffee bits over the crust after baking it and before pouring in the filling.

The filling contains coconut milk, milk, unsweetened coconut, eggs, sugar and cornstarch. The milks, coconut and most of the sugar are heated in a saucepan. The eggs, some of the sugar, and the cornstarch are mixed together in a bowl. Once the milk mixture is hot, it is used to temper the eggs. I don't like the term temper because it seems arcane. I like to think of it as acclimating the eggs. Like when you go swimming and dip your toes in first, then your foot, then part of your leg, then you jump in. When you pour just a little of the hot milk mixture into the yolks while stirring, it warms them gently and keeps them from scrambling, which is what would happen if you just dumped the eggs into the hot liquid.

The pie is finished with butter, rum, and a touch of vanilla and coconut extract. It's topped with whipped cream and toasted coconut. Yum.

I hope everyone had a great National Pie Day.

Sweet Miniatures, Miniature Krumkake

Difficulty rating: .25 SOB

I've been dying to try out the waffle cone maker that my husband got me for Christmas, but 20 degrees isn't exactly ice cream eating weather, although it may be ice cream storing weather. Leafing through Sweet Miniatures I came across the perfect test: Miniature Krumkake. I've never made these (or pizzelles, etc.) before and was eager to give it a shot.

I did a little research on krumkake recipes to see how Flo's compared. It is completely different from any other I've seen. This recipe has no eggs and in fact has only 5 ingredients: all-purpose flour, powdered sugar, sesame seeds(?), sour cream and vanilla. I decided to give it a shot as written because I am a sucker for any recipe that uses sour cream. Why I love sour cream so much I cannot fathom, but I like just about anything that's made with it. My husband says his father once commented, "People pay for sour cream? When I was young, if the cream was sour we threw it out!" Gotta love curmudgeons.

Skeptical though I was, the batter came together with decent fluidity. I thought it would be awfully dry but it was like a muffin batter - not liquid, but definitely moist. I heated up the iron, and dropped a tablespoon of batter onto the bottom plate. I latched the top plate down and waited about a minute. Holy cow! It turned out great! I nearly burned my fingers shaping it around the cone that came with the iron, but it worked. Almost immediately after shaping it cooled and crisped. The directions for the waffle iron say you should use a towel to protect your fingers, but for these little ones a towel would have proved unwieldy for shaping. I suffered with the occasional outburst of 'ouch!' (hence the .25 SOB rating above. They are so easy I was tempted to give them 0 SOBs, but the slight burn on my fingers suggests otherwise.)
One tablespoon made a rather large cookie, so I used about 1 1/2 teaspoons to make the cookies shown in the photo (the quarter is for size reference - I don't generally eat coins). Since my iron is large (made for waffle cones rather than cookies), I could make more than one at a time and thereby make the process even easier. I tried two, then three, and finally four. Four was just too greedy and the last one almost set up before I could get it rolled, so three proved to be the ultimate number. These were easy, yummy, and quite impressive. I took them to a birthday party where they were inhaled in a second. Making mini ice cream cones would be great in the summer, provided you could scoop them fast enough so the first ones wouldn't melt. I guess you could stash them in the freezer for a few minutes. I'll be trying that as soon as it warms up a bit.

Once they were cool, I filled some of them with chocolate ganache that was languishing in the fridge and the rest with a blood orange curd that I mixed with whipped cream (does that make it mousse? or do you have to have gelatin for a mousse? Inquiring minds and all that - someone please let me know). I made a second batch sans the sesame seeds - I felt they didn't add anything and the little specks were distracting. All in all, though, this recipe is a winner!

Eggs - Farm vs. Supermarket

Need I say more?

Curing Supplies

I just received my order from butcher-packer.com and I'm so excited! You can see all the goodies in the photo. First, there is the pink salt, the main curing salt for bacon and other non-aged things. I also got some #2 cure (it was cheap so why not), and the rest of the bags contain casings. I got hog casings for the medium-sized sausages, sheep casing for hot dogs and links, and a beef bung that I'll probably use for mortadella.

I plan to start with bacon and pancetta. I have some pork belly in the freezer that I will thaw, and once it's thawed I'll step you through the process. The bacon will have to wait a few days since it needs a week to cure before it's smoked, and I want to make sure it's ready for smoking on a weekend when we have time. Plus I want it to be warmer than 16 degrees outside! Brrrr...

Empanadas and Tostones

Mexican/Latin American food might be my favorite (although the competition is close with Italian, Thai, Chinese, French - oh who am I kidding - I just love food!). Anyway, I have been trying to make more "ethnic" food at home as a cost saving measure (and to try to keep me from overeating. Fat chance!).

Before I begin, I want to apologize for the poor photo quality. I really need to set the white balance before I take another picture. Even after tweaking the photos in Fireworks, the color and contrast really suck. Take the plantain slices at left. They have a much more salmon-hued center than is shown here. This photo makes them look like regular bananas! Now, back to your regularly-scheduled programming.

For dinner last night I decided upon empanadas (meat pies) and tostones (twice fried plantains). Empanadas probably aren't the best thing for a quick workday dinner. They involve making pie dough (I've used store bought and there is no contest - homemade is better), cooking a meat filling and letting it cool, then forming, filling and baking the little pies. I made really tiny ones (about 2 1/2 inches long), which made it take even longer. (Note to self: buy a larger round cookie cutter.)

If you are nervous about making pie crust, empanadas are a great way to start. You don't have to worry about working with a large piece of dough at a time, fluting the edges, having the crust shrink, and all the other issues that deter people from making pie crust from scratch. Again, I started with a Cook's Illustrated recipe. (Sheesh, you'd think I own stock in their company or something. Which of course I don't since they are privately held.) It's a basic pie dough recipe: flour, salt and a bit of sugar are mixed in a food processor. Chilled butter cubes are added and processed until the butter pieces are all smaller than peas. Ice water is added until the dough comes together. The dough is refrigerated until firm.

While the dough chilled, I sweated some onions in vegetable oil with a little salt. BTW - I just love this cast iron pan - it is well seasoned and makes cooking even more of a joy. This pan is very special to me since my very sweet, elderly neighbor gave it to us because it was too heavy for her. But I digress. Next I threw in some garlic and spices including cumin and oregano. Then I added ground chuck and cooked the mixture until the pink had disappeared from the meat. Some beef broth was added (I think beer would work well here too), and for kicks I threw in some leftover carnitas. I cooked this until most of the liquid had evaporated, then put it aside to cool. While it was cooling I shredded Monterey Jack cheese, rolled out my dough and began cutting out circles. Each circle was topped with a teaspoon of filling, a pinch of grated cheese, and formed into little half circles. The edges were brushed with water and I folded the circles in half.  I used a fork to crimp the dough together and put the empanadas on a parchment lined cookie sheet. I popped them in a 425 degree oven for about 15 minutes.

While the empanadas were baking, I began the tostones. I fried the sliced, unripe plantains (photo above), briefly in hot vegetable oil. After draining on paper towels, I released some aggression by pounding them flat with a meat mallet. Back into the oil they went for the final fry. Once golden brown on both sides, I fished them out with a slotted spoon and sprinkled them with salt. Tostones are like french fries with a lot more flavor.

Once the empanadas were out of the oven we dug in. Our friend Jason was there and between him and my husband, I only got one empanada from the first batch. That's okay, I had plenty of homemade salsa, guacamole and chips to tide me over for another 15 minutes until the second batch was ready.

If not for the colorful condiments, this meal would be, as my husband is wont to say, a BHH meal (brown, hot and heluva lot). I suppose a guacamole salad would have been good, but by 7:30 I was too tired to get out the lettuce. The best part (besides the fact that they were delicious) is that I have dough and filling left over to make more empanadas and freeze them. That way the next meal won't be quite as labor intensive.

Hmmm...it might be time to invest in a chest freezer, since I don't know if I can cram even a half-batch of empanadas in ours! The last time I opened it something fell on my toe. Maybe I'll have to eat the rest tonight.

     

Big, Beautiful Muffins

Occasionally I get the urge to make muffins. Yesterday was one such day. After digging out a blood orange from the produce drawer, I noticed half a bag of forlorn, forgotten cranberries. I decided to use them before they all withered and make cranberry-orange-walnut muffins.

I have to be careful about how many ingredients are in the title of a dish for my husband to want to eat it. He says anything with more than three ingredients in the name is just too much. I guess this barely skates by, but we argue about whether the word "muffins" counts. I say no, just cranberry-orange-walnut, since those are the only ingredients in the name, but he then he clarifies his position as it being only three words in the name.  He ate some anyway.

Confession time: I really want to find a recipe for these sticky, tooth-achingly sweet, very orange muffins available at a local deli/restaurant. When I asked about getting the recipe (I know the restaurant owner so felt fine in asking), he disappointed my greatly by telling me that they were from a wholesale vendor. Rats. Now I'll have to develop one.

This will come as no surprise, but today's recipe is a Cook's Illustrated recipe that I have modified. You begin by taking 10 tablespoons of butter and creaming it with a cup of sugar. (I think 1 1/4 cups makes a better muffin, but of course I likey my sugar!) Then you add 2 eggs and a teaspoon of grated orange zest (I added a dash of Penzey's orange extract). I also added my leavenings (1 tbsp. baking powder, 1/2 tsp. soda and 1/2 tsp. salt) at this point so I didn't have to dirty up another bowl by mixing together the dry ingredients. That way I can add the flour directly from its container, which I place on the scale and tare. Then I can just scoop until the desired weight is reached. Next I whizzed up the remaining good cranberries (about a cup) in the food processor just until coarsely chopped. I then added half of 1.5 cups of yogurt to the butter mixture and blended until the yogurt was nearly incorporated. (OK, I didn't have enough yogurt, so I mixed Greek yogurt, sour cream and milk to the right consistency. I used the milk since the Greek yogurt is drained and very thick.) Then I added half the 3 cups of flour and blended, then 1/2 the remaining yogurt, 1/2 the remaining flour, and the rest of the yogurt and rest of the flour. Whew! It takes longer to type it than it does to do it. I finally got smart and put my (oh so crappy) camera on a tripod. I was able to capture the mixer in action that way! By the way, sorry about the lousy color and image quality of these photos. I was working with very little lighting and didn't want to use a flash, and this camera is not very good at auto white balance. I hope I get a bit of a tax refund so I can buy a new camera!

Back to the action. I gently mixed in the cranberries and a cup of chopped walnuts. Then I used a spring-loaded scoop (disher) to put the batter into muffin tins. This batter was very thick and held its shape in the muffin tin. I like that. Why? I don't know - I guess it just looks neater that way.

This recipe is supposed to make 12 muffins. When I use my new silicone muffin tins that's how many I get. But when I use my "vintage" (isn't that a nicer word than "old?") muffin tins, I get 18. I guess portion sizes have been creeping up even in cookware!

Into a 375 degree oven they went. About 20 minutes later, I had these gorgeous muffins. They may be a little brown on the bottoms, but I was in the shower and didn't check them in time. Oh well, they weren't burned, just a dark golden brown. They smelled great and everyone at work gobbled them up.