Bakin-n-Bacon

Cardamom Semolina Cookies

I tried a few recipes from the Food Network magazine recently. One of them, the Croque Monsieur macaroni and cheese (see below), was fabulous. The two desserts I tried, well, not quite fabulous.

The cookie recipe pictured here had promise - the coarseness of the semolina could add an interesting textural dimension to the shortbread perfumed with one of my favorite spices, cardamom.

As it turned out, the amount of cardamom was overwhelming and gave an off flavor to the cookies. The texture was a bit too sandy for my tastes. I'd give the recipe a C- overall.

The other dessert recipe I tried was from a lighthearted article where the chefs were to come up with creative uses for ramen noodles. The recipe I tried was a coconut pudding with the noodles supposedly adding to a bread pudding-like texture. It was beyond awful. Either my tastebuds are in a funk or I'm just not finding great recipes recently.

While I was making these cookies I kept thinking to myself 'sesame semolina' instead of 'cardamom semolina'. Maybe I was thinking of a bread recipe I once saw; I don't know. But the idea of sesame and semolina together just seems so right. Anyone know of a cookie recipe with those ingredients?

More baking on the way - up next, the tart from this month's cover of Saveur magazine.

Here's the 'croque monsieur' macaroni and cheese, which was a mac 'n' cheese with ham, topped with buttery crisp croutons. The photo doesn't do the dish justice. It's one of the best things I've made recently.

Russian Punch Cake - Saveur

I'm on a roll with this issue of Saveur. This is the Russian Punch Cake (Russische Punschtorte) from the latest issue. According to the magazine, "The hallmarks of this elegant layer cake are a creamy custard filling and a meringue frosting."

You can probably tell I haven't been doing much decorating recently. This cake, which is supposed to be divided into 16 pieces, ended up being a 20 piece cake. Ooops. I did the circles first, but in retrospect I should have done the lines first. Why that didn't occur to me beforehand just shows you how out of practice I am.

I want to know what makes this cake Russian. The layers are brushed with rum, hardly a Russian drink. Maybe it's the meringue icing resembling the snow in Siberia? If anyone knows, please fill me in on this mystery.

While I didn't have any major difficulty with the cake, I pity anyone without baking experience who tried to follow Saveur's recipe. For starters, the recipe didn't state what type of flour to use. I used cake flour, since in my mind that is what a pastry shop would use (although a pastry shop in Vienna may use flour unobtainable to the home cook in the U.S.). The results could be wildly different with all-purpose flour. Also, the cake baked up pretty flat and was hard to cut in three layers. I'm not great at the genoise style of cake where eggs provide all of the structure and lift (that's right, no baking powder or soda!), but I'm sure most home bakers face the same problem of deflating the batter too much when folding in the flour and butter. I think it would have been much better as an 8 inch cake rather than a 9 inch one. However, I FINALLY cut straight layers! Maybe I am getting the hang of this baking thing. Or not. 

Here's what the cake is supposed to look like. I tried to make the little honey or sugar "D"s, since it is my initial, but didn't have a fine enough tip on my squeeze bottle so I just made circles, which don't show up well in the photo. Also, I didn't have any candied violets left, so I used blueberries, which I think worked okay. My torch is pretty powerful so I burned a few spots, but it looks like the pros at Demel scorched a few places too, so I don't feel too bad.

This cake looks pretty impressive but the taste is just so-so. The pastry cream is very bland (although it set up nicely with the addition of gelatin), the cake is pretty ordinary (but it is brushed with rum, which is never a bad thing), and the meringue icing had waay too much starch in it and you could taste it. It is my favorite, an Italian meringue, which means that the egg whites are beaten to soft peaks with some of the sugar, but most of the sugar is added as 240 degree syrup whipped into the whites, then beaten until cooled. The texture produced with this method can't be beat, and it pipes like a dream. The best part, of course, is that you can whip out the propane torch and play with fire! This recipe called for 1/2 cup of powdered sugar as the initial sugar used to whip the whites, plus it called for 1 1/2 teaspoons each cornstarch and cream of tarter, which I found excessive. I think next time I'll just use my standard Italian meringue recipe (from Rose Levy Berenbaum). No doubt the starch was added to stabilize the meringue for piping and add to its shelf life, but those concerns don't bother me.

Overall I'd give this recipe a C+, but doubt I'll make it again. It is quite time consuming, as one would expect, and not quite worth all the effort. Next up is the chocolate truffle torte, once I buy a gallon of cream (I exaggerate, but I do need several cups of cream for that one).

Following are photos of the cake making stages I suffered through gladly accomplished.

First is a photo of the pastry cream after chilling. It is quite stiff and worked well between the layers. It needed more vanilla, though. Maybe my vanilla bean was a little too dried up.
 

This is why I always sift my cake flour when making something delicate like this. You can see the little cake flour "pellets" left in the sifter.
 

Note how holey this cake turned out. I don't know what I did wrong here! Since this was a genoise with no leavening other than eggs, I didn't want to rap the cake pan on the counter to get out any bubbles! But, for once, I cut layers straight (if not even). Hooray!

The layers are brushed with rum. To me using straight liquor is a bit harsh. I like it better when the alcohol is boiled with a sugar syrup so some of the harshness is tamed. Also, the cake could have used more syrup on it.

 

Ta da! Straight layers!

  

Look at how stiff this meringue was:
 

Not impressive yet. I didn't worry about making it very smooth since I was piping a lot of decoration on it.
 

The "Leaning Tower of Pisa" school of decorating:
 

Starting to look a little better here. I need to learn how to count to 16, though.
 

Fire, baby! I love playing with the torch.
 

(Rock Me) Amadeus Cookies

This month's Saveur magazine featured an article on a Viennese pastry shop named Demel. (Actually the name is a lot longer but it's too much to type.) If my passport were not expired I think I would have hopped on a plane and gone to visit. It's my idea of what a pastry shop should be - case after case of tortes, cookies, cakes, pies and tarts. I would probably gain 20 pounds in a week if I visited a pastry shop like that.

There were three recipes that accompanied the article and I gave the first a try. They are called Amadeus cookies, but I have no idea why they have that name. The cookies are a crisp plain shortbread with a pistachio/almond filling, half dipped in a chocolate glaze.

Although you can't tell from the photos of the finished cookies, the filling is quite green. Here is a shot of it after I mixed it together. It's so hard to get colors to show up properly in artificial light.

The cookies came together well and rolled out pretty easily. I forgot to rotate the pans in the oven so they didn't bake as evenly as they could have:

You'll note the ones toward the back are a tad darker.

I have to take a minute to quibble with the editors and recipe developers at Saveur. They recently changed their layout, and had an article explaining why they did so. They felt the previous format shortchanged their ability to put in detailed instructions and explanations of techniques. Perhaps they still need to get used to having more space, because I felt the explanation of the recipes from Demel lacked clarity. Specifically, I thought the ingredients could have used more precision. The recipe called for 1 3/4 cups flour. Just "flour." I think (although I suppose I could be wrong) that Demel probably uses a specific flour for nearly each application in the pastry shop. Were these cookies made with unbleached all-purpose flour? bleached flour? pastry flour? a proprietary flour? I know that the recipe developers probably had to interpolate from the European recipes given to them, but give us a clue as to what the original recipe included. Additionally, there were no weights given in the recipe - just volume measurements. They did explain how they measured, however, which at least gives me a clue as to how much flour a cup was in this instance.

Also missing from the explanation is how American butter differs from European butter, which is what I expect the original recipe used. I'd like to know how, if at all, they had to change the recipe to accommodate the higher water content of American butter. But alas, I just had to make the cookies without knowing these important (to me at least) details.

The only problem I really had with these cookies was when I dipped them. Try as I might not to squeeze too hard, on some cookies the part that was dipped kind of opened up because I was gripping the other half too hard. For the most part, though, I was able to do a decent job.

My husband found these cookies rich and decadent. I thought they were attractive and quite tasty. I think these might go on the cookie tray at Christmas, as the green filling would be especially attractive during the holiday season. They are definitely on the rotation due to their good looks and equally good taste.

Next weekend I might try the more complicated recipes, but this is all I had time for this weekend.

Help Me Design a New Kitchen!

Remember this? That's our current kitchen. It is so ugly that even though we haven't sold our other house and the economy has us scared out of our wits, nearly all I can think about is how much I want to change this monstrosity.

You know how they have Superfund money put away for companies that destroy the environment and then disappear? I think they should have a Superfund for people who do horrible things to beautiful old houses and then move. The rest of our house (save for the bathroom, which suffered the same fate as the kitchen) is a beautiful, 100-year-old Craftsman-style bungalow, with gorgeous quarter-sawn oak woodwork, unique narrow birch hardwood floors, push button light switches, and character galore. Yet someone did this to the kitchen. It's so unfair!

Below is the layout of the current kitchen and an adjoining "bedroom," which we are using as an office. It would be a terribly small bedroom and is really laid out strangely. What we discovered when we ripped out the carpeting was that apparently the kitchen used to be larger. It was changed during the first owner's tenure, since I have spoken to the second owner's daughter who asserted that the current kitchen size is what it was when she was growing up there.

The first owners built the house in 1908 and lived there until the 1960s. The second owners lived there until the early 1990s. Since then there have been two other owners, the first of whom is responsible for the kitchen atrocity pictured above. The most recent owner bought the house as a "flip." He put in air conditioning and did a few other upgrades, then the bottom started falling out of the housing market. He sold the house at a loss (which I'm hoping we don't have to do with our other one!).

We are going to take out the current wall and make the kitchen one big room:

This is where you, dear reader, can help. I want a lot of ideas about how we can best utilize the space. The kitchen will be 11 feet wide and 23 feet long (give or take 1-2 inches in each dimension). The area with the 'X' through it is a closet for an adjoining bedroom that we cannot afford to give up, and the gray boxes indicate where the radiators currently are located. I'd rather not move the radiators because our budget will be eaten up with the large amount of electrical work that will need to be done. Right now nearly everything in the kitchen is on one circuit, and it's a small wonder the house hasn't burned down! We plan to upgrade the electrical service not only for the kitchen, but also the detached garage and the remainder of the house as well, so it will easily be the most costly part of the project unless we do it ourselves. That seems unlikely as neither of us has the time or energy to do that much physical work, which would involve pulling wires through 100-year-old plaster walls, crawling around in an attic crawlspace, and lots of other fun activities.

To give you a start in helping us with this design, I'll lay out our must-haves: two sinks, a traffic pattern that will allow guests to be in the kitchen and get themselves a drink or snack WITHOUT GETTING IN MY WAY, a place for the large pot rack we brought with us from the old house, Marmoleum floors, and a traditional Craftsman-style aesthetic. I'm looking at Kraftmaid/Crosscreek Mission Oak cabinetry but am open to other suggestions. Using recycled/salvaged items is highly desirable.

Some options I'd like to consider are: refrigerated drawers, two freestanding ranges (much cheaper than cooktop/wall ovens), and shallow pantry cabinets.

OK, folks, bring on your ideas. If you want to send sketches, attach them to an email and I will post them here. The email link is at the top right of the main page.

Oh, by the way, I'm offering naming rights for the kitchen. Since I can't afford to start this project yet (although it's shovel-ready I'm afraid I can't get any stimulus funds for it...), if someone wants to fork over the dough for a particular part of the project, we will use their idea AND put a nice brass plaque on it. Think of it...the "John Q. Public Memorial Sink" - or "This Refrigerator Dedicated to the Memory of Slippers, the Best Cat EVER!" Hey, people have spent money on dumber things like interest-only mortgages, so I thought I would give it a shot!