Chocolate Glazed Fudge Cake

In time, everything makes sense, one way or the other. Because it leads us to a better place, it teaches us something, it introduces us to certain persons, makes us stronger…bla,bla,bla.

But sometimes that perspective is almost immediately felt. That´s what happened to me a few weeks after I started this blog. That was a bit over six months ago, and it became a major thing in my everyday life right away. The reasons are many, having an excuse to bake and cook and spend hours debating between recipes at the top of course, but also because I was absolutely certain that food would be a passion forever. What I also realized back then, was the immediate bond that can be created with people you don´t know, that might live thousands of km away, but with whom you still feel friendly, at home, in sync, whatever way you choose to describe it.

Minted Zucchini Tagliatelle with Cucumber and Lemon

To anyone else except the FFWD group, this is just a plate piled with unfathomable green and white stuff. To us it´s a lovely salad, Minted Zucchini Tagliatelle with Cucumber and Lemon. In my case it should be zucchini and cucumber tagliatelle because I made faux pasta with both vegetables.

So, say you want to eat healthier and lighter. Well, recipes like this can fool you into feeling you are having a great and succulent meal. For a while at least, then you might dive into the broken potatoes and steak you also made, or the strawberry tart that´s sitting pretty outside in the terrace waiting to be shot for the Sunday post, the same terrace where you´re enthusiastically eating said salad. It is a good recipe mind you, though sweltering weather would probably be mandatory before attempting to have it for lunch. By itself.

I had never made ribbons, though they appear profusely almost everywhere from TV shows to blogs to restaurants. I used a vegetable peeler and it really takes a minute. And they are so cute!

Carob Brown Bread

Somehow, I trick my mind into believing that using whole or gluten-free flours is not as bad when it comes to counting calories. They might be healthier, but the amount is large either way. Bread is bread, especially slathered with butter or jam.

I don´t think I ever baked a white bread to have lying around the house for myself. It just lingers there, like the prisoner before questioning, until it starts to dry out and I give it away or make a strata. Considering the cheese and extra ingredients the latter has, you´re right to question my judgment. But that´s not our point here.

Sunflower Seed Cake

Looking for a plain cake with a twist on a cold afternoon, I came upon a chapter in a book that was about textured cakes. A bit of everything, from rice flour to bran to buckwheat to rye.

Plain cakes are my weakness, but with an added something, like pepper or sweet wine or red wine, they are my ultimate weakness. I have rows of bags with different flours, seeds, dried fruits, you name it. Sometimes I bake with the sole purpose of using them and this afternoon was no exception. Most of the times I discover a good recipe. This cake falls in all those categories. But the real wonder came when I cut it. Do you see the green flecks of sunflower seeds? Did you know they were so green inside? I didn´t.

Zucchini, Corn and Bacon Crepes #SundaySupper

It´s back to school time at our Sunday Supper table, hosted by the talented Nicole of Daily Dish Recipes. That means today, you lucky mommas with kids will get an incredible array of savory recipes to help you through days of waking up early, carpooling, buying last minute how-come-you-didn´t-tell-me-you-needed-this school supplies, lunch boxes, you know, the usual pre- and post-school activities.

I don´t have kids, but my house was full of teenagers at one point, since many years ago I had stepchildren. Not one, not two, but five. Though I didn´t send them to school every morning I had to feed them, during weekends, month long vacations and many days in between. So some recipes entered the rotation and were real life saviors.

Choco Raspberry Ice Cream Sandwich - FFWD

We´re having a celebration at FFWD, since this is our 100^th recipe from the book Around My French Table. Or should I say some people´s hundred mark. I joined late, and missed a few, even this one.

Well, in my defense I have a good argument. We´re supposed to make Peach Melba. You know, with peaches. Which, as I extensively complained about in other posts, can´t find anywhere. I could use mangos, but the last ones I bought tasted a bit like insecticide (is there someone else who understands what I say or is it my taste buds alone?). Not nice at all. I could do a pear melba, but the words absolutely boring come immediately to my mind.

So where do this ice cream sandwiches come from, you´re asking. From the bonne idée. Where it suggests making a vanilla raspberry cassis ice cream and serving it with anything chocolate. Again, I took some liberties and made a cream raspberry cassis ice cream. Such a long name for a simple thing.

Roasted Tomato Bread

 

It´s not spring yet, but today we had a sneak peek at it. Sunny and warm beyond any logical desire considering we still have, officially, one more winter month to surf.  From hail to rain to 24ºC (75ºF), back to dark skies. In the time it took me to bake the bread and go to the terrace and take pictures with natural light, it´s now getting absolutely cloudy. It´ll probably rain, again. So boring. And uneventful.

Popovers - TWD

Sometimes things happen at the right time. Today is my turn, together with the lovely Amy from Bake With Amy,  to host our Tuesdays with Dorie group. We are baking from the wonderful book Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan, and the recipe is Popovers. The contributing baker is none other than the great Marion Cunningham. 

This is my first time making popovers, and boy, they are a tough thing to photograph. 

Even if you, like me, had never baked popovers there´s a big chance you had wanted to for a long time. Just looking at a picture of these incredible golden irregular towers of dough makes most of us drool.

And it´s a very well deserved title they hold. A blender, a few ingredients and a while later you´re taking amazingly tall popovers from your oven.

Late Harvest Citrus Cake #SundaySupper

This is my kind of Sunday Supper theme. I could easily spend a few weeks posting about cooking and baking with wine.

Though this country is well-known for it´s Malbec, which I used in the red wine velvet cake, I decided to take another route, the sweet late harvest road that took me straight to a cake. This is a type of wine that I´m not familiar with. My research let me know that it´s sweetness comes from harvesting the grapes later than regular wines, so the natural sugars become more concentrated. At least that´s my interpretation from the many articles I read. Wine experts will probably be rolling their eyes right now. Too bad they´re not here so I could distract them with a piece of this cake. 

Our country´s wine estates are located mostly in the province of Mendoza. That´s were the malbec grape found it´s natural habitat. We have really good red wines here. You don´t have to pay a lot to be able to uncork a good bottle.

Chocolate Pepper Loaf

I had forgotten how good this cake was. I didn´t even try to make you guess the secret ingredient. As the word implies it has black pepper in it. A regular chocolate loaf with a piquant aftertaste that just makes your mouth tingle.

It´s extra chocolaty since it has both melted chocolate and cocoa, which in my opinion is the ultimate way to achieve the deepest chocolate taste.

I´m so happy these days. I had to make a few work related decisions in the last few months, and they are all coming together wonderfully. The feeling of scary emptiness turned into happy emptiness, with that familiar void of anticipation when things start to change for the better.

So we should celebrate with chocolate cake in loaf form and some black pepper in the batter. Just to spice things up. Just because I´m feeling happy and want everyone to feel that way too. 

I added some dulce de leche and sprinkled ground nuts and chocolate cookie crumbs… just because. This is a great plain chocolate pepper cake with a wonderful crunchy top.

This recipe was served to Jacques Pepin and he had a hard time figuring out the `exotic´ flavor.

Cafe Style Grated Carrot Salad - FFWD

We´ve chosen a carrot salad for today´s recipe from Around My French Table.

I made this at the last minute and ate it for dinner with a blackened piece of rump steak. It was, much to my amazement, wonderful. We really liked it.

As far as salad simplicity goes this is almost just grated carrots, considering the walnuts, raisins and parsley are optional ingredients in the recipe. The rest is just raw carrots and a honey mustard vinaigrette. And for that you need a recipe?

Well, the vinaigrette is, according to my taste buds, perfect. I make this kind of dressing a lot, and usually end up with an un-balanced result and spend the next five minutes adjusting it. A little bit more honey, then it needs more salt, but then it tastes too salty so it´s a bit more vinegar, and so it goes…

Glazed Blueberry Cocoa Buns #TwelveLoaves

I jump at the idea of baking bread. I like them all. Lately I´ve been experimenting with different flours and a few days ago I made one with carob powder. A very interesting combination with amaranth flour. The days are usually good at this time of year for bread baking, dry and cool.  We still get very humid ones, but occasionally.

So joining Twelve Loaves was a no brainer. In the baking department I really love a challenge. They come courtesy of the season. Since it´s winter here in the southern hemisphere there are recipes that can be substituted, like mangoes instead of nectarines in a pie, and others that prove to be more complicated.

Pulled Pork Sliders + Bourbon Barbecue Sauce

There are some combinations that never fail. Pulled pork + barbecue sauce + slider works for me every time. Not that I eat them often. It´s a new discovery in my kitchen. I´ve had different variations of these mini sandwiches, but not with pork.

Now I´ve stumbled upon the perfect way to cook pulled pork, which according to my recipe is slow roasted. Just rub the piece of pork with a dry combination of spices and salt, cover it with foil and pop it into the oven for at least 4 hours at a very low temperature. The result is fantastic.

About the meat, my absolute favorite is boneless pork shoulder (bondiola de cerdo). It´s the most flavorful and with the right amount of fat to make a succulent slider. So for now, I will give my other favorite pork recipe a rest. 

Pear Choco Walnut Coffee Cake #SundaySupper

It hailed yesterday. After a week of complaining about how it rained almost every day, mother nature delivered this . Just her sweet way of saying shut up.
We´re having a rainy Sunday Supper table here, which doesn´t bother me at all since we´re having cake. Still warm, with chunks of fruit inside, walnuts and chocolate chips on top. Another very good coffee cake recipe to add to my collection. Full of flavor, simple and kid-friendly. Wrap it up and put it in your kid´s lunchbox. 
This cake came out surprisingly good. First I thought my cake tin would be too big, and then my batter curdled like crazy, even after the last batch of flour was added. Curdled batters make me feel very dumb, like how can I still get those after a million years baking coffee cakes? I make my own puff pastry but I can´t get a cake batter not to curdle? There was nothing else to do but pop it into the oven and wait.

Double Chocolate Scones

The rain is giving way to some pretty interesting baking recipes. These scones are proof.

I grew up eating scones. The scones, the ones that came from Ireland with my maternal great, or was it great-great, grandmother. The recipe that very few were able to make as she did. Or so they said. By the time I was interested in baking only one person deserved such title, and though I stood elbow to elbow while my aunt made the scones, I still couldn´t duplicate them.

So what´s a girl to do? Find her own scone recipe that will eventually become the scone. Tough luck to label something that way today. Don´t even get me started on the ridiculous idea that there can be one scone I could settle for and be happy. Never mind happy, I can´t even be contented with just one. Because more than eating them I simply love baking scones. On rainy days like today they beg to be made and eaten right out of the oven. Is there another way to eat them? I don´t think so. Always warm. That´s the best way if they are sweet and if they are savory.

Strawberry Galette

For some reason, every time I set out to buy strawberries for a TWD recipe, it´s raining. And then it doesn´t stop for a few more days. It happened when I made the strawberry cake and when I made this galette. Just saying.

Back to our recipe today, it´s a berry galette by contributing baker extraordinaire Flo Braker. She is truly a master, I love her recipes and I think this one is no exception.

It starts with a sweet dough that has cornmeal in it. Just my kind of mystery ingredient. Cornmeal adds a crunchy texture and a golden color that is a delight. This galette dough is easy to put together and to work with. The other interesting ingredient is sour cream, which makes it very tender and rich but not greasy.

 used my food processor to make it. Mix sour cream and ice water. Blitz flour, cornmeal, the tiniest amount of sugar, salt and butter. Add the water mixture, pulse a few times, wrap the whole thing up and let it rest in the fridge for a few hours.

Fig and Apricot Coffee Cake

I finally slept almost ten hours last Saturday. I had been going to bed after midnight, somewhere between 1 and 2 am, and waking up no more than five hours later. It went on for almost a week. You´d think that a couple of sleep deprived days would be enough, but they kept on happening. The thing is that I can sleep late if I want, but my brain and body weren´t very collaborative. Until this weekend when out of the blue I finally had my beauty sleep. Being sleep deprived for no reason makes me cranky and gives me headaches. Well, even if I do have a reason the results are still the same.

Cinnamon Toast Bread Pudding #SundaySupper #CookForJulia

Our Sunday Supper table today is honoring the incomparable JuliaChild and I´m sitting down to have brunch with her and this wonderful recipe that combines the perennial favorite that is cinnamon toast with a vanilla custard, resulting in a sweet and creamy bread pudding. A recipe from the great Julia of course.

Most countries have their own way of using leftover bread. Whether in a pudding, toast, sweet or savory, the daily bread is used to it´s last crumb. And most countries have their own JC; ours is of course Doña Petrona.

Bread pudding can be very good if done with the right ingredients and flavors. The combination here is simple, just like comfort food is, the kind childhood memories are made of.

Tomato Cheese Tartlets

I made my own quick puff pastry for this. Impressed? Well, it´s really easy since it uses the processor. Similar to making a pie dough or scones, the difference, of course, is that it needs to be religiously folded like an envelope between four and six times. Otherwise you´ll have a pie dough or a scone. Ha.

The recipe for our FFWD group is Tomato Cheese Tartlets, very Mediterranean, very Italian meets south of France flavor. Tomatoes, pesto or tapenade, mozzarella, puff pastry.

Clearly something to be eating while soaking up the sun in the Amalfi Coast or in Cannes while trying to enjoy a few days of vacation. You get the idea right? Do I need to tell you once again what a bleak winter day it is today? I know you´re getting tired of my endless whining, but it´s only for a few more months. Then we can switch places.

Since it´s all about the attitude, let´s go into the kitchen and make use of our lovely tomatoes and fresh mozzarella. I made neither a pesto nor a tapenade in the traditional way, I just threw sun dried tomatoes, arugula, basil, garlic, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper in the food processor. 

The pastry came out really good. I processed flour, salt and butter not too much, leaving pieces of butter the size of peas and bigger. Then I added some ice water, a few more blitzes and dumped it onto the counter. Four turns and 1 hour in the refrigerator. Two more turns and the puff pastry is ready to use.

I cut it, pricked it and then froze it for half an hour (like our friend Kathy suggested in the Q&A) before baking it. There´s definitely something glorious watching puff pastry come out of the oven, golden, puffed and smelling like melted butter.

The topping is made up of all those Mediterranean flavors I simply am mad about: olives, sun dried tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, balsamic. I already made my point with the ciabatta sandwich.

I baked the puff pastry with cherry tomatoes, thyme, salt, pepper and olive oil. They roasted a bit and were soft and had started to release their juice when I took the tart out of the oven. I immediately put the room tº fresh mozzarella on top, a few Tbs pesto/tapenade paste, olives, drizzle of olive oil. By the time I ended taking some pictures and took the first bite, the cheese had started to melt a bit. It was simply delectable, finger-licking good. 

I have to say that I believe the puff pastry is a must for the result to be so good, wether store bought or homemade, it should be all butter and fresh. 

This is a perfect appetizer, who wouldn´t want such an amuse-bouche? Who wouldn´t be happy eating tiny, fresh and flavorful little tarts like these while waiting for the rest of the guests to arrive?

And for the host it´s a snap to prepare, since most ingredients can be made in advance.

An absolute winner in my book of recipes. And for the record, I´m writing this having used winter tomatoes, wait till I get my hand on sun kissed ones. 

Check out this page to see what the other Doristas made for today. 

QUICK PUFF PASTRY

from Flour, by Joanne Chang

The ingredients are exactly according to the recipe. I changed the preparation instructions a bit since I used the food processor instead of the stand mixer.

Ingredients

2 1/3 cup (330g) all purpose flour

½ cup (60g) cake flour

1 ¼ teaspoons salt

1 pound (454g) cold unsalted butter, cut into small cubes

½ cup ice water

Directions

For ice water, fill half a glass with ice cubes and add cold water. Reserve.

Put flours and salt in the bowl of the food processor fitter with the steel blade. Pulse a few times to mix. Scatter butter on top of flour, and using on/off button, pulse until butte is the size of lima beans, no smaller than peas. Add almost all of the ice water and process, in the lowest setting, for 5 seconds. If it´s too dry add the rest of the water and process for about 10 more seconds, until the dough comes together in a shaggy, rough-looking dough. Don´t over process.

Dump out the dough onto a generously floured work surface and pat it into about an 8-inch (20cm) square. Using a rolling pin, roll out the dough into a rectangle, about 15 to 18 inches. Flour the dough and rolling pin as needed to prevent sticking, but brush the excess flour from the dough when making the turns.

Make the first turn: with the aid of a dough scraper, lift one third of the dough from the top, and flip it down onto the middle third. Do the same starting from the bottom with the remaining third of dough. Turn the dough clockwise, so that the short side is parallel to the working surface and the long side with the opening is on your right side. Repeat the rolling into a rectangle, the folding in three and turn to the right another three times. A total of four times.

Refrigerate for 1 hour and no more than 2.

Repeat two times the rolling the dough, folding it in 3 like a business letter and turning it to your right. The total will be six turns.

Now your dough is finished but needs to be refrigerated for at least 1 hour before using it.

You can refrigerate it, wrapped in film for 2 days or frozen for up to 1 month.

To make tartlet bases:

On a floured surface roll the dough about ¼ inch thick. Cut into squares using a long, sharp knife and making a clean cut, no seesaw motion. Transfer the squares to a baking tray, prick the dough well and freeze for half hour.

Preheat the oven to 350º F / 180º C and transfer directly from the freezer to the oven.

If you choose to bake with an ingredient on top, arrange it directly on the frozen dough.

Bake for 20 to 30 minutes until puffed and golden.

Nutella Polka Dot Cheesecake

Do you see the polka dots? Not really huh? They´re supposed to be there, fat, round and dark. It´s the idea behind the name. Really can´t have that name if you don´t see the dots. Maybe you thought it was a marbled cheesecake. But no, this is a most interesting recipe from that great baker I talk about whenever I get the chance. So this will be about the cheesecake only.

You see, it worked the other times I made this cheesecake with chocolate polka dots, as was intended in the original recipe. Perfect dots throughout the cake. I guess I got carried away and used too much hazelnut spread or too little. I´ll tell you next time I make this.