Lemon Pudding Cakes

I love America's Test Kitchen, Cook's Illustrated, and Cook's Country. I have a mail subscription to Cook's Illustrated, and I tear out and keep probably three-quarters of the recipes in every issue. But I have an online subscription to Cook's Country - which, as far as I can tell, is the simpler, more down-home relative - and if I need a specific recipe, I go there first. Every one I've tried has turned out great, and they tend to be a little less fussy than the ones in Cook's Illustrated.

I've made this lemon pudding cake once before, exactly the way the recipe's written - baked in a single 8x8-inch pan. It's got a creamy, custard-y bottom, with souffle-like cake on top. A little whipped cream balances the tartness really well.

We've been having friends over to enjoy the deck that Allen built, and I thought that individual - and closeable - containers would make this really easy to set out at a party, and easy for guests to serve themselves. It also makes the recipe way more adorable, which is really important.

Pretty-Good-For-You Apple Crisp

Some otherwise completely sane people believe that every dish presents an opportunity to ruthlessly cut fat, salt, and calories. That's not me. While it would be recklessly dishonest of me to say that I do everything in moderation, I believe that a cook has a duty to aim for the sublime, and if transcendence is achieved with a stick of butter, then try to limit yourself to a few bites.

That being said, I’m always glad to find a healthy recipe that delivers on more than just fiber, and I’ve found that Cook’s Country – the sister publication of Cook’s Illustrated, and published by public TV's America’s Test Kitchen – actually has some pretty great ones.

Most of the excess calories in a fruit pie or cobbler are delivered by a buttery, sugary crust, and it just can't be made healthy. A whole-wheat, low-fat pastry dough is an abomination that none should endeavor to eat. The pastry part of this apple crisp is rolled oats, a few pecans, a sneaky secret ingredient, and a little bit of butter and sugar. It’s delicious and satisfying. (And begs for you to keep in mind that two tablespoons of whipped cream have only 50 calories - a little cream adds a lot to this dessert.)

Edible Holiday Presents

I am living life right now in full-blown Christmas mode. I've spent most of my adult life developing a Christmas playlist that isn’t terrible (Allen would argue with that), and it's playing on a loop. My Christmas presents are wrapped – not because I’m so together, but because few things fill me with glee like a bunch of wrapped packages stacked up in our living room. The only ones left to deal with are those presents that have yet to be made.

Every year, Allen and I make a bunch of edible gifts – pralines, granola bars, four kinds of truffles, and sometimes peanut brittle or marshmallows. The truffles are the most well-loved among their recipients, and the most time-consuming. Every year, I naively look forward to the magical night, a week or so before Christmas, when Allen and I will get home from work, prepare our mise en place, wash our hands, and calmly execute dozens of perfectly spherical, glossy confections. And every year those candies deliver us to the brink of sanity and coat two rooms of our house in a fine layer of Dutch-process cocoa.

But year after year, we soldier on.

Cherry Crunch

We've had some great prices on cherries here lately, and I can't resist them at the grocery store or Farmer's Market. There's a little cafe here in Decatur - Our Way - where my best friend and I used to go almost every day in high school during the period when we were supposed to be working on the yearbook. (Represent.) We were rebels. We'd get the three-veggie plate, sweet tea, and I always got cherry crunch.

I've been trying to approximate their recipe for upwards of a decade, and since the restaurant was closed for several years, I've been doing it from my memory of that wonderful dessert. And I think that if I were willing to add two more sticks of butter to this recipe, I'd have it. But let's just leave it at a cup, shall we? Recipe after the jump.

French Macaroons

Why am I, the self-proclaimed and post-evident non-baker of the two of us, hell bent on making macarons (we're talking French macaroons, not to be confused with these)? A cookie with firm but delicate shell that makes what's an actually chewy cookie so deceptive, a wide range of flavors and fills, bite size... I could go on about these but I think we all know why they are so great. I think, for me, it's also about the challenge. These suckers take time to get right and how you complete each step matters. Much has been written on the science -- and a science it is -- of making macarons yourself so I'll share the sites I've found to be most helpful and the experiences, flops and all, I have had. I'm still quite the novice with just about 5 batches under my belt, but maybe you'll try or have tips to share?

Jump!

Irish Soda Bread

We've freshened up the site a bit! A new masthead above, and to your right you'll now find a column to hold a curated selection of seasonal and holiday ideas. This way, many of the most relevant posts are right up front!

Now, on to the soda bread. A recipe and chocolatey bonus after the jump!

KING CAKE!

It's Mardi Gras season! Every year (or, the last two, that is) I've had a Mardi Gras party. My best friend is from New Orleans, and we went often to beautiful New Orleans during college - that's how I met King Cake (different than the French Galette des Rois Elizabeth shared last year). This is a traditional cake during the Mardi Gras season; the sweetness does not kid around, and inside is small baby (what's a cake without one, I ask?). The person who gets the slice with the baby has to buy the next cake.

The party gives me a reason to have King Cake at least once a year. And here in Boston, most have never had it before, so I get to introduce others to the tradition. Step-by-step guide on making your own cream cheese-filled (my favorite!) New Orleans King Cake after the jump.

(So many baking posts - what's that about?)

fresh apple cake

Apologies for the onslaught of posts about baking. But seriously, go make this cake right now. It is so easy - the hardest part is peeling the apples - and it is so damn good. Super moist, with some light, crispy caramelization at the edges and top. Perfect for taking to a dinner with friends.

Make sure your oven's the right temp - just invest $3 in an oven thermometer - and follow the instructions to a tee.

Over and out.*

*I've been using a walkie-talkie a lot at work.

honeycomb pie

I received The Pie and Pastry Bible as a gift at Christmas, and I absolutely love it. It reminds me a lot of Bo Friberg's The Professional Pastry Chef - both books cover the basics of nearly every technique or recipe, and then explore the myriad fun variations of each.

The recipe for this apricot and honey chiffon pie came from the book, and it's a good recipe, but the best part is the frivolous, fanciful effect of the "honeycomb" on top. The secret is after the jump.

chocolate babka

Here's the thing about our household. I found this recipe in Martha Stewart's excellent Baking Handbook when all of Atlanta was trapped under snow, making do only with what it already had in its kitchen pantries. The recipe calls for a full two pounds of one type of chocolate, and I thought, "Well, I'm sure we've got that!"

Good thing I made it; this bread sustained us and neighbors through a full three days of offices-closed, grocery-stores-depleted, full-on Deep-South snow freakout.

recipe: the New York Times' chocolate chip cookies

I like chocolate chip cookies very much, and I've always thought them pretty fool-proof. The Nestle Toll House recipe is easy, and it always makes a good, serviceable cookie. Frankly, I preferred cookies with a little embellishment, like these peanut butter cookies.

But now I've tried Jacques Torres's cookie recipe (via the New York Times), and I will never go back. These cookies are perfect right out of the oven, perfect a day or two later when they're chewy and substantial, and perfect as raw batter that you're powerless to stop eating. Yes, the recipe is a bit fussy, and you could probably manage without using two different kinds of flour, but I would make it to the letter at least once if I were you - you'll be impressed.

I have adapted this very minimally, first to make measuring the flour a bit easier, and then to decrease the size just a tad - I like my cookies big, but not salad plate big.

I made these cookies to go along with our Halloween costumes, and if Oscar the Grouch didn't like cookies before, he does now.

diy: monster costumes

Halloween was over a week ago, so sorry about this. I've had very important things going on, like fashioning casual headwear for my dog and reorganizing my tart pan collection. But now - an easy (also, very undetailed) explanation of making a monster costume.

Tin Can Cakes

I did a bad, bad thing. I waited so long to put this post together that I can barely remember what the process was for the two I made. I know the goal: it was to make cakes in non standard sizes like this for two birthdays. I know the outcome: I did end up with two cakes from two different cans. Luckily, I took lots of photos and I think I'll be able to re-tell the story fairly well. I hope. Lots of photos and fuzzy memories after the jump. That's tempting enough to prompt a click, right?

recipe: pumpkin cheesecake

The autumnal months bring out certain obsessions in me – wool blankets, fires on the hearth (sometimes despite 60-degree weather), the relentless pursuit of “coziness” in our household’s furnishings and food. My most specific fall food craving is pumpkin - which works out because it’s basically great in everything. I'm not ashamed to admit that my preferred pumpkin is canned (and I'm not alone in this). I’m all for using fresh ingredients, but I feel about this the way I feel about homemade-versus-store-bought chicken stock – I’ve tried it both ways, and I can’t see enough difference in the taste or the ingredients to go through the trouble of making it from scratch at home.

A Cake to Carry

I mentioned that yesterday I made this Orange Cake. My first reason for making it was that it looked delicious and light and would give me a reason to stop thinking about my portfolio for a bit. And after I committed to making it, I realized that it's also really transportable - and I felt that was worth of another mention. As person in a city where most of the people do not have cars, we're always having to compromise with what we can take where. Can I bring this on the T? Will it fit on my bike? This cake is baked in a bread tin and topped with an orange marmaladesque topping and powered sugar. You can keep the cake in the tin, put powdered sugar in a short mason jar (I have a ton of these, I much prefer storing in glass than plastic and the Salem Street Hardware Store lets you buy them individually) with cheese cloth over top and put the orange topping in another small container (these in particular are from Crate and Barrel and I use them often). Lid and wrap and put in another bag and you're ready to go, easy for the subway or a bike ride. When you get to where you're going you can easily heat up the sauce and cake before serving at your destination - and when you dust it with powdered sugar it will hardly look like something that's bumped around on it's way there.

thoughts on homemade wedding cake

I love this article on endeavoring to make a homemade wedding cake. It perfectly describes all the steps I, too, took - those mental and physical. Making a wedding cake is terrifying and, hopefully, gratifying. The time I spent assembling the two wedding cakes I've made on-site comprise two of the most stressful hours of my life.

Check out NPR's other Kitchen Window stories here.

baking for parties

I'm much more into pies and pastries than I am into cakes. There's not much in the world that's more perfect than a (good) apple pie with vanilla ice cream, and my love for warm-weather pies knows no bounds, including cool weather. However, pies are a bit of a pain - making dough, rolling it out, fitting it into a pan, and then handling whatever process the filling calls for. After all this, a standard 9" pie pan only serves eight good-sized slices. In this past summer season of cookouts and parties, that would have had me making three or four pies to serve just part of my extended family.

The solution, it would seem, is to simply make bigger pies - this way, you still do everything once but yield 30-50% more deliciousness, and it's really not any harder to roll dough out to ten inches than to nine inches.

I've found that one of the easiest ways to bake large quantities of dessert - as well as lend a nice-looking uniformity to the table - is to use a 10" springform pan or pastry ring in place of your usual pie or cake pan. This gives the pies straight, elegant edges, and makes them look more professional (when you order a piece of pie at a restaurant, it's often cut from a 10" - or larger - straight-sided pie). I like to cut mine into 16 pieces, which allows party guests to go easy on dessert, or to try a couple of different flavors.

recipe: peach-blueberry cobbler

No, cobbler isn't pie, strictly speaking. But pie is cobbler's closest cousin.

Fruit cobblers are incredibly varied. Wikipedia has a surprisingly ridiculous entry on the dish, which features the phrase "the Slump, the Buckle, and the Sonker." Here in the US, cobbler usually features a rolled pastry, a biscuit-like pastry, or a cake-like pastry. Each has qualities to recommend it, but my recipe is for a buttery cake-like pastry, and it's delicious and really easy. The most tedious part is peeling the peaches, and there's a trick for that.

recipe: chocolate cream pie

Pie season continues apace! Today is chocolate cream pie, which might be my very favorite thing to eat.

I mentioned in the key lime post that this pie is complicated - and I think I misspoke. It's actually very simple, but with a few more steps than the ridiculously-easy key lime. Won't you join me on this delightful trek toward hyperglycemia? It's worth it.

Granola and Sewn Parchment Bag

I'm a big fan of granola. For about the last year I've come to make it almost every other week as a big bowl of plain yogurt, granola and fresh fruit has become one of my staples. This is post is a double whammy. BAM. BAM. One, my favorite granola recipe and two, a granola giving gift bag project. An easy to make bag from parchment paper for when you don't have tupperware to spare, glass jars to part with or because you look for any reason to use your sewing machine. Go, granola, go!