Tag Archives: Desserts

Peanut Butter Pie with Cookie Crust

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pb_pieCurrently baking out of Baked by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

Every time I consider making something with peanut butter in it, I think of my step-daughter who loves the stuff. And you really can’t get much simpler than this no-bake frozen concoction. In fact, you could leave off the crust and just eat the filling as a frozen mousse.

So Cho, this one is for you.

You start off by making an easy chocolate cookie crust held together by a bit of butter. This crumb mixture gets pressed into a pie pan and left to solidify in the fridge while you make the filling.

The filling is simply cream cheese, smooth peanut butter, vanilla, brown sugar and cream. The cream cheese, peanut butter and sugar are mixed together until smooth. Then you whip the cream to soft peaks and fold it into the peanut butter mixture. Then the whole thing is dumped into the crust and frozen.

There are a couple of things I’d recommend changing. First, the authors have you put a layer of melted chocolate between the crust and the filling. The only purpose I found for this chocolate layer was to make it impossible to get the pie slices out of the pan. It didn’t add anything to the flavor, so I’d just leave it out. And the second change I’d make was to use either a springform pan or a square pan lined with tinfoil instead of a pie pan. The first couple of slices came out of the pan sans bottom crust. That crust was too hard to cut through. By pulling the pie out of the pan, you’ll get a better angle with the knife and can get a spatula or something underneath that bottom crust much easier.

The recipe also calls for an easy hot fudge sauce. The sauce was good and it went really nicely with the peanut butter filling.

Baked Bars

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baked_barsCurrently baking out of Baked by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

You might have heard of these bars under a different titles, such as Seven Layer Bars or Magic Bars. The big thing about this type of bar is that it is made up of seven different layers.

1. A graham cracker crust
2.  Nuts
3. Chocolate chips
4. White chocolate chips
5. Butterscotch chips
6. Sweetened condensed milk
7. Toasted, shredded coconut.

The only change the boys at Baked made was to use the coconut in the crust, along with the graham crackers. This makes for a mighty tasty, albeit crumbly, crust. These are some of the sweetest things to have come out of my kitchen in a very long time, and to even try to eat them without a glass of milk is pure folly.

The crust is a standard graham cracker crust (with toasted coconut added) held together with butter. The buttery crumb mixture is pressed into a pan, refrigerated briefly and then baked until toasty. I liked this crust, but I thought it had too much butter in it. Next time, I’ll reduce the butter slightly.

Once the crust is cooled, it’s topped with a layer of walnuts (sliced almonds, in my case), semisweet chocolate chips, white chocolate chips and butterscotch chips. And if that isn’t enough sweetness, two cans of sweetened, condensed milk are poured over the entire thing. This sugar bomb gets baked until the condensed milk is brown and bubbling.

We could only eat these bars in small, small squares, but they were pretty good. Besides reducing the butter in the crust, if I make these again, I’ll increase the amount of semisweet chocolate and reduce the white chocolate chips and the butterscotch chips.

Dark Chocolate Fleur de Sel Cupcakes with Snappy Butterscotch Icing

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fleur_de_sel_cupcakesSalty sweets seem to be catching my eye lately. First there were those salty oatmeal cookies and now these dark chocolate cupcakes that are liberally sprinkled with coarse salt before baking and after frosting. The cupcakes were good, but the star of this recipe is the butterscotch icing. Oh my.

The recipe comes from a new book by Christie Matheson called Salty Sweets. I got the recipe here.  The first time I made these cupcakes, it was for a family dinner on Christmas Eve. They were easy enough to make, but I thought they could benefit from a few modifications.

First, I scaled down the amount of baking soda from 1 teaspoon to 1/2 teaspoon. I also added 1 teaspoon of instant espresso powder to the batter. Second, and mostly importantly, I doubled the amount of butterscotch icing.

But that icing? Oh. My.

See, you really only need one batch of the icing to cover the cupcakes (unless you like a really thick layer of frosting), but you really should try this stuff drizzled over ice cream or straight from the fridge by the spoonful.

The icing is the only part of the recipe that gave me any trouble. You combine brown sugar, heavy cream, butter, water and coarse salt and cook it, on the stovetop, until it thickens. The first time I made the icing, I let it cook for the 15 minutes that the recipe calls for. Well, it never thickened enough that I could frost the cupcakes with it. I ended up beating the icing with a hand mixer to thicken it.

The second time I made the icing, I let it cook for almost 40 minutes. This time it thickened enough to stay put on the cupcakes, but it was pretty thin. In the end, I think I prefer the beaten version of the icing. It makes for a really nice mouth feel, you can mound it up like frosting, and it just looks better.

Dulce de Leche

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dulce_leche

Almost exactly a year ago, I was wandering around the Borough Market in London. It was my first trip to London, and I was having a fantastic time. The market was full of people and food, and I probably looked like a dolt as I snapped picture after picture. One of the stands I wandered by was selling dulce de leche and giving out free samples.

Now, I’ve had dulce de leche, and it was good. But this stuff was amazing! It was tangy and creamy, with none of that overwhelming sweetness you sometimes find in dulce de leches. I bought a bottle, brought it home and shared it with Bryan. Then I pretty much forgot about dulce de leche until now, when I ran across this recipe here.

With tastebuds tingling at the memory of the dulce de leche from London, I set out to make my own. This really couldn’t be easier. You submerge a can of sweetened condensed milk in boiling water and simmer it for three hours. That’s it. The only hard part is remembering to add water to keep the can submerged. At the end of three hours, well, four hours since you want to let the can cool down, you are rewarded with dulce de leche.

Was it as good as the stuff I got in London? Not quite. That dulce de leche had a tang to it that mine didn’t. Maybe it was made from scratch, or maybe they used goat’s milk. But no matter. This was mine, and it was perfectly lovely spread over the first apples of the season.

Nectarine and Almond Crumb Tart

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nectarine_crumb_tartCurrently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie

Right from the start, me and this tart didn’t get along. It all started when I went to the market to get some plums. You see, the original recipe calls for plums, not nectarines, and for several days running, the market had piles and piles of beautiful plums. Except for the day I went to buy some. On that day, not a plum in sight. But they did have nectarines . . .

Next up was the crust. Mackie calls it a sweet almond dough that is pressed into the pan, rather than rolled out. The dough is made by combining ground almonds, sugar, flour and melted butter. The mixture is crumbled into a tart pan and pressed into place. Sounds easy. Should be easy. It wasn’t. The dough started hardening up right away and made it hard to cover the pan evenly. Eventually, after a lot of swearing and pressing, I got a fairly even crust. That went into the oven to blind bake until golden brown.

After 25 minutes of baking, my crust, when I peeked underneath the beans, was still white and wet. Out came the beans. In about 10 more minutes of baking, I had a browned crust. While the crust cooled, I started on the filling.

Cream cheese, eggs, sugar, lemon zest, cornstarch and nutmeg (basically a cheesecake batter) are mixed and spread onto the crust. Then the fruit is laid on top of the filling and the whole thing is covered with a crumb topping (flour, sugar, cinnamon and chilled butter mixed until crumbly). Again, sounds fairly simple.

My filling was very liquidy and it poured into the crust. And my lovely, beautiful nectarines had no flavor. None. Zip. At this point, I was going to finish this recipe come hell or high water. So, on went the sliced nectarines where they promptly sank into the filling. Adding the crumb topping only submerged them further, but at this point, I didn’t care. I popped the whole thing in the oven and started scraping bits of crust dough off my kitchen floor.

The tart baked for just over an hour and the thing actually had the gall to look and smell really lovely. I let the tart cool for a couple of hours and then cut a slice. Really, I didn’t have any hope that it would taste good (those nectarines . . .). I took a bite. Not bad. I took another bite. It was actually pretty good. Another bite. This is delicious. Something happened while that tart baked. The nectarines got some flavor, the filling firmed up and the crust and crumb topping gave the tart some texture and bite.

In the headnotes to the recipe, Mackie says this is an “easy-to-prepare” tart. Don’t believe it. It has multiple steps and components, not including cooling times. But the end result is completely worth the time and trouble. I was prepared to hate the tart, after all the work and trouble it caused me, but the result was worth it.

Chocolate Whipped Cream Cake and Chocolate Pudding

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Currently cooking from Tasty by Roy Finamore

Here’s the story of the dessert that almost wasn’t . . .

Once upon a time, I offered to provide dinner (with dessert, of course) to Bryan’s niece who just had a baby. Along with a huge pan of lasagna, I planned on wowing her with Finamore’s Chocolate Whipped Cream Cake filled with whipped cream and raspberries. It is elegant, but simple (and very pretty, judging by the picture in Tasty).

choc_cakeAs I was reading through the ingredient list, something caught my eye. The recipe calls for 2 teaspoons of baking soda. Now, according to author Shirley O. Corriher (in her most recent book, Bakewise, she talks about how baking soda/baking powder works and the proper proportions one should use), 2 teaspoons of baking soda is the amount of leavening needed for 8 cups of flour. This recipe has less than 2 cups. So, I anticipated that the cakes would fall, and in the recipe, Finamore says that the cakes will fall a little. Uh, yeah. Take another look at that picture. I’d say my cakes fell *a little*.

So, with visions of a perfect black and white cake crumpling around me, I decided to turn the cake (which tasted fine, by the way) into a chocolate trifle by making Finamore’s version of chocolate pudding (and knocking out another recipe while I was at it).

Fortunately, the chocolate pudding recipe is pretty straightforward. You whisk together, egg yolks, cornstarch and unsweetened cocoa. You temper this with hot milk/cream, then the whole thing goes back on the stovetop to cook. Once it has come to a boil, you take it off the heat and stir in bittersweet chocolate, butter and some vanilla.

I wondered about the lack of sugar in the recipe, but figured that the bittersweet chocolate would provide the sweetening. Wrong! The dry bitterness of the cocoa powder came through loud and clear. Fortunately, the pudding was still liquidy and hot enough that I was able to stir in about 1/4 cup of sugar with no problems (I halved the recipe, so if making a full recipe, you’d need more sugar).

In the end, I got my chocolate trifle and it tasted fine, but I’m sorely disappointed in Finamore. I can’t believe that these two recipes passed muster as is. I did a quick search to see if there had been any corrections posted, but I didn’t find anything. The fix for the chocolate pudding is easy. I’d dissolve 1/2 to 2/3 cup of sugar in the milk/cream mixture as it is heating. For the chocolate cake, I’d reduce the baking soda down to 1/2 teaspoon or use 1 teaspoon baking powder along with 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda.choc_trifle

Raspberry Buttermilk Cake Recipe

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raspberry_buttermilk_cake3This is the perfect little cake. It is quick and easy to make with ingredients that are probably sitting in your kitchen right now. There are no fancy mixing methods, no expensive, hard-to-find ingredients and no decadent frostings. Not too sweet or heavy, this cake is perfect for breakfast or as an afternoon snack. You can use just about any fruit you have on hand, fresh or frozen.

The original recipe appeared in the June 2009 Gourmet magazine. I ran across a variation here. I’ve made the cake twice. The first time I followed the original recipe and used fresh blueberries. That cake was okay. The second time I made several adjustments and used frozen raspberries. That cake was fantastic.

In my version, I cut down on the sugar from 2/3 cup to 1/2 cup. I also cut down on the leavening quite a bit. My version of the recipe is after the jump.

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Black Raspberry Jam Squares

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Currently baking from Great Coffee Cakes, Sticky Buns, Muffins & More by Carole Walter

You know how when you make a recipe and it doesn’t turn out right and you can’t figure out if you did something wrong or if it is the recipe’s fault? Well, that’s what’s going on here. I’m pretty sure I followed the recipe closely, but one bite of these squares was enough; they were promptly thrown in the trash. I didn’t even bother to take pictures.

At first glance, these squares looked promisingly different. The recipe starts off with a shortbread crust that is spread with black raspberry jam. The squares are then topped with a cinnamon meringue studded with walnuts and baked until the meringue is firm.

I had no problems putting the squares together, and they smelled pretty good while baking. But the shortbread crust turned out chalky and gritty, and the jam overwhelmed everything. Even the meringue had its share of problems, including an unappetizing wet texture underneath a hard crust.

This was supposed to be my last recipe out of this book, but I just can’t end it on such a dismal note. That and I have a pile of very ripe bananas sitting on my counter that either have to be used or thrown away. So one Banana Chocolate Chip Cake coming up . . .

Rustic Cinnamon Walnut Horns

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walnut_horns3Currently baking from Great Coffee Cakes, Sticky Buns, Muffins & More by Carole Walter

I’m not sure what to classify these as. Are they cookies? Mini cakes? The lazy person’s croissants? Whatever you want to call them, they are fantastic! Warm from the oven, they are soft and pillowy and full of cinnamony goodness. The walnuts give the horns a nice crunch without overwhelming the other flavors.

You start off by making a batch of the yeasted simple sweet dough. Once the dough has rested overnight in the refrigerator, you roll the dough in chopped walnuts and cinnamon sugar and then roll them out into a square. The dough is then cut into triangles, brushed with an egg wash, sprinkled with more cinnamon sugar and walnuts, and finally rolled into croissant shapes and baked.

There’s something about this yeasted sweet dough that goes well with cinnamon and nuts. I suspect that any nut would work well here. Once you get the yeasted sweet dough made, these are a snap to assemble, but they are even easier to eat.

Apple and Nutmeg Custard Crostata

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apple_crostadaCurrently cooking from The Carefree Cook by Rick Rodgers.

I like apple pie. I like custard. I like nutmeg. But I hated this crostata. Don’t let its looks fool you (or the heavenly smell of it baking). Underneath that flaky crust, is curdled custard swimming in butter.

The premise of this crostata is that it delivers an apple pie in a much easier form. It starts out by making a standard pastry dough with butter. You roll the dough out in to a 12-inch circle, sprinkle some sugar on it and then arrange apple slices on it. A little more sugar is sprinkled over the apples and then the edges of the dough are folded up and over the apples. This gets baked for about 15 minutes to set the crust, and then you pour a simple egg/cream/nutmeg custard over the apples and bake until the apples are tender and the custard is set.

The first indication that all was not well with my crostata was seeing the custard start to bubble. Bubbling custard usually equals scrambled eggs. The crust didn’t bake up as brown as I would have liked; I think brushing it with egg whites or milk would have helped that. The other major problem I had was that a bunch of the butter leaked out of the crust and into the custard, making it somewhat greasy.

I liked the idea of this crostata. Next time, I’ll simply leave out the custard and server it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.