A Little Sweet Interlude After A Prolonged Quietude

Hey.  I sorta rhymed.  “Interlude”…”quietude”.  Yeah, I know, keep my day job.

Sorry I’ve been MIA for so long.  Haven’t been feeling the blogging muse, although I have been cooking, and making some yummy stuff.  And I’ve been documenting it, so we have some nummies stashed away waiting hopefully for an influx of the enchanting prose you’ve come to expect from me (kafff, kafff, kafff…..).

Seriously, I know I’ve promised, publicly, that I’d keep this puppy going come Hell or high water, and I feel really, not guilty, I try not to do guilt, but “loser-ish” for dropping the ball for so long.  Pinkie swear I’ll try not to do that again.  And I really promise not to bore you all with any of the ultimately inconsequential reasons for my absence.  Let’s just say I missed all y’all, and hope you felt even an iota of the same.

All rightie then.  Keep calm and carry on.

OK, so now that we’ve cleared the air, sort of, let’s talk about sweet little nibbles that are nice to have around the house.  Desserts, mid-afternoon snackies, tea-time goodies, a little sweetness with that cuppa first thing in the morning.  All of them are pretty damned nice treats.  Lord knows, I have a sweet tooth a mile wide.  Several sweet teeth actually.  I do loves me my sweets.  Candy, cookies, cakes, fruit crisps and crumbles, icey creams, sweet scones and biscuits and buns, pastries, all those little delicacies, save pies.  Not a huge pie fan am I (there I go rhyming again….).  But don’t get me wrong, I’ll eat a nicely made pie in a New York minute.

That said.  I don’t cook a lot of sweet stuff.  My sweet temptations are usually purchased.  Why?  Good damn question, and one I’m working to correct, since home-made stuff’s sooooooooo, so very much better than MegaMart purchased, and has better ingredients.

Part of the issue is that, as we know, it’s a single-Homo sapien household.  While the little fuzzbombs would dearly love to take excess cupcakes or doughnuts off of Mazziedog’s hands, I don’t want either the veterinarian bills or the 300-pound dogs sharing my bed that would come with such garbage disposal duty.  So no sweets for them.

And I also don’t want the 300-pound Mazziedog either.  Given the proper sweet inputs, I’d blow off breakfast, lunch AND dinner, and just scarf the sugar plums.  Or…..I make something that serves 12, have half of it, and then it either gets too stale to eat, or I get tired of it (me and that leftover thing….).  So, I don’t cook sweets as often as I would like.

I’m trying to change that.

The Cake Is NOT A Lemon…

….although it *IS* a lemon cake.

I have to say, one of my favorite flavors in the “sweet” end of the spectrum (and frankly, even in the “savory” end) is lemon.  I love the pucker, the bright, sparkly tang, the hit of acid that melds so well with the sweet of sugar (or chocolate, for that matter, chocolate and lemon is a great combination).  Lemon lifts and lightens the sometimes cloying heaviness of cakes, cupcakes and cookies, and truly does refresh the palate as a closer to a heavy meal.  Lemon sorbets and ice creams are a lovely, refreshing end to a summer’s meal of pasta or grilled meat, especially if there’s been lemon used in the entrée as an acidic punch.  Sort of brings the meal full circle.

A few years back, I made a wonderful lemon ice cream with a blueberry sauce that I still dream about.  Someday, maybe next summer, I’ll make it again and share it with you.  Can’t do it right now….my freezer is waaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy too full to have room for the ice cream maker bowl, *AND* for the finished icey cream !  Need to eat down some of the stock-pile, I guess.

But as always, I digress.

What we have today is a lovely, very easy, fabulously tasty double-lemon cake, made even better by the use of Meyer lemon juice.

Surely, most, if not all, of you know about Meyer lemons.  You’ve at least heard of them.  Some of you, however, may be wondering what the big whup is about them.  Those of you thinking that, have, most likely, never tasted a Meyer lemon, for the most wonderful thing about Meyer lemons is Meyer lemon's a wonderful thing (props to Tigger for the quote !).

Meyer lemons are a cross between a normal lemon and a mandarin orange.  The skin is extremely thin, and edible.  It has only the tiniest, thinnest layer of the bitter, white pith normally found under citrus skin.  The flesh and juice of the Meyer is much sweeter, and much less tart and acidic, than the normal lemon.  “Floral” is a term frequently used to describe the taste of Meyer lemon juice and flesh.  It’s still lemony, for sure, but a kinder, gentler lemon, very fragrant and compelling.  They were grown for centuries in China as an ornamental houseplant, where it was discovered in the early 20th century by a US Department of Agriculture employee named….guess what….Frank Meyer.  He brought some plants back to the US, where they flourished in California, Florida and Texas.  After being almost wiped out by disease, they’ve made a comeback in the last 10 or so years, thanks to the endorsement of two icons of Le Chic Cookery, Alice Waters and Martha Stewart.  Both of these paragons of “good things” embraced the Meyers and from there, well, the rest, as they say, is sort of history.

OK, enough of the (boring) history.  Let’s bake a cake shall we?

Here A Figgy, There A Figgy…

Happily, in my little kitchen, everywhere a figgy figgy !

Even though I most certainly am NOT a fan of typical Summer weather (although, honestly, I got nothing to b*tch about this year in SoCal….so far….although I’m sure, dead-bang sure our time is comin’….), I absolutely AM a fan of the bounty of fruits and vegetables that comes along with the heat and the long, sunny days.

I’ve already shared my reverence for vine-ripened, sun-warmed straight-from-the-vine beefsteak tomatoes (got another haul in the CSA share this week and about another 6 ready to ripen in the backyard in the next few days…*big grin*).  Corn is plentiful, sweet and tender, and we’ll be seeing some corn dishes real soon, because they’ve been featured in the little kitchen for the past week.  Corn….how do I love thee??

But there goes that silly digression trait of mine again.  Because the reason we’re gathered together here today, my friends, is to celebrate the pinnacle of the late Summer/early Fall produce bounty.  The fig.  To me, the fig, in all of its succulent, jammy, sweet, seedy glory, is what all fruits aspire to be.

I came late to the fig love.  Oh, I’d eaten my share of Fig Newtons when I was a snot-nosed kid, and even purchased The Newts pretty frequently as an adult, but I honestly can’t remember seeing a fresh fig commercially until about 5 or 10 years ago.  I think I might have had some friends that had fig trees in their yards, but I wasn’t interested enough to ask them to share (or they were too covetous of their bounty more likely).  I’d certainly seen them dried, and again, purchased them, used them in cooking, and eaten them.  I liked them (as I did The Newtons), but thought, “eh, no big whup”.

Then….at a Farmers’ Market a few years back, I saw a carton of fresh ones.  They were hideously expensive, but since I’m the die-hard trendoid foodie that I am, I took the plunge.

I got home, rinsed one off, took a bite and…

My Big, Fat Mexican Dinner

A few weeks back, I did a belated birthday dinner for one of my closest friends.  When I have friends over, it’s usually ALWAYS cook’s choice.  Its my chance to try out new stuff, revisit old favorites, play with new techniques and flavors and, most especially, make those*big ticket* high yield dishes like stews and braises and baked pastas and so on that I normally don’t make just for myself.  That pesty leftover issue, you know (plus the fact I don’t want to have dogs that weigh 300 pounds, because *THEY* would gladly relieve me of my leftover burden).

That changes for Birthday Dinners.  If I’m cooking for you for your birthday, you get to choose the entire menu.  Them’s the rules.  It’s your day, it’s all about you, not me (for once, because usually it IS all about me, all the time, which probably explains a lot, actually…).  Or, when it’s not all about me, it’s all about Rosie.  That Princess thing she’s got goin’ on.  Unless it's your birthday, then it's all about you.  Clear?

So, when presented with the “what do you want me to cook for you for your birthday?” question, Lupe chose Mexican.  Yes, Lupe.  Yes, she’s Mexican.  Talk about performance anxiety !

When I said, “anything in particular…” she said no, but Mexican was it.  OK, so the rules bent a bit, since I still got to choose the particulars.  We were all happy.  I got to play; Lupe got what she wanted for her celebratory feast.

What shook out was pretty damned good, too, especially for a Polish girl from Chicago.  We had carnitas, with two homemade salsas, homemade refried beans, red rice and homemade corn tortillas.  For dessert, we veered away a bit  (OK, a LOT) from Mexico, because I was looking for something light and tangy, since I figured the meal would be a bit on the, shall we say, rich side.  The carnitas, salsas, beans and rice were new recipes (well, new for me to use, they actually came from an 8-year old "Bon Appétit" and have been waiting in the wings ever since….).  The tortillas are my standard, and the dessert I’d made once before and loved.

WARNING:  This is going to be a long, long, looooooooooong, picture intensive post.  But I will give you the complete recipes for everything at the end.  And just so's ya knows, one of the projects I’m working on, and trying to figure out how to accomplish, is to have a separate page with a sorted list of the recipes I’ve posted.  The links will click you back to the original post with the recipe.  I know how annoyed *I* get when I’m blog cruising, and find a great recipe, and have to cut and paste in 45 different steps to get it so I can print it and use it.  But that’s in the Future Machine right now.  So bear with me, there are a couple of gems in here.

Oh, and we had cilantro slaw too, but that won’t be covered here, since we’ve talked about it before.  Basically, shredded cabbage, chopped cucumber, chopped onion and chopped cilantro, dressed with olive oil, lime juice and minced garlic.  It’s good !

Onward to La Fiesta En La Cocina Pequeña!

The Most Delectable Sweet Treat You've Probably Never Heard Of

So….what the heck is that fuhnk-ay lookin’ thing??

Why, glad you asked.  It’s a silicone canelé mold.

What’s a canelé?

Why, glad you asked that as well.

A canelé (or alternatively, a cannelé) (pronounced KAH-nuh-lay), is an absurdly delicious, incredibly rich, creamy yet crispy, custardy yet caramelized, sadly ephemeral “cookie” (or really, I think, but what do I know, more of a tiny, tea-cake type creature) that are originally from the Bordeaux region of France.  Canelés can be eaten for tea, for breakfast, as a dessert, a snack, or what I think is most intriguing….as a nibble with a cocktail or an aperitif wine!  I can so totally see that.

They are typically baked in a tin-lined copper mold, the interior of which is coated with bee’s wax to allow the canelé to slip out.  The batter is essentially a rich crêpe batter, but heavy with sugar, which causes the caramelization of the exterior (which gives you the lovely, crust effect), and without the bee’s wax, you could never remove the canelé from the mold.

Actually, even WITH the bee’s wax, removing the canelé from the mold is a crap shoot.  Thankfully, the culinary gods have given us silicone molds.  Those babies make it a snap to make canelés, and get what the French have coveted for a century or so.

I first heard about canelés on a culinary chat board site I frequent, the eGullet Society Forums.  You’ll also find a link to the main page over to the right.  It’s a cool site, and if you’re not familiar with it, you should check it out.  It’s got a wealth of information from a lot of people who really know their stuff.  At any rate, a while back there was an entire, fairly long, discussion thread about canelés.  And they sure sounded intriguing to me.  Seriously, what’s not to like about a little, two-bite sized nibble of eggy, sugary, custardy goodness, surrounded by that caramelized sugar crust?

Well, except for that whole bee’s wax coated mold and sticking thing.

Coffee-Chocolate Layer Cake with Mocha-Mascarpone Frosting

Hellllllo, tall, dark and velvety….where have you been all my life, gorgeous?  Come on in and stay a while.

Lord help me.  I tried to come up with a sassy, snappy title for this post, but I just couldn't.  Because nothing says it as well as "Coffee-Chocolate Layer Cake with Mocha-Mascarpone Frosting".  I mean, really, just look at that cake, and then look at its name….”Coffee”…”Chocolate”…”Mocha”...”Mascarpone”…is that a lovely little symphony of lusciousness or what?

In the great debate over dessert, custard or ice cream, pie or cake, I fall firmly into the cake camp.  Pie just doesn’t float my boat the way gooey, velvety goodies do.  And a beautiful, delicate layer cake, with creamy, silky frosting is just about the best of the best.  And I’m not talkin’ about those serviceable, but mundane boxed mix cakes, (and never, EVER about frosting in a can) or those industrial sheet cakes from the MegaMarts.  A homemade cake, with a light, tender crumb, and a rich, creamy butter cream frosting.  Wow, that’s Heaven on Earth as far as I’m concerned.

And a treat that, until recently, I hadn’t been able to achieve in the little kitchen.  It’s all about that pesky patience thing, and learning to work methodically and carefully, and taking your time with the ingredients and the process.  I’d tried “scratch” cakes before, and never had success.  They were tough, they didn’t rise evenly, the frosting was heavy and greasy, they were just…*not good*.  Not hideous really, but not worth the effort, and not anything I was proud of.  So I kept the “scratch” cake on the list of “Culinary Things I Really Can’t Do Well”.

Like bread.  After all, “I’m not a baker”.

That didn’t keep me from ripping out recipes though, for cakes that sounded yummy (yes, my recipe clipping compulsion is a sickness.  I fully expect to star in a reality show one day about recipe junkies).  And for the past few months, I’d been thinking I really wanted to give the whole cake baking thing another go.  After all, I had conquered bread, and biscuits, and even pie crusts.  I had learned to not fear the flour.  It was time to climb the Layer Cake Mountain.

So, let’s make this glorious example of the pastry arts, shall we?