The Dining Diva

Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies

Saturday has become predictable.  At 10 AM I meet my friend Chef Vinny for a Pilate's class that used to be on a Pilate's reformer but is now on a gravity machine.  Pretty cool and good for developing core strength and lengthening out the muscles.  After being appropriately stretched, folded, prodded and bent, Vince and I usually adjourn for coffee and a bagel at Twigg's Coffee House .  The coffee isn't that great, but the bagels (and other pastries) are and the ambiance can't be beat.  Here, Vince and I have commiserated about the challenges and woes of our respective lives.  And though we usually don't come to any earth shattering resolutions, we almost always leave feeling better than when we walked in.  Or, we opt for breakfast at any of the great breakfast places that abound in San Diego. 

This past Saturday, however, neither one of us felt like coffee and bagels and we most definitely didn't feel like breakfast.  Oddly enough, what we felt like doing was baking.  Both of us missed our calling to be a pastry chef, though Vince probably had a better opportunity to achieve it being an actual graduate of the Scottsdale Culinary Institute in Arizona.  We baked the Mexican Chocolate Streusel Cake the weekend before; we felt like doing cookies this weekend.  Kind of a warm up for the approaching holiday season. So we turned to a cookbook I already owned and selected a recipe for which I happened to have all the ingredients, or at least almost all the ingredients

We decided to bake the Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies from the All-American Cookie Book by Nancy Baggett.  As I said, I had almost all the ingredients and the ones I didn't have weren't critical. I didn't have an orange, but I had limes, so we subbed that in..........

The lime worked just fine, but as they say hindsight is always 20/20, the orange would have probably provided a stronger flavor note than did the lime.

The really good thing about cranberries is that they last a long, long time when frozen.  And since we're coming up on prime cranberry season I figured why not get rid of what was in the freezer to make room for this year's crop.  So into the work bowl of my trusty Kitchenaid food processor went a bunch of cranberries, 4 oz to be exact

Once they had been coarsely chopped, 3 tablespoons of brown sugar went in

A few more pulses to combine and they came out looking like this.  I love the deep ruby color.

As with any baking project it's really key to get all the ingredients together before you start preparations.  It's called mise en place in the restaurant business and here's ours.

The recipe called for both butter and shortening.  Shortening was another thing I didn't have so we used all butter, 2 sticks, which went into the stand mixer along with 1 1/4 cups of packed brown sugar to be creamed

Something a lot of people forget to do is to scrape down the sides of the bowl during the beating process.  It's a simple step that helps to ensure all the ingredients are well incorporated into the mixture.  Remember, baking is based on formulas with each individual ingredient providing specific parts of the formula.  Scrapping the bowl between each addition will make sure each ingredient gets to do the job for which it was intended.

Next a couple of eggs were added one at a time, beating well after each addition

Then some vanilla, corn syrup and the lime zest were added followed by flour that had been sifted together with cinnamon, cloves, allspice and salt.  The allspice was the last of our ingredient substitutions.  The original recipe calls for ground coriander which I thought I had but didn't.  Since there really is no alternative for that we just used our baking instincts and decided that allspice was probably a better choice than Chinese 5-Spice, though that probably would have worked too.  Anyway, here's the almost finished batter

 

Not to mention my favorite way to clean the beater.  It's all about playing with food.  I love the tactile nature of raw ingredients and food preparation.  Plus, touching and handling the products during preparation trains your hands to feel when a dough or batter is right.

Finally, the last 3 ingredients went it, those cranberries, oatmeal and chopped pecans.

The recipe called for dropping them onto a prepared pan with a coffee measure, which it usually 2 tablespoons.  I grabbed the first one I found in the catch-all drawer and started dropping

Turns out this was a 3 tablespoon coffee scoop and these turned out to be ENORMOUS cookies.  We'd baked 1 dozen when I found the other coffee scoop that was 2 tablespoons and we finished up the baking using that one.

The final results

We liked the cookies a lot.  They had excellent flavor though were softer than we had though they would be.  We will make these again using the orange zest and shortening as called for in the recipe plus one additional add-in.  These cookies would be real dynamite if they had 3-4 oz of finely chopped dark chocolate.  Cranberries, oranges, oatmeal and chocolate.  What's not to like!

Mexican Chocolate Streusel Cake

500 years ago or so, strange and exotic food items from the New World began their trans-Atlantic voyages to the Old World.  In turn the Old World sent some of their favorite food items Westward.  The story of tomatoes is legendary with the Italians being one of the few countries to quickly and lovingly embrace them. And pigs, olives and wheat quickly established themselves in the New World. But by far, the most popular gift from either world was the the Aztecs sent Eastward...... xocolatl, or chocolate.

Chocolate comes from the tropical cacao tree which grows it's cacao fruit at an easily reachable level making them easy to harvest.  The shell of the cacao fruit is easy to crack and the pulp surrounding the bitter seed rather tasty.  While the cacao fruit pulp made man and monkey happy, man discovered that when he ground the shiny, bitter and ate it, it gave him an energy boost that could either wake him up in the morning or keep him awake at night, which ever he needed. It's stimulant properties had been discovered and appreciated.  So much so that gradually over time, xocolatl evolved into a drink - such as it was - for the ruling classes and for ritual, including those heart wrenching human sacrifice for which the MesoAmericans are so well-known. 

The Spanish court took to the new  stimulant drink because, well, because it was a better pick-me-up than brandy at 8 AM in the morning, especially for the royal kids of the court.  Other European royal courts weren't quite so enamored of chocolate as it was being called until a royal wedding brought the ruling families together. The game of one-oneupmanship as practiced by the royal families on that matrimonial party scene went to the Spanish and their fabulous drink. Their party tent became the most coveted invitation, not in small part due to the fact that they were serving this terrific drink they called chocolate. And as evolution is wont to do, the drink gradually changed as competing royal families tried to do each other one better by adding or subtracting ingredients until eventually chocolate as we know it emerged.

Back in Mexico sugar, canela (cinnamon) and ground nuts were added to the xocolatl and pressed into tablet form in order to make it more usable and palatable to the ruling classes.  It was later vigorously frothed in a special pot with a special utensil to make a rich hot chocolate. Because of the added sugar, Mexican chocolate is not the easiest chocolate product to use in cooking.  It tends to be grainy and since baking is based on formulas, sugar quantities in recipes often have to be adapted. But it is possible, after some experimentation, to successfully bake with Mexican chocolate. 

North of the border Abuelita (a Nestle product) and Ibarra are the most common Mexican chocolates found. Over the last year I seem to have collected quite an assortment of chocolate from my travels around Mexico.  Since I had more than I could possible use I decided it was time to reduce the inventory and made the Mexican Chocolate Streusel Cake from Mexico, One Plate at a Time by Rick Bayless.

I'm a pretty good baker, I really enjoy the process, not to mention I have a terrible sweet tooth. There are a couple of things that I usually do to help ensure the success of each recipe I make when I bake.  One is that I read through the recipe several times before starting to make sure I understand it, and I don't make big changes in the recipe formula.  The other thing that I do is to get everything lined up. measured out and ready to go before I start baking.  Kind of a common sense thing, but not everyone does it.  So, back to chocolate, Mexican chocolate. I ended up using 3 varieties of Mexican chocolate --

Popular, which I purchased in Monterrey and which I really like. 

Uruapan which I picked up in Patzcuaro.  I was a little disappointed in it as I felt it was more like Abuelita or Ibarra.  And finally I used a little bit of chocolate that had been grown and hand made in Michoacan

This is actually an unsweetened chocolate containing no added sugar, canela or ground nuts.  It is suitable for baking. I used about 2-3 oz. of this chocolate and about a pound of the other two brands

Because of all the additives in Mexican chocolate it's a more brittle and not as easy to chop as other chocolates.

 

That white line you see in the chunks of chocolate above is sugar, and as you can also see, the product has a tendency to get crumbly or come off in big hunks.

This is the hardest and messiest part of making the cake.

About half the chocolate is reserved for the cake and the other half is put into a food processor along with 7 tablespoons of butter an egg yolk and 1 cup of flour.

It's lightly pulsed until crumbly with some large lumps

As with most cake recipes you start off by creaming fat and sugar together, in this case 2 sticks of butter and 8 oz of cream cheese and 2/3 cup of sugar

   

The objective is to get the sugar to dissolve into the fat which will encourage tenderness and evenly distribute it all though the batter.  Next, come the eggs.  4 of them added 1 at a time beating them well between additions until each egg has been well incorporated

Here I detoured from the written recipe and added 2 teaspoons of vanilla.  Vanilla is a natural with chocolate and especially Mexican chocolate.  So, since it wouldn't significantly alter the formula for the cake I added it and think it perked up the flavor.

The dry ingredients, flour and baking powder, sifted, go in last and are mixed only until incorporated.

And finally, that reserved chocolate was folded into the batter

Into the pan

Add the struesel

And into a 350* oven for 30-35 minutes

Cool..........cut

And serve

This cake is surprisingly rich as a result of the cream cheese and moister than I had remembered.  Rick Bayless recommends serving it warm, it's not bad cold, or at room temperature either.  A couple of baking hints -- I would recommend adding the vanilla and I would make absolutely sure that the baking powder is still active.  Once a can of baking powder is opened it will loose it's power to puff relatively quickly.  If you can't remember the last time you used an open can of baking powder, replace it before you bake.  The streusel topping is heavy, which means that the batter is going to need all the puff power it can get in order for the cake to get a decent rise. 

In addition to being a nice dessert cake, in a pinch, this could also do double duty as a breakfast coffee cake since the crumb is denser and coarser than a regular layer cake.

Didja Know That...

Trivia Time~

Since I seem to be on a baking jag I thought it might be kind of interesting to know how the term baker came about.

It seems that the word baker derives from the Old English baecestre, the feminine of which is baecere, both of which come from the word bacan, meaning to bake.  A female baker was often called a baxter.

Other names, or words, that have been used to identify a baker have been backster, backmann, becker, furner or pistor. 

Furner........ think of a furnace, this being a person who minds the furnace or the oven.  Remember that once, especially when Old English was spoken, all ovens were gas fired, and not fired from natural gas or propane, but from fires that had to be tended and stoked in order to keep them going.  Hence the furnace fire and the job of tending them evolved and the person doing that heated job ended up being called a furner. 

Pistor is a lot less easy to figure out, but in Old English parlance, a pistor is someone who pounds the grains used in making bread, which would typically be a miller or baker. 

"Than all the baxters will I ban

That mixes bread with dust and bran"

From: Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis; 16th c.

(And since 16th century literature is not a specialty of mine, ya'll need to know this quote really came from Wordsmith.org)

Into the Red

Out of the corner of my eye it caught my attention. Supple, lean and screamingly, vibrantly red.  I circled back.  And then circled back again, and by the last pass of the shopping cart I was pretty sure I heard my name being seductively whispered sweet and low.  There, in a pyramid heap at the end of a row of produce lay the vividly red object, not of my affections, but the phantom siren, which, with plump, dewy stalks with pale green, webby leaves were begging to be scooped up and taken home. I had never made such a purchase, nor had I ever really contemplated it before.  But, today was different.  I bagged 5 of the healthiest looking stalks and headed for the checkout counter to make my first purchase of.............rhubarb.

I had grown to adulthood in a family with mid-western roots, one where rhubarb made a routine appearance on dining tables.  But not so much in California.  It was one of the things my parents and small extended family often talked about, but was not frequently found and so faded from the rotation of commonly served family dishes.  As I drove over the hill from Del Cerro to San Carlos I began to contemplate just exactly what was I going to do with this stuff.  Since I knew my mother loved it I asked her first. 

"Rhubarb sauce.  Make rhubarb sauce with it.  That's what we always did with it, and boy was it good."

Somehow, rhubarb sauce wasn't exaclty turning my crank.  I mean, what do you do with the sauce once you've got sauce?  Eat it plain?  It remainded me way too much of the insipid fruit sauces we made out of USDA Commodity fruits from my days as a K-12 Food Service Director, a career from which I have happily, and thankfully, been sprung.  No, rhubarb sauce wasn't going to make it, and, truth be told, I didn't think it was a good enough fate for those 5 ruby red babies safely stored in the hydrator of my refrigerator. 

Next I turned to my cookbook collection.  Some people collect stamps, some collect coins, teacups or even spoons from every state in the union.  I collect cookbooks, some of them even in languages other than English. And I've probably got enough of them to be a viable competitor with Amazon or Powells.  Could there be a suitable recipe in one of the books from my trusty collection? Was I going to be relegated to having to do a dessert dish, or could I find something savory to do with the rhubarb?  Surely, Charlie Trotter or Thomas Keller used rhubarb in something other dessert.  But, egads, what if one of them really did have a savory recipe using rhubarb; would my cooking skills be up to the task of tackling one of their notoriously complicated recipes.  Well, of course.............maybe, probably. 

Luckily, I was saved from having to find out when I came across Rhubarb Tart with Brown Butter Struesel.  I know I said no dessert, but this sounded pretty good and pretty easy, and besides I'm pretty much a pushover for almost anything with brown butter.  I also came across The Rhubarb Compendium clearly the love-child of someone with w-a-y too much time on their hands, but more information about rhubarb than you could ever imagine. 

RHUBARB TART W/BROWN BUTTER STRUESEL is made in 3 parts.  First up the crust.

The tart crust is not the standard pie pastry.  This one has the addition of sugar, egg and cream, which makes it a little bit more forgiving and more likely not to be tough.  Making it in a food processor takes about 90 seconds from start to finish. Pulse the flour, sugar and salt to blend, then add the butter - which, yes, is missing from the picture - pulse a few times until crumbly.  Add the egg and cream, pulse again, and this is what you get

Pastry stright out of the food processor.  It's pretty soft and only slightly sticky.  The next trick is to pat it into all the nooks an crannies of the tart pan.

After much poking and prodding, stretching and patting the crust finally fit the pan.  To prevent it from bubbling up as it bakes, the raw tart shell gets stabbed all over with the tines of a fork.  It can't be baked right now, the pastry is far to soft and warm, it would melt.  So into the fridge it went for 2 hours to firm up.

Meanwhile..................

Time to start the struesel with the items you see to the left.  While the Alton Brown Gear measuring cups might not have been the most efficient cooking equipment I've ever purchased, the Cuisinart saucier pan was.  I bought it from the cookware shop on Amazon.com and it was half the price of the Alton Brown Gear measuring cups.  But I digress. For the struesel topping I'm using butter, brown sugar (packed) flour, almonds (untoasted) and cinnamon

Brown butter is quick and easy and can be done in not more than 5 minutes.  Once the butter is melted, the water in it will evaporate and the milk solids will filter out and down to the bottom of the pan.  Then they will start to take on a nice gold hue and a rich nutty taste.  Browned butter can be used in more than just desserts and works surprisingly well with fish.

Toss in everything else, stir a bit and then set aside to cool.  This stuff is killer.  Very rich and satisfying.  It could probably be sealed in an airtight ziplock and frozen, to have on hand all the time. 

And the star of the show.  The rhubarb that was calling my name.  Trimmed and ready to sacrifice itself for my eating pleasure.

Sugared up and almost ready to go. The tart shell was baked because rhubarb will give up all it's internal liquid once it starts to bake, which would make the tart shell really gummy and gooey if it wasn't pre-baked.

NOW, the tart is ready to go into the oven for an hour

55 mintues later, golden and ready to eat.

So how was it?  It's one of the best desserts I've made in quite a long time.  Bitter isn't my favorite flavor profile, but I discovered I like rhubarb.  It was tart yet sweet.  I couldn't imagine what red celery might taste like.  In my wildest imagination I wouldn't have come up with the real flavor profile.  Like the vibrant ruby red color that seduced me in the grocery store, this dessert is rich and ever so satisfying.  A little will go a long way because, frankly, you can't eat that much of it without making yourself sick.  But I may just try..............

Lime Steals

Key limes, $.99 a bag, what a deal. 15 limes per bag.  What a steal - or at least what a steal for San Diego - but what to do with them.  Oh sure, I could have just squeezed them all and made a big pitcher of Margaritas. Hmmm...............on second thought, not a bad idea. I've got the Mexican lime juicer, one of the best kitchen devices ever invented, BTW.  But no. I was in the mood for something sweet.  I was in the mood to bake.  A lime bundt cake seemed to be just the thicket. 

Baking's not really difficult or time consuming, it's mostly being able to follow instructions and not deviate too much.  With regular cooking you can kind of wing it and get creative, but baking depends upon specific formulas for success.  Mess with the formula too much and it's a recipe for disaster.  Baking is also a little bit like cooking Chinese, it goes better and faster if you get everything ready and assembled before you start baking.  With that in mind, here's where I started

Yeah, that's Alton Brown Gear in the background there.  It looked really cool and really easy to use on his show, but alas, it's not all that convenient, especially when you get to the top of the measure.  It gets messy and hard to fill.  But it does make adding stuff to a KitchenAid stand mixer pretty easy.

First things first, cream the butter, 8 oz of it (or 2 sticks)

Then add sugar.  The purpose here is to get the sugar to dissolve in the butter, or at least get to the point where it's only sort of grainy when you rub a bit between you thumb and finger. Sugar is part of what makes the cake tender, in this case 2 cups of the granulated stuff.  Here's what 5 minutes of creaming will do.

Eggs are next, 5 of 'em.  Eggs add more fat and more tenderness but also act as a binder, it's part of what's going to hold the structure of the cake together.

3 cups of flour that had been sifted with 2 tsp. of baking powder and a 1/2 tsp. of salt - in this case, sea salt from Colima, Mexico - was added to the creamed mixture alternately with 1 cup of milk until barely just incorporated.  I had grated the zest of 4 key limes with my microplane and folded that in and then poured the whole lot into the bundt pan.

Into the oven at 350* the cake went for what the recipe said would be 1 1/4 hours.  I know my oven has a tendency to cook fast, but this was ridiculous. The cake was done after about 35 mintues.  So either the recipe had the oven temp wrong, or the time was wrong........or both.  One of the benefits of having baked my entire life is that I have enough experience to know when a cake is really done. I could kick myself for not trusting my baking instincts.  But nooooooooo, I just couldn't believe the cake was done after being in the oven for less than have the prescribed baking time. I left it in to bake a little longer.

After cooling for 15 mintues I turned it out of the pan onto a rack set over a square of non-stick foil in preparation for glazing.

The glaze is crazy simple; a 1/2 cup of fresh lime juice and 3/4 cup of granulated sugar.  Key limes, on the other hand, are not crazy simple, they're seedy, marble sized citrus fruits that defy easy juicing.  That is at least unless you have the deceptively simple Mexican lime juicer.  Just cut the lime in half, turn it upside down into the bowl of the juicer and squeeze.  It's quick, easy and not an upper body workout like it would be using a regular reamer. The Mexican lime juicer is that silve contraption in the photo below

Since the cake is still pretty hot when the glaze is applied, it will readily soak it up. Some will drip off.  Hence the non-stick foil.  No need to waste the glaze that has dripped off, just mop it up off the foil and keep glazing away until every drop has been absorbed into the cake.

Voila - Key Lime Bundt Cake

It was pretty good, especially with ice cream, but those extra few mintues of baking took their toll.  The texture/crumb was fine and light but a little on the dry side.  There was also a thin, crusty, slightly crunchy shell around the entire cake from too much heat. The Key Lime flavor was pronounced, tart and refreshing. It is a very easy cake to make and I will try it again.  I think this recipe would lend itself to other citrus fruits as well, making this a pretty versatile receipe.  I'm thinking ruby red grapefruit might be an interesting choice, as might orange.

Blackberries, blackberry coulis or that coconut sorbet from Whole Fruit would also go really well with the lime version of this cake.