Dessert By Candy

Apple And Yogurt Are Made For Each Other

The classic French yogurt cake is a versatile canvas. It is a cinch to make with tender fine crumb and mild taste. It plays well with many different flavours. My most recent is Apple Yogurt Cake with Cinnamon Streak from The Kitchn, adapted to use whole wheat flour as per my latest habit. This week I’m all about quickbread and this is no exception. What makes this cake special is the diced apples scattered throughout the cake and the little streaks of cinnamon butter. The fruit adds fruity tartness and plenty of moisture to every bite while the cinnamon butter adds little pockets of sweetness.

I used a mix of Northern Spy and Fuji apples in this cake. Northern Spy is my absolute favourite baking apples because they are tart, doesn’t turn to mush, and so full of apples flavour. Fuji is my eating apple of choice and its sweetness balances out the tarter counterpart in the Spys. I love how this cake is packed with fruit. I used 4 medium size apples for the 9x13 cake. Along with all that low-fat yogurt in the batter, I can almost say this is a healthy breakfast treat if I try really hard.

This cake reminds me of baked French toast because it is so moist. Even more so when I serve it with a drizzle of maple syrup! Like most quickbread, the key to tenderness is don’t overwork the batter. It takes barely a few strokes to mix the wet and the dry ingredients together. I stayed very close to the original recipe except for using 50/50 all-purpose and hard whole wheat flour. I also stirred in grated lemon zest before I juiced the lemon. Oh, and a touch of ground ginger too.

This recipe was featured in The Kitchn’s Eat Cake For Breakfast! 15 Cakes for Morning Enjoyment post. What a delightful collection of recipes! I also bookmarked the Oatmeal Cake with Broiled Coconut and I’m sure it will not be long before I give it a spin in my kitchen too. I love the indulgence of eating cake for breakfast but truth be told, when I eat cake with my morning coffee, it is probably laziness more than anything. Grabbing a piece of leftover cake from previous night’s dessert often seem infinitely easier than to come up with a healthy spread at those early hours. Of course there are rare occasions when I actually bake cake first thing in the morning, before anyone wakes up. It is such a lovely surprise for everyone in the house to wake up to the enticing aroma of freshly baked cake.

Pretty Simplicity

I can’t say no to pretty cakes that can be made in under 20 minutes. If that cake is packed with flavour underneath its gorgeous look, even better! As soon as I saw the recipe for Big Girls Small Kitchen’s Pistachio & Marmalade Breakfast Cake over at The Kitchn yesterday, I knew I had to make it. When I discovered that I had every ingredient at home, even down to homemade marmalade and fresh-squeezed orange juice, I knew I had to make it immediately.

What makes this breakfast cake different from all other run-of-the-mill quickbread? Let’s first talk about the flavour combination. Pistachio, orange, and cardamom is one that reminds me of my favourite Scandinavian yeast cakes. Depending on your point of reference, perhaps it makes you think Moroccan. In either case, it’s super delicious and not seen often enough. Secondly, the recipe uses orange marmalade in the batter. Even though I sold and gave away many jars of homemade marmalade, I still have plenty more at home. Score! Last but not least, the recipe calls for cornmeal which naturally lends a lovely golden hue and subtle crunch to the crumb. Delicious! Did I mention how pretty this cake is? For such a small amount of work, it is the perfect snack or dessert to serve unexpected company. Everyone needs a handy recipe like this for emergency situations.

Spice Goddess

Indian cuisine always seems too complex and too intricate for me to attempt at home. Such a long list of spices just the create the simplest home-cooked dishes! For years, I left it to the professionals. Of course, I cannot be more wrong. This ancient cuisine thrives under generations of mothers passing their cooking skills to daughters. It is possibly one of the most home-influenced cuisine in the world. Lacking my own Indian mother, I’m happy to learn from cooking shows demonstrating modern takes of well-loved dishes.

I watch Bal Arneson’s Spice Goddess show from Food Network Canada occasionally when I do my morning workout at the gym. She appears so approachable and the way she cooks just makes sense to me. So what if there are many spices to measure out? I can get used to that. Instead of relying heavily on ghee (clarified butter) and cream, she insists on building flavour and richness from spices, savoury vegetable, and dahi (yogurt). That’s remarkably similar to the way I cook. I made her version of Paneer In Tomato Sauce over the weekend and it confirmed why I love watching her show so much.

New York-Style Crumb Cake

I am impressed by the variety of food dubbed “New York-style” and how much people all over the world clamour to try the real thing. New York-style cheese cake, New York-style pizza, New York-style bagel, just to name a few. Of course there is also whole myriad of food not explicitly named New York-style yet uniquely delicious in the New York kind of way. Black and white cookies, pastrami sandwiches, bialys…this list of food lover’s “New York must eats” just keeps growing. Thanks to BAKED Explorations, I learned of yet another New York-style food not to be messed with: the New York-style Crumb Cake. How did the city manage to claim the humble coffee cake as its own?

As Matt Lewis helpfully explained in the cookbook, there are a few things that makes a crumb cake New York-style. The huge boulders of crumbs, the large ratio of crumb topping to cake, no swirls, and the lack of nuts set this style apart from crumb cakes all over. Although my favourite crumb cake involves sweet tender pieces of apples baked inside the cake, I have an open mind when it comes to cakes. I almost made this cake exactly as written. Yes, almost.

One Ha’ Penny, Two Ha’ Penny

I learned to sing the Hot Cross Buns nursery rhyme long before I ate one. My ideal version of hot cross buns must have a sticky glossy glaze, a pastry paste cross, and plenty of currants and spice! Unfortunately, most versions available at stores are made with raisins and yucky sugary citrus peels. After one too many disappointments, I don’t even bother to buy hot cross buns anymore even though they are my favourite Easter treat. Yes, I would pick bread over chocolate!

Last week I saw Simply Recipes posted a hot cross buns recipe and I could not stop thinking about them since. If I bake my own, I can make sure they are exactly the way I like them! The recipe looks delicious in every way except for the cross made with icing. Baking a batch of hot cross buns is not trivial so I ought to at least look for one promising everything I love about the treat. A little more research later and I landed on Wild Yeast’s recipe adapted from Jeffrey Hamelman’s Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes. Added bonus: all the measurements are in weight! I love the precision and convenience of measuring by weight instead of volume when it comes to baking.

An Excuse To Enjoy Mustard

Out of the rotating cast of condiments in my pantry, mustard ranks high on my list and I’m always looking for new ways to enjoy it. These simple mustard batons is a delicious way to kick start an evening of festivity, just add wine and olives! Exactly how simple? Unroll sheets of premade puff pastry, spread with some good kicky mustard, fold, cut, egg wash, and bake!

Seeing that so few ingredients are used in this recipe from Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table, it is worthwhile to seek out high quality ones for each of them. Frozen puff pastry is a staple at most grocery stores but if you look closely at the ingredients, more likely than not they are made with puff pastry fats instead of traditional butter. Despite the ease of handling, I loathe the artificial taste. Of course I would love to have a steady supply of all-butter frozen puff pastry in the grocery store next door, I’m okay using their store brand made with a blend of butter and vegetable oils. If only there is a Picard where I live! Sigh, a girl can dream…

Fortunately, I have much better luck sourcing the other ingredients. Do you know that Canada is a major producer of mustard? Appropriately enough, there are some local artisanal mustards that I really like. Kozlik’s has a whole line of really awesome flavoured mustards ranging from fiery to mellow to sweet. I always have a few bottles at home. When I visit their shop at St Lawrence Market, I love to taste test their whole line of mustard in search of new favourites. Not only do they offer pretzel sticks as tasting vessels, on weekends, they may even be grilling up some peameal bacon so you can judge how well the mustard taste with its natural match! The white sesame-topped mustard batons are filled with a thin layer of Kozlik’s Amazing Maple mustard. I only wish I hadn’t finish my bottles of Sweet & Smokey or Balsamic Fig & Dates earlier this week.

Strawberry Honey Millet Muffin

The first sighting of local strawberries is a harbinger of spring. I would love to tell you that these Strawberry Honey Millet Muffins are made with local Ontario strawberries and we’re enjoying some nice warm weather. Alas, I can’t. We had sleet and hail in late April and the only thing I’m glad is that I haven’t switch out my snow tires yet. Traveling to Tampa and Austin in the last few weeks had me envious of their local strawberries. Though I took advantage of enjoying the little sweet jewels, it’s just not the same as home. Spring, kick old man winter out the door soon please please please?

Inspirations can come at the oddest hour. I woke up at 4am last night and couldn’t fall asleep. Of course, I started flipping through cookbooks. The Millet Muffin recipe from Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Everyday caught my attention early on when I received the cookbook in the mail. I love the crunchiness millet adds to baked goods. When I read the recipe last night, the roasted strawberries serving suggestion seemed like the best idea in the world and I decided that I must make these muffins next morning with chopped strawberries in the batter. I take my words seriously so here they are.

Strawberries are rarely baked into cakes or cookies probably because they are too moist. I chopped the, ahem, California strawberries into dices and folded them into the muffin batter just before baking. The batter itself is a close adaptation of Swanson’s recipe to accommodate ingredients I have available. Whole wheat pastry flour was replaced with a blend of hard whole wheat and all-purpose flour (a logical substitution I learned from Kim Boyce’s Good To The Grain). Yogurt was replaced with equal volume of buttermilk to cut down a little on fat content. With the added fruit, the recipe yields 16 regular size muffins. The lightly honey-sweetened muffins are wonder as part of brunch or breakfast on-the-go. Here’s to the eventual arrival of spring!

A note about these photos: I can’t believe they are straight-out-of-camera. When I took the pictures, it was overcast and raining outside all morning. I thought for sure there wasn’t enough natural light but everything turned out just fine. In fact, the light was not as harsh as a sunny day. So much I have yet to learn.

Good Food, Great Friends

Last weekend I traveled to Austin, Texas for my first inline marathon of the season. Usually for this type of travel, my diet is more bland than glam not just for the sake of performance, but to accommodate the various tastes of traveling companions. Thanks to our generous hosts who are also fellow food lovers, I ate very well during my stay. In fact, I had so many great meals that I so wanted to stay behind in Austin for a few more days!

Upon arriving in the city without our checked luggage (thanks Continental for the big bottle of hairspray in your toiletries kit), we dropped by TacoDeli for a late light lunch. This local mini-chain may not serve the best-of-the-best Mexican food Austin has to offer but I certainly enjoyed my lunch tremendously. The lack of good Mexican food in Toronto means my palate may not be sophisticated. However, my choice of al pastor (diced and trimmed pork marinated and cooked in homemade adobo sauce using chipotle, ancho, and guajillo peppers, garnished with cilantro and onions) and PapaDulce (roasted sweet potato, roasted corn, roasted red pepper, topped with plenty of roasted pepitas) had me in taco heaven. I love the depth of flavour in both the pork and vegetarian filling but the caramelized sweetness of the vegetable had a slight upper hand. The warm and soft corn tortillas were of course mandatory. If only I had room to try a few more from their extensive menu! I washed everything down with a cup of refreshing watermelon agua fresca. Such an appropriate start to a nice hot weekend in Texas!

Boy, am I glad I did not spoil my appetite because dinner was a feast of Japanese farmhouse cooking and sushi at uchiko. I heard so many great things about this restaurant so my expectation was high. Between the five of us, we sampled a great portion of what the menu had to offer. With the sake and beer flowing, I did not keep track of every dish that we ordered. However, a few memorable dishes included yokai berry (Atlantic salmon, dinosaur kale, Asian pear, yuzu), karaage (fried marinated chicken, sansho pepper, seasonal pickle), ao saba (Norwegian mackerel, bluefoot mushroom, onion, juniper, huckleberry), gyutan toro sushi (grilled beef tongue toro, fish caramel), hamachi sushi (Japanese yellowtail, pickled green apple, jalapeno), ham & eggs maki (katsu pork belly, yolk custard, espelette), and sunchoke dashi (spring vegetables, arugula, noble sherry, bottarga). Alas, we did not save room for dessert! Fortunately, my friends had a little gift for me so I can still enjoy a taste of the dessert back home. They gave me a copy of the uchi cookbook. All those mouth-watering photography and recipes are really inspiring. Uchi and uchiko truly take fusion Japanese cuisine to the next level.

Dilemma Of Spotty Bananas

I’m usually very decisive when faced with a few spotty bananas on the counter because banana bread is a perennial favourite at my house. I felt uncharacteristically hesitant this morning because I recently bookmarked a few interesting banana recipes.

Option 1 is America’s Test Kitchen’s Banana Bread. Of course I’m curious to find out ATK’s version of perfection for this favourite. There’s comfort and trust with the reliability of an ATK recipe. Though truth be told, I doubt the subtly would make this banana bread anymore memorable than some of the best recipes I regularly use. I yearn for something a little more exciting.

If excitement is what I seek, there’s no shortage of it in option 2. Dan Lepard posted his recipe for Banana Blondie a few years ago at his column in The Guardian. Blondie usually refers to a brownie without chocolate with moist texture contributed by butter, brown sugar, and eggs. Lepard’s interpretation is in fact a white chocolate brownie (a whitie?). That alone is enough to make me rush to the kitchen. As if that’s not enough, the blondie is sweetened with mashed bananas with brazil nut toffee folded in. I cannot stop thinking about this recipe the minute I lay eyes on it. The recipe is a little involved though not overly so. I would absolutely jump on it except I had been with traveling so simplicity was a big consideration.

Enter Flo Braker with option 3. Her cookbook Baking For All Occasions does not have immediate visual appeal due to lack of photographs. However, every time I read the recipes, there are bound to be more than a few that pique my interest. Her Banana-Bottom Pineapple Swirl Cupcake is perfect example.

Spring On My Mind

Grain salad is my best friend when it comes to ready-to-eat food to fuel my post-workout hunger. After a hard training session, I often come home ravenous and want my dinner now, now, NOW! I simply cannot wait that long to chop and toss when my stomach is telling me to eat immediately. The beauty of grain salad is not just limited to its whole grain goodness. While many greens would wilt in the dressing, the plump grains simply soak up all that flavour and taste even better.

The ingredients for this Kamut and Mushroom Salad with Shallot and Celery may not seem particularly spring like. However, the very fact that I switch gear from hearty soup and stew to light salad is already a sign of spring to me. The combination of ingredient is a little unusual yet it absolutely works. Of course the recipe comes from Ottolenghi The Cookbook. What an endless source of inspiration to brighten up my meals!