pao de queijo II.

So, it seems like this is a great tasting recipe but possibly has too much liquid as written below, or at least we need to look at the tips for how to get things to rise whilst remaining remotely spherical. 

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pão de queijo II.

INGEDIENTS
1 cup milk
4 tbsp butter
1/4 cup peanut or corn oil
1/2 tsp salt, or to taste, possibly up to 1 tsp

2 cups tapioca flour
2 eggs, beaten

1 and 1/2 cup cheese, grated (we used a mix of 50% pecorino and 50% dry mozzarella...the important thing is that it should be mostly hard dry cheese)

METHOD
Preheat oven to 175C. In a sauce pan, combine milk, salt, oil, and butter and bring to the boil. Remove from heat, stir in tapioca flour, then stir in eggs and cheese. Let cool for 15 minutes or until handleable. With floured hands, shape dough into golfball-sized spheres and bake for 20-25 minutes until puffed up and golden. Makes 9 or 10. Maybe 12.

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god damn.

These, having followed the directions exactly. Well, I baked them for 32 minutes or so, looking for that "papery skin on top", but instead kind of dried them out so they cracked and had to be glued back together with salted caramel. Still the best brownies ever.  I didn't follow the salted caramel recipe in the link, I bought some Bebogeen and melted it in a saucepan then added some brown sugar, salt, and butter until it tasted right.

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masterbaker.

Yes I baked my own birthday cake this year, at my insistence. I wanted to feel good about eating more than one piece of it, so I made this gluten-free business pictured below, it's a flourless chocolate cake with a raspberry something, coulis maybe? The cake recipe is from Cook's Illustrated, it should've been a tah taha hajt a (this is the new way to indicate a psychotic mandible-chomping fake laugh) "piece of cake", but I am the shittiest baker ever, so I overmelted my chocolate and things ended up the tiniest bit grainy.

Nonetheless! This much good chocolate can never really be bad. Recipe forthcoming someday if I'm ever bored again.

kiss me, kate.

Hm. I really know absolutely zero about Hollywood musicals. Gun to my head, I would never have had any idea what Kiss Me, Kate was about. And it's about something I knew or used to know quite a bit about (not shrewishness, although that's totally true, but The Taming of the Shrew, Billy Shakes, etc, you know..."literary things").

That Is Super Fucking Interesting, Mark. Here's Hilly's version of Dorie Greenspan's version of Katharine Hepburn's brownie recipe as triumphantly executed by the VDuck Kitchen and Training Facility last week. These are the best brownies ever conceived, but they are not terribly sweet brownies, that's what the salted caramel is for. Well and also for making the nuts stick if you don't want to put them in the brownies themselves. Adding them afterwards was a technical consideration b/c I don't trust our oven and, well, nobody wants burned nuts etc etc etc.

Also, remember that your nuts are probably salty (how many more times can I say nuts, nuts nuts nuts), so don't overdo the salt in the caramel.

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firestone/greenspan/hepburn brownies with salted caramel.

1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt

pinch ground cardamom

1 stick (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
2 tsp finely ground instant coffee (I used decaf without incident)
2 large eggs, preferably at room temperature

1 cup raw sugar, ground fine
1 tsp pure vanilla extract

120g bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped (I used a 50/50 mix of 70% and 85% cacao b/c neither bar I had was perfect)

1 cup toasted, salted nuts of your choice, the choice this time was 1/2 macadamia and 1/2 pistachio

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Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 150C/325 degrees F (I realize those aren't the same thing).

Butter an 8-inch square baking pan and line the bottom with parchment or wax paper. Butter the paper, dust the inside of the pan with flour and tap out the excess. Place the pan on a baking sheet.

Whisk the flour, cinnamon, cardamom, and salt together in a medium bowl.

Put the butter in a medium saucepan and place the pan over low heat. When the butter starts to melt, sift the cocoa over it and add the instant coffee. Continue to cook, stirring, until the butter is melted and the cocoa and coffee are blended into it. Remove from the heat and cool for about 3 minutes.

Using a whisk or a rubber spatula, beat the eggs into the saucepan one at a time. Next, stir in the sugar and vanilla (don't beat anything too vigorously — you don't want to add air to the batter), followed by the dry ingredients, nuts and chopped chocolate. Scrape the batter into the pan.

Bake for 20-30 minutes, at which point the brownies will still be gooey but the top will have a dry papery crust. Transfer the pan to a rack and let the brownies cool for at least 30 minutes. Turn the brownies out onto a rack, peel away the paper and invert onto a cutting board. At this point caramel was drizzled and nuts were attached.

Cool completely before cutting into 16 squares, each roughly 2 inches on a side.

Serve with salted caramel for drizzling and nut adhesion/cohesion/etc. Uncaramelized, they can be wrapped in plastic and kept for 3 days or so, but they'll never last. 

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salted caramel. 

1 cup light-brown sugar (or dark-brown sugar, depends on what color you're going for)
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1/4 cup evaporated milk or koffiemelk, some sort of unsweetened, reduced milk product
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
Pinch of salt, to taste

Combine in a saucepan over low heat and reduce, stirring pretty constantly, until you gets to the desired consistency.

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almond flour banana bread.

Spent an hour on the phone with Yahoo! tech support tonight, they're doing this awesome thing where they don't tell you exactly how long your hold time is going to be, but that it's going to be "more than 30 minutes". But then that's the last you hear from them. No "you are number [computer voice] 14 in the queue", no nothing.

In case you don't have the nebulous "more than a half an hour" to sit around and listen to old Dave Koz CDs on hold, you can opt to have them call you. Awesome, right? Except they can't tell you exactly how long that will take either, their best guess tonight was "366 minutes". They couldn't come to the phone right now, but they would call me back in "366 minutes". I decided to wait an hour on hold with the Koz instead.

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You may not know that Mara is a bit of a gadget person. True fact. I attribute this to persistent flashes of unvanquishable young-at-heart optimism and a related continuing hope for feelings of childlike wonderment. Plus a bitch just like new toys.

A few months ago she bought this "mini cupcake maker" for €7 at the drugstore. As always, we are a bit skeptical as to how well these bargain devices will function once they're home, but this one seems like a weener so far. Our poor cancer-ridden neighbor was having some more of herself removed this week and while we were feeding her cat yesterday we noticed a bunch of bananas symbolically going brown on the counter.

We knew this was somewhere we could make a real difference, and immediately decided to turn this particular story of decomposing organic matter into a happy ending we could taste: we stole her damn bananas* and made this gluten-free bread that became cupcake muffins. Totally great, didn't taste one bit healthy.

* OK, she came home today and yes, we gave her some of the cupcakes.

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almond flour banana bread.

1 1/2 cups almond meal or almond flour
4 rather small eggs, beaten
1/3 cup shredded unsweetened coconut
1/4 cup butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
3 medium bananas, mashed (about 1 cup banana puree)
1 tsp vanilla extract
3/4 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

Cream butter and sugar together, stir in eggs. Add mashed bananas, vanilla, cinnamon and nutmeg. In a separate bowl, combine almond flour, coconut, baking powder and salt. Stir into banana mixture just until combined. 350F for about 20 minutes for standard size muffins or according to your budget drugstore cupcake muffin maker's instructions.




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nooks, crannies.

In other news, Mara made English muffins that look exactly like the real thing. WTF. I hear they're good. UPDATE: I finally had one four seven of them. They're Our New Favorite Thing.

bluetooth.

Downside: hangover. Upside: blueberry whole-wheat waffles. Upside: Scrabble. Upside: Rosemary's Baby. Upside: more Scrabble. Upside: Thai coconut-turmeric soup thingie, which is still easy and good.

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whole wheat blueberry waffles.


3 eggs, separated
2 tbsp raw sugar
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 and 1/4 cup goat's milk yoghurt (or regular yoghurt as long as it's pourable)
1 tsp vanilla extract

1 and 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder 

Grease and preheat both sides of waffle iron on medium heat for 3 minutes. Beat the yolks, sugar, vanilla and oil together in a medium bowl. Add half of the yoghurt and stir. Add dry ingredients and the remaining yoghurt. Mix until just blended. Set aside. Beat egg whites till stiff and fold into the batter. Pour 1 1/4 cups of batter into the center of the waffle iron. Cook for 1/2 to 1 minute. Flip to the other side and cook 2-3 minutes. Remove gently with a fork.

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feelin' froggy.

Blogging like the wind I am. This will probably turn into a discussion of one of the following: our new refrigerators; what to do with current leftovers; or Moroccan bread.

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head to head corn-off.

Above image from United Loneliness in Berlin, used without permission (but with the best intentions, does that help?).

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The Berlin contingent arrives today (hopefully), and because I feel like it, I am making not one but two (albeit pretty dissimilar) not-for-purists cornbreads today, one very savory (below), and then the sweeter, brown-butter version from Herbivoracious discussed previously.

The below recipe hasn't been tested yet, but it's based on Leland Atkinson's tamale tart recipe and some comments from Bitten's cornbread post. Did I emphasize the not-for-purists part? I ain't lookin' to hear no "that ain't proper cornbread" foolishness.

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south(west)ern cornbread.

1 cup coarse ground cornmeal
2 tbsp flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt, or a little more
1 beaten egg
1 and 1/4 cup buttermilk
1 poblano chile, roasted (canned would do, but make sure it's drained well), diced

1/2 tsp finely minced fresh rosemary, depending on your rosemary...mine was very harsh so i was afraid to use too much

1 tsp bottled BBQ sauce...this could maybe be 2 tsp

4 tbsp corn or other neutral oil
2 tbsp butter

Preheat oven to 220°C. Mix first 4 ingredients, then add egg, buttermilk, chile, rosemary, and BBQ sauce. Heat oil over high heat in skillet until oil starts to smoke, then add hot oil to cornbread mix while stirring briskly, and immediately pour entire mix into pre-warmed and buttered baking dish. Bake for 20-25 minutes.

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some people call me the corny baker.

It's over. The boys are napping, the adults are watching the Cowboys rout the Jets, and the dogs are alternating between dreaming loudly (with barks and everything) and looking morose because the food's been put away.

And what about the food. It was as if our dinner came out of a futuristic meal generator on which someone had pressed the "Thanksgiving" button (and selected the "careless plating" option): everything was textbook-perfect, really quite remarkable, even the parts I was responsible for. The menu:

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roast turkey + gravy
cornbread dressing with bacon and pecans
cranberry sauce
mashed potatoes
buttered corn
green bean casserole (the classic, with cream of mushroom soup and Durkee fried onions)
broccoli-rice casserole (a Paula Deen recipe made by Pitts)
broccoli salad (kind of a coleslaw idea, assembled by Pitts)

















apple pie
pecan pie
pumpkin pie
chocolate silk pie

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My contributions were based on the idea that I would cook the parts of Thanksgiving dinner that no one else likes to cook or likes to eat. That meant: cranberry sauce (detailed a couple posts ago) and stuffing (or dressing as some people like to call it).

The stuffing was going to be a recipe from John Folse's mammoth book, but when it finally came time to cook, it just seemed too complicated. So instead I ended up doing something that was probably equally complicated. First I made cornbread, and then I made stuffing with it. It wasn't actually hard, but I never ever bake, so this was slow, like learning a new piece of music. This recipe is doubled.

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unkle markie's corn bread.

1 cup yellow cornmeal
1/2 cup all purpose flour
3 tablespoons maple syrup
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 can creamed corn or 1 can corn, undrained, pureed with 2 tbsp cream.
1/2 stick (1/4 cup) unsalted butter, melted, cooled slightly
1 large egg, beaten to blend
2 slices bacon, chopped

Position rack in center of oven; preheat to 400°F. Butter 8-inch square baking pan. Whisk cornmeal, flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in large bowl to blend. Add creamed corn, bacon, butter and egg. Stir just until blended. Spoon batter into pan.

Bake until edges begin to pull away from pan sides and tester inserted into center comes out clean, about 20 minutes. Cool in pan on rack.

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corn bread dressing with bacon and pecans.

2 recipes Unkle Markie's Corn Bread above
2 strips bacon, cooked, and chopped
5 tablespoons butter
3 cups chopped onions
2 cups chopped celery
1 cup chopped shallots
1 tbsp dried rubbed sage
1 tbsp dried thyme
1 tsp fresh rosemary, minced
1 1/2 cups pecans, toasted, coarsely chopped

2 cups canned low-salt chicken broth
3 large eggs, beaten to blend

Preheat oven to 325°F. Cut corn bread into 3/4-inch cubes. Place corn bread cubes on baking sheet and toast until dry, about 15 minutes. Cool and transfer to large bowl.

Melt butter in a large skillet or wok. Add bacon, onions, celery and shallots; sauté just until golden brown, about 10 minutes. Stir in herbs and add to corn bread cubes in bowl. Mix in pecans.

Stir chicken broth into dressing. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Mix in eggs. Transfer to prepared baking dish and bake in covered dish alongside turkey for 1 hour (at 350F). Uncover dressing and bake until top begins to crisp, 5-10 minutes longer.

Serves 12.




Both photos are pre-baking, first one is pre-chicken broth.