Desserts for Breakfast

Interlude: Huckleberry, LA

2013-05-17T01:47:00.001-07:00

This has been one. crazy. month so far, and it's far from over. This past month, I packed up and moved (temporarily) ~400 miles to Los Angeles for a short four weeks. During that time, I drove three round trips between the Bay Area ↔ Los Angeles and 2 side trips (to Pomona and Davis), racking up a total of roughly 2500 miles behind the wheel. I gave five (different) talks at five different universities and really slept no more than five hours every night (on good nights). And, of course, there was the main reason that I moved: launching a new research project with a collaborator at UCLA. Anyways, I did say it's been crazy, right?

Given this breakneck schedule, I really didn't get to explore as much of the wonderful LA food scene as I would have liked, but I did make sure to carve out a bit of time one Thursday evening to visit one of my favorite bakeries in the city: Huckleberry in Santa Monica. The reason I wanted to go on a Thursday evening was because it's the one night a week that they turn their attention from pastries and breakfast to dinner. And oh.my.gawd, the Thursday evening dinner at Huckleberry was amazing.

Served family-style, we had dates stuffed with curry mascarpone for amuse bouche, followed by a huge bowl of bright cucumbers, fennel, olives, and frisee tossed in light and (at the same time) velvety mustard dressing. For the main came this big platter of some of the best fried chicken I've ever had, perched atop a bed of white bean cassoulet, which was this hearty, thick, warm-your-soul tomato-y and bacon-y stew. Uh! so, so good! Dessert was simple and sweet, with softly macerated raspberries ladled over an ultra-flakey egg-custard-filled tart. (Their dinner menu changes every week.)

As I said, this month is far from over yet (okay, fine technically, an extended month, but all the days are blurring together at this point). I'm off to the UK next! Tea and scones, here I come!

More details in subsequent posts, after I'm able to get more sleep, I promise. :)

(mis)Fortune Cookies: Matcha-Orange Flower and Brown Butter

2013-05-03T00:29:00.001-07:00

A good deal of ink has been spilt chronicling the trials and tribulations of being a graduate student. And with good reason, since said trials are many: the long hours, the miniscule (if any) pay, the annoying ridicule we're subject to from grumpy old professors who don't see the point of the modern probability theory revolution .... ahem and eye roll. And we graduate students undertake all of this knowing full well that only very few of us will make it into academia in the long run (we just really, really hope it's us!).

Part of what makes it all live-able, however, is the fact that we are also terribly good at laughing at ourselves and at our own predicaments. Take PhD comics, for instance, or #whatshouldwecallgradschool. Poking fun at grad students is easy. Even Tina Fey does it!

So last week, when I was scheduled to speak at the year's final lab meeting, my linguist-cum-baker partner-in-crime Andréa and I thought we should celebrate the end of the year with some special fortune cookies for the lab. Yes, these fortune cookies were special in that some were matcha and orange flower fortune cookies and others were brown butter and almond fortune cookies (flavors far superior to your normal run-of-the-mill types), but really the special surprises were the misfortunes tucked inside. My favorite? p = 0.06.

A full list of our misfortunes is available here.

The misfortune cookies managed to elicit some great hand-to-forehead-smacking reactions at the lab meeting, which was quite gratifying. But really hidden behind these misfortunes was some optimism for fellow students: grad school might suck every now and then and we might not all make it, but at least cookies, laughs, and some good old reflexive schadenfreude can make everything seem better for now.

Read on for recipe....

Fortune cookies
makes about 12 - 18 fortune cookies

for basic recipe:
4 Tbspn unsalted butter
150 g (¾ cup) sugar
3 large egg whites
60 g (½ cup) all-purpose flour

for matcha-orange blossom cookies:
1 Tbspn matcha powder
½ tspn orange flower water

for brown butter cookies:
½ tspn almond extract

1. In a small saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. If making brown butter cookies, cook the butter until the solids have dropped to the bottom and begin to brown. Remove from heat and let cool to room temperature, but don’t let the butter resolidify.
2. In a bowl, whisk together the melted butter, sugar, egg whites, and flour. For matcha cookies, add the matcha powder and orange flower water. For brown butter cookies, add almond extract instead. Whisk until the mixture thickens and is well-combined, with no more lumps. Cover and refrigerate for 1 hour.
3. Preheat oven to 300° F. Prepare baking sheets lined with silicone mats. Have ready a coffee mug and a muffin tin, for shaping and cooling the cookies, and paper fortunes. Working two cookies at a time, spoon a small, scant Tbspn of batter for each cookie onto the silicone mat, leaving a few inches in between. Use the back of a spoon to spread the batter into a thin circle.
4. Bake for 9-12 minutes, until the edges are golden brown. Remove from the oven and let cool for a few seconds. Place a fortune on the cookie, fold the cookie over in half, press the edge together lightly to seal. Then, using the edge of the mug, indent the cookie in half on the folded side of the half-circle, bringing the ends together. Place in a muffin tin to cool.

Note: for the fortunes, I used 8-pt Times New Roman font, which turned out to be a good size.

Enjoy!

Tropical Meringue Tart, with lime, coconut, and sesame

2013-04-17T23:48:00.004-07:00

First off, I'm quite honored to be a finalist for Saveur Magazine's Best Baking and Desserts Blog! Thank you to whoever it is out there who was a big enough fan of this blog to submit a nomination. I heard the news in the middle of a week that was riddled with rejection letters and hearing a lot of "no"s and "you're not good enough"s, so it feels pretty good to be recognized for some accomplishment, even if it's just me prattling away here and in my kitchen every week or so!

Lots of off-line things have been happening for me this week (things so big that the Saveur news only registered as a tiny blip on the radar), but I'm still in the middle of processing them all before I feel like I can talk about them here on the blog. In the meantime, though, I wanted to share one of my latest flavor obsessions: limes.

Oddly, this year more so than in any previous year, I've become horribly impatient about wanting warmer weather. It's uncharacteristic of me, because I'm so warm-blooded that I usually prefer the cold. Maybe, though, it's a symptom of too much non-stop stress, and I just need some sun, sand, a warm ocean, and a couple of nice, deep breaths. Barring a currently-impossible trip to the beach, limes have been the next best thing, their sweet, tart crispness reminiscent of frozen drinks and fish tacos. Ah, the fish tacos.

This tart des tropiques is my 'I wish I were in the tropics' spin on my favorite kind of pie: the lemon meringue. Here instead, nestled in a slightly nutty sesame seed crust, is a sweet and tangy and lusciously creamy lime curd--not quite as bright but more subtly flavored than lemon curd--covered with fluffy and puffy clouds of lightly-caramelized coconut meringue and sprinkled with some toasted sesame seeds and dried coconut chips for some extra crunch. The lime flavor here is definitely the star, with just a whiff of coconut, like the faint scent of the tropics that wafts through the warm night air when you're sitting in a rocking hammock strung between two palm trees on the beach, soft sand at your tiptoes and the ocean gently, softly ebbing away in the close darkness.... sigh.

Lastly, in other news, the second issue of sated is almost done! More news on that front to come very shortly. Stay tuned!

Read on for recipe....

Tart des Tropiques
makes one 9-inch round tart, or equivalent thereof

for pastry
260 g all-purpose flour
72 g sesame seeds
50 g sugar
⅛ tspn salt
7 Tbspn butter, cut in pieces
1 large egg yolk
1 Tbspn sesame oil
3–3½ Tbspn water
1 large egg white

for lime curd
8 Tbspn butter, cut in pieces
¾ cup freshly squeezed lime juice
125 g sugar
pinch of salt
3 large egg yolks
3 large eggs
zest of 2 limes

for meringue
3 large egg whites
94 g sugar
pinch of salt
pinch of cream of tartar
1 tspn coconut extract
toasted sesame seeds
toasted coconut chips

1. for pastry. Combine the flour, sesame seeds, sugar, and butter in the bowl of a food processor and pulse until the butter is the size of small peas. Add the egg yolk and sesame oil and pulse to combine. Add the water, one tablespooon at a time, while processing, just until the dough holds together when pressed between two fingers. Do not overmix. Remove the dough from the food processor, form into a small, flat disc, cover tightly with plastic wrap or parchment paper, and refrigerate for at least one hour. The dough should be firm to the touch.
2. Preheat oven to 425° F. On a lightly floured surface, roll out the cold dough to ⅛-inch thickness. Transfer to tart pan, press in the bottom and sides, and prick the bottom a few times with a fork. Return the pastry to the refrigerator if it has softened. Line with a piece of parchment paper, fill with pie weights or beans, and bake for 13 to 15 minutes. Remove the weights and the parchment paper, brush the insides of the pastry with a small amount of egg white, and return to the oven for 3 to 5 minutes more, until the crust is golden brown. Remove from oven and let cool completely on a wire rack.
3. for lime curd. Preheat oven to 375° F. Suspend a bowl over simmering water. Place the butter, lime juice, sugar, and salt in the bowl and let cool, whisking occasionally, until the butter has completely melted. Meanwhile, in a separate bowl, beat the eggs and yolks to combine. When the butter has melted, temper the eggs by gradually and slowly pouring about half of the butter mixture into the eggs, whisking continuously. Continue to cook over simmering water, stirring and scraping the bottom of the bowl with a spatula, until thick, about 10 to 12 minutes. Remove from heat, stir in the zest, and pour the curd into the prepared tart shell. Bake the tart for 10 minutes. Remove and let cool completely.
4. for meringue. In a bowl suspended over simmering water, beat the egg whites, sugar, salt, and cream of tartar until hot to the touch (140° F on an instant read thermometer). Immediately add the coconut extract and transfer to the bowl of a stand mixer with the whisk attachment. Beat just until stiff, glossy peaks form. Do not overbeat! Immediately pipe the meringue onto the cooled tarts, and brown under the broiler or with a kitchen torch. Top with toasted sesame seeds and coconut chips.

Enjoy!

Spring Quiche, with butternut squash, peas, and feta

2013-04-02T08:16:00.001-07:00

Lately, I've been really into meals that I can cook once and then easily eat for the next few day or so, given the perpetually increasing number of items on my to-do list, sigh. (My recent motto for life alternates on the minute between "Focus" and "Don't panic" whenever I look at said list!) Apparently, quiche is perfect for this make now-eat tomorrow mentality--so much so that it didn't lose its impressiveness when I made it one day and served it the next when friends came over for lunch. Also, it's like this wonderful meal-in-one, when you pack it with vegetables and serve it topped with heaps of fresh baby kale.

This particular quiche is inspired by a frittata that an acquaintance made when I visited Australia back in 2007. She took me on a picnic in the Blue Mountains (which are absolutely amazing, btw), and out of her picnic basket, she pulled this almost magic frittata that was densely packed with floating cubes of butternut squash, fresh peas, and feta cheese. The effect of the cubes of cheese and squash and the spheres of green peas surrounded by pale yellow egg was gorgeous, like abstract mosaic art. Until that day, I never thought I liked frittatas--they were way too much egg and not enough anything else, in my opinion--but that one definitely changed my mind.

...and I've been thinking about that frittata ever since. So I tried my hand at replicating it in quiche form, surrounded by a flaky whole wheat pie crust to satisfy the carb-loving part of me. :) Inside is a myriad of textures and flavors: bursting fresh peas, a little bit of bite and sweetness in the butternut squash, salty almost-brininess from the feta, and a bit of garlic to top it off. The egg here is really just an accompaniment, something to hold everything together (deliciously). :)

[click on photo for a larger image]

Read on for recipe....

A Spring Quiche
makes one 10-inch quiche

for whole wheat crust
187 g all-purpose flour
188 g whole wheat flour
1 tspn dried thyme
1 cup butter, cold
½ tspn salt
8–9 Tbspn ice water

for filling
one small butternut squash,
peeled and cubed
1 tspn olive oil
227 g (8 oz) feta cheese, cubed
2 cups shelled English peas
4 eggs
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 cup (245 g) European-style
plain yoghurt
1 cup (230 g) whole milk
1½ tspn salt
½ tspn freshly ground black pepper
½ tspn freshly ground nutmeg
baby kale

1. for whole wheat crust. Combine the flours, thyme, and salt in a bowl. Using a pastry cutter, cut the cold butter into the flour until the size of small peas. Gradually add the water one tablespoon at a time until the dough holds together when pressed between two fingers. There should still be chunks of butter—do not overmix! Form the dough into a disc, wrap in parchment paper or plastic wrap, and chill for at least one hour.
2. Remove the pastry from the refrigerator. Roll out the dough on a lightly-floured surface to ⅛-inch thick. Place the dough in a 10-inch quiche pan, trimming the excess. Return the pan to the refrigerator to chill.
3. Preheat oven to 425° F. Line the quiche crust with a piece of parchment, and weigh the tart crust down with pie weights or uncooked beans, and bake for 15 to 17 minutes. Remove the beans and parchment paper, and return to the oven. Continue baking for 5 to 7 min, until the bottom of the crust is no longer glossy. Remove from oven and let cool.
4. for filling. Preheat the oven to 375° F. Toss the cubed butternut squash with the olive oil. Spread the squash on a baking sheet and bake for about 15 minutes, until cooked but not completely very soft. Remove from oven.
5. Place the butternut squash, cubed feta cheese, and English peas in the prepared quiche crust.
6. In a bowl, whisk to combine the minced garlic, eggs, yoghurt, milk, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Pour the egg mixture into the crust. Bake for about 55 minutes, until the center of the tart is just set but still a bit jiggly. Remove from the oven and let cool on a wire rack for at least 45 minutes before serving. Serve with baby kale.

Enjoy!

Peanut Butter Jelly Ice Cream Sandwiches, with Rosemary and Marionberry

2013-03-22T00:31:00.000-07:00

This post has something of an odd musical soundtrack. First off, just to get it out of my system is this "song", which I cannot for the life of me get out of my head ever since I started thinking about peanut butter.

To understand why peanut butter's been on my mind, I have to rewind the story to this music, which started it all: the Mendelssohn piano trio, no. 1 in d minor. I first heard this piece when I was at that young impressionable age when you want to do everything your older siblings are doing. Every morning at 6am during middle school, I would wake up to the sounds of my older cousin (who grew up with me, like a sister) practicing the piano part--the arpeggiated d minor chord in the opening was my alarm clock. It became so internalized that without even seeing the music, I found that I could play the first few pages of the piece, too.

Suffice it to say that I fell in love with the Mendelssohn. I once convinced my cousin to let me turn pages for her in one of the concerts in which she performed the piece, and I would just sit, completely mesmerized by the gorgeous dark tones of the cello melody and the hanging high A of the violin in a dramatic mid-movement pause, nearly forgetting to actually turn the pages! (She never asked me to turn pages for her again....) But the sticking point was that I've never actually had the opportunity to play the piece myself. For some reason, my musical path took me into jazz and percussion, and I never got to do chamber music with classical piano when I was still playing seriously.

In early graduate school, I did get the chance to do some classical chamber music (the Brahms horn trio, namely), but the Mendelssohn eluded me still--I never seemed to know quite the right combination of people to make up the instrumentation. Until one day, I discovered that my friend Rob plays cello. (the same Rob from the SF Dessert Day! --Apparently, some people just never broadcast their talents, sigh.)

Long story short, at long, long last, I got to play the Mendelssohn! And let me tell you--the experience was so divine. On violin, we had another linguist (whom I played with a few years ago). And to finally hear the two string parts after years of only being able to hear myself play the lonely piano part--to hear the gestalt--was amazing, like the universe was being made whole again. (not that we played it anywhere near perfectly. I missed probably a good 35% of the notes!, but still!)

Anyways, we're getting to the peanut butter. I invited everyone to stay after we'd played for dinner to celebrate. It turns out that Rob's favorite dessert flavor is peanut butter, which, despite my love of Americana, is just one all-American ingredient that I've never really gotten into. So I wracked my brain for a good week or so trying to reconcile the strong, sometimes-overpowering flavor of peanut butter with the type of desserts I like to make: something sophisticated, subtle, many-layered. What I came up with was my play on PB&J sandwiches: a peanut butter jelly ice cream sandwich, made with rosemary-peanut butter cookies and peanut milk + marionberry swirl ice cream.

Peanut butter cookies are something of a classic, and I found that the rosemary really helps lend some complexity to the cookie, with just an extra hint of something special peeking through the peanut butter nuttiness at the end. These cookies are chewy and hit with a dash of turbinado sugar and smoked sea salt right before baking for a bit more sophisticated oomph.

For the ice cream, I took inspiration from a visit last summer to State Bird Provisions, where they serve this peanut milk drink with dessert. I wanted something that wasn't so boisterously PEANUT BUTTER!-y, and peanut milk--made by steeping peanuts and vanilla in milk overnight--was the perfect solution. The ice cream ends up with this smooth and softly subtle nutty flavor and a beautiful golden cream color. It was incredibly lucky that I happened to stumble upon freshly-made marionberry preserves at the local market the day I shopped for peanut butter because it made a great mix-in for the ice cream: sweet and dark and wonderfully purple. Blackberry jam would probably work just as well, if you don't serendipitously happen upon marionberry preserves. :)

Along with the PB&J ice cream sandwiches, this was our menu that evening:

Tartine's walnut bread

with brie and Seville orange marmalade

goddess salad

romaine, Point Reyes blue cheese, cherry tomatoes, roasted cacao nibs, and avocado-creme fraiche green goddess dressing

beets in apricot marmalade

with goat cheese

curried roasted carrots

pizza

#1: chipotle bbq chicken with apricots, smoked gouda, red onion, avocado

#2: margherita

grapefruit-blood orange soda

ginger-lime soda

apple cider

PB&J ice cream sandwiches

Given how prevalent peanut butter is as a dessert ingredient, it's funny that it's taken me so many years to actually post a peanut butter-related dessert on the blog. But, I think I just needed time to get it right--to find the right combination and to make it my own. I guess that's just how life works sometimes, like with the Mendelssohn, too: it took a lot of years for me to finally get to play the piece, but when I did, it was with a couple of my favorite people, and it was just right.

Read on for recipes...

Rosemary Peanut Butter Cookies
makes about 2 dozen cookies

188 g all-purpose flour
½ tspn baking soda
1¼ tspn sea salt
1 Tbspn + 1 tspn chopped fresh rosemary
8 - 10 Tbspn butter, melted
200 g light brown sugar
1 large egg
1 tspn vanilla extract
319 g natural, unsalted peanut butter
turbinado sugar
smoked sea salt

1. In a bowl, whisk to combine the flour, baking soda, sea salt, and chopped rosemary. Set aside.
2. In the bowl of a stand mixer, combine the butter and brown sugar. If the peanut butter you are using doesn’t have much oil in it, use 10 Tbspn of butter; otherwise, stick with 8 Tbspn. Beat the butter and sugar for about 2 to 3 minutes, until well-combined.
3. Add the egg and vanilla extract and continue beating until combined. Beat in the peanut butter.
4. In two additions, beat in the flour mixture. Cover the dough and chill overnight.
5. Preheat oven to 325° F. Prepare cookie sheets with parchment paper or silicone mats.
6. Form tablespoon-sized balls of dough, press each ball down slightly on the cookie sheet, leaving about one inch between each cookie. Using a fork, make a cross-hatch on the tops of each cookie by pressing gently. Sprinkle with a small amount of turbinado sugar and smoked sea salt.
7. Bake the cookies for 14 to 16 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through the baking time. Once the cookies are golden brown, remove from the oven and let cool completely on a wire rack.

Peanut Milk and Marionberry Swirl Ice Cream

for peanut milk
1 cup raw, unsalted peanuts
2½ cups whole milk
1¼ cups heavy cream
½ vanilla bean

for ice cream
2 cups peanut milk
1 Tbspn + 1 tspn tapioca starch
43 g cream cheese, softened
1/8 tspn sea salt
¾ cup milk
¼ cup heavy cream
67 g sugar
67 g light brown sugar
2 Tbspn light corn syrup
marionberry preserves

1. for peanut milk. Preheat oven to 350° F. Spread the peanuts onto a baking sheet and roast for 15 minutes until golden, stirring occasionally. Remove the peanuts from the oven and transfer into a heavy saucepan. Add the milk and cream. Split the vanilla bean lengthwise and add scrape the seeds into the milk mixture. Add the vanilla pods. Over medium-low heat, bring the milk to a simmer and simmer for about 45 minutes, until the mixture has reduced by about a quarter. Remove the peanut milk from heat and cover. Let steep for 2 hours, then transfer, covered, to the refrigerator. Chill overnight. The next day, remove the vanilla pods. Purée the peanut milk mixture in a blender until smooth. Strain the purée through a fine mesh sieve, pressing to extract all of the liquid. Discard the remaining solids.
2. for ice cream. Whisk to combine 3 tablespoons of the peanut milk with the tapioca starch in a small bowl. Set aside.
3. In a separate large bowl, whisk the cream cheese and sea salt until smooth. Set aside.
4. In a medium saucepan, combine the remaining peanut milk, milk, cream, sugar, light brown sugar, and corn syrup. Over medium heat, bring the mixture to a boil and boil for 4 minutes. Be careful not to let the milk boil over.
5. Remove from heat and gradually whisk in the starch mixture. Return the saucepan to medium heat and return to a boil. Let cook for about 1 minute, until slightly thickened. Remove from heat.
6. Gradually whisk the milk mixture into the cream cheese until smooth. Cover and chill for at least 2 hours. Then freeze according to your ice cream maker’s directions. After freezing, transfer the ice cream to a storage container, layering the ice cream with marionberry preserves. Let firm in the freezer for at least 4 hours or overnight.

rosemary peanut butter cookie recipe adapted from Alice Medrich's Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy
peanut milk recipe inspired by State Bird Provisions (via Bon Appetit)
ice cream based on base recipe in Jeni's Ice Cream

Enjoy!

Passionfruit and Espresso Tosca Cake

2013-03-05T02:12:00.000-08:00

I've always maintained that the best desserts I make are ones that are designed with a specific person in mind. There's something about crafting the perfect personal dessert, targeted and fine-tuned to one person's unique palate... it's a challenge in how well I know someone, how well I've figured out their tastes and likes and dislikes and favorites (that sometimes they don't even know they had), and when I get it right, it's better than any general, all-purpose dessert that I make, no matter how high the bar is to begin with. In a sense, this is my ultimate definition of the practice of baking with love.

(This is also why I realized a long time ago that I couldn't ever do cooking contests. Cooking for myself is just never as rewarding--and never tastes as good!--as cooking for someone else.)

This cake was for a friend of mine who has this unique talent in making sense of the world in the most lucid manner, no matter how convoluted the situation. Her advice has helped me through many major scrapes in the past few years, and after nearly eight years of knowing her, I *finally* got her to reveal her birthday this year, so I had quite a few birthdays and years to make up for! This surprise cake had to be nothing short of perfection.

One of my favorite things about how this passionfruit and espresso Tosca cake turned out is that the cake boasts this quiet and understated drama. It's a natural layer cake without all of the boisterous pomp and circumstance of a traditional, tall cake-and-frosting-and-cake-and-frosting layer cake: the nutty and slightly crunchy topping of the toasted almonds melts into the salty-sweet, espresso-tinged caramel, which soaks into the top of the underlying, fluffy but moist genoise cake base, which itself bursts with the tart, tropical boldness of passionfruit. It might seem like a lot going on at once, but the beauty of the cake is the simplicity with which all of these complex flavors find a balance together in the continuous layers of the dessert. Somehow, they just all make sense together here, which I thought was particularly befitting of my friend.

Her response to the cake:

"Best. birthday. cake. ever."

Mission accomplished.

(Special shout-out to Emma of Poires au Chocolat for posting about Tosca cakes.)

Read on for recipe...

Passionfruit and Espresso Tosca Cake
makes one 9-inch round cake
or one 6-inch octagon and four 3-inch hexagons

for cake
58 g whole milk
75 g passionfruit purée
5 Tbspn (71 g) unsalted butter
150 g all-purpose flour
1 tspn baking powder
½ tspn baking soda
¼ tspn salt
3 large eggs
150 g sugar
1 tspn vanilla extract

for topping
150 g sliced almonds, toasted
9 Tbspn (125 g) unsalted butter
125 g light brown sugar
50 g whole milk
½ tspn salt
1 tspn espresso powder
1 vanilla bean, optional
flaked sea salt

1. for cake. Preheat oven to 325° F. Grease one 9 x 3-inch pastry ring (or equivalent) and place on a parchment or silicone-lined baking sheet. Set aside.
2. In a bowl, stir to combine the milk and passionfruit purée. Set aside.
3. In a small, light-colored saucepan, melt the butter. Continue cooking until the solids drop to the bottom and the butter turns golden brown. Remove from heat and let cool to room temperature.
4. Meanwhile, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
5. Suspend a mixer bowl over a pan of simmering water. Whisk the eggs, sugar, and vanilla extract in the mixer bowl until warm to the touch. Remove from the simmering water and continue whisking on high, until the mixture falls from the whisk in thick ribbons.
6. In three additions, gently fold in the flour mixture, alternating with the passionfruit and milk mixture. Finally, fold in the melted browned butter, mixing just enough to incorporate the butter. Do not overmix.
7. Immediately transfer the batter to the prepared pastry ring. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes until golden and set.
8. for topping. When 15 minutes have passed in the baking time, start the topping. In a saucepan, combine the sliced almonds, butter, brown sugar, milk, salt, and espresso powder. Split the vanilla bean lengthwise, scrape the seeds into the saucepan, and add the pods. Cook over medium heat until the butter and sugar melts, then keep cooking for a few minutes longer, stirring frequently, while the mixture bubbles and thickens slightly. Remove from heat and remove the vanilla pods.
9. Increase the oven to 400° F. Remove the cake from the oven and top with the prepared almonds, smoothing with the back of a spoon. Place the cake in the top third of the oven and bake for 8 to 10 minutes longer, until the glaze is dark brown and bubbling. Remove from the oven, sprinkle with a small amount of flaked sea salt, and let cool completely on a wire rack. To remove, slide a knife along the inner edge of the ring before lifting the ring off carefully.

Note: passionfruit purée can be found in specialty stores or online.
recipe in part inspired by Poires au Chocolat.

Enjoy!

Grapefruit Rosemary Olive Oil Cake

2013-02-18T16:48:00.000-08:00

This is my belated Valentine's Day dessert entry (so shoot me, I'm a horrible blogger, always posting desserts after the actual occasion. :)). I got so tired this year of seeing the annual flood of horribly saccharine pink and white desserts unleashed on the internet around February 13. I'm not even quite sure what particularly prompted my annoyance this year, given that I usually relish this holiday (and, as evidence, this blog is full of wonderfully pink Valentine's Day desserts).... Let's chalk it up to to the Grumps that come with old age for now! ;)

Instead, I wanted to represent love in its complex glory, beyond whatever pink, fluffy, on-the-surface feel-goodness that we so often idealize it to be. Anyone who's ever loved someone else before--be it your family or friends or significant others (so this is basically everyone, I'd think)--can probably agree that love is at once sweet and savory and simple and complicated and bitter and tart and dense and light and fragrant all together. Love can simultaneously cause delirious joy and be cripplingly and forcibly painful (okay, not that this cake is painful, but you get my drift), and it goes down so much more easily in my experience with a nice, strong, delicate cup of hot tea (or a nice, strong bear hug, whichever one you can get at the time!). And, the oddest, most curious thing about love is that, despite all of its convoluted manifestations, it is the one emotion that somehow manages to provide enough hope to make life worth living. This is what I thought I should be celebrating on February 14.

So here it is, this year's Valentine's love cake: a grapefruit and rosemary olive oil cake. Thanks to the olive oil, the cake is just so in terms of balancing heft and moisture with airy-ness and fluff. The grapefruit provides a hint of citrus and some bite from the zest but also, at the same time, the grapefruit gives the cake a dash of bitterness--just like a strong marmalade--that you wouldn't normally find in an orange- or lemon-based cake. The bitterness is quite well offset by the light glaze of sugar syrup brushed on right after the cake comes hot out of the oven and by the copious amounts of powdered sugar topping that one should serve the cake with. Finally, the rosemary really rounds out the flavor, with just enough complexity to keep an otherwise simple and straightforward cake nicely interesting.

In other news, things have been quite busy at work, hence the sad, neglected state of my kitchen and studio lately. Sigh. It's come to that point in time in one's graduate school career when you don't really quite know what's going to happen next: it's a stressful way to live, and I'm terribly eager to figure it all out soon. I'm so thankful that I have this blog to escape to when I need it. Thank you, readers, and happy belated Valentine's! ❤.

(P.S. In the spirit of multi-tasking, which seems to be the story of my life these days, this cake is also partially inspired by Lunar New Year's, what with the citrus and all representing prosperity. :))
(P.P.S. This song seems like a fitting soundtrack for this post.)

Read on for recipe....

Grapefruit Rosemary Olive Oil Cake
makes one 10-inch cake or two 7-inch cakes

1 small (325 g) grapefruit
2½ cups (500 g) sugar
3 cups (375 g) all-purpose flour
2 tspn baking powder
1 tspn baking soda
1 tspn salt
2–3 Tbspn chopped fresh rosemary (see note)
4 eggs, at room temperature
6 Tbspn (81 g) extra virgin olive oil
confectioners’ sugar

1. Trim a small amount from the bottom and top of the grapefruit, just enough to reveal the flesh. In a small pot, cover the grapefruit with water and bring to a boil. Cook for about 1 minute and drain, discarding the water. Repeat the boiling, cooking, and draining twice more.
2. Combine the blanched grapefruit, 1 cup (200 g) sugar, and 3 cups (690 g) water in the small pot over medium heat. Cook for about 20 to 30 minutes, stirring frequently, until the sugar dissolves and the grapefruit rind is fork-tender. Remove the grapefruit from the cooking liquid, saving the liquid for later. Let both cool to room temperature.
3. Preheat oven to 350° F. Grease and flour one 10-inch round cake pan or two 7-inch round cake pans and set aside.
4. In a bowl, whisk to combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and chopped rosemary. Set aside.
5. Cut the grapefruit in half and scoop the flesh into a food processor. Scrape a majority of the pith from the rind and discard the pith. Add the grapefruit rind to the food processor. Add the eggs and pulse to combine, until the grapefruit is a chunky purée. Add the remaining 1½ cups (300 g) sugar and olive oil to the food processor and pulse to combine well. Add the flour mixture in two additions, pulsing briefly to incorporate the flour. Do not overmix.
6. Transfer the batter to the prepared pan(s). Bake for 40 to 50 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean and the edges and top are just turning golden brown. Remove from oven and place on a wire rack.
7. Brush a small amount of the reserved grapefruit cooking liquid on top of the cake. Let cool for about 10 to 15 minutes before removing the cake from the pan and letting cool completely.
8. Serve when cool, with a generous amount of powdered sugar.

Note: adjust the amount of rosemary dependent on the potency of the herb that you have on hand. For a cake with lighter rosemary flavor, go with 2 Tbspn. For something more robust, go with 3 Tbspn.

Enjoy!

Dessert Day, part 1: San Francisco, CA

2013-02-01T09:56:00.001-08:00

berry bread pudding at Sandbox Bakery

I have a friend, Rob, who constantly amazes me with his sheer amount of enthusiasm for desserts. It's awesome, and I love having a partner in all sorts of sugar-filled crime sprees.

At the end of last quarter, Rob and I hatched a plan (I now can't recall how this actually came about) to do a Dessert Day in San Francisco. The idea was to try the best of the best of San Francisco sweets, in search of the perfect desserts. We made a list of places to go, and it turns out that the list is so long (and encompasses several side lists for other parts of the Bay Area) that December's Dessert Day will be the first of many. In one afternoon, we managed to make it to eight places--a feat that I'm still quite impressed by. Originally, I thought we'd just go to each place and get a dessert to go, and I'd eat my stash over the course of the subsequent few days. But Rob insisted that we needed to actually sample the desserts on the spot (see what I mean about crazy love for desserts?!). I slowed down by our sixth stop; otherwise, I'm sure we could have made more than eight. :)

pictured above (top to bottom): cookies at Goody Goodie; the dessert case at Thorough Bread and Pastry; donuts from Dynamo Donuts

Here are the places we went on Dessert Day (part 1), in the order of our itinerary that day.

1. Sandbox Bakery, Bernal Heights

Sandbox is supposedly known for their Japanese-inspired bakery items, but sadly, we got there a bit late in the afternoon for any of those to be left. However! the bread pudding that we did try was so good. I'm usually not a fan of bread pudding because it's usually way too rich and egg-y for my tastes, but the version at Sandbox was much better--a perfect mix of bready and moist from the custard without being overbearing.

2. Goody Goodie Cream & Sugar, Mission

We put Goody Goodie on the list because I'd been there briefly for this year's Scharffenberger bakery tour and really liked the seasalt-basil-lemon chocolate wafer cookies they had designed for that tour, and so I was curious to try their usual cookie offerings. I have to say--finding that perfect chocolate chip cookie is hard! I liked the dough at Goody Goodie and the popcorn in their Circus Cookie was a smart (and appreciably salty) addition, but the search for the perfect chocolate chip cookie in the City continues for me.

3. Dynamo Donuts, Mission

I'd been to Dynamo before and was so disappointed that we got there too late on our Dessert Day to nab one of my favorite, favorite flavors: the passionfruit-milk chocolate. In my opinion, that combination is so right for a donut, with sweetness from the milk chocolate balanced by the tartness of the passionfruit. Out of the ones that we did try, I was surprised that my favorite was the bacon-topped donut, since I usually shy away from the fad of bacon-topped desserts. But maybe it's just that I was too disappointed by not getting the passionfruit milk chocolate to care. :( Also, I'm sorry, Dynamo, but Portland's Voodoo Donuts still wins for maximum fluffiness in my book. (Maybe I'm really bitter at not getting that passionfruit milk chocolate!)

above: cornbread jalapeño ice cream and Vietnamese coffee ice cream at Humphrey Slocombe; and Humphrey Slocombe's unmarked storefront in the Mission

4. Humphrey Slocombe, Mission

Ah, Humphrey Slocombe. The hipster-ist of hipstery San Francisco ice cream shops. So hipstery that it's unmarked outside. The crazy flavors were actually surprisingly tasty (e.g., cornbread and jalapeño jam?! insane-sounding but it actually really works), but maybe I was feeling too intimidated by the hipsterness of it all, and settled for a more "vanilla" Vietnamese coffee flavor. :)

5. Craftsman & Wolves, Mission

Speaking of hipster sweet shops, Craftsman & Wolves is one that I've been looking forward to trying ever since Anita made cookies with William Werner's fig sangria jam a few Christmases ago. We sampled quite the eclectic assortment of things from the recently-opened bakery: pâte de fruit, a passionfruit-sesame croissant, a cornnut-topped cake, and a savory kimchee poundcake. The pâte de fruits were a hit, bursting with massive amounts of flavor in such a little bite, but both Rob's and my knock-it-out-of-the-ballpark favorite was the savory kimchee cake, which sounds completely wacky but is so, so good in an odd way. (Okay, maybe at this point, we were getting a bit tired of the sweets!) I like imaginative baking that I wouldn't have thought of myself, and Craftsman & Wolves is definitely a place to go for that.

above: scenes from Craftsman & Wolves

6. Tartine Bakery, Mission

Tartine has always been one of my personal favorite San Francisco bakeries, and after sampling so many dessert shops in a row, I can honestly say that it's as good as all the hype (which isn't always the case with popular places!). I'm not wild about the bread pudding here, which Rob tried (too egg-y; cf. Sandbox Bakery's above), but I did pick up an entire box of one of my absolute, hands-down favorite items from Tartine (and one that I feel like doesn't get as much recognition as it deserves): the lemon almond poppyseed poundcake (pictured below). I could wax poetic about this poundcake for days on end--it's sort of the perfect specimen of a lemon poundcake, in my opinion. It's super moist and dense from the almond paste, perfectly pucker-y lemony, baked in a super chic Pullman pan for all-around brown edges, and the sides are coated with a crunchy sugar crust, which is kind of a stroke of genius. It's rare for me to find bakery items that I will return for over and over again, but Tartine's lemon poundcake is definitely one.

Also, I felt as though I hit the jackpot on our dessert tour, because Tartine's breads had just come fresh out of the oven when we made it there. And they had olive loaves! Which, if you haven't had one, is pretty darn close to what I imagine bread tastes like in heaven. I got one that was still hot, and hugging that loaf in the cold San Francisco evening air while the most amazing smell of olives wafted all around pretty much made me the happiest person ever at that moment.

7. Thorough Bread and Pastry, Castro

Thorough Bread is a bakery I hadn't heard of before but popped up during my research for our dessert day list, and it was a pleasant find in the middle of the Castro! The bakery reminded me of the type of neighborhood bakery one would find in small towns (or the types of bakeries I saw in Portland, incidentally)--the ones that do breads and cakes and cookies and all sorts of desserts, but does them all really well. We were getting so tired at this point that we just stood at the pastry case gawking at the beautifully made individual mousse cakes. I took a lemon blueberry one home, and it was a delicious treat the next day. Oh, and they had a huge Christmas tree in the corner that was entirely made out of bread and cookies! Now *that* was an impressive sight.

8. The Ice Cream Bar, Cole Valley

I've written about the Ice Cream Bar before, so I didn't include any photos here. I am consistently smitten with how retro this place is--so much so that it brings back memories for me of the '50s that I shouldn't have because I wasn't actually alive then! I had the orange creamsicle-inspired ice cream soda because I'm kind of a bit of a sucker for anything creamsicle-flavored. Sitting at the soda fountain bar with my short legs dangling, gossiping about work and life and friends, and sipping on fizzy citrus with a touch of creaminess (a huge relief after soooo many baked goods) was the perfect ending to an intensely sugar-filled afternoon. (...and yes, I was pretty hyper for a good few days afterwards.)

above: scenes from Tartine

Dessert Day, part 2 will hopefully happen soon. Have suggestions for me of your favorite dessert places in San Francisco or around the Bay that should make the list? Please leave them in a comment below!

The Café au Lait Tart, for breakfast for dessert

2013-01-22T23:00:00.001-08:00

Well, here's one for recursion: it's dessert for breakfast for dessert! :) This idea has been floating around in my head for quite a while now, but I hadn't had a chance to properly realize it until a friend requested this week to have "breakfast for dessert," since she found herself too busy to ever properly have breakfast for breakfast. I'm never one to let friends go hungry, and so, at last, the café au lait tart was born.

My inspiration behind this tart was to make it a beautiful homage to the first meal of the day, pulling together the flavors and textures that we'd normally associate with breakfast into dessert form (minus the scrambled eggs and bacon--that's so overdone). The crust has a hint of nutty sweetness from a tinge of oat flour, and then there are layers of milk jam, whole-fruit wild blueberry jam, and espresso dark chocolate ganache, all topped with golden oatmeal praline and flaked seasalt. (You can see my diagram of the dessert in the planning stages here.) The end result is at once rich and bitter and crunchy and creamy and sweet and salty--pretty much one of the most sophisticated ways to start your day, all compressed into a single bite.

[for larger image, click photo above]

...Now, if all days started this way!

[My apologies on the short post, but hopefully the recipe makes up for it. I find myself far too lacking in words these days, having used up my quota for work purposes.]

Read on for recipe....

The Café au Lait Tart
makes one 14 x 5-inch tart

for oatmeal praline
40 g rolled oats
75 g sugar
1 Tbspn honey

for oat crust
100 g oat flour
160 g all-purpose flour
50 g sugar
7 Tbspn (99 g) unsalted butter,
cold and cut in pieces
1 large egg yolk
½ tspn vanilla extract
3–4 Tbspn cold water

for milk jam
460 g whole milk
100 g sugar
¼ tspn baking soda
scant ¼ tspn salt

wild blueberry jam

for dark chocolate espresso ganache
200 g 68–72% bittersweet
chocolate
45 g 99% unsweetened chocolate
227 g heavy cream
1½ Tbspn unsalted butter
1 tspn espresso powder
2 Tbspn honey
flaked seasalt

1. for oatmeal praline. Preheat oven to 350° F. Spread the oats on a baking sheet. Bake for about 7 to 10 minutes, stirring once or twice, until golden brown. Remove from oven and let cool. Line a baking sheet with a silpat or parchment paper. In a light-colored bottom saucepan, combine the sugar and honey over medium high heat. Do not stir—if necessary, swirl the pan to cook the sugar evenly. Cook until the sugar has turned a deep caramel color. Remove from heat and immediately stir in the toasted oats. Working quickly, spread the oats in a thin layer on the prepared baking sheet and let cool completely. Once cool, break into very small pieces.

2. for oat crust. Using a food processor or pastry cutter, mix the flours and sugar together. Cut the cold butter into the flour mixture until the size of small peas. Add the egg yolk and mix to combnie. Gradually add the vanilla extract and cold water while mixing just until a dough begins to form when pressed between two fingers. Do not overmix. Form the pastry into a disc, wrap with parchment paper or plastic wrap, and chill for at least one hour.

Preheat oven to 425° F. Roll or press the cold dough into the tart pan to for a ¼-inch-thick crust. Trim off and discard the excess dough. Prick the bottom of the dough all over with a fork, cover with parchment, and weigh down with pie weights. Chill again if the dough has softened. Bake for 13 to 15 minutes until the edges have turned golden. Remove the weights and the parchment paper, and continue to bake for 5 to 7 minutes more until golden brown. Remove from the oven and let cool.

3. for milk jam. Combine the milk, sugar, and baking soda in a large, heavy-bottomed pot or dutch oven and bring to a boil over medium high heat, stirring occasionally. Once at a boil, reduce the heat to medium low and let simmer, stirring frequently and scraping the bottom with a spatula, for about 45 minutes to 1 hour, until the milk has turned a medium light caramel and is the consistency of jam. Stir in the salt, remove from heat, and let cool.

Spread the milk jam onto the bottom of the cooled crust, smoothing with the back of a spoon or spatula. Top with a very thin layer of wild blueberry jam.

4. for dark chocolate espresso ganache. Chop the chocolate and melt in a double boiler. Keep warm. In a saucepan, combine the heavy cream and butter. Bring just to a simmer, remove from heat, and stir in the espresso powder. Gradually pour the hot cream over the melted chocolate, stirring constantly with a spatula. Add the honey and stir until smooth.

Immediately pour the warm ganache on top of the jam layer, being careful not to disturb the jam. Do not overfill the tart; there may yet be a few teaspoons of leftover ganache. Just when the ganache starts to set, sprinkle the top of the tart with flaked seasalt and pieces of praline. Save any leftover praline for later use. Let the tart set at room temperature completely before serving, about 1 to 2 hours.

Milk jam recipe from Tartelette.

The wild blueberry jam used here was provided to me by Bonne Maman. I've been a fan of their jams ever since college, and, per desserts for breakfast policy, I don't plug products on the blog unless I love and use them myself. Bonne Maman is great for simple, solid jams for dessert purposes, and the wild blueberry flavor here--with whole wild blueberries inside!--is really perfect for this tart.

Moving forwards: here's to 2013!

2013-01-15T21:23:00.000-08:00

It's taken me far too much time to put together the usual year-end post commemorating 2012. Every time I started writing, the post would balloon and explode into epic proportions (like this paper I'm finishing up for work...). Though, it makes sense. 2012 started off as just another ho-hum, inconspicuous year, but then it morphed unexpectedly--as life is wont to do--into this insanely packed time of travels, adventures, friends, disappointments and sadness, life lessons, big decisions, and growth. Finally, I decided to erase everything I'd written. No one post would do the year justice, and instead of holding up the blog waiting for some massive retrospective, I decided that it's much better just to take a quick look back and really a much longer look forwards. Because 2013 is going to be awesome!

So here's a hit list collection of a few of my favorite moments from 2012. Some made it to the blog previously, others are seeing the light of the internet for the first time ever, but that doesn't make them any less important (if anything, they might have been even more personally memorable).

in 2012, I...

fell in love with Portlandia.

spent Chinese New Year in Taiwan for the first time in decades.

reveled in Italy.

celebrated my best friend's birthday in Vegas (a very strange and foreign place to a quiet nature/culture/history traveler like myself, but I did begin to understand and appreciate the appeal of the anonymity you achieve being surrounded by a drove of strangers with thumping music drowning out every distracting thought that could cross your mind, if just for a little bit).

gave a talk on food photography at BlogHer Food in Seattle.

launched sated magazine.

had a BBQ birthday bash during which I realized that I have somehow ended up surrounding myself with the most amazing and inspiring group of friends a girl could ask for.

flitted all over San Francisco during the summer.

made another wedding cake (actually, it was several cakes).

picked many, many, many pounds of plums from my backyard tree--many of which were transformed into jam by Blue Chair Fruit.

got in a car with one of my best friends from grad school and drove her across the country from SF to her new job in Pittsburgh, via Vegas, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, Boulder, Kansas City, St. Louis, and Columbus

hiked to the Delicate Arch by myself in the pitch black to see the sun rise over the Utah desert. (I've been planning to do this hike since the fifth grade.)

spent an inordinate amount of time playing D3.

road-tripped to LA... twice (yay for K-town and ice milk!).

attended the San Diego wedding of the college friend who taught me how to bake tarts.

received a national grant and ran a successful workshop because of it! (a favorite moment from the workshop dinner)

took a springboard diving class, a sport I've wanted to try since elementary school. (and I'm fantastically bad at it!)

finally visited Joshua Tree National Park.

realized what I wanted right now in life, and picked myself out of a two-year slump, deciding to go full throttle for something that inspires me to jump out of bed in the morning.

in general, decided to stop apologizing as much for being myself, as long as I am being myself to the fullest.
(It's a good policy.)

for 2013, to live by:

"The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it under its roof." --Barbara Kingsolver

Here's to the new year! 2013, you had me at hello.

Cranberry Clove Linzer Torte, and Happy Holidays

2012-12-27T02:23:00.001-08:00

Christmas was a quiet affair this year, without much of the usual hubbub or raucous festivities. This was partly a purposeful calm-down for me: while I usually revel in the holiday season, 2012 has been such a whirlwind that it felt good to just spend a day taking a deep breath, seeing close family and closer friends, and watching the rain pound down outside. No usual holiday dessert insanity for me this year, either. Just a simple, almost-rustic cranberry clove linzer torte: tart, buttery, spicy, sweet, and cakey, with a side of chocolate red tea that I got from a visit to the Netherlands a few years ago. The idea for a cranberry filling inside a linzer torte, which typically has a raspberry jam center, came from a colleague of mine (thanks, Beth!), and I actually like this cranberry version much better than the original. Because the cranberries are tarter, the torte isn't cloyingly sweet as it can sometimes be, and the contrast between the tart center and the sweeter, clove- and cinnamon-infused, nutty crust is such a perfect balance. The torte was so good that I made three of them, cutting large wedges as gifts to neighbors, friends, and family (and saving a fair portion for myself for breakfast this week! ;)).

What did you all have for Christmas dessert/breakfast this year?

[click on photo above for larger image]

Despite the quiet Christmas, I'm actually looking forward to a more lively New Year's this year. In years past, I've hosted a small game night on New Year's Eve for New Year's orphans (read: antisocial introverts like me who don't get invited to your stereotypical boisterous NYE extravaganzas), but this year, I have proper plans to attend a proper NYE party, which I'm properly excited about! :D My friend and I are going to make this gorgonzola and pear galette, which the host has eloquently renamed, "Galette de Poires à la Gorgonzola"--everything sounds way more festive in French, doesn't it!

Then, a few days after New Years, I'm off to Boston for a short business trip. It's been years since I've been to Boston last, but I'm excited to get to explore the city again. Please, please, please--if you have any recommendations for must-eat or must-see places in Boston, please leave them in a comment below!

I hope you all are having wonderful holidays, be it Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, or Yay-no-work-or-school-for-a-couple-of-days-and-the-freeways-aren't-crowded-at-all Week! Happy Holidays!

Read on for recipe...

Cranberry Clove Linzer Torte
makes one 9-inch tart

for cranberry filling
2 cups fresh cranberries
125 g sugar
zest of 1 small orange
juice of 1 small orange
juice of ½ lemon
½ vanilla bean

1. Combine the cranberries, sugar, orange zest, and orange and lemon juices in a saucepan. Split the vanilla bean lengthwise, scrape the seeds into the cranberries, and add the vanilla bean shell.
2. Over medium heat, bring the cranberries to a boil, stirring occasionally. Let the cranberries boil, bubbling vigorously, for about 5 to 7 minutes without stirring. Once the cranberries begin to thicken, stir, scraping the bottom of the pan, until the mix reaches a consistency of warm jam.
3. Remove from heat immediately and let cool to room temperature. Remove the vanilla bean pod before using.

for crust
30 g hazelnuts
76 g almonds
125 g all-purpose flour
150 g sugar
½ tspn salt
1½ tspn ground cinnamon
¾ tspn ground cloves
10 Tbspn (142 g) butter
1 large egg yolk
zest of 1 lemon
zest of 1 orange
½ tspn almond extract

4. In a food processor, combine the hazelnuts, almonds, flour, sugar, salt, cinnamon, and cloves. Pulse until the nuts are completely ground.
5. Cut the butter into small chunks. Add the butter, egg yolk, lemon and orange zest, and almond extract to the flour mixture. Pulse just until a dough begins to form.
6. Remove the dough from the food processor, wrap with parchment paper, and chill for at least 1 hour.
7. Preheat oven to 350° F. Grease and flour one 9-inch springform pan, and line the bottom with a parchment round.
8. Reserve a third of the dough and press the remainder into the bottom of the pan. Spread a thin layer of cranberry filling on top, leaving a 1-inch ring of dough exposed around the edge.
9. Roll out the remaining dough on a floured surface. Using a cookie cutter, cut the dough into shapes and scatter randomly atop the tart.
10. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes until golden brown around the edges and on top.
11. Remove from the oven. Let cool for 10 minutes on a wire rack, and then loosen the sides with a thin knife. Let cool completely before serving.

Crust recipe adapted from Alice Medrich's Sinfully Easy Delicious Desserts

Enjoy!

Jars of Cookies, from sated magazine

2012-12-23T08:46:00.000-08:00

It's almost Christmas. I can't believe it. Somehow this year, the holidays have just sort of snuck up on me with no fanfare until a friend pointed out to me yesterday that it's already the 23rd. WHAT! None of my holiday shopping is done. >< I hope you all don't mind receiving Christmas gifts in January instead.... :\

I am super excited, however, to finally get to share a few photos from a shoot I did for sated about cookies for the holidays. I'm especially excited about these photos because while shooting this feature, I basically got to break many of the tenets of modern-day food photography: I shot in direct sunlight and at comparatively small apertures than normal (think f/11 instead of the typical f/2.8s that you see in a good deal of food photography these days). I'm kind of delighted by the results, if I might say so myself, with the sunlight glistening and sparkling off the jars, and the streaks of light piercing through dark edges of the photographs. It's refreshing to break all the rules every now and then!

Also, these recipes, developed by Anita Chu and Jennifer Altman for sated, are delicious. I might have, um, generously sampled them while shooting. :P In particular, the hazelnut thumbprints pictured below are one of my favorite, favorite things that Anita makes, and I'm so excited that she's sharing the recipe over on the sated blog today! Click on over for the hazelnut thumbprints recipe, as well as recipes for buttery Scottish shortbread and spicy speculaas (pictured above).

I hope everyone has a smooth next few days leading up to Christmas! Drink lots of hot chocolate, spiced apple cider, and mulled wine for me!

Cinnamon Chocolate Sunken Souffle Cake with Sparkling Cranberries

2012-12-20T23:00:00.000-08:00

This is a cake that I made last week for our department holiday party. I went back and forth about whether or not I wanted to share it here on the blog, since I only had time to snap one quick photo of it before having to cart it off to the party where it was promptly demolished without any further photo ops. But then I thought, if the world ends tomorrow, I would want you to go out having this recipe, because it's one of my favorite flourless chocolate cake recipes, and because it's even awesomer when topped with a high pile of crunchy, tart, sugared cranberries for a decadent sparkle to the cake. I like to call it the "Richness of the Base" cake, which is kind of a really lame linguistics pun (and yes, I like my puns in baked form). But really, this is one of my go-to flourless chocolate cake recipes ever since I developed it for the chocolate issue of sated. While I find most flourless chocolate cakes far too dense, this one is the perfect balance between being richly chocolate and still light enough to feel like you're eating cake rather than eating a melted-down bar of chocolate. The coconut oil and cinnamon in this version add a touch of extra special punch to the cake, making it perfect for holiday parties. Also! sugared cranberries are just wonderful little bursts of fruit--this is my first time making them, and I probably ate most of the cranberries before they even made it onto the cake. Oops! :)

I also decided today that if the world does end, I wanted to at least see one last sunset at the Pacific Ocean. So I just dropped everything and went. The sun and the trusty Pacific did not disappoint!

It's been sort of an insane past week, filled with a family friend's funeral and bad news and horrible people doing horrible things, and all of this oddly punctuated by good, fun, sweet, heart-warming moments in a way that's just... life being life. Even if the world doesn't end tomorrow, I keep getting the feeling that I want to hug everyone a little tighter from here on out.

Read on for recipe....

Cinnamon chocolate sunken souffle cake, with sparkling cranberries
adapted from sated magazine
makes one 9-inch cake

128 g coconut oil*
340 g (12 oz) dark chocolate (68 - 72%), chopped
75g + 57g sugar
6 large eggs, separated
1 1/2 tspn ground cinnamon
1/2 tspn salt
powdered sugar
sugared cranberries, using this recipe

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Grease one 9-inch round springform pan and line the bottom with a parchment paper round.
2. In a bowl suspended over simmering water, heat and melt the butter, chopped chocolate, and 75 g sugar. Stir until everything in the bowl is melted and well-combined. Remove from heat and set aside to let cool briefly.
3. Whisk together the egg yolks. Once the chocolate mixture is about room temperature or just barely warm, gradually pour the egg yolks into the chocolate mixture, whisking continuously. Stir in the ground cinnamon and salt.
4. In a separate bowl, whip the egg whites until soft peaks. Add the remaining 57 g sugar and continue to whip just until stiff peaks. Do not overmix.
5. Stir a third of the egg whites into the chocolate mixture. Then, fold in the remainder of the egg whites just until there are no more visible streaks. Be careful not to overmix.
6. Immediately pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes until the top of the cake is dry, but do not let the cake crack. Remove the cake from the oven. The middle should still be a bit jiggly, but the cake will continue to set as it cools. Place the cake on a wire cooling rack and let cool completely before unmolding.
7. Before serving, sprinkle the cake with powdered sugar and spoon the sugared cranberries into the sunken well of the cake.

*If coconut oil is unavailable, substitute with 9 Tbspn of unsalted butter.

Enjoy!

Deck the tables! from sated magazine

2012-12-07T07:59:00.001-08:00

Over on the sated blog, there's a feature I shot with holiday table floral arrangements from the wonderful Christina of Farmgirl Flowers. Farmgirl Flowers is one of my favorite local SF businesses that I've discovered while working on sated: their mission to work with all locally-grown flowers and to create these wonderfully organic-looking, dense, and eclectic bouquets just resonates so well with the locavore movement currently in the food world. Click on over to the sated blog for tips from Christina for making these own bouquets at home!

Inspired by everything I learned while shooting this feature, I've been putting together some small arrangements of my own out of the local flowers I can find at the markets on weekends. I find that having flowers on the desk in my study/studio is so calming--it's useful to have something charming to look at off to the side of my computer screen to keep me going during the long hours of the sometimes-frustrating writing process! Here are a couple results of my recent floral experiments that I managed to remember to take photos of... lots of dahlias this time of year!

I hope everyone has been having a good first week of December! During a late night procrasti-baking session this week, I made meyer lemon and sage pound cake-lettes (with sage milk glaze and sliced almonds), but they all disappeared at the next morning's lab meeting before I could take any photos of them to share here! But, with meyer lemon season in full swing, I'll definitely be remaking them soon.

Happy Friday!

TGIF: Cookies

2012-11-29T18:35:00.000-08:00

I haven't had time to be in the kitchen much lately, but when I have, it's usually to bake cookies. I've been making an awful lot of cookies lately. I think it's because they're short on time commitment but big on the satisfaction factor. After sitting and staring at a computer screen for endless hours of stressful writing and fretting and everything in between (read: work stuff. I love it, but it's emotionally draining sometimes, you know?), some nice nutty butter melted into flour and sugar and baked to a ooey gooey, chewy crisp is just the perfect antidote. I've also been experimenting, tweaking things here and there in the chocolate chip cookie recipe to try and achieve the perfect texture, bite, and flavor. What I've learned so far is that it should be a crime to serve chocolate chip cookies without a nice sprinkling of flaked salt on top. Salt just makes the cookies so, so much better! Another thing I've been playing around with are flour combinations--bread, 00, all-purpose, whole wheat. It's been interesting experimenting, and while I'm close, I'm not quite there yet, so I won't share until it's perfect. :) Speaking of perfection, everything else I've managed to pull out of the kitchen lately is only okay, but not ... perfect. And I really only want to share the really, really good stuff here.

Okay, that was way too stream-of-consciousness ranty. :) I can't believe it's already December! sigh.

Fresh Squeezed for Anthology Magazine

2012-11-16T16:49:00.000-08:00

For all you who are suffering desserts for breakfast withdrawal, there are THREE! citrus-inspired recipes of mine in the new 2012 Anthology Magazine Gift Guide released today. :D! I'm so thrilled to have contributed to the gift guide, especially since I spend many a long hours drooling through the uber-clean and beautifully designed pages of Anthology whenever it hits the shelves.

The recipes include Meyer Lemon Snow Balls (a lemony spin on one of my favorite holiday cookies that my mom made when I was little), Orange Rosemary Bundt Cakes with Dark Chocolate Glaze (something sophisticated to eat by the fireplace while watching the Christmas lights sparkle on the tree), and a Winter Citrus and White Chocolate Tart (a super easy and gluten-free wow-factor dessert for the holiday table!).

Happy Friday, everyone!

Dogpatch Day, San Francisco

2012-11-13T08:45:00.002-08:00

Last week involved a lot of anxious stressfulness, an increasingly frustrating waiting game with other peoples' busy schedules (I hate it when my work is dependent on others, but such is the nature of things, and I recognize that it's a two-way street), trudging through work feeling as though I was wading through quicksand mud pits, and then ultimately feeling as though nothing got done. Sigh, I'm sure we all have these weeks! Thankfully, I have awesome friends who will kidnap me and force me to take a day's vacation doing fun things, like hanging out in the Dogpatch district in San Francisco, eating awesome food, and seeing grand musicals!

The Dogpatch neighborhood is probably one of the places in SF that I go to most commonly. It's a warehouse district, near the water by the Bay, and it houses many of the professional kitchens of the local bakeries as well as prop studios and photography studios within two big blocks of each other. Many of our sated magazine shoots happen there. But, funnily enough, as much time as I've spent in this neighborhood, I've never gotten to take a day and enjoy it as a visitor, so this was a treat. We started the day with brunch at Serpentine, which was so hipstery cool with its industrial-y feel and fancy gin bottles lined up behind the counter that I felt like a total country bumpkin in comparison. But no matter! The food was good--and the fried lemon slices on top of my eggs benedict were a stroke of genius. I've never seen (or thought of) anything like it.

Then we had an hour or so after brunch and before our matinee show to get to, so I took my friends to Flora Grubb Nursery, which is one of my favorite new discoveries in SF. I have no green thumb myself, but I love getting lost in the gardens here, with all of the succulents growing out of every corner, in desks, in old rust-bucket, reclaimed cars, on walls, in wreaths this time of year!, in terrariums. The rose geranium plant that I got here months ago is still alive and kicking, which is impressive given my impressive talent of killing even the most resilient of plants. (also, there was a cute kitty on premises, which is always a plus.)

Then we were off to see the Lion King! in all of its African drumming and Zulu-speaking glory. I'd seen it before many, many years ago, but that was before I'd started studying linguistics, and it was fun to watch it again with new knowledge about African languages in mind.

Finally, we ended the day back in the Dogpatch, living it up with crema catalina ice cream (lime custard + burnt orange caramel) and crispy Valrhona chocolate pearls (and poodles! and sunsets!) at Mr. & Mrs. Miscellaneous.

I have a recipe idea that's been burning in the back of my brain that I want to share soon, but it's just a matter of finding some time in the kitchen to make it come to life! Sigh. Hopefully this week, so that it's in time to make it onto Thanksgiving tables..

--
Photos are from both the iPhone using the ShakeIt Photo App and the dSLR.

Salted Dark Chocolate Espresso Cookies

2012-10-31T08:27:00.000-07:00

First off, I want to thank you all for your amazing and supportive comments on my last post! I love that I have such an inspiring and talented group of readers for this blog, and it makes me so proud to be able to connect with you all through this forum. The post has just been republished on my school's main arts site!, with the hopes that it'll engender even more awareness and discussion and might help other students in similar situations. It's a bit nerve-wracking for me to have the post published on the school's website, since I'm so accustomed to hiding my arts life from my academic life. But, I'm trying to live my life more unapologetically, which means learning to be braver about sticking my neck out there. Courage, people!

Second, I want to extend wishes and thoughts to everyone on the East Coast right now--I hope you all weathered the giant Frankenstorm alright and are all safe and sound (and have power and water!).

Meanwhile, I *just* realized late last night (I guess technically it was early this morning, but I have a strict rule that "night" doesn't end until I go to sleep :)), that it's Halloween today! Happy Halloween! And where the heck did October go??? Usually I love to celebrate Halloween. Not only is it an awesome holiday in its own right, but it also kicks off two months' worth of holidays, all the way through January, and I love the buzz of celebration and excitement that you feel starting October 31 all the way up until New Year's Eve.

This October, however, I fear that I've been living under a rock in a cave, buried deep under piles of papers and essays and commented versions of essays to turn into papers and more deadlines for papers and essays (much to the glee of my dissertation committee, it seems....). I've barely even touched my kitchen, except to make tea or to heat up whatever leftovers I'm fortunate to have in the refrigerator. Although, you shouldn't pity me too much--my leftovers have been a decently tolerable combination of Indian food, Asian fusion, and awesome Chantal Guillon macarons. :). Luckily, deadline season will come to a close soon, and hopefully life can return to some more semblance of "normal," whatever that may be.

So finding balance in life isn't easy! This week, I could feel the cracks starting, that creative part of my brain tick- tick- ticking away from disuse while it's been shoved aside for academic deadlines. I could feel my eye actively start framing the world around me in photographs wherever I looked, I became inseparable from my camera phone, my normal doodles in the margins of papers became even more involved, and I started having un-suppressible, obsessive thoughts about dark chocolate with port-soaked cherries. And then it happened: writer's block. BAM. Right in the middle of a streak of productivity, there was an essay that I just. couldn't. write. No matter how many days I spent or how many new drafts I started--nothing. Argh!

So finally, deep into one night of frustrated non-writing with deadlines looming, I walked away from the computer and into the kitchen, pulled one of my current cookbook favorites off of the shelf, and flipped to the deepest, darkest chocolate recipe I could find. I can always count on Alice: these dark chocolate espresso cookies (with a few slight modifications from her original recipe) were exactly what they sound like, the very essence of chocolate. Made completely with unsweetened chocolate (make sure to break out the good stuff in your cabinets), these amazing bites come out of the oven so perfectly melty, with the giant chocolate chunks in their molten centers wrapping you up with this warm bittersweet hug in such a good way you never thought bitter, unsweetened chocolate could. After they cool, the cookies are still perfectly gooey. I used coconut oil instead of butter in these, and if you eat a cookie ever so slowly, you'll get just the faintest hint of sweet coconut flavor come through like a streak of sunshine. Then, the hit of smoked sea salt flakes sprinkled on top brings everything together--really, chocolate just shouldn't be eaten without a bit of salty sophistication to it! Be forewarned that these cookies are rich. I don't normally drink milk, but I needed a shot of milk next to these.

I guess the million dollar question here is whether these cookies cure the stubborn affliction of wrtiers' block? Well.... the next day, I wrote my essay! Of course, I'm not quite sure if it was eating these cookies that did it. Or, if it was baking these cookies and then bringing a box of them to my advisor's office, where she sat and ate them while offering sage advice on how I should approach my essay. I guess ultimately, it doesn't matter. Writer's block is gone, and so are the cookies now. :)

Here's wishing everyone a Happy Halloween! I guess I'll celebrate it a few days late after the deadlines of this week are past, but at least that lets me take advantage of all the 2 for 1 deals on leftover Halloween candy on November 1. Mwahaha! :)

P.S. Also a big thank you to my good friend Priscilla, who is an uber-talented knitter, and made me the cup/bottle warmer.

Read on for recipe.....

Salted Dark Chocolate Espresso Cookies
adapted from Alice Medrich's Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy
makes about two dozen cookies

284 g (10 oz) good quality unsweetened chocolate
53 g (¼ cup) coconut oil
43 g (⅓ cup) all-purpose flour
¼ tspn baking powder
¼ tspn salt
2 large eggs, at room temperature
267 g (1⅓ cups) sugar
1½ tspn instant espresso powder
1 tspn vanilla extract
smoked sea salt flakes

1. Finely chop 170 g (6 oz) chocolate and set in a double boiler over simmering water with the coconut oil. Stirring constantly, melt. Once melted, remove from heat, set aside, and let cool to room temperature.
2. Chop the remaining 114 g (4 oz) chocolate into large chunks, about the size of big chocolate chips. Set aside.
3. In a bowl, whisk to combine the flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.
4. In a mixer bowl with the paddle attachment, combine the eggs, sugar, espresso powder, and vanilla extract. Beat on medium high for about 5 minutes, until pale and fluffy and the batter drops off the beaters in a thick ribbon. Fold in the flour mixture, followed by the cooled melted chocolate mixture. Fold in the chocolate chunks. Cover and chill until firm, about 1 hour. (Or chill in the freezer for about 30 minutes.)
5. Preheat oven to 350° F. On lined or greased cookie sheets, drop 1 to 1½-inch balls of dough, leaving about 2 inches between each ball. Sprinkle the dough balls with salt flakes.
6. Bake the sheets one at a time for 8 to 10 minutes, rotating once half-way through baking. The centers should still be soft when you remove the pans from the oven. Let the cookies cool briefly before enjoying hot, or store in air tight containers for about two days. Serve with a shot of milk.

Enjoy!

On purpose, rhythm, and writing your own damn story

2012-10-23T09:09:00.002-07:00

It hasn't escaped my attention that this blog seems a bit neglected as of late, but I hope you all will excuse me for the long silences because for the first time in what I feel like is years, I am going full force after something that I want: a goal, a purpose, a reason. And reaching for that almost unattainable goal, one that makes the tips of your fingers tingle when you feel as if you can almost touch it--it feels really good.

For those of you who don't know, over the past few years, I've been living something of a double life. Yes, there's the photographer and baker (and self-taught-muddling-through-it-sort-of-but-not-really graphic designer) that you know from this blog. But I am also a scholar, a linguist, and an academic (or at the very least, I'm in school to become one). And I am very serious about both lives.

But, the message that I kept hearing all around me was, "You can't do both. You have to choose one. People have one passion, one career, one love, one thing to give everything they've got to. Pick one." I was accused over and over again in academia for not being serious enough, for letting my attention wander (Thankfully, my advisor has never uttered these words to me, even if she may think them, and for that restraint and solidarity, I am incredibly, unspeakably grateful). In the food and photography world, I kept holding back, feeling guilty that I was doing two things, not putting my all into going where I wanted to be, into developing into the artist I wanted to fulfill in my head (My friends had an on-going betting pool to see how long it would take for me to quit academia for photography, which was fun to joke about but wasn't particularly helpful). This requirement that I eventually choose just ONE distressed me greatly, and I wound up wasting time not on scholarly or artistic pursuits but on stressing out, feeling completely paralyzed, that I just didn't know which to give up and that I didn't want to just completely carve out a whole, integral part of my identity and throw it away.

Right about when I was begrudgingly and reluctantly coming to terms that I had to make this hard choice, a few miraculous things happened. First, that workshop I was talking anxiously about in my last post? It was amazing. (I'm self-congratulating a bit because I co-organized it. :)) Though there were the tough moments, like the moment someone asked me the hardest question that you can ask me about my dissertation work (aka: the question you hope in your heart of hearts that no one will ever ask you), everything that happened at the workshop--the good and the ugly--all reminded me again of why I love linguistics and being an academic. It affirmed my feelings that I just do. not. want to give it up, no matter what nay-sayers were telling me. And more than that, it was inspiring: the determination that I came out of that workshop with was, do everything in your power to get there.

Then, a couple days later after the workshop, I attended this panel that was organized by a group for Diversity in the Arts at my school on being a career artist. I didn't go into it expecting much, and I had signed up for it a long time ago, before everything else had gone crazy, so I went anyways. The panel was mostly okay and not very applicable to me, until I met Pireeni Sundaralingam.

Pireeni Sundaralingam is a poet, an accomplished artist with publications, readings, residences at museums, the whole shebang. But crucially, Sundaralingam is also a neuroscientist, a legit, trained-in-the-sciences-at-Oxford-and-worked-at-MIT-and-UCLA-and-holds-an-academic-post scientist. She, my dear readers, is TWO things at the same time. And doing amazingly at both, to boot.

I spoke one-on-one with Sundaralingam as soon as I possibly could after hearing her tell her story at the general panel. I desperately wanted to know, "How is this possible? How do you go through your life and choose BOTH, not settle on just ONE, like everyone tells you to? How do you do it!" Here's what she told me (though I can't recount them as eloquently as she said them):

Make your own story. Just because everyone else might think that there are certain paths that you must take from point A to point B, be your own pilgrim and blaze your own path. It is your story to tell and no one else's, so have the courage to live your own story. And, Sundaralingam said, everyone behind you will thank you, because as you turn around, you'll see that you've just cut out a new path from point A to point B for others that are in the same situation as you.
Be unapologetic. There will always be the nay-sayers. But again, don't let them write your story for you, and don't let them make you feel bad for writing your own story. At the end, you'll be the one who's won.
Find your rhythm. Balancing more than one passion isn't going to be easy. It's harder than just having one thing. But, as evidenced by Sundaralingam, it's achievable. The key, according to Sundaralingam, is to find the rhythm between the two parts and to rely on that rhythm.

Meeting Sundaralingam and hearing her advice was invaluable to me. It's so rare to meet people who are practicing academics and scholars but who also have something else that is an equal part of their identity. I am sure these people exist--and that there are more of them than I realize--but it's rare to meet them and to discuss these things publicly since to have two (or more!) parts of your life that you're 110% serious about is so stigmatized. Wherever you all are, if you're out there, I want to hear from you, because we need each others' support!

So where does this leave me? After these few roller coaster weeks, here I am, learning to unapologetically go for what I want, the life that I want to live. Of course, I haven't found my rhythm yet! Psh, that will take years, no doubt, and patience is something that--though it doesn't come so naturally to me--I need to remind myself to have. I hope you'll all have patience with me and with this blog, too, as I try to figure things out. For the first time in a long while, I don't feel paralyzed anymore. I feel as though I know what I have to do, and that Purpose (with a capital "P") is so empowering. So, I'll be back. The photographs and the desserts (and the sort-of-crummy-but-I'm-learning design) will be back. Just be patient. I'm working on that rhythm.

x, Stephanie

White Grape Sorbet

2012-10-08T22:52:00.002-07:00

This is one of those weeks that calls for a quiet simplicity to my dessert. Something unfussy, deliciously straightforward, cleansing. Because inside, I feel like this. And this. What can I say? I have a nasty habit for biting off more than I can chew, spreading myself far too thin (it's funny how many food-based sayings there are for this situation). This week, there's a Big Deal workshop that I'm co-running at school, and not only do I have to take care of all these organizational details, but I'm also supposed to give a talk there in front of all the Big Wigs who are coming (somebody just shoot me now, because that's a much more pleasant fate than standing up there in front of people who are 10,0000-gazillion times smarter than I am, who will be looking at me, the polite few will be kind enough to wear these fake smiles and nod gently even though they are smiles and nods of pity, and the not-so-polite few will no doubt just tear me apart in the Q&A session. Just thinking about it makes me want to find a giant rock-cave and crawl into it, never to appear again.) Then, we're also running way late on our sated schedule, and my life in general is just. a. mess. Despite how everything looks clean and put together here on the blog, know that it's my happy place, my simple place, where I go to get away from the disintegrating chaos that is my week. *deep breaths.*

So this white grape sorbet, a counterpoint to the dark and boldly purple concord grape sorbet that I made last year, is the perfect therapy for this week. The sorbet is made from these absolutely beautiful green grapes that my mom brought me a few weeks back. They were perfect and rustic specimens of grapes, slightly bruised light purple in some areas, clumped tightly together on the stems, with leaves still winding around the clusters and pockets of cobwebs hidden inside. I love it when I get grapes like this, which look real like how grapes fresh off the vines should look and not like the plastic-ky, cleaned-up versions of grapes that you see floating in cellophane bags in the supermarkets. The grapes and the sorbet taste equally clean, with a mild sweetness, refreshing and quietly subtle.

Wish me luck with this week--I'll see you at the end of it, if I survive!

Read on for recipe....

White Grape Sorbet

850 g white grapes, stemmed (should yield about 800 g of grapes)
1/4 cup (58 g) water
1/4 cup (50 g) sugar
1 Tbspn white wine

1. Combine the grapes and water in a saucepan. Cover and cook, stirring periodically, for about 4 to 7 minutes until the grapes are soft and have released their juices.
2. Remove from heat and press the grapes through a fine mesh strainer to extract all of the liquid.
3. Add the sugar and wine to the grape juice. Stir until the sugar has completely dissolved.
4. Chill the mixture thoroughly and freeze in an ice cream maker of choice. Sorbet is done churning when it is the consistency of a thick, pourable smoothie.
5. Transfer to a container and continue freezing until firm, about 3 to 4 hours.

adapted from David Lebovitz with a nod to Jeni's Ice Cream for sorbet-churning tips.

Enjoy!

TGIF: the Ice Cream Bar, San Francisco

2012-10-05T01:09:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, Scharffen Berger hosted its second annual San Francisco Bakery Crawl to kick off their annual Chocolate Adventure Contest. The crawl is always a blast to go on, being an awesome chance to visit several of the "hot right now" SF bakeries without having to worry about traffic and parking around the city! Score! :) One of the stops on this year's tour was The Ice Cream Bar, which is this awesome old-fashioned ice cream counter and soda fountain that makes you feel as if you've stepped off the street from modern-day San Francisco into a time warp back to the wonderful art deco age of the 1930s. Though we didn't get to try any of the Ice Cream Bar's famed ice cream sodas, they did serve up some delicious ice cream sandwiches, and I'm itching to make another trip back to ~~the 1930s~~ Cole Valley to try their soda offerings. --that and I'm such a sucker for art deco anything. :)

(though in an odd counterpoint, every time I think of soda jerks, I get this song stuck in my head.)

Happy Friday, and I hope everyone has a great first weekend of October! (already?! yikes!)

[A big thanks to Scharffen Berger for hosting me on the bakery crawl. As always, I would never write about anything here that I didn't personally try and like enough to want to share it with everyone.]

Peach and Lemon Verbena Pie, and a virtual pie party!

2012-10-02T02:05:00.003-07:00

A few weeks back, Sarah (of the vanilla bean blog), Hannah (of honey & jam), Beth (of local milk), and I were a-tweeting and a-twittering (or whatever kids do these days) about pie, lamenting the fact that we were too far away to try each others' scrumptious-sounding crust-and-fruit creations. But, not to fear!, we decided that an on-going virtual pie party was the second best thing. Sarah hosted us all last week on her blog with tiny little peach pies-in-jars, and it's my turn now. :) So, welcome all! to the Virtual Pie Party, part deux.

Like Sarah, I just couldn't let the last of the season's peaches at the market pass without one final hurrah. I love late season peaches. There's this one stand in particular that has these beautiful and super sweet giant yellow peaches that only come out late in the season, with the flesh of the peach falling effortlessly off the pit inside. I used these last summer for one of my favorite cakes on this blog, and I've been waiting and waiting for them to show up again since. This peach and lemon verbena pie showcases these peaches perfectly, with a deep dish form so as to stuff as many peaches into a single pie as I could... naturally. :) I've also been itching to use the leaves off my finally-flourishing lemon verbena plant (especially after I managed to kill one already earlier in the summer!), and the touch of lemon verbena lends an incredibly bright and fresh streak to the sweet cooked peaches inside the pie. The crust itself also has a bit of almond flavor thrown in, for an amazing scent fresh out of the oven, and of course I couldn't resist finishing off the thick lattice with an extremely generous sprinkling of turbinado sugar for a crunchy, candy-like top.

Sarah served her peach pies with a side of Ella Fitzgerald playing in the background--a detail that I love and appreciate, especially because my undergraduate honors thesis was all about Ella. But in my current tired and sleep-deprived state, the song that kept popping into my head when I thought of my peach pie was this. Yeah, very cultured. Okay, okay... the next song that popped into my head was at least a little bit higher up on the culture scale: Nina Simone's Four Women ... which, on some level I guess is fitting for this virtual pie party of made up of four women bakers. :) (though this is definitely not what the song is about!) Of course, thinking of Nina Simone led me to think of Rene Marie's "O Nina!" tribute (sorry, couldn't find a recording online), which appears on the same album as one of my favorites. Of course, you can't get me talking about my favorite jazz artists/albums/tracks without mentioning Diana Krall's cover of "A Case of You", Carmen McRae's Great American Songbook (this album is seriously life-changing), and--this is how we get back to Ella--Ella Fitzgerald's Harold Arlen Songbook. Jazz vocalists are a dangerous subject to bring up around me...I could go on and on about this forever and bore everyone here to death!

Hm... somehow I don't think I've been the greatest host of a virtual pie party, prattering on about music instead of pie and blogs and photography. But "quirky" sort of comes with my territory. :) Sarah, Hannah, and Beth: here's to hoping that one day we'll all be able to get together in one place to share pie and coffee and long discussions of music!

(Ack! I realized that this very meandering post turned into a music link fest. Might as well throw this one in there and be done with it. ;P)

Read on for recipe....

Peach and Lemon Verbena Pie
makes one 8-inch deep dish pie

for pastry
3 cups (375 g) all-purpose flour
2 sticks (226 g) butter, cold
½ tspn salt
1 Tbspn almond extract
6 – 7 Tbspn water, cold

for filling
3 lb (1.36 kg) ripe but firm large yellow peaches
10 – 12 lemon verbena leaves
½ cup (100 g) sugar
¼ cup (30 g) tapioca flour
1 tspn almond extract
1 large egg, separated
2 Tbspn heavy cream
turbinado sugar, for sprinkling

1. Combine the flour and salt in a bowl. Using a pastry cutter, cut the cold butter into the flour until the size of small peas. Add the almond extract and mix briefly. Gradually add the water one tablespoon at a time until the dough holds together when pressed between two fingers. There should still be chunks of butter. Do not overmix! Form the dough into a disc, wrap in parchment paper or plastic wrap, and chill for at least 1 hour.
2. Meanwhile, peel and pit the peaches, and cut each peach into 8 slices. Toss the peach slices with the lemon verbena and sugar. Transfer the peaches to a strainer suspended over a saucepan. Let macerate for 1 hour.
3. Remove the pastry from the refrigerator. Reserve about ⅓ of the dough. Roll out the other ⅔ of dough on a lightly-floured surface to ⅛-inch thick. Place the dough in a 8-inch springform pan, trimming the excess. Combine the excess dough with the reserved dough and roll out to ⅛-inch thick. Return both the pan and the prepared dough to the refrigerator to chill.
4. Preheat the oven to 425° F, with the baking rack in the bottom-most position.
5. Transfer the peach slices to a bowl. With the juices in the saucepan, cook over medium high heat for 12 – 15 minutes, until bubbling and thickened. Pour the reduction over the peaches. Add the tapioca flour and almond extract and toss to combine.
6. Separate the egg. Whisk together the egg yolk and heavy cream. Remove the prepared pie shell and pre-rolled dough from the refrigerator. Brush a layer of egg white on the bottom of the pie shell. Fill the pie shell with the peaches. Cut strips of the rolled dough and create a lattice pattern on top of the pie. Brush the top with the egg yolk wash, and sprinkle very generously with turbinado sugar.
7. Bake the pie on the bottom-most oven rack for 20 minutes. When the top of the pie turns brown, place a piece of foil lightly on top. Reduce the oven to 375° F and bake for 40 more minutes, until the fruit is bubbling. Remove from oven and let cool briefly on a wire rack. Serve warm or cooled, but preferably on the same day the pie is made.

Enjoy!

Plum, Rosemary, and Brandy Cakes

2012-09-18T01:02:00.000-07:00

Autumn denial again. Knowing plums would very soon disappear from the markets, I of course woke up on Sunday morning with a mad craving for plums... and plum cake. So I managed to scavenge a few good specimens from the couple of vendors at the market still left who were selling plums (most of the market has now moved onto grapes!), and set about to make a good, simple plum cake for Sunday/Monday morning breakfasts. ..."simple" with rosemary and brandy, of course! :) (because since you're eating cake on a Monday morning, might as well have it with plums soaked in brandy, amiright?!)

Lately I've been craving simple butter cakes like these, laden with fruit (exhibit A: last week's cake). I think it's just because everything else in life is so insane and potentially stress-inducing that I need my desserts at the very least to be comfortable, easy to understand, straightforwardly good. The rosemary in here (homegrown! My brown thumb has successfully kept rosemary alive for at least one summer so far!) adds just enough complexity and surprise to make it intriguing at the same time. It's the best kind of comfort food.

Here's wishing everyone a happy and productive week, filled with enough relaxing moments to breathe here and there to keep us all sane. :)

Read on for recipe....
(Toni remarked that this cake reminded her of the magic cake in Pixar's Brave! So I couldn't resist feeding my black bear some. :D)

Plum, Rosemary, and Brandy Cakes
makes three 4½-inch round cakes
inspired by Adrian Richardson's The Good Life

3 - 4 small plums
¼ cup brandy
2 Tbspn dark brown sugar, lightly packed
200 g (1½ cups + ½ Tbspn) all-purpose flour
2½ tspn baking powder
½ tspn salt
1½ Tbspn fresh rosemary leaves, finely chopped
127 g (9 Tbspn) butter, at room temperature
125 g (½ cup + 2 Tbspn) sugar
2 large eggs, at room temperature
2 Tbspn buttermilk
powdered sugar

1. Pit the plums and cut into roughly ½-inch thick slices. Toss in a bowl with the brandy and dark brown sugar. Let the plums sit in the liquid for at least one hour.
2. Preheat oven to 350° F. Grease and flour three 4½-inch springform round cake pans. Set aside.
3. In a bowl, whisk to combine the flour, baking powder, salt, and chopped rosemary. Set aside.
4. In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat the butter and sugar on medium until light and fluffy, about 2 to 3 minutes.
5. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.
6. Reduce speed and fold in the flour mixture in two additions, alternating with the buttermilk. Mix until incorporated, but do not overmix.
7. Divide the batter evenly between the three cake pans. Use the back of the spatula to smooth the tops and spread the batter out to the sides of the pan.
8. Strain the plum slices, reserving the brandy juice. Arrange the marinated plum slices on top of the batter.
9. Bake the cakes for about 40 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cakes comes out cleanly and the edges of the cakes are beginning to turn light brown. Remove the cakes from the oven.
10. Immediately spoon all of the reserved brandy on top of the cakes, letting it soak in.
11. Let the cakes cool for 10 to 15 minutes on a wire rack before unmolding from the pans.
12. Sprinkle with powdered sugar before serving.

Enjoy!

Backyard Apple and Walnut Cake, with Rose Geranium Ice Cream

2012-09-13T10:02:00.000-07:00

I have been trying with all my might to resist the fast-approaching onset of fall. I'm pretty much in denial about it all: the shortening days, the colder weather, the disappearance of summer produce from the markets, the upswing in activity with everyone returning from their summer vacations. On Monday when I met up with a few food-blogging friends in San Francisco for dinner, I refused to bring a thicker, non-summery coat and froze my ass off walking to the car, even though I knew full well beforehand that it was getting colder. Usually this is one of my favorite times of the year, and I relish the change in the seasons and everything that goes along with it, but for some reason, this year, I just don't feel ready yet! I haven't accomplished even a quarter of what I set out to do over the summer, and fall also means that 2012 is drawing to a quick close, and I haven't accomplished even 10% of what I set out to do at the beginning of the year...! I needs more time!

But alas, you can only resist change for so long before your mom starts showing up at your door bearing bags and bags of fall fruits in the form of adorable little apples and elegantly-shaped pears from the neighbors' yards back home!

These apples were too cute and sweet and juicy for me to turn them down, so before I knew it, I ended up with a bags! of them scattered about my kitchen. ... So of course the most efficient way to use them would be a cake! (or pie, really. But there's pie down the road for this blog, I promise.) A cake stuffed so chock-full of apple-y goodness that it turns into a super-robust and moist pound cake--none of that light and fluffy summery stuff. This backyard apple + walnut cake means Fall Business.

I've also been craving a walnut cake for the longest time and so am finally happy to have delivered on that front. Apples and walnuts are such the classic combination, and the bites of buttery nuttiness are perfect amidst the richness of this cake. A thank you is due to the wonderful folks at California Walnuts for sending me these fabulous specimens for the cake!

Oh, and so we can all feel good about being "healthy" and all, there's some whole wheat flour thrown in there for good, rustic measure. :)

You *could* serve this cake with whipped cream, or, you could make good on another summer goal of mine: make rose geranium ice cream. (check!) I've been on the search for rose geranium since I first read about it in the Chez Panisse desserts book years back, and finally, when my friend Toni took me out to the amazing Flora Grubb Nursery in the summer, I found a beauty of a rose geranium plant to bring home! Surprisingly despite my notorious brown thumb, the plant's been thriving ever since, exploding out of its new pot every which way with large, spindly leaves. The rose geranium ice cream is wonderfully flavored from the leaves, with tints of the haunting floral and slightly spicy-sweet smell of the plant.

...happy September! (though I am still going to refuse for a teensy while longer to admit that fall is pretty much here. <-- stubborn :))

Read on for recipe....

Backyard Apple and Walnut Cake
makes one 9 x 3" round cake

975 g (~9 - 10) small apples
2 1/2 cups (300 g) whole wheat pastry flour
1 tspn salt
1 tspn baking powder
1/4 tspn ground cinnamon
1 cup + 5 Tbspn (297 g) butter, softened
1 1/2 cups (300 g) light brown sugar, lightly packed
3 large eggs, at room temperature
1/2 cup buttermilk
90 g walnuts, coarsely chopped

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour the insides and bottom of a 9 x 3-inch round cake pan. Line the bottom with a parchment paper round. Wrap the outside of the pan with bake even strips (see note).
2. Using a mandolin, very thinly slice two of the apples. Arrange the slices on the parchment paper at the bottom of the cake pan, starting from the inside and working outwards.
3. Finely grate the remainder of the apples, resulting in about 600 g of grated apple. Set aside.
4. In a bowl, whisk to combine the whole wheat pastry flour, salt, baking powder, and ground cinnamon. Set aside.
5. In a separate bowl, combine the butter and brown sugar. Beat on medium until light and fluffy, about 2 to 3 minutes. Add in the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in the grated apple until combined. Add the flour mixture in two parts, alternating with the buttermilk. Beat briefly until combined, but do not overmix. Fold in the chopped walnuts.
6. Carefully pour the batter into the prepared cake pan. Use the back of a spatula to gently press the batter into the apple slices on the bottom and to smooth out the top. Tap the bottom of the pan gently on a counter to release any air bubbles.
7. Bake the cake for about 1 hour and 5 minutes to 1 hour and 15 minutes. The cake is done when the top is golden brown and just beginning to pull away from the edges, and when a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out cleanly. Remove the cake from the oven and transfer to a wire rack. Let cool for 15 minutes, until the pan is cool enough to touch. Run a sharp, thin knife along the inside edge of the pan to loosen the cake. Invert the cake onto a plate, remove the pan and parchment round. Let cool completely.

Note regarding bake even strips: Normally, I'd say that bake even strips were optional, but because this cake will be flipped on its head, a flat top is preferable. If you don't have bake-even strips, try using a 9 x 3-inch springform and trimming the top before flipping the cake over.

Note regarding peeling apples: For the sliced apples on top of the cake, I prefer to leave the skins on so that there are borders to the design on top of the cake. Just make sure to use a mandolin to make very thin slices so that the peels don't get chewy. For the grated apples inside the cake, I left the peels on because the apples are finely grated and a teeny bit of peel doesn't bother me much. If you'd like a smoother texture, you can peel these apples first before grating them.

Rose Geranium Brown Sugar Ice Cream
adapted very liberally from Jeni's Ice Cream

2 cups (460 g) whole milk
1 1/2 cups (345 g) heavy cream
10 large rose geranium leaves
1 Tbspn + 1 tspn tapioca starch
1/2 cup (100 g) dark brown sugar, lightly packed
2 Tbspn (38 g) light corn syrup
1/8 tspn sea salt
1/2 tspn vanilla extract

1. Combine the milk and cream in a medium-sized pot with a tight-fitting lid. Rub the geranium leaves between your fingers briefly to release their fragrance, and then add them to the milk and cream. Over medium high heat, bring the dairy mixture to a simmer, stirring occasionally. Once the mixture has reached a simmer, remove from heat, cover, and let steep for 30 minutes.
2. Strain the milk and cream through a fine mesh strainer, making sure to press all of the liquid out of the rose geranium leaves. Discard the leaves. Return the milk and cream back to the pot.
4. Prepare the tapioca starch in a separate bowl. Spoon about 2 Tbspn of the milk and cream mixture into the starch and whisk until smooth. Set aside.
3. Add the tapioca starch, brown sugar, corn syrup, and sea salt to the remaining milk and cream in the pot. Whisk to combine. Over medium high heat, bring the mixture to a rolling boil, stirring with a spatula to prevent over-boiling and burning. Let boil for 4 minutes.
4. Whisk the tapioca starch into the pot. Let cook while stirring until the mixture becomes a bit thicker, about 1 minute. Remove from heat.
5. Whisk in the vanilla extract, cover, and refrigerate until cold.
6. Freeze according to your ice cream maker's instructions. If the mixture looks a little bit separated when you remove it from the refrigerator to freeze, give it a whisk and it will come back together quickly. Finish freezing the ice cream in the freezer overnight.

Note: the rose geranium ice cream is also very, very good with dark chocolate shards mixed in at the end of churning!

Disclaimer: I received these walnuts for free, but, as per strict desserts for breakfast policy, I wouldn't be telling you about them unless I personally used them and loved them. Also, this post contains a few Amazon affiliate links to books that I personally own ...if you click through and buy something, I get a few middling pennies, so support your friendly neighborhood grad student-baker today. :)

Enjoy!

Breakfast with Alice at Plow, San Francisco

2012-09-05T01:39:00.001-07:00

This supposed recipe blog has been quite thin on recipes lately, a fact of which I'm well aware. It distresses me not to have a new recipe to share each week (it's that same sinking, smelly, guilty feeling I get when procrastinating dissertation work...), but August has been a month spent mostly not in the kitchen but on the road. In the latter half of August, one of my good friends moved to Pittsburgh, and while I'm super sad to see her and her husband go (they were the unofficial desserts for breakfast taste-testers and dessert consumers, so applications are now being accepted for that position! -- please inquire within ;P), I helped drive their car across country on one last road trip romp. ...more on that in the future. Then, this past weekend was spent at a college friend's wedding in San Diego and eating my way with friends through Los Angeles's Koreatown (mmmmmm...late night tofu and delicious kimchee). Time not on the road these past few weeks have been spent with friends--new and old--visiting from out of town, which offers me an opportunity to see and explore my own city with fresh eyes!

^ Alice, clicking away

Before I left for SoCal, the amazingly talented Alice Gao popped into town and miraculously had room in her schedule to squeeze in a breakfast in San Francisco with me. :D I lobbied especially for breakfast because I wanted to see Alice in action making those amazing instagram photos of morning foods that always have me drooling and green with envy. To kill two birds with one stone, I suggested Plow, which I've been hankering to go to ever since blog reader Alanna suggested it a few weeks back when I posted about trying to find good brunch places in SF proper. You guys never lead me wrong! Plow was delicious--especially the savory dish we ordered, with perfectly seasoned scramble, buttery toast to heap the eggs on, and these crispy, savory, herby potatoes that can really define a good brunch experience. (The French toast, on the other hand, left a bit to be desired.) Oh, and the space itself was gorgeous, of course, with bright diffuse light (courtesy of foggy San Francisco summers) glowing through the windows lining one wall of the restaurant.

Hopefully with the onset of September, things will get back to normal again--or, as close to normal as this life ever is! In case you missed it, I did do a new post for sated magazine's blog about in-season melons and chocolate with an extraordinarily simple recipe from the first issue of the magazine: check it out here!

(iPhone point of view after the break || Alice's instagram photo here)