by Joanne Chang, the pastry chef and owner of the two Flour Bakery and Cafes in Boston, and I received a copy to review. This was one of those books that had me turning pages and walking toward the kitchen at the same time. It's full of irresistible looking treats and informative tips in each recipe. Chang's background includes an education in applied mathematics and economics, but her love of pastries inspired an eventual career change. She worked in other restaurant kitchens, including a stint in New York with Francois Payard, and then opened her own bakery in Boston. Her philosophy is one of "simple things are best" because even complex pastries start with the basics. Hence, the name Flour for her bakery. Those simple things throughout the book range from breakfast treats to cookies, cakes, pies, and tarts, and then there are other sweets and breads. I have a feeling I'll be mentioning this book frequently around here. I've already baked two items from it, and both were very well-received.For this breakfast cake or pound cake or whatever you'd like to call it, maple pecans were made by warming pure maple syrup and toasted and chopped pecans in a saucepan. The goal was to stir the mixture and allow the pecans to absorb the syrup. Then, the pecans were cooled while the batter was mixed. Flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and butter were mixed, and the instructions include the amount of time for mixing with a stand mixer and a hand-held mixer depending on what equipment you are using. I like a thorough recipe like that. Then, in a small bowl, buttermilk, eggs, vanilla, and more maple syrup were whisked together before being added to the flour mixture. The liquid ingredients were added in two parts, and again mixing times were given. Last, fresh cranberries and the maple pecans were folded into the batter, and the batter was scraped into a parchment-lined loaf pan. It baked for just over an hour and filled the house with maple goodness all the while. Once it cooled, the cake was removed from the pan and topped with a thick maple syrup and confectioners' sugar glaze.
I had leftover dates after making tamarind-date chutney, and I started thinking about different ways to use them in baking. Date scones came to mind, and I know I have a recipe for walnut date bars somewhere, but neither of those options were quite right. I was indecisive until I saw the banana-date tea cake recipe in Tartine
. This was perfect. It’s a simple quick bread with lots of banana flavor, crunchy walnuts, and sweet, chewy dates. The batter is mixed, poured into a loaf pan, topped with long slices of banana, and that’s it. When I’m making use of a leftover, I feel like what it’s going into needs to be a simple preparation, and I had all the other ingredients for this on hand.Bananas were mashed and eggs and vanilla were added to them. Flour was sifted with cornstarch, cinnamon, baking powder, and baking soda. Butter was creamed with sugar, the banana mixture was added, and then the flour mixture was folded into the batter. Toasted and chopped walnuts were added with pitted and chopped dates. I use kitchen shears to cut dates in half, pick out the seeds, and then cut them into chunks. It seems easier to me to cut with shears since the dates are so sticky. The finished batter was placed in a greased loaf pan, and then it was to be topped with full-length slices of banana. My banana broke in several places as I sliced it, so my slices were quartered rather than full-length. It was still pretty enough though, or so I thought. The banana slices were sprinkled with sugar, and the tea cake baked for a little over an hour until an inserted cake tester came out clean.
Last week at the farmers’ market, I bought some summery-perfect blackberries, and in my mind, I saw them swirled into some kind of cake. It could be argued that I have a mess of recipes that flit through my head on occasions such as this. You see, I knew that I had cut out a page from an old issue of Saveur with a blackberry cake made by Tamasin Day-Lewis, and I also knew I had read about a blackberry cornmeal cake somewhere else. When I got the blackberries home and safely stowed in the refrigerator, I started flipping through files and books, and the cake from Saveur, while tempting, was somehow more complicated than I remembered and seemed more like an end of summer treat. The cornmeal cake didn’t look quite how I remembered it either, and then like a certain bear in a fairy tale, I found a recipe that looked just right. In Sunday Suppers at Lucques
, there is this rich and lovely pound cake of Basque origin with a blackberry compote baked into the center of it and served poured over it as well. That was it. Those berries were destined to become a pound cake.
The cake was made with 14 tablespoons of melted butter and four eggs. It was not lacking in richness. It also contained dark rum, vanilla, almond extract, and orange juice. It was baked in a loaf pan, and just before the pan was placed in the oven, the cake surface was brushed with an egg ash and sprinkled with a handful of sugar. Said surface puffed beautifully while baking and emerged crackled and glistening. For the compote, caramel was made with sugar, water, and scrapings from one vanilla bean, and then half of the blackberries were added to the caramel. Brandy was also to have been added, but I was out of brandy, and this is where things got interesting. I used bourbon instead and thereby made the discovery that the flavor of bourbon with that of blackberries is quite wonderful. I’m sure brandy would have been great too, but at some point consider making a blackberry compote with bourbon because I’m now thinking up excuses to mix those two items together as often as possible. So, some blackberries went into the caramel and cooked until they released their juices. Then, the caramel mixture was strained into a bowl. The liquid went back into the saucepan on the stove and was thickened with a cornstarch slurry. The thickened sauce was then combined with the strained cooked berries and the remaining uncooked berries, and half of that combination was layered into the cake batter in the loaf pan while the other half of it was used for serving.
The recipe didn’t end there. This wasn’t just a pound cake and compote. Thick slices of the pound cake were buttered and toasted on a griddle before being served. Cream was suggested for serving along with the compote, but I didn’t feel like that was even necessary. I didn’t think the buttering and toasting was necessary either because the cake looked fantastic just as it was. I went ahead with the toasting just for fun, and the result was almost french toast-like on the cut surface. It did add another dimension to the flavors and textures of the dessert, but I have to say the cake held its own quite well when I skipped that step the next day. It’s a pound cake that can be elevated to another level of dessert indulgence, or it can be enjoyed one simple slice at a time, and the blackberry bourbon compote does no wrong either way.
The other day, I read a post on Food Gal’s site that sent me straight to the kitchen. She mentioned how we can’t waste food these days, and so she found a couple of excellent uses for left-over ricotta. Wasting food is not just economically ill-advised, it’s an environmental misstep as well. I’m usually pretty anal about planning meals and using everything before it spoils, but once in a while I end up with a bit of something that has no defined purpose. As I hungrily looked at those lovely lemon ricotta muffins, I remembered that I too had some left-over ricotta in the refrigerator. When I started rummaging through the pantry, I found I was lacking lemon and almonds and the frugality of this endeavor would be a bit diminished by a trip to the grocery store. I could have just left them out, but Kurt was in need of a dessert item, a snack cake seemed like a good solution, and so I turned to another recipe which I found online.
Here’s the twist in this story: this is from a book that I don’t own. When Dolce Italiano appeared last year, I read mixed reviews and never acquired a copy. If anyone out there has this book, I’d love to hear what you think of it.
This simple pound cake made good use of my remaining ricotta. It smelled so good when it came out of the oven, we couldn’t resist cutting into it before it had completely cooled. The crunchy, crusty edges were sweet enough as they were without a confectioner’s sugar dusting, and the interior was unbelievably tender. I may cook some apples or pears or cranberries to spoon over pieces of it tonight. The recipe states that the flavor is best the next day, so I can’t wait to find out if it’s even better than it was yesterday.
