Blueberry Cornbread

For several days this week, I found myself craving cornbread. I’m not sure where the craving came from, but I suspect it came from the menu at a restaurant we ate at last weekend. The restaurant, Maya, is here in Charlottesville and they offer a long list of sides that come with each entrée. I didn’t choose cornbread that night for dinner, but seeing it listed must have made me want it anyway.

I like my cornbread sweet and usually don’t make it as sweet as I want it. As a result, I think I use a different recipe every single time I bake it. This time I used a Mark Bittman recipe that I found online. Bittman’s recipes usually turn out great for me and the recipe touted itself as “easy and forgiving,” which is exactly what I was after for weeknight baking. The recipe also called for a flexible amount of sugar, so I figured that gave me a little wiggle room for making it extra sweet.

And just to mix things up, I threw in some frozen blueberries. It sounds kind of weird, but I had tried blueberry cornbread before, so I knew it was a good combo. Plus I have a LOT of frozen blueberries to go through in the next handful of months.

For the blueberries, I used a trick I learned from a Martha Stewart blueberry muffins recipe. Toss the blueberries in a little bit of flour before adding them to the batter. When you do this, the blueberries don’t sink to the bottom!

The original recipe called for 1/4 to 1/2 cup of sugar. I used the 1/4 cup of sugar and then added a 1/3 cup of honey. If you don’t like your cornbread as sweet as I do, use just a 1/4 cup of sugar.

Cornbread!

Blueberry Cornbread

Recipe slightly adapted from a NY Times Recipe of the Day by Mark Bittman

Ingredients

• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 1/2 cups yellow cornmeal
• 1/2 cup unbleached all-purpose flour, plus 1 tablespoon for blueberries
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1/3 cup honey
• 2 eggs
• 1 1/4 cups milk, more if needed
• 1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries

Bread Pudding with Bourbon Sauce

It’s only 37 days into 2012 and I’ve already successfully cooked several things I had never cooked before and as of yesterday, I finally made a decent batch of bread pudding. In fact, this batch of bread pudding is so decent, that I think it’s possibly the best bread pudding I’ve ever eaten. It may spoil me for all future bread puddings in restaurants.

I’ve previously made bread pudding at least a couple of times and although it was usually edible, it wasn’t great. I think I was trying too hard and adding too many things to my bread pudding. I should have kept it simple. Like the bread pudding currently in my refrigerator.

Boozy Bread Pudding

After my mediocre attempts a couple of years ago, I kind of gave up on ever making bread pudding again. Then my friend Alison recommended a bread pudding with bourbon sauce recipe from Simply Recipes. She liked it enough that she’s made it more than once, so I thought this recipe might be worth a shot.

Fast forward about a month and I finally made the Simply Recipes version. And it is AMAZING. So good that I want to eat it slowly and enjoy every bite. It’s the kind of dessert that makes me yell how good it is while I’m eating it. I’ve already declared it the very best dessert I’ve made in a really long time. I’ve also already decided that I love it so much that I want to make another batch of it as soon as this batch is gone. I think my husband agrees with me on all counts.

Bread Puddings

I’m not going to post the recipe here as I really didn’t do much altering of the Simply Recipes recipe. You should make it as it is.

My notes about my slight changes to the recipe, should you care to take them into consideration:

• I didn’t have quite enough bourbon on hand to make the sauce AND soak the raisins, so I soaked the raisins in a bit of amaretto instead. Why amaretto? Because I love cooking with it. No real reason other than that. My second substitute choice probably would have been rum.
• In the recipe, it’s mentioned that the bread pudding could be made in individual ramekins instead of the 9×13 baking dish. I went with the individual ramekins. My guess was that the individual bread puddings would be less mushy. I was correct and I’ll probably never bake bread pudding in a big pan again.
• The bourbon sauce calls for 1 cup of bourbon. The recipe warns that the sauce is very, very boozy and that the amount of bourbon used can be reduced. I only had a 1/2 cup of bourbon in the house (and it was Sunday, so I couldn’t buy more). So I used the 1/2 cup I had and in my opinion, it was still a bit too much bourbon. Next time I’ll probably use just a 1/4 cup of it.
• Although these were amazing just out of the oven, the leftovers are still pretty phenomenal. Just lightly warm the bread pudding in the microwave.
• Finally, if you don’t like bourbon or don’t like sauce (or don’t want to get sauced on the sauce), these taste just fine with no sauce at all. Or you could substitute some sort of caramel or toffee sauce. Or top it with vanilla ice cream. I think a drizzle of maple syrup would be pretty fantastic, too. Then it would essentially taste like French Toast. And there’s nothing wrong with that!

Homemade marshmallows!

Last week I wrote a blog post stating that 2012 would be a year of fearless cooking. In that post, I listed a number of things I’d like to cook or bake for the first time ever. This week, I get to mark one of those items off of the list: homemade marshmallows.

The process of making marshmallows was kind of magical to me. I’m not much of a science buff, but watching the transparent syrup and gelatin mixture turn thick and white with just the use of the whip attachment on my Kitchenaid was pretty amazing. How does so much air get incorporated into the syrup so quickly and why does it turn opaque white?

If you’ve never tried a homemade marshmallow, you’re missing out on a great thing. While I had never had a marshmallow made in someone’s kitchen prior to this week, I had at least tried some made in a bakery rather than a manufacturing plant. I won’t deny that I like the marshmallows made in a plant, but the marshmallows I made last night are so much better than those. My husband doesn’t particularly care for store bought marshmallows unless they’re toasted around a campfire, but he seems to like the homemade ones. In fact, he likes them more than I thought he would. (Okay, I admit it: I secretly wished that he would dislike them so that there would be more for me.)

Based on a recent Twitter discussion about homemade marshmallows, I came across a Martha Stewart recipe for them that looked pretty easy other than making sure that the sugar syrup was boiled to precisely 244°F.

Vanilla bean marshmallows

Since this was my first attempt at marshmallow production, I stuck close to the Martha Stewart recipe. My only deviation from the recipe was adding a scraped vanilla bean to the syrup. I figured that this was a safe addition that couldn’t possibly destroy my future marshmallows.

In addition (and based on a Pinterest tip from the same Twitter friend), instead of using just confectioner’s sugar to dust the pan, I used a 1:1 ratio of confectioner’s sugar and cornstarch. This seemed to work pretty well: it kept the marshmallows from sticking to the pan and added a little less sweetness to the already sweet treat.

The next time I make these, I’ll probably play around with spices or cocoa powder or something else and make some crazy flavored marshmallows. There’s a peppermint swirl marshmallow picture on Pinterest that tempts me every time I see it, so maybe that will be the next variety (and maybe my husband won’t like those).

One warning: your house will be covered in powdered sugar by the time you’re done cutting these into squares. It’s a small price to pay for marshmallows this delicious.

Marshmallow

Homemade Marshmallows

Recipe from Martha Stewart Living magazine, February 1996

Ingredients

Chocolate Macarons

For the first time in a while, I got to spend all of last weekend at home with no real plans. I love weekends like this every now and again as they’re usually the weekends when I get to cook and bake a lot. Last weekend did not disappoint. In addition to cooking some foods that we eat frequently, I made two things that I had never made before: potato gnocchi and French macarons.

I’d eaten them both multiple times, but I’d never made them from scratch myself until this weekend. Something about making homemade pasta seemed daunting and the macarons seemed completely impossible to me despite my baking skills.

Successfully making gnocchi and macarons over the course of a weekend has made me think about all sorts of other foods I’ve always wanted to make but never have. Some foods I haven’t made because they’re expensive. Others I haven’t made because they appear to take forever to prepare. Some I just haven’t ever gotten around to trying. And others just plain scare me.

As a result of my bravery last weekend, I’ve decided to go ahead and make 2012 the year of fearless cooking. I shall not let a long, laborious recipe hinder my cooking. Nor shall I let warnings of how difficult it is to make an item hold me back. I may, however, let prohibitive costs get in my way every now and again. This year when I want to cook something and think it’s too difficult, I need to remind myself that I’ve made several wedding cakes. And gnocchi!

I made macarons!

I’ve started a list, shown below, of what I want to cook or bake this year that I’ve never made before (or haven’t made on my own in my adult life as I don’t remember all of the things I may have helped my mom make as a kid). I’ll continue to add to the list as I think of more items to make and as suggestions roll in from Twitter and Facebook friends.

In addition, please feel free to suggest any foods that you’ve always wanted to make but were afraid to attempt for one reason or another.

In 2012, I will fearlessly prepare the following items in my kitchen:

1. Gnocchi (completed 01/21/12)
   
2. French macaron cookies (completed 01/22/12)
3. Marshmallows (completed 01/29/12)
4. Crêpes
5. Cream puffs
6. Fried chicken
7. Pressure canned foods, like canned green beans
8. Caramels – the candy, not the sauce
9. Puff pastry
10. Lobster
11. Chocolate soufflé
12. Hollandaise sauce
13. Gougères
14. Beef Wellington
15. Fresh pasta – maybe linguine or fettuccine
16. Boston cream pie
17. Charlotte – I can make the ladyfingers, but assembly is my roadblock
18. Ricotta cheese
19. Flour tortillas
20. Duck confit
21. Baklava
22. Baked Alaska
23. Crown pork roast
24. Madeleines

Tartine Bakery Window

While looking at the admin page for my website just now, I noticed a few blog posts about my honeymoon that I started months and months ago and never posted. These posts were all intended to be photo heavy, so I think I’m going to go ahead and post them anyway. Please ignore the fact that my honeymoon was more than 9 months ago.

A Twitter friend told me that I had to go to Tartine Bakery when we were in San Francisco. So, on our last full day in town, we made a special trip there for lunch. It was well worth the confusing subway ride there and I can’t wait to eat there again the next time I find myself in San Francisco. I liked Tartine enough that I’ve since bought both of their cookbooks in the hopes of recreating something vaguely resembling their baked goods at home.

Anyway, I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves here. The light in the window where we ate lunch was pretty fabulous, so I got some great pictures.

A bakery case full of deliciousness.

Croque Monsieur

Turkey Sandwich

Peppered turkey and broccoli rabe sandwich

Frangipane croissant

Mexican wedding cookie

Tartine croissant

Frangipane croissant

Homemade Biscuits and Peach Butter

Hello. It’s been a while, but here I am ready to write about food cooked in a new kitchen in a new home in a new city (that we like a lot thus far). More about that later. And by later, I mean another day.

All I want to do tonight is share a biscuit recipe with you. I was craving bread tonight, but I didn’t feel like leaving the warm house to buy some and I didn’t feel like waiting 3 hours for a loaf of homemade bread. So I made biscuits. They’re easy and ready to eat in less than half an hour from start to finish.

Once the idea of biscuits was in my head, I remembered that I bought a copy of James Beard’s American Cookery a while ago just for his biscuit recipes. I made a lot of biscuits with my mom as a child and the biscuits were almost always from my parents’ well-loved James Beard cookbook. My claim is that I was making biscuits on my own at age 5, but my husband doubts the truth of this statement. Maybe I wasn’t really 5, but I was young. And I made a lot of biscuits.

So, the biscuits I made tonight are the biscuits of my youth and they were as good as I remembered them to be. When I was a kid, we often made these with buttermilk or recently spoiled milk. And when we had it in the house, we often mixed in a little bit of strawberry cream cheese. It might sound weird, but it was actually quite wonderful. Tonight I had a bit of heavy cream that I needed to use, so I threw that into the dough instead of regular milk…but normally I’ll use 2% milk.

Since biscuits need jam, I cracked open a jar of peach butter that I made last summer. If you’ve got a jar of homemade preserves at home, you should use some of it on these biscuits.

Baking Powder Biscuits

Recipe from James Beard’s American Cookery

Ingredients

• 2 cups sifted all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup shortening
• 3/4 cup milk (I used heavy cream this time, but normally I’ll use 2% milk.)
• 1 tablespoon sugar (Optional, but I used it.)

Directions

1. Sift the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar (if used) into a bowl.
2. Cut in the shortening (butter, lard, vegetable shortening, chicken fat – what you will). The pieces of fat should be quite fine.
3. Add the milk and stir quickly until the dough clings together.
4. Turn out on a floured board, knead a few times, and pat or roll out to 1/4 to 1/2 inch thickness.
5. Cut into rounds with a floured cutter 1 to 2 inches in diameter.
6. Place on a buttered cookie sheet, or, if you like biscuits crisp on top and bottom and soft in the center, place in a buttered 9 x 9 inch pan.
7. Bake at 450 degrees 12 to 15 minutes, or until light and brown.

Mountain bound.

After spending the bulk of my adult life living in or around Williamsburg, I’m leaving. My husband, Joel, got a great job offer from UVA and we decided that he should take it. So we’re moving to Charlottesville in early December!

Even though Charlottesville is a mere two hour drive from Williamsburg, it will be the farthest I’ve ever lived from the tiny town I grew up in on the Chesapeake Bay. The nearby mountains will probably take me a little while to get used to since I grew up practically below sea level.

I’m super excited about Charlottesville for lots of reasons (including the just mentioned mountains). Unlike Williamsburg, it’s a bit of a real town. Although it’s not as close to my parents as Williamsburg is, it’s the same distance from my sisters and much closer to almost all of Joel’s family.

And then there’s the food! Charlottesville has a lot of fantastic restaurants (we already have a contender for a favorite nice restaurant) and loads of nearby wineries, farms and orchards and good, healthy local meat. I’ve also heard that their farmer’s market is wonderful and if I’m lucky, I’ll still have a little piece of dirt for a vegetable garden next spring. Plus, for the first time ever, I’ll live close to a Whole Foods!

With the move so close, we’ve got a lot to do. There’s a house to sell and I need to think about gainful employment for myself. Plus we have to actually move (that’s the part I’m not looking forward to at all). So, I’m not expecting to be around the blog much until then. But stick around as I’ll be back with new things to share and hopefully lots of pretty mountain pictures!

]]> http://www.boastfulbaker.com/2011/10/19/heading-towards-the-mountains/feed/ 1 http://www.boastfulbaker.com/2011/09/12/the-cake-made-me-cry/ http://www.boastfulbaker.com/2011/09/12/the-cake-made-me-cry/#comments Tue, 13 Sep 2011 02:04:25 +0000 Melissa http://www.boastfulbaker.com/?p=1130 Continue reading →]]>

Our wedding cake!

It seems silly to write posts about my wedding five months after the fact, but I still have so many details to share. My wedding cake is one of the most important of these details. Look at it! Wouldn’t you want to brag about it if it were your wedding cake?

When we got engaged and started making wedding plans, the cake was one of the first things we discussed. Since I’m not insane, I chose not to make my own cake. And if I wasn’t going to make my own wedding cake, there was only one option for us: Charlie Little of Cakes by Charlie. Both Joel and I had the pleasure of working with Charlie before he started baking wedding cakes full time and the man’s desserts are incredible. They’re both pretty to look at and absurdly delicious. His baking talent is beyond words.

Once our wedding date was chosen, Charlie was immediately contacted as we didn’t want to miss out on his cake for our wedding. Plus we wanted him to be a guest at the wedding, so we didn’t want him to book two cakes on our wedding day or anything crazy like that.

As the wedding drew closer, we decided on the style we wanted from his vast album of cakes (and we chose our cake flavors as well). Our choice was relatively simple – just a tiered cake decorated with a single budding forsythia branch to match the yellow and green theme of our wedding.

Charlie was confident forsythia would still be blooming on our wedding day. Mother Nature apparently had some other thoughts about this and a huge storm a week or so before the wedding destroyed what was left of the blooming forsythia in our area.

So Charlie improvised. He called us to inform us about the dearth of forsythia and we calmly told him that whatever he needed or wanted to do for the cake was fine with us. We knew it would taste good and we knew that the man is practically a magician in the kitchen, so anything he came up with would be wonderful.

Little did we know how wonderful it would be. Since there was no blooming forsythia around, Charlie made some himself out of gum paste and a naked branch. But he didn’t stop there. Since he knew daffodils were our flowers, he made some of those as well. Along with an assortment of other spring blooms including dogwoods.

Before the ceremony, the bridal party hid out in the building where the reception was held. When I arrived, Charlie and the cake were there and the cake literally made me cry (see me in one of the photos below – you can tell that I’ve been crying). It was that breathtakingly beautiful.

I knew the cake would look and taste good, but the finished product completely and totally exceeded all of my expectations. I truly think my wedding cake is one of the loveliest cakes I’ve ever seen.

If you happen to live anywhere near Williamsburg, VA, and need a wedding cake, y0u should contact Charlie. Just make sure to call him way in advance as he’s in high demand around here.

Wedding cake!

Admiring my cake with my sister Tasha and Charlie

Every single bloom and blossom was made by hand!

Most fantastic cake ever.

Intricate handmade flowers.

Made by Charlie Little of Cakes by Charlie.

Could I have had a prettier cake? I think not!

Cutting the cake required great concentration.

Just in case you’re wondering the cake flavors were: chocolate with mocha buttercream, carrot cake with caramel buttercream and amaretto cake with raspberry filling and vanilla buttercream.

These photos are all mixed up and I don’t remember which ones were taken by our photographer and which ones were taken by my family. So, the photos are by Stephen Salpukas, Tasha McKelvey and Donald McKelvey. But now that I think about it, it’s possible that I took one or two of them as well as I think I borrowed my dad’s camera for a few cake shots before the ceremony. The food photographer in me couldn’t resist…not even on my wedding day.

Early last week I found a giant heirloom tomato in my garden that should have been picked a few days sooner. If I didn’t want it to go to waste, I needed an immediate use for it. Since we had a guest coming over that night for snacks and drinks, I had to think of something immediate AND easy to prepare. Bruschetta was the first thing that popped into my head since we had a loaf of roasted garlic bread on hand already.

A quick search for bruschetta on Pinterest (which is the first place I search for cooking ideas these days) led me to the bruschetta with tomato and basil recipe on Simply Recipes. I had everything the recipe called for on hand and was able to have this bruschetta topping ready for the roasted garlic bread just a few minutes after our guest arrived.

This bruschetta was so good that I’ve made it for dinner thrice more in the last six days. This bruschetta is good enough that I don’t think we’ll tire of it this summer. I’m confident that nearly every ripe tomato I pull out of the garden for the rest of the summer is going to be turned into a bruschetta topping. It’s easy to make (especially on hot August weeknights when I’m tired and don’t really want to cook) and the only ingredient I don’t always have on hand is a loaf of fresh bread.

I made very few changes to the recipe from Simply Recipes. I have been substituting heirloom tomatoes from my garden for the plum tomatoes. Since heirlooms are a lot juicier than plum tomatoes, I’ve taken to chopping the tomatoes and letting them drain for about 10 minutes in a small colander set over a bowl.  I haven’t been scooping out the seeds from my tomatoes as we don’t mind them in a dish like this. The only other real alteration to the recipe I’ve made is adding a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes to each batch for a little hint of spice.

It’s August in the United States and it’s hot just about everywhere. My solution for beating the August heat? Ice cream sandwiches. Preferably with homemade ice cream and homemade chocolate chip cookies. But if you don’t bake or don’t make your own ice cream, store bought cookies and ice cream will certainly suffice.

My ice cream sandwiches were made with my very favorite chocolate chip cookies, a recipe from Everyday Food magazine that I shared here a while ago. They’re soft and slightly salty and absolutely perfect.

For the ice cream, I whipped up a couple of batches of Salty Caramel ice cream from the recently published Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home cookbook. If you’re not already familiar with Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, you should be. Salty Caramel is one of the company’s signature flavors and the recipe for it alone is worth the price of the cookbook…especially for people like me who can’t buy Jeni’s ice cream very easily.

The Salty Caramel ice cream was an amazingly perfect companion for the chocolate chip cookies, so if you’re up for the work of homemade ice cream and cookies, you should make your own ice cream sandwiches just like these. And if you’re not up for the work, buy a package of your favorite cookies and a pint of your favorite ice cream. Either way, all you have to do to assemble these is to gently squish two cookies together with some slightly softened ice cream and freeze until firm.