Banana Bread Bundt Cake with Chocolate Peanut Butter Glaze

I like to share the things I bake with others (by and large, “others” refers to my husband), but I must admit that when I choose what to bake, I almost always choose things that I like. It’s kind of dictatorial. A good example of this is my frequent use of coconut, even though I know a LOT of people vehemently do not like coconut.

Adding the Chocolate Peanut Butter Glaze

On the other side of this, there are lots of foods I don’t like and I pretty much never make them. And since my husband is the primary person I share my kitchen creations with, he doesn’t get to eat some things he loves very often. In the non-baked goods department, I deprive him of items like scallops, brie and avocados, just to name a few. In the baked goods department, he doesn’t get to enjoy things made with bananas because I hate bananas and will not eat anything containing them.

But a few weeks ago I made this Banana Bread Bundt Cake for my husband even though I knew I wouldn’t eat a single bite of it.

His good fortune is due  to the review copy of Breakfast for Dinner I recently received. This new cookbook by Lindsay Landis and Taylor Hackbarth  (of the blog Love and Olive Oil) focuses on the joy of eating breakfast-type foods at dinner time. Some of the recipes are very clearly foods that you normally eat for breakfast adapted for dinner. Other recipes are a little more of a stretch as they use just one or two ingredients that are typically found at the breakfast table. This Banana Bread Bundt Cake recipes falls under that category. Bananas are a breakfast staple for many people (including my husband) but you’re not likely to see someone eating this cake at breakfast since it’s full of chocolate chips and covered in a rich chocolate peanut butter glaze.

Photo Courtesy of Quirk Books

When I received the cookbook, my husband flipped through it at the table one night and zoned in on a few recipes that he’d like me to make. His first choice of the bunch was this cake. Fortunately for him, he found this recipe at a time when I was trying to eat less dessert myself and was willing to actually make something I wouldn’t eat. Opportunistic of him, huh?

The recipe for the cake is well written and easy to follow, very approachable for someone who may not bake a lot. The cookbook itself is full of gorgeous photos and loads of recipes that I can’t wait to try. It’s a good mix of sweet and savory dishes. Many of these rely on breakfast favorites like bacon and eggs, but others riff on the breakfast theme a bit more subtly with their use of foods like espresso, biscuits, grits or maple syrup. This is without question a cookbook I’ll use again, possibly starting with the Chocolate Brownie Waffles pictured below (which I will selfishly make for my personal enjoyment).

Photo Courtesy of Quirk Books

If you hate bananas and would like to bake a Banana Bread Bundt Cake to selflessly share with someone dear to you, the recipe is below. Or if you love bananas and want it all for yourself, enjoy it! My husband liked the cake a lot, in part because he got it all to himself. I should note that I did try the Chocolate Peanut Butter Glaze (because I am not opposed to anything containing chocolate and peanut butter) and it was amazing! I’m trying to think of another dessert that would go well with it. Or maybe I’ll just make a small batch of it to eat over ice cream.

Banana Bread Bundt Cake with Chocolate Peanut Butter Glaze

Chocolate Peanut Butter Glazed Banana Bread Bundt Cake

Recipe from Breakfast for Dinner by Lindsay Landis and Taylor Hackbarth, recipe posted with permission from Quirk Books

The arrival of fall has made me even happier about our move. September brought cooler temperatures and less humidity than Williamsburg (our old town) usually had. The weather in the last month, with the exception of occasional rain, has been downright glorious.

And the arrival of fall also signaled the arrival of apple season in Charlottesville.  I’ve already made two trips to a very nearby orchard with a lovely view of the city and the mountains. I don’t know that I’d ever been to an apple orchard before, but I’m kind of in love with them right now. This one, Carter Mountain Orchard, is only about a 15 minute drive from our home in downtown Charlottesville and the view from the orchard is out of this world. Picking apples on a nice autumn day is definitely happy making, especially when you treat yourself to an apple cider doughnut or two while you’re there!

My second trip to the orchard took place on a beautiful weekday, so I brought along the camera to snap some pictures.

Because this is a food blog, you’re probably wondering what I did with the apples I picked at the orchard. I made a couple of apple walnut spice cakes, an apple pie and 19 pints of canned applesauce. I’m heading back to the orchard again this weekend as I’ve agreed to make a couple of apple pies for other people next week.

Getting close to the apples!

Looking up at the apples and the sky

In the orchard

Jonagold apple on the tree

Apples

Apple tree with a view

So many apples

Ladder to the sky?

A trip to an apple orchard isn’t complete without an apple cider doughnut!

The Apple Barn

Bad apples.

More of the Apple Barn

View from Carter Mountain, with bonus bird!

Charlottesville, as viewed from Carter Mountain

My husband and I came back from our trip to Paris in April with an obsession for macarons. Prior to our trip, I had tried macarons from a few different places here in the U.S. and I’d even made my own mediocre batch of them at home – but I wasn’t totally gaga over them until we ate more than our fair share of them in France. Since we can’t live in Paris and probably can’t travel there as often as we’d like, I’m on a quest to make homemade macarons that taste good enough to substitute for the real French ones.

Since we returned from Paris, I’ve made five different batches of macarons with varying degrees of success – but I think I’m getting the hang of it now as the most recent batches have been the prettiest and most delicious.

One of the best flavors we tried in Paris was salted caramel, consisting of lightly caramel flavored almond meringue shells and a rich, salty caramel filling. Even though our absolute favorite flavor in France was triple vanilla from Pierre Hermé, I decided to try the salted caramel at home first. I knew I could make a decent salted caramel but I wasn’t so sure I could make something so intensely vanilla flavored as the ones we ate in France.

When it was time to make my first batch of them, I quickly came across a French macaron recipe in Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy by Alice Medrich. The recipe looked and sounded good and didn’t require me to measure ingredients on a scale (yes, I bake a lot and no, I don’t ever use a scale). That recipe ended up being perfect and I’ve used it every time that I’ve made macarons since.

Finding the perfect salted caramel filling recipe took a little more time. And even when I found the recipe, it took several batches of trial and error for me to finally get it right. It didn’t help that I needed to convert the measurements and I think the original recipe used way more butter than necessary. In the end, I reduced the butter in the recipe by a third and ended up with a much better finished product. The recipe at the bottom of this post reflects that reduction.

While I won’t go so far as to say that making macarons is easy, I haven’t found it to be quite as challenging as I had heard it was. The recipe is rather particular about some things, but if you follow those directions, you should end up with a decent batch of macarons. They may not look perfect, but they’ll still taste good.

The macarons pictured here are chocolate with salted caramel filling. If you don’t like chocolate, you can easily make a batch of plain macarons with salted caramel filling instead. I’ve made both and they’re both fantastic! The recipe posted below is for plain macarons and I’ve included the variation for chocolate at the bottom of the recipe.

French Macarons

Ingredients

• 2 cups (8 oz.) powdered sugar
• 1 1/3 cups (4.5 oz.) finely ground blanched almond meal
• 3 to 4 large egg whites, at room temperature
• 1/4 teaspoon almond extract
• 3 to 6 drops of food coloring to match your flavor (optional)
• 3/4 cup filling, such as salted caramel, lemon curd, chocolate ganache, buttercream, chestnut spread, Nutella, peanut butter, or jam

Variation – Chocolate Macarons: Mix 3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder (natural or Dutch-process) with the powdered sugar and almond meal.

Salted Caramel Filling

Recipe slightly adapted from Polka Dot Made

Makes enough filling for at least 2 batches of cookies.

Ingredients

• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1.5 cups granulated sugar
• 2 teaspoons fleur de sel (or other coarse sea salt), plus more for sprinkling as you assemble the macarons
• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted buter

Directions

1. Chop butter into small cubes.
2. Pour cream into a small saucepan, add fleur de sel and bring to boil. Remove from heat as soon as it starts to boil.
3. Place sugar in a medium saucepan. Cook sugar over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally to ensure that it caramelizes evenly.
4. When the sugar reaches a dark brown color remove from the heat and slowly pour in the hot cream while continuing to mix with a spatula or whisk. The caramel will spit and bubble as you mix the cream into it, so please use caution while pouring.
5. Let the caramel cool to around 115°F. Whisk the butter into the caramel a few pieces at a time until thoroughly incorporated.
6. Pour the caramel into a shallow container and allow to cool in the fridge.

Assembling the Macarons

1. Pair macaron shells according to size.
2. Take the caramel out of the fridge, place in a medium bowl and whisk vigorously. This whisking will thicken the caramel to a buttercream consistency perfect for piping. Be careful not to whisk it too much or it will start to separate. For this reason, resist the urge to use an electric mixer instead of a whisk (trust me, I did this).
3. Fill one half of your paired macaron shells filling them generously but keeping a space of approximately 3mm from the edge of the shell. Sprinkle with a few grains of fleur de sel.
4. Pick up the macaron filled with caramel in one hand and the empty matching sized macaron in the other and close the macaron by gently twisting the two shells together from left to right. Let the filling spread all the way to the edge of the shells.
5. Store the finished macarons in a covered container in the refrigerator for at least 24 hours. Prior to serving, let the macarons return to room temperature.

 I haven’t made a lot of progress lately towards completing all of the items on the Year of Fearless Cooking list that I posted in January. But today I made a Boston cream pie and successfully (I think, we haven’t eaten it yet) crossed an item off of the list. While making the Boston cream pie, I remembered that I never wrote about the cream puffs I made many, many months ago.

If you’re able and willing to use a pastry bag and tips, you should most definitely learn to make cream puffs – a combination of pâte à choux, a light pastry dough, and some type of cream filling. They’re frequently filled with pastry cream, but I chose to fill mine with a lemon curd and whipped cream filling.

Cream puffs have been a favorite dessert of mine for years. In high school, whenever I would eat at a sandwich shop in the town next to mine, I would buy a few to eat. And before I baked at home so frequently, I would often buy a big tub of frozen ones at Costco. Needless to say, these homemade ones were much better and I doubt I’ll ever buy them again.

As I do with every new type of food I get it into my head to make, I did a little bit of cookbook and Internet searching for the perfect recipe. In this case, I ended up with two perfect recipes. At some point in my search, I decided I want a whipped cream based filling so that helped narrow the field a little bit.

In the end, I used a pâte à choux recipe from Steamy Kitchen and a lemon cream filling recipe from Bon Appetit (just make the lemon cream filling and skip the pastry recipe in favor of the Steamy Kitchen one). For once, I didn’t alter either of the recipes – in part because I’ve never made choux pastry before and in part because the recipes looked good as is. Both the pastry puffs and the filling turned out perfect and I’ll definitely make these again the next time I get a craving for these sweet little bites. Or I’ll use the Steamy Kitchen recipe again to make gougères as they’re also on the Year of Fearless Cooking list.

Pâte à choux – Source: Steamy Kitchen

Lemon cream filling – Source: Bon Appetit

Canned Foods of 2012

I’ve been busy this summer. Busy canning nearly every weekend and sometimes on weekday nights. I thought my canning might decline a little because of our move to Charlottesville and our slightly smaller kitchen with less storage space. I was mistaken, the canning didn’t decline at all. It helps that I’ve moved to an area full of hard to resist farms, orchards and markets.

This blog post is being written for a handful of  reasons including: recording the quantities of particular items that I made for future years, posting sources for all of the recipes I used this year and for boasting about my canning craziness.

Thus far in 2012, I’ve squirreled away 220 jars of fruit and vegetable goodness (not including countless jars of refrigerator pickles that I ate ages ago) in various locations around our house. I’m not done canning for the year, but my pace should start to slow down a little. I say that despite plans to use the rest of the frozen strawberries in my freezer for sauce and jam and plans to make cranberry sauce and apple butter in a month or two.

My husband and I will keep and use some of the things I’ve made, but most of what I’ve made will be given away as hostess or Christmas gifts to friends and family and some of it will more than likely be swapped with Internet friends for handmade goods.

Fire Roasted Tomato Salsa – 10 Half Pints

Fire Roasted Tomato Salsa – Source: Simply Recipes

I made this salsa for the first time last summer and it was very well received by everyone who received a jar of it. I even wrote a blog post about it this summer!

Spicy Fire Roasted Tomato Salsa – 17 Half Pints

Spicy Fire Roasted Tomato Salsa – Source: Simply Recipes

I didn’t actually mean to make spicy tomato salsa. I accidentally bought a bunch of spicy peppers instead of sweet or mild ones.

Chipotle Fire Roasted Tomato Salsa – 11 Half Pints

Chipotle Fire Roasted Tomato Salsa – Source: Simply Recipes

Same recipe as the last two salsas, but I subbed in a few dried chipotle peppers for the regular peppers. Just to try something a little different. I also made this salsa smooth rather than chunky.

Sweet and Spicy Tomato Jam – 7 Half Pints

Sweet and Spicy Tomato Jam – Source: White On Rice Couple

I actually made the Tomato and Thyme jam first and when I had an abundance of tomatoes a couple of weeks ago, I decided to try this version too. I haven’t tried it myself yet but gave a jar to a new friend in town and she said that she’s obsessed with it…so that’s a good sign!

Smoked Tomato Thyme Jam – 11 Half Pints

Smoked Tomato Thyme Tomato Jam – Source: White On Rice Couple

I’ve known about tomato jam for a couple of years but I couldn’t really understand the appeal of it until this year when some friends were visiting and told me about a smoked tomato jam that they had recently tried. Their description of the jam finally made me want to try tomato jam and I ended up making my first batch of it the very next day. I followed the White On Rice Couple recipe to the letter – but before I threw the tomatoes into the pot to cook down, I smoked them using my charcoal grill and some mesquite chips. This stuff is sooooo good, especially with a slice of smoked cheddar on a piece of crusty bread. I really need to try a grilled cheese sandwich with it. And even though I have only 11 precious jars of it, one of those jars is earmarked to give to the friends who suggested it to me!

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Tomato Sauce – 7 Pints

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Family Secret Tomato Sauce – Source: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

I first tried this sauce a couple of summers ago as a result of a canning swap. It was fantastic, but I promptly forgot about it until this summer when I was lucky enough to get 50 pounds of free tomatoes from one of my in-laws. With that many tomatoes and a newly acquired food mill, I knew I wanted to make some sauce. Fortunately I remembered this one!

Smoky Tomato Sauce – 6 Pints

Smoky Tomato Sauce – Source: Food in Jars by Marisa McClellan

I can’t wait to turn this into tomato soup this winter. I used the tomato sauce recipe found in the Food in Jars cookbook. Because I wanted to smoke the tomatoes I used in this recipe (after my success smoking them for the tomato jam), I sent a tweet to Marisa, the book’s author, to make sure that this would be safe. Fortunately she thought it was!

Dilly Beans – 5 Pints

Dilly Beans – Source: Food in Jars by Marisa McClellan

I make one small batch of these every summer, mostly just for myself. The recipe is from my favorite canning website, Food in Jars. And I’ve also written about them before.

Refrigerator Garlic Dill Pickles – 12+ Pints

Refrigerator Garlic Dill Pickles – Source: Food in Jars by Marisa McClellan

Another recipe that I’ve made every summer for the last three years. I like my pickles crunchy, so I don’t process these and just refrigerate them. They get eaten so quickly that I can’t even keep track of how many jars I make each year.

Sweet and Sour Red Onions – 10 Quarter Pints

Sweet and Sour Red Onions – Source: Food in Jars by Marisa McClellan

I haven’t tried these yet, but when I came across this recipe in the Food in Jars cookbook, I was intrigued.

Sweet Pickle Relish – 12 Half Pints

Sweet Pickle Relish – Source: Canning and Preserving by Ashley English

I make this every summer and haven’t bought relish at the store in three years. Finely dicing all of the vegetables for this takes forever and ever, but it’s worth it every time I make a batch of tartar sauce with this relish. Plus some of my family members really like it and would be rather sad if I stopped making it.

Lemon Vanilla Strawberry Jam – 10 Half Pints

Lemon Vanilla Strawberry Jam – Source: adapted from Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving

This one is another accident, I meant to make strawberry vanilla jam and accidentally added tablespoons of lemon juice instead of teaspoons. Oops. Luckily it still tastes good.

Vanilla Strawberry Jam – 17 Half Pints

Vanilla Strawberry Jam – Source: adapted from Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving

I made this two years ago, but skipped it last year. And I regretted it. My original source for this jam was Food in Jars, but this year I just made the strawberry jam in the Ball cookbook and added vanilla beans and extract to the mix. The addition of vanilla gives this jam a much richer taste than plain strawberry jam.

Strawberry Balsamic Black Pepper Jam – 7 Half Pints

Strawberry Balsamic Black Pepper Jam – Source: Canadian Living

As part of a swap last year, I was asked if I could make a batch of this jam. I happily obliged as it was one I was curious about anyway. It’s now my favorite strawberry jam, one that I eat straight out of the jar with a spoon.

Amaretto Cherry Jam – 12 Half Pints

Amaretto Cherry Jam – Source: Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving

Cherries are my favorite fruit and even though it’s a royal pain to pit enough cherries to make a batch of jam, I’ve done it the last two summers. This is pretty much cherry pie in jam form. And since cherry pie is my favorite pie, this jam is a winner.

No Pectin Cherry Peach Jam – 5 Half Pints

No Pectin Cherry Peach Jam – Source: Jam According to Daniel

I took a jam canning class here in Charlottesville last month and the owner of Jam According to Daniel, a local jam company, taught the class and shared his master jam recipe and techniques with us. I took the class in an attempt to meet people, not because I needed to learn how to make jam. Ironically I didn’t make any new friends, but I did learn a new way to make jam. I also have a new addiction: Daniel’s fig jam. After taking the class, I tried his method with this cherry peach jam – and love the result. Now to get someone to give me some free figs…

No Pectin Peach Jam – 5 Half Pints

No Pectin Peach Jam – Source: Jam According to Daniel

This is the second jam I made with the Jam According to Daniel method, which uses no pectin and FAR less sugar than most jam recipes. The yield from the peaches isn’t as high as a regular jam recipe, but the tasty jam is worth the extra fruit.

Peach Jam – 20 Half Pints

Peach Jam – Source: Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving

My husband’s favorite jam is peach jam and every summer he is very concerned about the quantity of peach jam that I produce. I think I’ve made enough this year. He likes plain peach jam the best, but I’ve actually warmed him up to the Bourbon Vanilla Peach jam below as well.

Bourbon Vanilla Peach Jam – 18.5 Half Pints

Bourbon Vanilla Peach Jam – Source: Beantown Baker

This is my favorite of the peach jams I’ve made. A healthy dose of bourbon (Jack Daniels in my house) is added to this jam right before it’s poured into the jars and I think it adds a great layer of flavor to the finished jam.

Not pictured: Strawberry Jam – 27 Half Pints – Source: Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving

More to come as I complete more canning!

Fried green tomatoes and remoulade sauce

I don’t fry very many foods at home due to the mess of frying on the stove, the oil disposal and the general unhealthiness of fried food.  Despite this, once or twice a summer I am compelled to make a batch of fried green tomatoes. A couple of weeks ago, I found some green tomatoes at the Charlottesville City Market and had to buy a few for this summer’s first fried green tomatoes. I chose three small green tomatoes and happily paid a mere $1 for them.

A couple of days later, I sliced and salted the tomatoes, dredged them in flour, egg and cornmeal and fried them in a pan of bubbling oil. Paired with a bit of homemade remoulade sauce, they were the best work day lunch I’ve had in a long time and they cost only a dollar!

The recipes I use for both the fried green tomatoes and the remoulade sauce are from Simply Recipes. The recipe has a number of steps, but it was quick enough that I was able to make it during my lunch break on a work day. And in case you were wondering, I don’t usually cook lunch from scratch on a work day, this was a rare deviation from leftovers or sandwiches.

If you’ve never tried fried green tomatoes, you’re missing out. Even if you don’t like tomatoes, you may like these (I speak from experience as I used to hate regular tomatoes). If you end up with a little extra remoulade sauce, it’s great as a spicy spread for sandwiches (or you could just make another batch of fried green tomatoes).

Sliced and salted green tomatoes

Flour, eggs and cornmeal for breading the tomatoes

Ready to bread

Bubbling in the frying pan

Ready to eat fried green tomatoes

Lunch!

Serve with remoulade sauce

Best lunch for a buck I’ve had in a while

When tomato season hit last summer, I felt an urge to can tomato salsa for the first time. I’d canned batches of peach salsa and tomatillo salsa the previous summer, but never got around to a batch of regular tomato salsa.

In the world of home canning, once you get it in your head that you want to can something, you need to find a recipe as canning food without a legitimate recipe is not a wise idea for a host of food safety reasons. I won’t go into those reasons here, please use Google to research this if you’ve never canned before.

Off I went in search of the perfect tomato salsa recipe for canning. None of the canning cookbooks I owned at the time had exactly what I was looking for in a salsa. I then spent a number of hours (I’m not kidding, I spent hours) looking online for a good recipe. I scoured all of the well known canning blogs and websites I knew about and came up empty. All of the recipes I found were just not quite right for one reason or another. Some were too spicy, some didn’t have cilantro, some weren’t actually intended to be preserved at all. I wanted my first batch of canned tomato salsa to be fire roasted with a nice touch of spice and I needed it to contain cilantro! Apparently I’m picky about salsa.

Finally, I found the perfect recipe on a site that’s not specifically known for canning recipes: Simply Recipes. I think I found it by accident when I was searching the recipe index for a different recipe. And as it turns out, that particular recipe was posted just a handful of days before I made my batch of salsa.

So I made a batch of this tomato salsa and it is quite possibly the best thing I’ve canned to date. It’s everything I want a salsa to be and nearly a year later, it’s still a little bit spicy and full of flavor.

It’s tomato season again here in Virginia and I’m already thinking about this year’s batch. I made just a dozen jars last year and kind of hoarded it for months just to make sure it lasted. A few lucky people received jars as gifts or in swaps and all of them took the time to rave about it to me. I’m hoping to make at least a couple dozen jars of it this summer and I’ve already got a day planned in August to can batches of it with some Twitter/Flickr friends. Hopefully I’ll make enough this year to share with a few more people!

I’m not going to repost the Simply Recipes tomato salsa recipe in this post, so you’ll need to visit the site yourself to see it, but I will mention a few things I did that aren’t in the recipe.

• I used a different combination of peppers than the recipe states. I believe I used more jalapenos as well as Serrano and Anaheim peppers. If you like it spicy, you could probably add in a pepper variety known for having a bit more heat.
• The recipe gives details on grilling the tomatoes in order to peel them. I grilled my tomatoes on my charcoal grill, both for easy peeling and for fire roasted flavor.
• In addition to grilling the tomatoes and charring the peppers as mentioned in the recipe, I grilled the onion and garlic in the recipe as well, in order to kick up the fire roasted flavor even more.
• I used Roma tomatoes for my salsa, mostly because they have less seeds than some other varieties. Depending on what’s available at the farmers market this year, I may use a different variety.

Other than that, I followed the Simply Recipes recipe to the letter and ended up with a fantastic batch of salsa. So good that I’ll never need to search for another tomato salsa recipe!

Yet every summer when I start flipping through the cooking magazines that I have subscriptions to, I get excited about corn recipes. I do love summer corn, on or off the cob, so this excitement makes sense. More than anything though, I think it’s that the pictures of recipes with corn in them just look beautiful. They’re so colorful and evocative of summer.
This summer is no different and the current (July 2012) issue of Bon Appetit magazine had a recipe for charred corn salad with basil and tomatoes. As soon as I went to the grocery store again, I picked up a half dozen ears of corn so that I could create this salad for myself.
The Bon Appetit recipe instructed me to grill the ears of corn in order to char them. Because it was about 100° F that day and because I’ve been too lazy to use my grill this year (and possibly too lazy to even check to see if we have charcoal), I chose to broil them in the oven. I think I got a pretty similar charred effect with much less effort.
I also opted not to make my corn salad with basil. Mostly because I forgot to buy basil when I bought the corn. Since the recipe already had lime juice in it, I decided to throw in some cilantro instead since I had that on hand. And while I was at it, I added a touch of cumin because it goes so well with lime juice and cilantro. In the end, I guess my charred salad is bordering on charred corn salsa. And I think that’s a good thing.

The recipe said to serve this at room temperature. I liked it best at room temperature, but I think my husband liked it better chilled. Either way, it was delicious and a perfect side dish for a miserably hot summer evening. It would probably be a nice dish to bring to a barbeque too!

Charred Corn Salad

Slightly adapted from recipe in July 2012 Bon Appetit magazine

Makes 4-6 servings

Ingredients

• 6 ears of corn, husked
• 3 tablespoons olive oil, divided
• 4 green onions, thinly sliced
• 1 large tomatoes, chopped
• Juice of 1 lime
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
• 1 teaspoon cumin
• Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper

Directions

It’s recently come to my attention that I haven’t baked enough cake this year. I think my husband has been subtly mentioning this for months, but I apparently chose to pretend I didn’t hear him for months. I’m going to go ahead and blame our move late last year for the cake drought. When we lived in Williamsburg, it seemed like I needed to bake cakes for one reason or another pretty frequently. Now that we’re in Charlottesville, my husband is the only one other than me in need of cake (his office apparently isn’t aware of my dessert making ability). And as I just mentioned, I chose to ignore his pleas for months.

No matter what reason for the dearth of cake in our house really is, I’m now aware of the shortage and will consciously make an effort to up our cake intake for the rest of 2012. Starting with today’s batch of Red Velvet mini cupcakes.

Red Velvet cake was chosen today for no reason other than my realization that I haven’t made it in a couple of years. I also knew that I still had a giant bottle of red food coloring on hand from the last time I made it.

A few years ago I needed to find a good Red Velvet cake recipe for my sister’s wedding cake. I made a few batches of bland, tasteless cake and finally found the magic recipe in a well worn copy of a local cookbook my husband owned. By “local cookbook”, I mean the kind of cookbook often put together by churches or civic groups. This particular cookbook appears to be from a local community college’s culinary program. Wherever it’s from, their Red Velvet cake recipe is a winner.

Red Velvet Mini Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

Recipe adapted from VVTC Cookbook

Makes about 40 mini cupcakes.

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• 3/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1 egg
• 1/2 teaspoon white vinegar
• 3 teaspoons red food coloring
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 3 teaspoons cocoa powder
• 1 (8 oz) package cream cheese, softened to room temperature
• 1 stick margarine, softened to room temperature
• 1 (16 oz) box powdered sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350°. Line mini muffin tin with paper mini muffin/cupcake liners.
2. To prepare the cake, mix buttermilk, vegetable oil, egg, 1 teaspoon vanilla, vinegar and food coloring. Beat for 2 minutes (I used the lowest setting on my Kitchenaid stand mixer, but a hand mixer will work fine for this.)
3. Add flour, sugar, baking soda and cocoa to wet mixture and beat for 2 more minutes.
4. Spoon batter into muffin/cupcake tin. Fill each liner to about 2/3 full.
5. Bake for about 10 minutes, until toothpick inserted in center of cupcakes comes out clean
6. To prepare frosting, beat cream cheese and margarine together until smooth. Add powdered sugar and beat until smooth. Add 1 teaspoon vanilla extract and continue to beat for about 5 minutes, until frosting is fluffy.
7. Using a pastry bag and decorating tips, pipe frosting onto cooled cupcakes. Or spoon it onto cupcakes if you prefer.

A few notes:

• If you only have one mini muffin tin (like I do), gently scoop cupcakes out of tin with a teaspoon and place on rack or tray to cool. Repeat lining muffin tin, spooning batter and baking steps to bake the rest of the cupcakes.
• You’ll have lots of extra frosting. Do what I’m doing and make a batch of cinnamon rolls. Top them with this extra frosting.
• You could make regular cupcakes if you’d like. This recipe will make about a dozen of them.

Fresh strawberries

Strawberry season is starting to wind down in my part of Virginia, but I took full advantage of it this year. Or as full advantage as a person with a small freezer can take.

Since I started canning a lot of food a couple of years ago, a trek to the strawberry patch to pick a TON of berries for jam and other canned goods has become an annual event for me. When I lived in Williamsburg, I could usually drag someone along with me to pick berries, but since I’m in a new town this year, I ventured out on my own (for some reason, my husband had no interest in tagging along).

I did a little web research and decided that an orchard/pick-your-own farm about 20 miles outside of Charlottesville was the best place for me to pick strawberries. So I took a Friday afternoon off, slathered on the sunblock (even though it was cloudy) and drove out to Chiles Peach Orchard in Crozet.

Heading into the berry patch

The orchard is actually nestled in the hills (I don’t think they count as mountains) of Crozet. And the strawberry patch seemed to go on for miles. Even though there were a fair number of people picking berries when I arrived, I was never tremendously close to any of them as there were so many rows of strawberry plants. This is how I prefer to pick strawberries

The farm provided wagons!

The morning before I picked berries, I was fretting about how I was going to pick lots of strawberries by myself. I figured that I would have to pick a flat, go back to the farm stand, possibly pay and put the flat in the car – and then start the whole process over again. Then I arrived at the orchard and found a fleet of wagons available for use in the fields. I didn’t have to haul berries back and forth after all!

A wagon full of strawberries.

And since I had a wagon, I filled it with berries. I actually picked enough strawberries that I had to take 2 of the sides off of the wagon to get them back to the car.

32 pounds of strawberries

I picked and paid for 32 pounds of strawberries and I’m guessing I probably ate another 3 pounds of them while I was in the strawberry patch. It’s impossible for me to resist a strawberry buffet.

Beautiful berries

You’re probably wondering what I did with 32 pounds of strawberries? Several pounds of them went straight into the fridge for us to eat all week. This year we ate them plain or with sugar or with vanilla pudding. And sometimes I ate them with Cool Whip. And sometimes my husband ate them with ice cream and chocolate sauce. We even soaked some of them in sugar and amaretto and used those as a topping for cheesecake.

You could also make strawberry shortcake. Last year I made ginger strawberry shortcakes. You can find the recipe in a guest blog post I wrote for Indie Fixx. One of my other favorite strawberry recipes is from an old Gourmet magazine. It’s a strawberry mascarpone tart. It’s amazing. And not that hard to make.

I should also mention that these strawberries were delicious enough (and cheap enough) that I went back for a few more pounds last weekend. The last of those are about to be gone…so I might have to drive out to the orchard again this weekend for one last round. Or maybe I’ll just pick cherries since those are ripe now too!

Ready to wash, slice and freeze

As for the other 30 or so pounds of strawberries, they’re in my freezer. They’ve all been washed, sliced and frozen. In my very full freezer, there are 75 cups of strawberries neatly measured into quart bags. Soon I will start using 4 or 8 cups at a time to make various jams and canned goods. Last year I made a variety of strawberry treats including: plain strawberry jam, vanilla strawberry jam, strawberry margarita jam (yes, there’s tequila in it), strawberry lemonade concentrate, strawberry sauce, strawberry lime sauce, strawberry rhubarb jam and strawberry balsamic black pepper jam (this is so much better than it sounds).

In addition to strawberry canned goods, I might make a couple of batches of strawberry ice cream or strawberry sorbet this year. But that won’t happen until I make some jam and clear a little freezer space for the ice cream maker bowl.

Mountains of strawberries