Adventures in Shaw » Holiday Baking

Nutty Cranberry Relish Scones

Shaw_Girl — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 15:09:20 +0000

Lessons Learned From My First Time Hosting Thanksgiving Dinner:

No matter how nice the cooking schedule looks on paper, something’s going to happen to fuck it up.
Because of that, always make most of the sides before the turkey goes in the oven. People can microwave ‘em later.
Truffle butter makes EVERYTHING better
My friend Mazzie is an AMAZING sous chef (and a helluva gravy maker)

Before hosting next year (oh yeah, I’m totally thinking I’ll do this again next year), get a Gel Pro Chef Mat.
Crowds freak out our cat Scout
Our apartment fits 8 nicely for a dinner party (much to the aforementioned Scout’s dismay)
Brian is a kitchen wonder and can calm me down when I’m in a culinary panic.
The Black Dog can pick some amazing wines
Cheesecake is a wonderful solution for Thanksgiving dessert – it can be made a day ahead and whipped out to thunderous applause
James is a napkin folding wonder (and gives fucking brilliant hostess gifts)
And wine plus 80′s music equals me dancing crazy

In the end, however, the dinner was a rousing success, the turkey was poultry-tastic and we all had way too much fun. Now I have a fridge full of leftovers and am trying creative ways to use them up. First up, throwing this wonderfully flavorful nutty cranberry relish (a dinner hit) into my favorite scone recipe. This could easily work with any type of cranberry side dish you have leftover from the big day (as long as you used real cranberries and not that canned shit).

Recipe: Nutty Cranberry Relish Scones

Ingredients

3 cups all purpose, unbleached flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ cup sugar, plus a little more for dusting the tops of the scones
½ teaspoon kosher salt
1 ½ sticks unsalted butter, cold and cut into cubes
1 cup nutty cranberry relish (recipe linked above)
1 cup buttermilk

Instructions

For the egg wash: whisk together one egg and a tablespoon of water
Preheat oven to 400 degrees and line a baking sheet with parchment paper (or you can use a scone pan).
Sift together the dry ingredients into a mixing bowl. Add the butter cubes and work the butter into the dry ingredients until a crumbly texture is created.
Make sure the relish is drained of any juices and then add them to the flour mixture. Using a fork, stir the relish into the flour mixture. Add the buttermilk slowly as you stir with a fork. Stop pouring the buttermilk once a dense dough is formed (this may mean you won’t use all of the buttermilk).
Transfer the dough to a floured surface and gently knead it a little until it’s a uniformed dough. If any of the cranberries poke out of the dough while kneading, simply poke it back into the dough. Using a floured rolling pin, roll out the dough until it’s about an inch thick. Then cut out triangular wedges from the dough.
Place the scones on the baking sheet and brush each of them with the egg wash. Sprinkle each scone with a bit of sugar. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until golden brown.

Meal type: breakfast

Roasted Butternut Squash Cheesecake

Shaw_Girl — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:29:06 +0000

Leave it to me to run straight to dessert in my quest for a great Thanksgiving meal. I wanted to try a different take on dessert but still wanted it to celebrate the Fall season. After eating my fair share of roasted butternut squash the last few weeks, a light bulb went off in my head.

“You know what? This would make a great dessert,” I said to myself one day while eating chunks of roasted squash. I may or may not have answered myself, but that’s neither here nor there.

I thought at first about making the squash into a sweet potato like pie. That was quickly squashed (pun intended) when I realized I didn’t want to play around with a crust while tackling my first turkey. Then inspiration hit when my Twitter foodie pals and I started talking about the outrageous prices some stores were charging for seasonal cheesecakes. I have a go-to cheesecake recipe that I have modified before to include fruit puree. Why not try it with butternut squash puree? The resulting cheesecake was a gem! Even the Boy loved it – and he hates cheesecake.

Roasted Butternut Squash Cheesecake

Ingredients

For the filling:
3-8 ounce packages cream cheese, softened
1 cup heavy cream 1 cup roasted butternut squash puree (see this post on how to roast the squash for this recipe)
1 1/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
5 large eggs

For the crust:
5 ounces graham crackers
1/2 cup walnuts
5 tbsp butter, melted

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 and line the bottom of a 9 inch springform pan with parchment paper.
Snap the side pan closed and cut off any excessive paper that hangs outside the pan. Reduce the oven temperature to 325 degrees. In a food processor, crush the graham crackers and walnuts until it becomes a fine powder. Pour in the butter and pulse on low.
Pat the crumb mixture evenly around the bottom of the pan. Bake the crust for 10 minutes or until it’s firm. Set it aside and start on the filling.
In a mixing bowl, whip the cream cheese until it’s smooth and uniform. Add the sugar and continue beating until it’s incorporated into the cheese. Add the salt and spices and whip until the spices are distributed throughout the cream cheese mixture.
Stop the mixer and add the first egg. Turn the mixer back on and allow the egg to be whipped into the cream cheese. Add the next egg and continue the process until all the eggs have been added.
Finally, reduce the mixer speed slightly and pour in the heavy cream and squash puree. Continue mixing until all the ingredients are whipped together uniformly.
Pour the filling on top of the crust. Cover the bottom and sides of the springform pan with foil and place it in a roasting pan. Fill the pan with hot water until it reaches halfway up the side of the springform pan.
Bake the cheesecake for an hour or until the edges are set but the middle still jiggles a bit. Turn off the stove and let the cheesecake remain in the oven for another hour. DO NOT open the oven during this second hour.
Remove the cheesecake from the oven and take it out of the roasting pan. Let the cheesecake cool completely before wrapping it up in plastic wrap and refrigerating it. Let the cheesecake cool in the fridge overnight.

Meal type: dessert

Pumpkin Chocolate Swirl Pound Cake

Shaw_Girl — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:17:44 +0000

It’s quite possible I have gone a tad bit pumpkin crazy this season. And to understand my almost obsessive love for pumpkins, we need to go back to my childhood. See, I was the kid whose mother wouldn’t celebrate Halloween. Convinced it was a bad holiday, my mom didn’t want us to dress up or go trick or treating. It didn’t help that every year the local news blared stories of tainted Halloween candy (thanks WJBF and you’re “in-depth coverage”). No, the universe had aligned against me, thus depriving me of a true Halloween childhood experience.

As I got older, I started dressing up for Halloween, but I never got around to carving a pumpkin. In fact, until I moved to DC, I had never even held a real pumpkin before. And when I first saw them at the farmers markets last year, I was actually a bit intimidated by them. All that changed when I timidly bought my first pumpkin a few weeks ago at the 14th & U Farmers Market. It was a small pumpkin, cute as a button and irresistible to anyone who had a culinary loving heart. After a bit of research (okay, googling “what the hell do I do with a fresh pumpkin”), I realized just how easy it was to work with fresh pumpkin. Before I knew it, I was whipping up breads, doughnuts and cookies. Thoughts of cheesecakes, muffins and even popovers danced in my head. All that was shoved aside, however, when I saw a Bon Appetit recipe for a chocolate swirl pound cake. I have been experimenting more with baking recipes lately, so it seemed a great idea to add pumpkin to my favorite pound cake recipe. Adding the chocolate swirls per the Bon Appetit recipe was a bonus. The pound cake turned out delicious – the spices and essence of a pumpkin pie folded into a Southern classic. I may need some work on my swirl making abilities, but the chocolate was still bursting out of every bite. This cake just may replace the pumpkin pie on my Thanksgiving table this year.

Recipe: Pumpkin Chocolate Swirl Pound Cake

Ingredients

3 3/4 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground cloves
2 cups sugar
3 sticks unsalted butter, softened
6 eggs
3/4 cup pumpkin puree (or canned pumpkin – NOT pumpkin pie filling)
3/4 cup milk
2 ounces semisweet chocolate, grated

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a bundt cake pan and set aside.
In a small bowl, whisk together the ground nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves. Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, spices and salt in a mixing bowl. Set aside.
Using a stand (or hand) mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until fluffy at medium speed. Add the eggs one at a time, waiting until each egg is mixed in thoroughly before adding the next egg. Once all the eggs are added, pour in the pumpkin puree and continue mixing until all of the ingredients are combined.
Reduce the speed of the mixer and add a third of the flour mixture and a third of the milk alternatively. Allow all the ingredients to be incorporated and then add another third of the flour and the milk alternatively. Wait until all of the added ingredients have been incorporated before adding the last third of the flour and milk. Beat one last time to finish incorporating all of the ingredients.
Spoon half of the batter into the prepared bundt cake pan. Sprinkle one ounce of the grated chocolate evenly over the batter. Spoon the remaining batter over the grated chocolate. Top the batter evenly with the rest of the grated chocolate. Using a knife, make swirl patterns throughout the batter.
Bake for 55 to 60 minutes or until a cake tester comes out clean when inserted into the cake. Remove from the oven and allow to cool to room temperature.
Carefully remove the cake from the pan (I place a large plate over the pan and then carefully flip the pan upside down) and allow to cool completely before serving.

Number of servings (yield): 12

Meal type: dessert

Apple Galette

Shaw_Girl — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:53:40 +0000

I have a confession to make: I get very nervous when I cook for someone for the first time. Call it performance anxiety or just one of my many “quirks”, but I freeze up like a deer in headlights whenever I’m presented with the task of cooking for someone new. I worry that the dish isn’t tasty enough and everyone’s just too polite to say otherwise. I worry that I made some horrible mistake, like accidentally putting in salt instead of sugar, resulting in a salty dessert. I worry that somehow, without my noticing, a hideous spider got into the batter and I’m serving up spider cookies to all my friends. In short, I worry…a lot.

This same sense of worry overcame me yet again last weekend when I made an apple crostata for my friends Carlea and Geoff. After a lovely day of apple picking at Stribling Orchard, we all headed over to Carlea and Geoff’s house for a friendly apple bake off. Geoff had planned to make an apple galette, while I was shooting for an apple crostata recipe from the Barefoot Contessa herself. I bet you just now looked up at the name of the post and saw it wasn’t titled ”Apple Crostata”. You’re very perceptive, my dear reader. The reason? My crostata came out like an apple biscuit, while I swooned over Geoff’s flaky galette crust. I decided then and there to recreate it at home.

Geoff followed a recipe from Cook’s Illustrated, which led to me renewing my long since lapsed subscription to the magazine (although now I subscribe to their online content only…much, much better than having stacks of magazines overtake my apartment). It also led to me getting a crash course in the fraisage technique. After cutting the butter into the dry ingredients for a dough, this technique is used to evenly distribute the butter throughout. This leads to a flakier crust and thus a winning apple bake-off dish!

Recipe: Apple Galette (adapted from Cook’s Illustrated)

Ingredients

For the Dough:
1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
2 tbsp corn starch
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp sugar
12 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cubed
4-6 tbsp ice water
For the Apple Filling
1 1/2 pounds apples, cut into 1/4 inch slices
2 tbsp unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1/4 cup sugar
2 tbsp fruit preserves (I used white fig and balsamic vinegar)
Vanilla bean seeds of 1/2 vanilla bean
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tbsp water

Instructions

Preheat oven to 400 degrees
Combine flours, salt, and sugar in food processor and pulse to sift the ingredients together. Add the butter (the amount from the dough ingredients) and pulse again until a crumbly texture is achieved.
Add the ice water 1 tablespoon at a time and pulse. Repeat this process until the dough starts to form into large pebbles.
Empty dough onto floured surface and gather into a rough rectangular mound (about 12×5 inches in size). Starting at farthest end, use heel of hand to smear small amount of dough against counter, pushing firmly down and away from you, to create separate pile of dough (flattened pieces of dough should look shaggy). Continue process until all dough has been worked. Gather the dough into another 12 by 5-inch mound and repeat smearing process. Dough should form cohesive ball after the first process.
Form dough into 4-inch square, wrap in plastic, and refrigerate until cold and firm but still malleable, 30 minutes to 1 hour.
Toss the cut apples with the vanilla bean seeds and cinnamon and set aside.
Once the dough is sufficiently chilled, place it in the center of a large piece of parchment paper. Roll the dough out into a 16×12 inch rectangle. Cut any excess dough so a perfect rectangle is formed. Roll up 1 inch of the dough on all sides to form a border. Move the dough (still on the parchment paper) over to a baking sheet.
Layer the apples in a row, starting from either side. Make sure the apples overlap somewhat to create a scalloped look. Dot the apples with the butter pieces (from the apple filling ingredient list) and sprinkle the sugar on top. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes, or until the dough is a golden brown and the apples have caramelized.

Meal type: dessert

Pumpkin Shortbread Cookies

Shaw_Girl — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:35:24 +0000

This is the start of my favorite time of year. From October through Christmas, I’m that giddy, goofy annoyingly cheerful person everyone hates (I guess I should apologize upfront for all the merriment and good cheer that will be unleashed…mostly to the Boy since he has to live with me). While I enjoy Spring too (especially after having suffered the slim pickings of the farmers markets during the lean Winter months), this time of year is pretty much the cat’s pajamas in my book. And with more space in my new apartment, this year I can crank out the cookies and treats like nobody’s business. My first stop? Pumpkin shortbread cookies!

It all started when I was trying some of the new gelatos at the Dolcezza stand at the Penn Quarter Farmers Market last Thursday. One of their newest flavors was a Georgia Butter Pecan and it was heaven. I immediately thought a great shortbread would be the perfect dipping utensil for the gelato. Since I still had some pumpkin puree from the pumpkin walnut bread, I thought I’d add it to my go-to shortbread cookie recipe. The added pumpkin puree meant I had to tweak the dry ingredients a little (to compensate for the added moisture to the recipe). But the end result was an ode to pumpkin pie set amongst the all too familiar snappiness of a shortbread cookie. This was pretty much Fall wrapped in a cookie package…woohoo!

Recipe: Pumpkin Shortbread Cookies

Ingredients

2 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 sticks (or one cup) unsalted butter, room temperature
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup pumpkin puree (see this post on how to get pumpkin puree from a real pumpkin)
1/2 tablespoon pumpkin pie spice

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
Using a stand (or hand) mixer, beat the butter until creamy. Add the powdered sugar and continue beating until the mixture is fluffy. Add the flour and beat until incorporated. Add the pumpkin, pumpkin pie spice and vanilla extract and beat until a sticky dough is formed.
Place the dough ball on a piece of parchment paper and with lightly floured hands, roll it out into a thick log. Wrap the log in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least an hour (but no more than 2).
Take out the dough log and using a non-serrated knife, slice the dough into 1/4 inch thick discs. Place the cookies on the parchment paper and bake them for 15-20 minutes, or until they are lightly brown. Place the cookies on a wire rack to cool completely before serving. Makes 20 cookies.

Meal type: dessert

Mini Key Lime Cheesecakes

Shaw Girl — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 21:13:07 +0000

I have the attention span of a five year old…after they have devoured all of their Halloween candy. It’s sad really because there are times when said short attention span gets the better of me. Just recently, while driving, I got distracted by my Blackberry and missed a turn. And by distracted, I mean I was busy taking a picture of me driving in my mother’s Miata…so I could post it on Facebook (disclaimer: I was at a stop light, so it wasn’t like I was barreling down the streets of Georgia with one hand on the wheel and the other on my Blackberry trying to strike a pose).

My attention span only gets shorter when a nifty new gadget or piece of gear is in my general vicinity (and by general vicinity I mean within a ten mile radius because I can sniff out new techie things like a police dog sniffing out cocaine at an airport in Miami circa 1983). So it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that when I set out to make these mini key lime cheesecakes for our New Year’s Eve celebration, my new baby kept distracting me. Sure, this is the same camera model I had earlier in the year. But I just now got around to replacing the one that had to be sent back due to a defective flash. And this time I actually read the owner’s manual from cover to cover…and discovered you can control the camera from your LAPTOP!!! I don’t need no stinkin’ camera remote, I have my Macbook! Wait, where was I going with this post????

Oh yeah, I was explaining how I got distracted from my intent to make these lovely little cheesecakes. Well, I have obviously digressed…shocking, I know. Nonetheless, I was supposed to start making these cheesecakes around 8, but didn’t actually get started until almost 10. But the ease of the recipe meant no real damage would be done to my sleep time. In fact, Deb has come up with one of the easiest cheesecake recipes I have ever come across (and I’m a girl that knows her cheesecake recipes – so head over to Smitten Kitchen stat for this one)! Because I decided to make these at the last minute, I didn’t have time to buy the mini cheesecake pans Deb recommended, so I used these great little mini tart pans that also have a removable bottom. I also changed up the crust by using Pecan Sandies (I used roughly half a full bag of the cookies or if you have a kitchen scale, seven ounces) instead of graham crackers.

While making the cheesecakes, I uhmmm, yeah kind of got distracted and overwhipped the cream cheese (how could I not take a few minutes to watch two idiot newlyweds select a God awful house on House Hunters???). I panicked because the batter ended up being a bit runny and I poured (what I thought was) too much in the first two tart pans. But all was not lost as the filling firmed up quite nicely during baking and even more after being refrigerated overnight.

If you like key lime pie but are ambivalent about cheesecakes, this is the dessert for you. The key lime is tart enough to overrule what some consider the overly sweet taste of a regular cheesecake. And that runny batter? It resulted in a more pie like consistency instead of the usually dense and rich filling common of cheesecakes. The fact that these came out tasting good is a testament to Deb’s recipe because my attention span just wasn’t with me that night.

On a side note, I want to thank all of you who have stopped by my little blog over the last year. I’m still new at this blogging thing, but have been priviledged to meet some wonderful people through it and have made some amazing food because of it. A new love of photography was born and an old love affair with my kitchen was rekindled. When I look back at the first few posts of Adventures in Shaw, I laugh because I had no clue what I wanted to say on this blog. But somehow I found my footing and my voice and by some miracle, people listened. I was moved beyond words at the outpouring of sympathy when I lost my darling Diva and was amazed that people I never physically met cared enough to send words of encouragement. For that, I am humbled and inspired to (and yes, I am sadly using an Emeril phrase here…forgive me but it’s appropriate) kick it up a notch in the new year (this includes a whole new look debuting shortly)! So now I’m off to ring in 2009 with good food and even better company! I hope you’re lucky enough to do the same. Have a Happy New Year everyone!