Cakes, Pies, Cookies and Pastry
Sorta – These velvety sweet chestnuts in a crunchy sugar shell aren’t quite as light-textured as the real deal, but they’re good enough to be a variation instead of simply an earnest attempt, and now that the candied chestnuts of my childhood have hit about $5.00 each they’re a variant well worth making. (Assuming, of course, that marrons glacés are on your list of “wish I could afford more.”)
Left: Marrons glaces en chemise. Right: Glazed candied chestnuts
Although fresh chestnuts can be used, it’s far easier to start out with IQF peeled chestnuts (see below). The processing that delivers them whole, absolutely skinless and in a neither-cooked-nor-raw state is probably something we don’t want to know too much about;* but whatever it is has the happy side-effect of making them much more receptive to candying and much less likely to break.
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Also an Eek of the Week: Fake Bakers, about the – many, according to story – people who bring purchased pastry to bake sales and cookie swaps and pass it off as home made. To enhance verisimilitude, they doctor the store-bought by roughing it up so it doesn’t look too perfect. Directions are provided. I am still trying to digest this.
And in the meantime of course baking cookies, including vanilla almond Moth Cookies and The Spritz Bill Really Likes. Links to more never-fail all-timers after the jump, but first:
Our favorite Pepparkakkor, crisp, spicy, better-than-gingerbread. The quintessential Christmas Cookie and if the Christmas part gives you trouble just use a bird cutter and call ‘em doves of peace.
The recipe makes approximately a zillion. The dough is easy to mix, easy to handle and perfectly happy to stay in the icebox for weeks while you slice off chunks of it to roll and cut and decorate. Or not; a lot of people like them best plain.
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On right, fresh chestnuts. On left, one of the all-time convenience ingredients: peeled, skinned and ready to go, as easy to cook as dried beans.
Admittedly, dried chestnuts don’t have the mashed potato fluffiness of the fresh article. Somewhere between mealy and creamy is about the best they can do. But other than that they’re just shortcut chestnuts: great in soups and stews and stuffings, great with winter vegetables and great in holiday sweets and why they aren’t more widely adored is a mystery to me.
Sweet Snowballs (chestnut and white chocolate candy) recipe at the end of the post.
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December 1st, 6:00 PM: The candied grapefruit rind is bubbling in the syrup, almost done, so I’m sort of stuck in the kitchen when I notice it’s cold outside in the clear still night under the fat moon. So of course I get nervous about the lettuce and my pet baby radicchios.
The radicchios are still making progress toward heading up; I continue to have hope
Decide to put covers back on even though plants are already at that frozen stage where you shouldn’t touch them if you want them to thaw unharmed. Wilted tips better than wilted everything being my thinking on that.
Turn off the grapefruit (recipe follows)
Home candied citrus rind is worlds better than store-bought. Also extremely easy to make and very nearly free.
Put on the headlamp, recruit Bill, who puts on his headlamp, and down we go to cover most but not all of what’s left.
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In theory, the combination of steam vents and tightly crimped edges prevents the juice leakage visible at left. In my view, if there isn’t so much juice at least a little bubbles out somewhere, there isn’t enough juice.
Inside that crust is a Three Cheers Pie (apple, pear and quince) in honor of this being pie season.
Of course, back last spring I would have said summer is pie season; with rhubarb as the opening salvo. Even before those stalks start getting stringy there will be cherries and peaches, plums and blueberries – all primary reasons for pie to exist.
On the other hand, next thing you know here come the apples and pears and pumpkins and then uh-oh, it’s Christmas, the one time of year when mincemeat pie…
Take your pick for maximum pie pressure, no matter how you slice it that’s a lot of crust. Here are a couple of the recipes I use, starting with that super-fast easy one.
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Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing, and I’m not talking about the manufactured “collectibles” created each year for no other purpose.
Nope, this is your warning ( in case you didn’t already know) that elderly Halloween doodads, while not in the league of antique Christmas ornaments, are nevertheless worth more than you might think.
Not always a lot more
Candy container, plastic, from the 1950’s, spotted at a nearby shop
But sometimes, as in this example from the website of Showcase Antiques
“ Composition "Pumpkin Girl" candy container painted in tones of yellow, green, blue, red, and white; marked "Germany;" circa 1910. Height=4.5 Price: $795.00”
In a normal year, this wouldn’t come up; I’d just be merrily chirping along about how this is a good time to bake
Spicy Walnut Gingerfingers
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Every autumn there’s more of this: bake sales being swept up willy nilly in the (laudable! I’m for it!) attempt to get junk food out of the schools.
Sigh. When will these people wake up and smell the donuts? You don’t have to be Michael Pollan to realize American kids’ obesity problem isn’t caused by too many home made desserts, it’s caused by a crashing dearth of home made anything else.
When even well fed children are growing up thinking a carrot’s a machine-made toy, ready to eat right out of the bag, it’s hardly surprising to find that the default model for “food” is something you buy, not something you prepare at home. And from there it’s not rocket science to see the profitability of sugar, salt and fat.
But the solution isn’t to ban sugar, salt and fat per se (good luck with that, btw), it’s to give children a chance to combine these things into something really good and thus seduce them into the joys of home cooking. From there the rest is easy… Well, easier, anyway.
Point here is simply that people who know how to cook eat a lot less junk than people who don’t, and dessert is the gateway goodie – most children go for baking cookies before they get all excited about making boeuf bourguignon.
Case in point: Fat Banana Cookies, rich with fruit and nuts, simple to make, filling enough so just a few will do. Also durable; thanks to the banana they stay moist and tasty for a good long time.
The bananas get star billing because: a) plain brown cookies, what's to show? and b) I want to plug mini bananas, not only a more sensible size but also tastier, once they’re fully ripe. For richest flavor and creamiest texture they have to be well speckled with brown. This bunch is still just at the edge of being cookie material.
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Old Faithful got its name by being a never-fail. It always comes out delicious – even when it isn’t textbook perfect – and it’s very chocolate. I’ve been making it for years and was reminded to put up the recipe when Emma came for an overnight and wanted to do some cooking. Just made one the other day and was reminded again… this may not seem like baking weather but people continue to be fond of cake.
Emma learning the toothpick guide trick for splitting layer cakes
This person somehow became 16 when I wasn’t looking (or teaching her to cook), so we made roast chicken and chocolate cake, on my theory that armed with these two she would be ready for anything.
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Did you keep cutting off the rhubarb flower buds, doing your best to extend the season by preventing
Rhubarb flowering instead of making pie material
If so, welcome to the club of “if only.”
Just about every rhubarb grower I know is convinced that removing the flower stalks will
a) keep the edible leaf stalks from growing tough and
b) encourage the plant to produce more of them,
and they are abetted in this belief by most of the published information on rhubarb growing, including that from reliable sources like universities and extension services.
Nevertheless, (a) is untrue and (b) applies mostly to the following season.
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Any food lover who has eaten a genuine whoopie pie has got to be cracking up over the current rage for – what shall we call it? – the new whoop-de-do : small cakes sandwiched with lots of rich filling that resemble the genuine article the way a square of ground Kobe beef filled with foie gras resembles a White Castle hamburger.
You can read all about it in this New York Times whoopie pie story by Micheline Maynard, or just know that ever since she tapped me for an opinion about their origin, I’ve had them rattling around in my head.
I’ve also had a container of very nice ricotta rattling around in the refrigerator. Also half a batch of the dough for Chocolate Split Seconds.
ricotta whoopie pies
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