Dessert

I’ve picked up snowboarding now that I live so close to the mountains. Being a beginner means a lot of falling and unfortunately I took a particularly bad fall the most embarrassing way possible…

I hurt myself falling off of the chairlift.

With 3 out of 4 tendons of my rotator cuff injured, I was given the bad news of not snowboarding again until I healed up.

This disappointing information required a hefty dose of chocolate. I chose Robert’s Brownies My Way by Alice Medrich
because she uses the phrase “densely creamy and intensely bittersweet”. I didn’t find them intensely bittersweet, but these brownies are lightly sweetened and they are fudgy to a point where you think they haven’t been baked long enough. As long as the toothpick comes out mostly clean, you’re in the clear.

Recipe here.

This is one heck of a cookie. It’s an intense chocolate, crisp exterior and when your teeth sink down into it, it turns into a rich fudge. Magical.

I made these during my true Nervous Chef days when I was setting off the smoke alarms. Somehow I didn’t screw these up. Surprising, as meringues have been failing me as of late.

You need good chocolate (aim for something you would eat on its own, quality matters here), sugar, pecans and egg whites. Everything comes together quickly, so when the oven is done preheating your cookies are ready to go in.

Most of my cookies look a little more rough than the ones I’ve seen on the web. I’m not sure the reason why. Maybe not enough mixing?

These are from Alice Medrich’s Bittersweet, but you can also find them in Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies.

Melting Chocolate Meringues (makes about 30 2-inch cookies) From Bittersweet

Ingredients:
4 1/2 ounces 70% chocolate, coarsely chopped
2 large egg whites (1/4 cup), room temperature
1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/3 cup sugar
3/4 chopped nuts (walnuts, pecans, I think toasted hazelnuts would work well too)

Directions:
1. Preheat the oven to 350F. Prepare cookie sheets with parchment paper.
2. Melt chocolate in a medium heatproof bowl. I make a make-shift double boiler by placing the bowl on top of a saucepan filled with simmering water. Set aside.
3. In a large bowl beat the egg whites with the cream of tartar and vanilla. When soft peaks form, slowly add the sugar until you get stiff peaks. Be careful not to beat too long or they’ll be dry.
4. Mix up the chocolate and nuts into the egg whites and fold with a rubber spatula until the colour is uniform.
5. Drop tablespoons of batter 1 inch apart onto the cookie sheet.
6. Bake 8-10 minutes. Cookies should look dry and have a bit of give to them when pressed on. They’ll still be gooey inside. Cool completely.

I may have missed baking a pumpkin pie for Canadian Thanksgiving, but at least I’m in time for the American one.

This is from King Arthur Flour. Apparently Canadians prefer their pumpkin pies spicier compared to their American counterparts. I’m a fan of the spicier ones myself. Do you have a preference?

The flavours meld much better the next day. If I had to serve this, I’d make the pie one day in advance.

Recipe here.

Every so often I am suddenly hit with a flavour/texture that I need to make. I was looking for something light but crunchy. When I saw Bonita’s post featuring these hazelnut meringues, I knew I had to make them.

The key to a good meringue is a bowl that doesn’t have a speck of fat and room temperature egg whites. I’ve heard not to use egg whites from a carton, but I use them and it works out fine. I never had a problem with meringues until recently — it would not maintain a stiff peak no matter how much I beat it. Did my meringues need a blue pill?

This time around I made sure that the bowl was clean (wiped down with vinegar), but I didn’t let the egg whites fully come to room temperature which is why it took longer for the stiff peaks to appear. Lesson learned: do what the instructions say and make sure that the necessary ingredients are at room temperature.

The taste profile was exactly what I was looking for in a cookie. I used a 70% chocolate and I think it might have been too stark of a contrast with the sweet meringue. 60% and lower would suit the meringue better.

I sound a little bit like a broken record recommending Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies by Alice Medrich so much, but it really has become my go to source for cookies.

You can find the recipe here

You don’t need to have a camp fire to make these s’mores-like bars.

It’s all pretty simple, making it a perfect recipe for the trepidatious baker. You mix up a few ingredients and bake until the marshmallows are a wonderful gooey mess. These have been described as “crack” by a few people, so use at your own risk.

Recipe from Alice Medrich’s Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies

You can find the recipe here

I always get suckered when I see things claiming to be the “best”. I then feel obligated to try it and to see if the claim is true. Most of the time I’m pretty disappointed with the outcome.

So when I saw the cook book Beat This saying that it had the best recipes, I had to test it out.

With strawberry season at full peak, the strawberry pie recipe was meant to be. Instead of rolling out the crust, you just press it in making the whole process less time consuming. I had doubts that the crust would turn out, but it actually does. The downside? If you haven’t given your pie pan a good greasing, it’ll stick and crumble when you try and slice it out. The dough turned out to be much more powdery looking than I had hoped for. I think you can add a bit of water, but I left mine as is to see if it would turn out (and it did).

After the crust is cooled, the you beat heavy whipping cream and cream cheese that then turns into a light and fluffy filling. The strawberries aren’t baked, so make sure you’re using the best you can find.

Strawberry Pie from Beat This

Pastry
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons confectioner’s sugar
8 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into small cubes
Salt

Filling
3 ounces cream cheese (room temperature)
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

Topping
1 quart strawberries, hulled
1/2 cup currant or seedless raspberry jelly

Directions:
1. Have a rack in the bottom third of the oven. Preheat oven to 350F.
2. Generously butter a 9 inch pie pan.
3. Mix the pastry ingredients together until the dough starts coming together. It will still be a bit powdery looking, but once baked it’ll be fine.
4. Press in the crust and prick it with a fork in a few places.
5. Bake 15-20 minutes or until golden brown. Cool.
6. Whip the cream until soft peaks form and add the other ingredients until combined.
7. Pour into crust, smooth it out and chill for an hour.
8. Put the berries on the filling, points up. Melt the jelly on low heat and use a pastry brush to put the glaze on.
9. Refrigerate for 3 hours.

It’s scorching hot in Toronto right now. Over on the West Coast? Not so much. I’m really missing the crazy and humid Toronto heat until I acclimatize to the breezy weather here.

This was the last ice cream I made in Toronto before I had to return the ice cream maker to my sister. In The Perfect Scoop, the recipe references this ice cream tasting similar to an orange creamsicle, a favourite of mine when I was a child. Every other kid I knew always bought those rocket popsicles (now called Mega Missiles?!) because of the cool colours, but I was all about the creamy filling hidden underneath the crisp cool orange exterior. So of course I had to make this.

There was never a chance that this ice cream would develop freezer burn.

The sour cream gives it an extra creaminess and a tang to it. Did it taste similar to my childhood favourite? I recently had a creamsicle and it just wasn’t as good. So I’m saying goodbye to creamsicles and saying hello to this ice cream.

Recipe here.

I collect cookie cutters. I love the different shapes and the way they can make an ordinary cookie look fantastic. The weird part about my cookie cutter collection? I don’t like using them. They’re generally too fussy to make: letting the dough chill, rolling it out, chilling it again…I’m more of a drop cookie kind of girl.

When it’s a special occasion, I will reach for the cookie cutters. I thought these cute Message-in-a-Cookie cutters from Williams-Sonoma.

I turned to Alice Medrich’s Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy for a recipe. The recipe makes a huge batch, but the cookie cutters are huge so it produced about 18 cookies. I used vanilla paste instead of vanilla extract. It’s worth the splurge if you’re looking to wow others.

To prevent the dough from sticking to the cutter, lightly dip the cookie cutter in flour first. You want to press firm, but not too deeply to get a good impression onto the cookie. Usually I like to roll my dough thicker than called for to make soft cookies, but if you do that here, the wording gets all marred. It should be rolled out to 1/8″.

Along with the cookies I decided to try my hand at a red velvet cake from Rose’s Heavenly Cakes. People rave about red velvet. I find it a bit scary with all that red food colouring. What used to be a natural chemical reaction with an acid reacting to the cocoa powder has turned into how much red dye #47 we can shove into a cake. Despite the scary almost neon colour, it received rave reviews. Scary colour aside, it was moist and the cream cheese frosting didn’t feel heavy.

Recipe for red velvet cake from Heavenly Cakes can be found here.

Sugar cookie recipe can be found here.

My niece can’t eat eggs or dairy, but that doesn’t stop me from baking up something tasty for her. She’s a chocolate fiend and judging by the pictures, she enjoyed every bite.

Recipe here.

No, this cake does not have tiger blood in it and is not related to Charlie Sheen (or any of his cooking methods).

I can’t get enough of Alice Medrich lately and I’ve had this cake in my head for years. It’s from her book Bittersweet, a cook book that I’m fond of as it was the catalyst for my love of baking.

I’ve wanted to try this recipe since I bought the book, but I think I was too intimidated by the ingredients white pepper and olive oil (at the time I was used to things that you heat in a microwave and called it a meal).

You make your batter and then you take a portion of it and add the cocoa mixture so you can do your layers. This is supposed to be self-marbleizing, but mine came out more as a gentle wave, but I didn’t split my layers as evenly as I would have liked to.

The cake comes out moist and the chocolate is deep and rich. Because this cake is olive oil based, you need to use a flavourful one (and probably a somewhat expensive one). It doesn’t help that the recipe calls for a cup of this liquid gold. I ran out of my good stuff and substituted half with some EVOO from Whole Foods. You can taste the olive oil flavour, so try to use something decent. There’s only a hint of white pepper in this and I was wasn’t too sure if I’d add 1/4 teaspoon more next time, but I think that the 1/2 teaspoon gives just the right amount of heat and doesn’t overpower. It’s like a little tickle instead of a slap in the face.

If you do make this cake, please please please try it toasted the next day. It was Medrich’s recommendation and I’m glad I followed it. It gives the cake a much different character. I will pretty much be eating this cake for breakfast until it runs out.

Recipe here. (Note: Medrich specifically states natural cocoa powder, not dutch-processed. I’m guessing this was omitted as it’s hard to come by in Canada. I bought mine from King Arthur Flour.)