[Elise] Quick pie crust.

Pastry month is mostly about making fancy delicious pastries that, let's be honest, look kind of scary to make. But tonight, I just really wanted quiche. And I really didn't want to put lots of effort into making a crust for what is otherwise a pretty simple dish. After a brief review of several simple recipes online (and a quick look at what's in my fridge) I came up with this. It took about 3 minutes to measure, mix, and press into the pan. All measurements haphazardly approximate.

2 cups of flour (approximately)

some salt

1/3 cup of sour cream (in a liquid measuring cup)

2/3 cups of vegetable oil (fill up to the one cup line... see, easy)

Then mix it with a wooden spoon until the flour is all mixed in.

The recipes generally said to split in two halves, press into a half inch thick disks between waxed paper, refrigerate, roll to 1/4 inch take off one sheet waxed paper, press into pan, take of the other sheet. Simple enough, right?

Hah. I put about 3/4 of the soft crumbly mess straight into the pan and pressed roughly even. This gave me a slightly thicker crust which is what I really like in my quiche (and I didn't have waxed paper). I put this in the fridge and went to work on the filling.

For the quiche part I sauteed some onions, brocolli, corn, and red pepper. I put this in the pan, covered liberally with shredded cheddar cheese. For the filling I mixed four eggs, a cup and a half of milk, a tablespoon of melted butter, salt and pepper. This part didn't turn out quite how I wanted (but still tasted good). Next time I might try five eggs and 1 1/4 cups of milk (or else a different recipe altogether). I poured this over the veggies and cheese and topped with chopped scallions.

After baking at 350 F for 30 minutes it came out nicely browned and delicious!

Note about the crust: The you could taste the sour cream in the crust (yum) which isn't something I would like as much for a sweet pie. I would try plain yogurt for something sweet (also recommended was buttermilk, but that is not a staple item for me).

[Inez] Chocolate hazelnut tarts

I've been eying this recipe from The Baker's Daughter for a while now. February being pastry month on the blog is as good an excuse as any to get moving with the tarts. I had kind of been thinking about making this recipe next weekend, following my one year tradition of making extravagant chocolate desserts for Valentine's Day rather than, you know, celebrating with a special someone or something silly like that. (Wow, the formatting on that one is all weird now that we switched to the new template for the blog.) Turns out having a giant blizzard is more of a motivator to make chocolate deliciousness than a Hallmark holiday.

Here's why I wanted to make this recipe:

and

Hazelnuts and chocolate. Proof that there is a Higher Power who loves us.

I'm going to walk you through the recipe, because parts of it made me a little nervous. I'm here to reassure you that it will be all right. The recipe you see below has been modified slightly to make it, in my opinion, even better.

Crust:

• 1/2 cup hazelnuts
• 1/2 cup sugar (or maybe as little as 1/3 cup)
• 7 T butter
• 2 egg yolks
• 1 cup + 3 T flour
• a few pinches of salt

The recipe originally says to use a food processor, but I don't do that. Therefore, stick your hazelnuts (either toasted or raw) in a blender or a coffee grinder and grind them up until they are like hazelnut meal.

Throw the hazelnuts, sugar, flour, and salt in a bowl and mix it around. Cut in the butter, or if the butter is frozen you can grate it in.Then, mix in the egg yolks.

This is where I got nervous. You're supposed to add the egg yolks -- yes, two eggs yolks are the only liquid you add -- and then form the dough into a disk and refrigerate it for an hour. But I didn't have a disk, I had a crumbly mess. Trust in the process. It will turn out all right. Form something resembling a disk, wrap it tightly, and refrigerate an hour.

Meanwhile, make the filling:

• 1/2 cup cream
• 10 oz bittersweet chocolate, chopped (you really do want bittersweet, not semi-sweet, for this)
• optional: liqueur or other flavoring (e.g. Frangelico, Kahlua, etc)

Heat the cream till just about to boil. Pour over chocolate in a heat-safe bowl and let sit 5 minutes. Then whisk it together and drool. Don't eat it yet! Refrigerate (covered) for 1 hour.

Ding ding ding! One hour's up! Turn your oven to 350F. Grease and flour 6-9 tart tins (see below for an explanation of the numbers). Then take the crust out of the fridge. Now, the recipe originally says press the crust into 6 3-inch tart tins, so that's what I did (okay, 6 ramekins, but whatever). Having done this, I would like to advise that you turn this recipe into 8 or 9 tarts rather than 6. These babies are intense, and you want the end result to be slightly soporific bliss -- not a coma. Also, having personally made the bottom much thicker than the sides, I would advise that you try to keep the crust to an even 1/4 inch or slightly less, including on the bottom. Once you've pressed all the crusts into the tins or ramekins, fill them with parchment paper and baking beans (so the crust holds its shape). 

Bake 15 minutes. Remove parchment paper and beans, bake another 5-10 minutes. Let them cool and then -- this is neat -- remove the crusts from the tins or ramekins. Actually you could probably wait until after the next step to remove the crusts. If you try that, let me know how it goes.

Now take the ganache out of the fridge and whip it on high for 1 minute until "it doubles in size and becomes fluffy." I'd say fluffy is an exaggeration, but maybe I did it wrong. Divide the filling between the crusts and smooth the top of the fillings as best you can. 

Whip another cup of cream (do not sweeten it!) and put a healthy dollop on top of each tart that will be immediately consumed. 

Consume.

Side note: Elise, have you tried the new Blogger editing thing? I don't know if they have it for browsers other than Chrome since that's all I've used it in, but it makes dealing with images a lot easier. You can drag them around and decide after you've uploaded them how big you want them to be and how you want them to be centered.

Happy Birthday!!!

As of this week, our blog is now one year old. So while I was in D.C. last month visiting Inez, I made yellow cupcakes with chocolate frosting, for the first time, from scratch. They had their shortcomings (somehow they came out tasting a little bit like sweet cornbread and the frosting was slightly over whipped) but nonetheless, they were delicious.

We pondered some about how to make this blog more cohesive. While the beautiful part of the blog is largely hard to plan and decidedly individual, the delicious portion is somewhat easier to control. So we've decided to give each month a delicious theme. February's theme: Pastries. So far, I have plans for at least one Swedish translation, and I believe Inez has her eye on a tart of some kind. Any suggestions for other delicious pastries to make this month, or theme ideas for future months will be entirely welcome.

[Inez] 50th Birthday Cake

I flew home to MN for the weekend because my mama Ruby turned 50 (a pretty big deal!) yesterday. She said she wanted a cheese cake and a chocolate compost cake. When I asked her what kind of frosting she wanted for the compost cake, she couldn't pick between our classic chocolate cream cheese frosting and chocolate ganache. So I said, "Why not both?"

(Note about the below picture: I've started using a crumb coat -- a very thin layer of frosting applied to entire cake before frosting it for real -- when frosting cakes, both to keep the crumbs in check and to make it easier to spread the rest of the frosting. I recommend it.)

Anyway, I made a double recipe of Chocolate Compost Cake, which you have seen elsewhere on this blog. Then I made a double recipe of chocolate cream cheese frosting (recipe in the first link above).

A triple layer cake is just so exciting.

Then I made the ganache. I used 1/2-2/3 cup cream, heated in a double boiler. Then I added 8 oz of a combo of bittersweet and semisweet baker's chocolate, chopped into bits.

I turned the heat off under the cream and just let the cream melt the chocolate. I stirred it away from the stove until cool, and went to town!

The top layer was baked in a bundt pan, so I filled the hole with raspberries. Any excuse to combine raspberries and chocolate is a 100% decision in my book.

Ruby was happy with the cake, and with the number of guests we had over the WHOLE THING was gone within 20 minutes of bringing it out. Wow.

[Inez] New Mexico (beautiful)

I just got back from a week in New Mexico, which is beautiful. While I can claim no credit for the beauty, I did do some capturing of it. I'll take full credit for that. Enjoy:

[Inez] Christmas cookies! (delicious)

This one is going to be a long one, because I made several different kinds of cookies. First of all, my mama Ruby is from Ohio. While she may be a slacker on the buckeye front, I'm willing to carry us. The most important ingredients, of course, are butter and peanut butter. Okay so the most important ingredients are actually peanut butter and chocolate, but isn't that picture impressive? It kind of makes you want to fast for a week just looking at it. I love the holidays.

Becca helped with the sugar cookies.

We made a lot of sugar cookies. Oh crud, are you going to want recipes for these? That will make this post interminably long! I'll put them at the bottom so you can skip them if you want.

Sugar cookies with two kinds of toppings. First I made some the traditional Steigerbuss way with colored sprinkles.

Then I took a break from sugar cookies to make peppermint pinwheel cookies, which are pretty much sugar cookies with extras (cocoa and peppermint).

Then I frosted the rest of the sugar cookies with Royal icing! Celeste stayed up until 1 am with me frosting these buggers.

Here's the loot:

(Recipes will come after I get them from my mom.)

[Inez] Christmas hen

I was browsing Tastespotting before heading home for Christmas, and I kept seeing these a

amazing looking roast chickens. If you know me much, you know it's not often I crave meat of any kind, but these chickens were just beautiful. One of them was a butter roasted chicken, photographed with roasted vegetables and a sprig of rosemary balanced across its fat roasted middle. My family doesn't do the Christmas goose or the Christmas ham, but I wanted that Christmas hen.

The recipe is a bit demanding in that you have to baste the chicken every 8 minutes for an hour and 15 minutes and turn it several times, but as long as you simply think of that as an excuse to admire the bird you will soon be eating, it's really not so bad. It's basically a chicken, slathered in butter, stuffed with lemon, rosemary and salt, rubbed with more lemon, rosemary and salt, and basted frequently while cooked uncovered.

The recipe I followed, linked to above, calls for white wine in the basting sauce, but of course my house has no wine to speak of. I used a bit of rice wine vinegar, a bit of cider vinegar, and more water than called for. I think it turned out just fine.

I roasted it with onions, carrots, potatoes, and yams, but oddly they didn't cook all the way through! I think it would be worth the extra hassle to stir the root vegetables a couple of times and maybe cover them with tinfoil for half an hour or so.

I also roasted up some asparagus (rolled in olive oil, sprinkled with salt, and roasted for about 10 minutes at 400 or so -- thank you to Alex for my now favorite way to cook asparagus) to go with the chicken. With the lemon from inside the hen squeezed all over it, it was delish.

The chicken, thanks to all the basting, was some of the juiciest, most tender chicken I've ever had. The only modification I would make to the recipe is rather than rubbing it with rosemary-lemon zest rock salt halfway through the cooking, I think I would rub the flavored salt under the skin. I would have liked to have the rosemary flavor infused in the meat a little more. In all, though, a delicious hen.