WHOOPIE PIES, MORNING BUNS

Happy Independence Day to my American friends! There is perhaps no better wholesome, all-American holiday with which to share the news that you can now read my story about the wholesome, all-American baking and pastry community in Portland, Maine over at enRoute. We had the most tremendous time during our brief stay there earlier this year, and I’m already scheming ways to return. On Standard Baking Co:

Portland’s most renowned pastry shop, Standard Baking Co., is located under its sister restaurant, the James Beard-award-winner Fore Street, whose wood-fired kitchen can take much of the credit for Portland’s foodie reputation. Standard’s sweet wonders are inspired by old-world traditions: caramel-coloured pain au levain, impossibly tender croissants, spongy financiers and sumptuous morning buns swirled with caramel and nuts.

On Scratch Baking Co:

Some of Portland’s most heavenly baked offerings are found over the Casco Bay Bridge in South Portland. At Scratch Baking Co., unpretentious American desserts like graham crackers and shortbread studded with sea salt tumble forth from woven baskets. Scratch’s masterful blueberry scone is feather-light and tastes faintly of sweet cream. Its most popular item is an outrageously addictive, chewy-yet-crisp bagel, lovingly made with a nine-year-old sourdough named Lulu.

Click through the whole slideshow to read it all! I took so many more photos during our trip, and I’ll post more soon.

 

SUMMER BAKING

Consider this a recipe dump for all things regarding baked goods. At a recent St. Jean bbq at work, I may have gone slightly overboard, featuring:

This cardamom-scented upside-down strawberry cake from Joy the Baker…

This (quite lopsided) raspberry-rhubarb galette from Lottie + Doof…

This stupendously rich chocolate cake with raspberry compote from David Lebovitz, via Cucina Nicolina…

And this lemon cake from Vitae Curriculum, with my own lemon curd recipe (use lots of yolks, no sugar, and more zest than you think you need).

And with leftover lemon cake batter and leftover chocolate ganache, I made a pan of cupcakes, too. And finally, a bit of homemade whipped cream, made by whipping a cup of heavy cream with a few tablespoons of sugar.

RHUBARB DOCUMENTATION

Some photos from our recent workshop with Patisserie Rhubarbe’s Stephanie Labelle. I soaked up every second we had with this insanely talented pastry chef, and this workshop was probably the most advanced one we’ve done yet. Not a single person in the room had ever made a panna cotta or marshmallows by scratch, and the workshop was full of people madly scribbling notes as Stephanie explained the complex recipes. There was also an almond tart, tangy rhubarb compote, and rhubarb-spiked lemonade — I was buzzing on sugar until about 2am that night. More photos at Le Pick Up’s site.

STRAWBERRIES, PT II

My intense strawberry cravings began last week, thanks to Luxirare, and continued unabated. Then I kept seeing this cake all over the internet — first at Saveur, then at Lottie + Doof, and finally Bon Appetempt — and no longer could I deny its garish, neon pink hue. I had to have it. So I made it for the Dep, added a box of fresh strawberries, and its happy rosy exterior did not disappoint.

SO BAKED

[Clockwise from top left: Kouign-amann, car snack from Montreal; Scratch Baking Co. graham cracker; Standard Baking Co. blueberry-oat scone; Scratch sea salt shortbread; Rosemont Market raspberry Linzer square; Scratch almond scone; Scratch coconut macaroon; Standard croissant, stuffed with gruyere and ham.]

I’m currently trying to wrap up a project relating to my recent trip to Portland, Maine. I was combing through my photos, and eventually arrived at the last photo from the memorably gluttonous trip: an image of a plate barely containing all of the crumbled bits and pieces that I took away with me (not pictured: the baguette, five cupcakes, whoopie pie, and two croissants that we ate on the car ride to Vermont). As you can see, almost everything had a bite or two taken out of it. Can you believe that I actually tried to give these semi-stale leftovers to our lovely host friend? Man, I’m obnoxious.

APPLE CAKE, VANISHING FAST

This airy, sweet apple cake — adapted from the Smitten Kitchen recipe — has a nearly perfect, loose, buttery crumb. The cake is laced with ribbons of cinnamon sugar and dotted with chunks of diced apple, and topped with icing sugar + diced walnuts. It is perfect for breakfast or after dinner. It is great as a snack, eaten over the sink, hand cupping the falling crumbs. And, it is blissfully simple to assemble. This cake disappeared in two days. I made another version for the Depanneur Le Pick Up yesterday, this time soaking the apples in sticky, tart homemade raspberry jam before tossing into the batter.

BAKING AT LE PICK UP

Some views from my baking work station at Depanneur Le Pick Up. I’m going to try to better document what I do at work, but I’m often so busy churning out hundreds of cookies, cake after cake, pans of brownies, etc, that I don’t often have the luxury of admiring everything like I do at home. The vermilion intensity of these pumpkins was too good to pass up, though. They were great in spiced cakes + butterscotch cookies.

[That cake, by the way, is Smitten Kitchen’s ‘Mom’s Apple Cake.’ I adapted it for sheet form and it turned out great. A beautiful woman came by the cafe three days in a row to buy pieces of that cake. When she came on the third day, the cake was gone. She was devastated! And grudgingly bought a cookie instead.]

FRENCH PEAR TART, & OTHER HAPPY MISTAKES

Earlier this fall, we bought a beautiful basket of tender, fragrant pears at the market and I needed to make something sweet for a dinner party. I loved the weird primordial vibe of this French Pear Tart at Tuesdays with Dorie, so weird primordial tart it was.

With the almond cream, pastry dough, poached pears, and jam glaze finish, it’s a bit labor intensive, but certainly worth it. Along the way I made one error — I used a tart pan about 40% bigger than what was recommended. But the error turned into a delicious surprise: the crumbly, sweet pastry dough and fluffy almond cream baked so thinly and for so long that the batter turned into a big slab of praline. Brittle. Or firm, chewy caramel. The result was not so much a tart, but a crunchy, sweet cookie topped with tender slices of pear.

But the greatest bonus of making this tart: we saved and bottled the poaching liquid from the pears — infused with citrus, cloves, cinnamon, and sugar — to make fizzy, aromatic bellinis for my guy’s birthday party.

CLAFOUTIS DREAMS

As I had never eaten them before, an earlier trip to the PSU Farmer’s Market this summer inspired the purchase of a small bag of pie cherries. They are much more pert and tart than their juicy, plump Bing or Lambert counterparts, but I was reassured that pie cherries are the only acceptable way to go in a traditional French clafoutis.

A clafoutis is a mild, custardy sweet made with a thick, flan-like batter that bakes away leisurely in the oven. While it’s traditionally made with cherries — and their pits (be sure to remind your guests of their stoney presence) — I’ve seen lots of mouthwatering variations made with plums, blackberries, raspberries, and even chocolate. It is a light accompaniment for breakfast, but we enjoyed it as a snack with tea, or as a post-dinner dessert, too.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a recipe to share with you, because we didn’t use one! I was skeptical about making such a tender dessert without a recipe, but I was reassured by the most confident of cooks that no recipe was needed. We ate this warm, right out of the oven, and later, its cold leftovers, right out of the fridge, with our fingers digging into the cold aluminum packets… and it’s actually better cold. Our clafoutis was magical — the yellow, wet cake faintly sweet and eggy, the tart cherries so addictive when cooked until hot, and an extremely liberal powdering of icing sugar, as they call it in Canada.

RHUBARB FLING

It feels a bit belated to be posting such starry-eyed anecdotes about my experiences cooking in Montreal, but I’m almost done! I promise! I think we’re entering the tail end of rhubarb season, so if you haven’t made a single dish with this tart, delicious, remarkable fruit, please make this galette tomorrow morning. Thank you.

I decided to make this spiced rhubarb galette for a dinner party, and I spent the better part of a morning spastically researching the best (i.e. easiest) ways to make the pastry dough, leaving myself with barely enough time to shop for the ingredients, resulting in two near-misses with angry cars while racing on my bike to Jean-Talon.

Turns out, it is the easiest dough in the world. Stalks of rhubarb, sliced on the diagonal, soak in a little  freshly squeezed orange juice, heapings of zest, and a myriad of spices — I riffed a bit one what Zested uses, and ended up with a heady combination of cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and coriander. The filling sat on the counter for an hour while I made the dough, and I kept leaning over into the rhubarb bowl and inhaling deeply and smiling a little. This is what it looked like during prep:

It was a bit scary to work with the dough at first, because it felt very dry and on the verge of cracking everywhere. I thought for sure I had messed up. But then, magic: everything sort of elasticated and warmed up and tugged into place. The filling spills into the crust raw, and oozes out its juices as the crust cooks and bubbles away. The crust is brushed with an egg wash and topped with generous handfuls of turbinado sugar. This is what it looked like before entering the oven for 45 minutes:

And this is what it looked like coming out:

…And that’s how you make a Gourmet magazine cover! JOKES! Anyway, I’m not a big ‘sweets’ person. I kinda hate super-sweet. Sweet things are almost always more interesting if they’re tempered by other non-sweet things (sea salt on brownies; ginger in strawberry jam; french fries in milkshakes etc). This has been proven true so many times it should be a rule, I think. This dessert was perfect because the crust is buttery but not sweet, and the filling is extremely tart, but somehow made outrageously decadent through the magical combination of citrus and spice. It’s fresh and clean and juicy and sour. I loved it.

And! I also did a quick rhubarb crumble for the vegan contingent of the dinner party crew, inspired by my dear friend Anna, who made Bittman’s simple crisp for a party while I was in Ithaca. Hers was devoured in about 10 minutes. I made it vegan by replacing the butter (used in the crumble topping) with weird vegan spread, which felt awful in my hands, and looked awful before it went into the oven, but as it turns out, tastes exactly the same. Life! So many awesome surprises! This effortless crumble — heavy on pecans and brown sugar — was VERY sweet compared to the vaguely Middle Eastern-tinged crostata (I had one piece of each, side by side, to compare. Science!), but in their own unexplainable ways, complimented each other like a pair of lovers holding hands. Similar, but different all the same.