Tag: walnuts

Categories
Cakes The Book

202. Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting p.726


The recipe courtesy of The Ulterior Epicure

Sometimes the stars just don’t align, and the baking Gods abandon you for a day. I’ve learned a lot about cooking and baking through this project, and I’ve gotten to a point where I rarely make the boneheaded mistakes that plagued my early experiments, but there’s always room to regress. Today’s flub up was ignoring the instruction to “butter and flour cake pans, knocking out excess flour”. Every single baked good in the book calls for this step, and it’s become such a familiar phrase that I think I literally didn’t see it when reading the recipe. Sure something felt wrong while I poured the cake batter into the pans, but I was working on three other things at the time and didn’t give it much thought. The finished product suffered as a result, but I’m going to rate it anyway.

This is a pretty straightforward cake, but it does have quite a few ingredients. Beyond the basic cake stuff (flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt, vegetable oil, eggs, sugar) the cake mixes in a healthy dose of grated carrot, cinnamon, crushed pineapple, sweetened flaked coconut, walnuts, and raisins. The raisins were optional, and I opted against. The cakes are split into two 9 inch round cake pans and banked for ~40 minutes. Once cooled they’re stacked and frosted with whipped cream cheese, butter, vanilla, and icing sugar.

The Good: The cake tasted great. It had excellent carrot flavour and the cream cheese frosting wasn’t too sweet or too heavy, and set the cake off nicely. I like walnuts in a carrot cake, and this one was no exception. The frosting had a great texture, going on easily, and holding its shape quite well, as you’ll read below the underlying cake had some serious structural issues, but if I had to try to ice something with the texture of a jello salad again, this would be a pretty good frosting option.

The Bad: My main issues with the cake were with the enormous almost goupy crumb of the cake, and its total lack of structural integrity. The recipe describes it as an unusually moist cake, but I think my mishaps turned a moist cake into a barely solid cake. Without the butter and flour in the pans, the cakes stuck. The first cake I tried to unmould fell to pieces, with the baked-on bits staying firmly in the pan, and most of the extremely moist and soft innards flying through the cooling rack I was trying to unmould onto. I tried to free up the bottoms, but the cake was just tearing while it was still warm. Instead of cooling the cakes on racks, I left them in their pans, and was able to get an offset spatula in to free them up once they’d cooled. This probably means that the cakes steamed as they cooled, instead of crisping up on the outside. I can’t know how the cooling in the pan affected the texture of the cake, or how the rough extraction from their pans affected the overall integrity of the cake. As it was, the cake was nearly impossible to cut, it was as malleable as an angel food cake, and the slices crumbled as I tried to serve them. Even chilled the next day getting a piece out as a whole was a challenge. The soft and goopy frosting added more to the structural integrity than the cake itself. The pineapple was added to this dish to make it extra moist, and it did its job. At least with my mixed up cooking instructions that extra moisture probably made a bad situation worse. More importantly, it didn’t taste all that good. I don’t think carrot and pineapple are a natural pairing, and I just found it out of place.

The Verdict: A lot of what went wrong with this cake was totally my fault, but things like the over-large crumb, and not so nice addition of pineapple were certainly problems with the recipe. Looking beyond the serious textural issues, the cake did taste very good. It wasn’t my absolute favorite carrot cake, but it did a good job of delivering carrot flavour in a cream cheese icing package. I suspect that baking this in a 13×9 pan instead of trying to make it a layered cake would make the textural issues much less important, and it would be just as delicious. The cake that I produced was not fit to serve to guests, and the cake I made is the cake I have to rate, but I think I’m going to give this recipe another chance in the next couple of months, and I might decide to revise the rating upwards then.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

184. Katharine Hepburn’s Brownies p.688

The recipe

You know who I have an irrational dislike for? Katharine Hepburn. I know she’s one of the best respected and beloved actresses of all time, and the Oscar winningest lady ever, but she just drives me nuts. Admittedly I haven’t seen much of her work, but one film is all it took. In Bringing Up Baby she plays the lighthearted and carefree Susan Vance who drives the films comedy of errors with her impetuous, irresponsible, behaviour that we’re meant to take as cute and endearing. Every line she delivers just gets on my last nerve. Obviously this is some personal damage of mine, as the rest of the world seems to think it’s a pretty good film. Katharine Hepburn is a lot better in her more dramatic roles, but even there her upper class New-England accent chips away at my soul. I’m also a Star Trek fan, and Kate Mulgrew (Captain Janeway) who bears a strong resemblance to Katharine Hepburn, seems to have used Hepburn as the model for her character. Janeway has all the weird vocal ticks, the grandiose delivery of her lines, and the obstinate bullheadedness of so many of Hepburn’s characters. I can’t stand Janeway, and it turns out that she’s just a pale imitation of the grating irritation that Ms. Hepburn could bring to the screen. All that to say, I was predisposed to dislike Katharine Hepburn’s brownies, which are apparently her once-secret family recipe.

The recipe starts by melting together butter with 2 ounces of chocolate in a double boiler, then stirring in sugar, eggs and vanilla. A quarter cup of flour and a bit of salt are then barely mixed in. A cup of chopped walnuts and folded into the batter, and everything goes into 325 oven for about 40 minutes.

This is a very simple brownie recipe, unfortunately I thought they were awful. As the recipe promised the brownies were gooey-soft, which some people are really into, but it’s not my ideal texture. There were way too many nuts, which further weakened the integrity of these very soft brownies. They were hard to pick up without risking catastrophic brownie structural failure. My main complaint was that they hardly tasted like chocolate. 2 ounces was just enough to give the brownies a chocolate appearance, without any chocolate taste at all. Really they just tasted like sugar and walnuts.

Unfortunately the gold standard for judging a brownie recipe is the ubiquitous boxed mix. Those boxed brownies are not bad, but any recipe you’re going to make yourself ought to be able to beat the pants off them. Katharine Hepburn’s brownies have conclusively failed that test. If you’re going to make brownies from The Book I’d suggest the Triple-Chocolate Fudge Brownies on page 689. I’ve made them a bunch of times, but haven’t blogged them because I’ve just replaced the three chocolates the recipe calls for with all semi-sweet. They’re seriously fantastic brownies, and they’d just destroy Katharine Hepburn’s mockery of a brownie in a head to head competition.

Interestingly both Teena and Adam have made these brownies and given them grades of A- and A respectively. There are rave reviews for these things all over the internet, but they’re just not for me. These brownies just give me one more thing to dislike about Katharine Hepburn.

Categories
Frozen Desserts and Sweet Sauces The Book

175. Maple Walnut Ice Cream p.858


The recipe

People asked me what I wanted for Christmas this year, and I told them that my heart’s fondest desire was an ice cream maker. Somehow this struck my extended family as hilarious. My dining companion, who had a lot to do with me getting a Kitchenaid mixer the previous Christmas, understood that I wasn’t joking, and got me the ice cream attachment for said mixer. She saved Christmas.

My mother occasionally made us ice cream as kids, but her machine is hand cranked. After the novelty wore off, the prospect of working that handle for twenty minutes every time we wanted a scoop of vanilla turned out to be more than a mother of three wanted to deal with. Her machine has been sitting safely in the cold room for the past fifteen years. By contrast the Kitchenaid attachment is completely painless. The only difficult thing is to remember to put the mixing bowl in the freezer the day before you want to use it. In my dream house with a second freezer the bowl will just live in there. I don’t want to shill for Kitchenaid, but I love my mixer. If our apartment was burning my first priorities would be to get my dining companion and the cat out, then I’d go back for the mixer.

I decided to start my ice cream experimentation with an old favorite, maple walnut. The recipe starts by reducing grade B maple syrup in a pot, then adding heavy cream, milk, and salt and bringing to a boil. Some of that hot syrup mixture is used to temper eggs, then the proto-custard goes back on the heat to thicken. As soon as it’s nappe the mixture is strained and chilled. The custard then goes into the ice cream maker, and when it’s partially frozen chopped toasted walnuts are added. The finished ice cream is still soft so it needs to spend a few hours in the freezer to harden.

This ice cream is incredibly rich, think Häagen-Dazs with some added fat. The ratio of dairy is 2 cups heavy cream to 1 cup whole milk, and that makes for some very creamy, very fatty, ice cream. Usually I’d fully support more fat in ice cream. I get saturated on ice cream very quickly, so that after about six bites I’m finished. I’m completely OK with making those six bites count by making them as decadent as possible. However, when I’ve got 1 1/2 quarts of it sitting in my freezer this insane richness becomes a problem. I fed most of it to guests, but I still had more than my fair share.

The maple and walnut flavours were really well balanced, I don’t like ice cream with too many chunks, and this recipe got the concentration just about right. The maple flavour permeated nicely, but as one epicurious poster suggested a final swirl of partially incorporated maple syrup would have been a nice touch. I’m lucky enough to live in Quebec, where some massive percentage of the world’s maple syrup supply is produced, so finding grade B syrup was as easy as walking to the local grocery store. Unfortunately those of you not living around here may have trouble getting your hands on it. It really is important to get this darker grade of syrup, as it has much more maple flavour. An imperfect substitution is to reduce the more commonly available grade A syrup to 2/3 of it’s original volume (since this recipe calls for reducing a cup of grade B to 3/4 of a cup, just reduce grade A by half). It should go without saying that fake maple syrup, or as we call it sirop de poo-poo, just won’t do.

As a first go with the ice cream maker I’d declare this a success. The flavour and texture were right, and while the richness became overwhelming quickly, those first few bites were lovely. If I didn’t have 40 different types of ice cream to get through, I’d make this one again.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

174. Chocolate Sambuca Crinkle Cookies p.671


The recipe

This is a polarizing recipe. If the thought of anise and chocolate together piques your interest, you’ll probably like these cookies. If however that sounds like the worst idea you’ve heard all day, you probably won’t. That may sound trite or obvious, but anise is like that. I don’t know anyone who is neutral on the subject of black licorice. People love it, hate it, or have a complex ambivalence towards it. If a recipe is anise scented, you know right off the bat that that’s going to be a dominant element of the recipe’s flavour.

I’m all for anise, I especially like it in savory cooking, I have a little trouble with those super salty licorice candies the Dutch love, but otherwise anise and I are good. When I first flipped through the cookies section of The Book these ones caught my eye, and I’ve been looking forward to making them ever since. I haven’t done them until now because they needed to be served in the right context. My dining companion and I aren’t huge on desserts, so I usually try to serve them when we have friends over, or to bring them places. It’s hard to bring chocolate-anise cookies to a party or dinner, because you know going in that lots of people are going to hate them. I had to wait until I was making batches and batches of cookies, so that they could be one among many elements of a cookie tray.

The cookie recipe is fairly standard. You sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt, melt bittersweet chocolate and butter in a double boiler, and whisk together eggs, walnuts, Sambuca, and sugar. You then add the chocolate and flour mixtures to the egg mixture and combine. You pop the batter in the fridge for two hours, then roll heaping tablespoons of dough into balls, and toss them in confectioner’s sugar before baking.

The sugar causes the tops to crack, and I was hoping it was going to give the uncracked parts a nice glaze. As you can see a lot of the sugar stayed in white clumps, which I didn’t find too attractive. The insides of the cookies were soft and cakey, studded with walnuts. As predicted chocolate, and anise were the dominant flavours. I used Pernod instead of Sambuca for this recipe (a Book approved substitution), but I should have remembered that Sambuca is much sweeter than Pernod and compensated.

For people who are into anise cookies, these were quite good. They weren’t the most beautiful cookies I’ve ever produced, but the texture was very nice, and the rich chocolate and anise combination was a winner for me. I try to take other people’s opinions into account when rating these recipes, I usually estimate other’s average ratings, and split the difference between their liking and mine. But we have a bimodal distribution here, and the mean is no longer a meaningful statistic, the mode or the median aren’t much help either. Since this is the food blog part of my life, and not the behavioral neurobiology part, I get to violate good statistical practice, and just ignore all those anise haters.

Categories
Pies, Tarts, and Pastries The Book

160. Cranberry Walnut Tart p.786


The recipe

Cooking is a learning process, and a lot of lessons just need to be learned the hard way. There are a host of excellent kitchen habits that food educators are desperate for us to get into, such as, reading the recipe all the way through, verifying that you have all the ingredients, doing things that can be done ahead ahead, getting your mise en place, and cleaning as you go. These are wonderful, labour saving, better for you in the long run, habits. Unfortunately it takes a fiasco for me to really internalize any of those teachings.

Today’s lesson was “Don’t assume, you’ll make an ass out of u and me”. I’d already learned the read the recipe all the way through lesson, so it was time to screw up the checking that you have all the ingredients you think you have step. I made a special trip to the grocery store to get the stuff for this tart, and picking up corn syrup wouldn’t have been a problem, but I took it on faith that somewhere in the depths of the pantry a sticky bottle of light corn syrup was waiting for me. I was wrong, in a two cook household you can never trust that the pantry fairies haven’t come along and wiped you out of cream of tartar. For the record, acceptable substitutions for 1 cup of light corn syrup are 1 cup of dark corn syrup, 1 cup of treacle, 1 cup of liquid glucose, 1 cup of honey, or 1 cup of granulated white sugar (increase the liquid in the recipe by 1/4 cup). You’ll notice that 1 cup of maple syrup is not on that list. I knew that I should really make a simple syrup as a stand in, and two seconds of googling would have turned me on to honey, but I went with maple syrup because I’d failed to heed the “do what can be done ahead ahead” lesson, and the guests were coming much sooner than I was ready for.

For this tart I baked off a batch of Sweet Pastry Dough, then whisked together eggs, brown sugar, maple syrup instead of corn syrup, butter, salt, and vanilla, then stirred in chopped walnuts and cranberries which i forgot to chop (I was frazzled). I baked it for half of the recommended 45 minutes because it was starting to burn.

Part of the filling boiled over the sides of the pan and onto the bottom of the oven, and some got between the crust and the tart pan. That left a lot less filling in the actual pie shell, so it began to dry out. Maybe if I’d chopped the cranberries as as I was supposed to they would have released more juice, and kept the caramel saucy. The pie was really sticky and thick, hard to cut, hard to eat, and didn’t taste all that great. The cranberry-walnut-caramel combination should have been a winner, and it might well have been if I’d followed the recipe properly. The people on Epicurious seem to like it well enough.

As a pie this really wasn’t great, but it worked out well as a life lesson. Today I learned that just because I’ve had an ingredient at some point doesn’t mean I still have it. I’ve also started to think about organizing the pantry so that it makes some kind of sense. In future, if the cook’s note at the bottom says that the recipe can me made a day in advance, I’ll consider availing myself of that. Sometimes it takes several painful repetitions for a lesson to sink in, but I’m begining to appreciate the fact that the Gods of pastry aren’t shy about smiting those who play fast and loose with the recipe. I always feel bad when I give a recipe a poor rating when it was at least partially my fault, but too bad, The Book doesn’t actually have feelings that I can hurt. I give my performance as a cook here 1/5 mushrooms, but the tart fares a bit better.

Categories
Poultry The Book

84. Persian-Syle Chicken with Walnut, Onion, and Pomegranite Sauce (Fesenjan) p.372

No recipe for this one.

This is a quick chicken stew, made with pomegranate, onions, walnuts, cinnamon, tomato, lemon juice, and molasses. That’s a lot of big bold individualistic flavours in one dish. Apparently this dish is traditionally made with duck instead of chicken. There may have been a very good reason for that. Duck has got a pretty intense flavour of its own, and it can stand up to this sauce. I found that the chicken flavour just got lost.

The weirdest thing about this dish is that the sauce is thickened with ground walnuts. I really liked the walnut flavour, and it pairs very well with the pomegranate juice, but the texture was just off. It’s not smooth, it’s not chunky, it’s mealy. Runny undercooked oatmeal comes to mind.

I’m also not a huge fan of sweet sauces for meats. This wasn’t candied or anything, but the combination of pomegranate juice, cinnamon, and nuts put my palate in dessert mode. Sweetened fruity stews and I just aren’t destined to be friends.

On a more positive note the chicken itself picked up bunch of great flavour. I didn’t eat much of the sauce on it’s own, but it had perfumed the chicken quite beautifully. I also liked having an excuse to break down a pomegranate. The little jewels are gorgeous, and a lot of fun to eat.

I wouldn’t make this one again, the sauce had a cohesive flavour, but it was going in a direction I didn’t want to follow. It completely overwhelmed the chicken, and the texture was just bad. Make it at your own risk.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

76. Cilantro Walnut Filling p.420

The Recipe

This is the filling for Twenty-First Century Beef Wellington. The filling for Beef Wellington in the 19th and 20th centuries was a duxelles and paté de foie. It’s a very French preparation which was renamed and popularized by the British. This twenty-first century version has a lot more in common with Argentina than the old world. I tasted it and my first thought was chimichurri. It’s a preparation of blanched spinach, cilantro, parsley, chopped walnuts, garlic, honey, bread crumbs, egg whites, cumin, corriander, salt, and pepper. The whole thing goes into the food processor and pulsed until smooth.

As a filling for a dish called Beef Wellington it was fairly weird. As a sauce for roast beef tenderloin is wasn’t bad. I can’t get over the preconception of what goes into Beef Wellington. I understand and appreciate the need to play around with traditional dishes, to update them, to take a fresh look at what makes them good, and to help the dishes to evolve with our tastes. Maybe in the twenty-second century I’ll be ready for this filling, but to my palate Beef Wellington without mushrooms in some capacity just can’t be Beef Wellington.

I think I would have preferred to leave the walnuts and cumin out of this filling. Without them it would have been a nice pesto, and might have worked better in the dish. Replacing the walnuts with pine nuts (another pesto classic) would work well too. The walnuts were toasted, and chopped fine in the food processor. This gave them kind of a mealy texture that didn’t really break down into a paste, and didn’t retain much crunch. I also wasn’t crazy about the flavour of the walnuts with the cilantro. The cumin was a distracting touch, that I didn’t think was particularly necessary.

I think a variation on this filling served over a grilled steak would work quite well. It doesn’t stand a chance as a replacement for duxelles in my heart. I give them credit for trying to cut the calorie count of the Beef Wellington, but this isn’t an adequate substitute. I’ll give it a three mushroom rating as a pesto, but as a filling for Beef Wellington it wouldn’t merit more than a two.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

56. Rosemary Walnuts p.5

No recipe this time, sorry.

This is the second recipe in the book, with only Candied Walnuts coming before it. It’s a very strong start. It combines my favorite things, simple, delicious, and affordable. It’s a shame that the recipe isn’t available online, but the proportions aren’t that important anyway. All you need to do is melt butter with crushed dried rosemary, salt, and cayenne. Then toss the nuts in the butter and bake the whole thing at 350 for ten minutes.

Those of you who’ve been paying attention will have noticed that the above photo has been contaminated with non-walnut nuts. My excuse? The grocery store was out of walnuts an hour before my guests arrived, so I went with what they had. In combination with the walnuts I had in the freezer I figured it would count. As a matter of fact the walnuts weren’t event the best part. I found that the cashews and pecans really sparkled with this treatment.

The star of the show in this dish is the cayenne, it’s unexpected, and it plays a beautiful counterpoint to the richness of the nuts. But wait! clearly the rosemary is the star. It gives the dish body, and takes the flavours to a more sophisticated place. Without the rosemary the dish would risk being brushed off as “spicy nuts”. Maybe neither star is enough to carry the show, but together they light up the stage like Sonny and Cher.

My only tiny change would be to reduce the butter by about half. Ideally there would be just enough to coat the spices onto the nuts without pooling and carrying flavours away.

These were are really excellent appetizer, and no one could help themselves from having just one more. If you find yourself in the kitchen singing “I’ve got you babe” to a dish of these, I won’t blame you.