To you, with love: Lemon blueberry cheesecake bars

If there is one thing I’ve learned this semester, it’s that there are people who come and go and there are people who will be there forever. There are people who are worth your time and there are people who are just…not. This semester, I’ve relied quite a bit on my two best friends scattered about the East Coast, the ones who drop everything and invite me up to visit when I call them crying. And there are my friends here, who are willing to sit around on a Thursday night while I, mid social life freakout, bake up a batch of cheesecake squares.

With the end of classes, I have twelve days left at school for the year. Visions of next year are still dancing around in my head; I’m becoming overwhelmed by all the options that are open to me. Being typically indecisive, I’m not sure what direction to go in but I know that a whole year to figure that out can only be good for me. And I know now what I have at this school — some of the best friends in the entire world — which maybe makes it an itsy-bitsy bit harder to leave.

So this one is for you all, because there is no better way to say thank you than with lemon and blueberries and cheesecake. I first stumbled upon this recipe a couple months ago and thought these squares were positively adorable. Somehow, I never made them back then. But somehow, I keep clicking on links that lead back to them — so here they are, finally. The lemon cuts the richness of the cheesecake, making them a perfect lighter dessert for summer. I love blueberries in anything, and here they are perfect little bursts of juice. I used whipped cream cheese, which I was worried about but it worked just fine. The one thing I would change next time is to increase the amount of graham crust as I found it wasn’t sturdy enough to hold up the filling. That said, there’s really no need for sturdiness, as one of my hallmates proved when she took a fork to the entire pan.

The recipe comes from Kesha at Shared Sugar. Her pictures are beautiful, check them out here.

Lemon Blueberry Cheesecake Bars
Adapted from Tyler Florence
Makes 9 bars

To make the crust:
2 tablespoons sugar
1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
9 graham crackers
1/2 stick unsalted butter, melted

To make the filling:
16 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
2 eggs
2 lemons, zested and juiced
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup blueberries
1/2 cup powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.

Butter the bottom and sides of an 8 by 8 inch baking pan. Cut two pieces of parchment paper in rectangles long enough to extend up the sides of the pan (so later you can use them as tabs to pull out the finished cheesecake bars). Place the parchment paper in the buttered pan cross-wise and press it into the corners.

Crush up the graham crackers in to dime size pieces or smaller crumbs. In a bowl, mix the sugar, cinnamon and graham crackers. Add the melted butter and mix until the butter is incorporated. Pour the mixture into the baking pan and evenly press it into the bottom of the pan and about a 1/4 inch on the sides. Use a glass or another smooth surface to disperse the graham cracker mixture. Bake in the oven for 12 minutes.

In a bowl with an electric mixer, add the cream cheese, eggs, lemon zest, lemon juice and sugar. Mix until the ingredients are creamy and the cream cheese is fully incorporated. Pour into the pan with the cooled crust. Then evenly distribute the blueberries.

Bake in the oven for 35 minutes until a toothpick inserted into the cheesecake comes out mostly clean. Only allow the top to get a hint of brown. Remove from the oven and cool completely. Then refrigerate for at least 3 hours. Remove the cheesecake from the pan using the parchment paper.

Decadence and excess: Salted Caramel Bacon Brownies

Decadence and excess is the name of the day. After one of my teammates enlisted my help — or surveillance — in making fudge for her French class, I decided today was a good day to try out one of the recipes that has been in the back of my mind for awhile: Salted Caramel Bacon Brownies. There are no words to describe these…rich, gooey, the base brownie tastes like pure melted chocolate and the caramelized bacon adds a smoky, salty note. That said, more than a couple bites of this is enough to make you feel quite guilty, and more than a little sick. I did cut a couple corners on this recipe; I stole the bacon from Cloister breakfast, neither wanting to fry the bacon myself or make the caramel using the leftover bacon fat. And we invited a couple of the swimmer girls over to eat them. Who, unfortunately, seem to exercise more restraint than lightweight rowers. Come on, don’t tell me you’re on a lawnparties diet too!

Some poor, depressed, heartbroken soul needs to come take these off my hands because these are the brownies hell is made of.

The brownie base is adapted from my favorite, David Lebovitz. The rest of the recipe is the creation of Kate from Savour Fare. See the recipe here or go to her site here.

Bacon Salted Caramel Brownies
Adapted from David Lebovitz

For the Bacon Caramel:
2 slices bacon
1/2 c. heavy cream
1 c. sugar
6 T. salted butter

In a small saucepan, fry two slices of bacon until crisp (I find it’s easiest to do this when the bacon is cut in half). Remove bacon, set aside, reserving bacon grease in the pan. Add cream to hot pan and let cool. When bacon is cool, crumble or chop finely.

In a larger pan, heat the sugar over high heat until the mixture is liquid and a deep amber color. Add the butter and the cooled bacon cream all at once, and stir until the butter is melted. Add the chopped bacon and let the mixture cool thoroughly.

For the brownies:
8 T salted butter, cut into pieces
6 oz. bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, finely chopped
1/4 cup unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder
3 large eggs
1 c. sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 c. flour

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Line an 8 inch square pan with two sheets of aluminum foil that covers the bottom and sides of the pan. Grease the foil with butter or a little Baker’s Joy.
In a large microwaveable bowl, melt the butter and the chocolate together in the microwave (start with 30 seconds, and stir thoroughly, then microwave for 10 seconds at a time, stirring between each bout of nuking, until the chocolate is melted and incorporated into the butter) (You can also melt them together over the stove). Add the cocoa and whisk until smooth, then add in the eggs, one at a time, and the sugar, vanilla and finally the flour. Stir only until combined.

Scrape half of the batter into the prepared pan. Then drop about a third of the bacon caramel, evenly spaced, over the brownie batter in the pan. It doesn’t have to cover the whole batter, but should be in splotches. Spread the remaining brownie batter over the top, then drop spoonfuls of the remaining caramel sauce over the top of the brownies and swirl.

Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, but err on the side of underbaking. Remove from the oven and cool completely.

L’imagination au pouvoir: Almond Cake

Spring is finally here, albeit through the random bursts of rain showers and thunders. Yesterday we were standing at the door of Rosana’s, ready to leave, after picking up last minute necessities for lawnparties, when the clouds burst. I realize I don’t have a very standard definition of last minute, lawnparties are after all over a week away. But per usual, the dress was bought a couple weeks ago, the obnoxious sun hat scored last week (finally!). Fake eyelashes were picked up on a whim for formals right around the time everyone else started thinking about maybe finding a dress. And that’s just how I work. I’m a big believer in themes and an even bigger fan of in your face, impression-making, big-impact themes. So while it may just be formals, for me it’s about the entire outfit.

Anyway, I can’t tell you how excited I am to no longer be wearing drab colors. I didn’t realize outfits could be coordinated to the season until I came out here. I’m excited for yellow, flowery prints, my new summer boots (yes, ask and I’ll show you they exist) and the ten-thousand pairs of sunglasses that have been chilling in my desk for months. And then, I’m excited of this cake because what says spring more than a light, French almond cake dusted with powdered sugar and served with berry compote?

I made this for my French class as part of a presentation on the development of French cuisine through the 16th and 17th centuries. It’s a favorite of David Lebovitz, who is my favorite. I once made his lemon curd to go alongside a lemon cake and ended up eating it by the spoonful straight from the pan on the stove. Please go check out David’s site for the full story behind the recipe.

Almond Cake

1 1/3 cups granulated sugar
3/4 cup almond paste (not marzipan)
10 ounces unsalted butter, at room temperature (this is a LOT of butter, over half a pound. It lends a lot of moisture to the cake but I may try cutting it down to 8 ounces next time to decrease the prominent buttery taste of the cake)
6 large eggs, at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup all-purpose flour (next time I think I’ll try using some almond flour in place)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees and position the rack to the center of the oven. Line the bottom of a 9-inch cake pan with a round of parchment paper, or butter the pan and dust it lightly with flour, tapping out any excess.

2. With an electric mixer, beat together the sugar and almond paste until the paste is finely broken up (the sugar crystals helps break the paste into pieces-so don’t add the butter yet!)

3. Now add the butter and beat for a few minutes until light and fluffy. In a separate bowl, or a measuring cup with a spout, stir together the eggs with a fork then dribble it into the batter as you beat. Add the vanilla.

4. Mix together the flour, baking powder and salt with a whisk. Stir the dry ingredients into the batter until just incorporated.

5. Transfer the batter into the prepared cake pan and bake for about 1 hour, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. The baking time may take a but longer due to the variation in different brands of almond paste.

Cool the cake on a rack before serving. This cake is extremely moist and will keep well for up to a week if well-wrapped.

Bring on the cinnamon-chocolate swirl cake

Today was an awfully frustrating day. After 6 hours of class, I came back to the kitchen only to find it absolutely wrecked by the Asian dinner party group from the night before. Empty chip bags and salsa jars were strewn everywhere on the tables and the couches were inhabited by two guys working (or more likely procrastinating). So I lugged a huge bag of ingredients and several pots and pans to the kitchen downstairs and set to work on this cake. It’s the perfect cake to sit down to after a long day. At 8 p.m., when it finally came out of the oven, we sat down on the futon and dug into it, still warm.

A layer of rich chocolate batter is swirled into a cinnamon pound cake. It’s wonderfully simple to make as the two flavors are made with the same basic batter. I estimated the amount of cinnamon, as I didn’t have any teaspoons to measure it out with; next time I might go with a stronger cinnamon flavor. By the time the cake came out of the oven — I sat by the oven with the oven light on staring at the cake cook for about 1 ½ hours — I had no energy to make the chocolate ganache that tops the cake in the original recipe. It’s still great as a simple pound cake (I made it in a loaf pan. I mean, finding a bundt pan in these kitchens? Impossible) but I imagine it would be even better topped with rich semisweet chocolate ganache and served with coffee at the end of a meal.

There we go with the coffee again. I’m two cups in and still have 100 pages of reading to complete before class today. I guess that is what I should have been doing when I was watching the cake rise and brown in the oven last night.

The original recipe can be found at Dana Treat.

Cinnamon-Chocolate Ribbon Cake
Adapted from Bon Appétit

4 ounces semi-sweet chocolate, chopped
3 cups cake flour
1½ tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. salt
3 large eggs
2 cups sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
1 cup whole milk
1 tsp. vanilla extract
4 tsp. ground cinnamon

Preheat to 325ºF. Grease a 12 cup bundt pan (or one loaf pan and several muffin tins) and set aside. Place chocolate in a medium microwave-safe bowl. Heat in 30-second intervals, stirring in between each one, until the chocolate is almost melted. Allow the residual heat to melt the rest of the chocolate and set aside.

Combine flour, baking powder and salt into medium bowl. In a separate bowl, beat eggs until foamy. Add sugar and beat until thick and fluffy. Gradually beat in oil. Beat in milk and vanilla. Add dry ingredients and beat until just blended.

Transfer 1½ cups batter to bowl with the melted chocolate. Stir to combine. Mix cinnamon into remaining (non-chocolate) batter. Spread half of cinnamon batter in prepared pan. Spoon chocolate batter over. Top with the remaining cinnamon batter. Using small knife, swirl batters together to marbleize slightly.

Bake cake until tester inserted near center comes out clean, about 1 hour to 1 hour 10 minutes.

Dana gives a recipe for the chocolate glaze that uses cream, butter and corn syrup. My original plan was to make a standard ganache with cream and chocolate and I don’t have, and don’t like baking with, corn syrup. Also, I ran out of white sugar and used 1 1/3 cups of brown sugar and only 2/3 cup white sugar. That didn’t appear to have any adverse effect.

Life rolls on: Cranberry Pecan Rolls

My dad is the one of the family that can cook intuitively. He stands at the kitchen counter, the bins of flour and sugar out and butter chopped into little cubes, and makes shortbread. He cuts the shortbread into 1-inch squares — exactly measured with a long metal ruler, exactly as you would imagine any MIT grad would. He then arranges the shortbread squares like this:

I’m not quite so blessed with the ability to bake without a recipe. Admittedly, shortbread is fairly self-explanatory. The less variation, the better. But my dad can also stand at the counter and make pizza dough without instructions. The dough always rises, without fail, every weekday night we want pizza. Alas, that is not the case for me.

I, like I imagine so many others, am quite intimidated by yeast-based doughs. And well, I think this is one of those cases where I had every reason to be intimidated because I got bested, by these chocolate-pecan maple rolls.

There were a couple problems to start with. Most importantly, I didn’t have a thermometer to determine when the milk and water were at 110 degrees. I wasn’t sure how important this was so I forged ahead anyway. Everything started off okay, the dough came together well. And then I left it out to rise, when out on a run, and came back — the dough hadn’t risen. After a little convincing by my roommates that the dough ball looked slightly bigger (though not doubled in size), I punched it down and continued along. I rolled out the dough, coated it in butter and sprinkled it with chopped pecans (actually broken with my hands because the kitchens are lacking in real knives) and dried cranberries. I did a couple with chocolate chips and cranberries for a friend who is allergic to nuts. A final drizzle of syrup completed the filling. I hopelessly wished for the jar of maple syrup that is always in the refrigerator at home and finally settled for fake pancake syrup. Oh the horror.

The final result was more like a biscuit than a fluffly cinnamon roll. The nuts, chocolate and pecans play well off each other but I would have loved to try real maple syrup. Honey would work well too, I imagine. These are something I would definitely try again in my kitchen at home.

I got the recipe from Melanger: To Mix. Please read her post on these chocolate pecan and maple rolls. She’s a beautiful writer and this post is particularly heartfelt.

Chocolate Pecan and Maple Rolls

Basic sweet dough recipe } Original recipe by Julia @ Mélanger

This recipe takes around four hours from beginning to end. You will need to plan accordingly but the taste will be worth the effort.

1 cup milk (I used fat free milk as it was all I had. I imagine fuller fat milk would work better)
¼ cup water (110F/45C)
3.5g / ½ package dried yeast
½ cup sugar
½ teaspoon salt
2 eggs, lightly beaten
4½ to 5 cups of plain, all purpose flour (I didn’t need the extra 1/2 cup)
¼ cup / ½ stick of butter, melted
Glaze:
1 egg, lightly beaten

Warm the milk in a saucepan until bubbles appear around the edge. Remove from the heat and allow to cool to 110F/45C. In the meantime, dissolve the yeast in the warm water. Allow to sit for 5 minutes. Stir in the milk, sugar, salt, beaten eggs, and 1 cup of the flour. Beat the mixture until smooth. Add 2 more cups of flour and continue to beat. Continue until the dough is glossy. Add the melted butter and stir well. Add a further 1 ½ cups of flour and continue to beat well. Stir in the remaining ½ cup of flour bit by bit until the dough is stiff – you may not need to add it all. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface, cover and let rest for 15 minutes. Then knead the dough lightly until it is smooth and glossy. Transfer the dough to a greased bowl, lightly spraying the top of the dough with oil to prevent drying. Allow to double in size, about 1½ to 2 hours. Punch down, and let rise again until almost doubled, about 1 hour. Turn out onto a floured surface. You should have roughly have between 2.4-2.6lb / 1.1-1.2kg of dough in total.

{ Chocolate pecan & maple scrolls variation }

1. 1/2 batch of above dough recipe will yield 8 chocolate pecan & maple scrolls.
2. Add 2 teaspoons of cinnamon into the dough with the milk, sugar, salt, beaten eggs, and 1 cup of the flour.
3. After the second rise, roll the dough out into a 12″ x 16″ / 30cm x 40cm rectangle.
4. Brush the entire surface with 1 oz / 30 g of melted butter. Sprinkle 1/2 cup of chocolate chips and 1/2 cup of roughly cut pecans (I used cranberries as well) evenly across the dough. Finish with a drizzle of 2-3 tablespoons of maple syrup.
5. Roll the dough up jelly roll style, starting from the longest side. Cut into 8 even pieces and place flat into a prepared pan to expose the filling. I use a 8″ / 20cm springform tin.
6. Allow to rise for 30 minutes. Bake for 25-30 minutes at 350F/180c.

Baking throwdown.

Speaking of chocolate cookies, I dug this picture up from last summer. Caroline will probably kill me because she looks so cracked out but aren’t the ginger-speckled cupcakes and chocolate pistachio cookies (and my little brother) so cute? I’m a huge fan of colored icing. Every year, my brother’s birthday cake (always the same 1-2-3-4 yellow cake) is topped with bright blue frosting and colored sprinkles. Mine were like that too, although I liked more variation in the color of the frosting, until I decided to become sophisticated.

A day for peace: Double chocolate sables

I don’t know why, for so long, chocolate chip cookie dough was the only cookie dough I ever ate raw. It never even occurred to me that you could eat other cookie dough, for instance this sugar cookie dough, until I started making chocolate cookies. I made a batch of chocolate sugar cookies for the Christmas cookie platter that turned out to be a total disappointment. Granted it was probably my fault for grabbing my brother’s sweetened cocoa powder for hot chocolate instead of the unsweetened baking cocoa powder. The uncooked dough was great, buttery and sugary. The actual cookies? Not so much. They were dry, bland mouthfuls of sugar. I attempted to save them by sandwiching them together with mint frosting and dipping them in dark chocolate but they were still a bland, confusing cookie of the thin-mint variety.

That is not the case with these chocolate cookies.

Anything called “World Peace Cookies” had better be good. Otherwise, I would seriously fear for the future of the world. These are amazing, raw and cooked. I think I actually prefer the dough raw, studded with chunks of milk and dark chocolate. You take them out of the oven before they look done and for awhile when they’re still warm, the cookies are a fragile, gooey mess but nonetheless irresistible. Once fully cooled, they have a slight sandy texture. I’m not usually a fan of sandy but with chocolate like this, anything goes.

The story behind these cookies can be found here. Dorie Greenspan has quite a following in the blogging sphere and there’s actually a huge group of bakers that have committed to making one of her recipes every week. It’s something I would like to be a part of if I were able to consistently bake every week here at school.

Unfortunately I took these cookies to the racecourse before getting a good picture of them. After that it was a lost cause. The picture for this post is one of Dorie Greenspan’s. I suggest you check out her Web site here.

World Peace Cookies
Baking: From My Home to Yours, Dorie Greenspan

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 stick plus 3 tablespoons (11 tablespoons) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup (packed) light brown sugar
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon fleur de sel or 1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
5 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped into chips, or a generous 3/4 cup store-bought mini chocolate chips

Makes about 36 cookies.

Sift the flour, cocoa and baking soda together.

Working with a stand mixer, preferably fitted with a paddle attachment, or with a hand mixer in a large bowl, beat the butter on medium speed until soft and creamy. Add both sugars, the salt and vanilla extract and beat for 2 minutes more.

Turn off the mixer. Pour in the flour, drape a kitchen towel over the stand mixer to protect yourself and your kitchen from flying flour and pulse the mixer at low speed about 5 times, a second or two each time. Take a peek — if there is still a lot of flour on the surface of the dough, pulse a couple of times more; if not, remove the towel. Continuing at low speed, mix for about 30 seconds more, just until the flour disappears into the dough — for the best texture, work the dough as little as possible once the flour is added, and don’t be concerned if the dough looks a little crumbly. Toss in the chocolate pieces and mix only to incorporate.

Turn the dough out onto a work surface, gather it together and divide it in half. Working with one half at a time, shape the dough into logs that are 1 1/2 inches in diameter. Wrap the logs in plastic wrap and refrigerate them for at least 3 hours. (The dough can be refrigerated for up to 3 days or frozen for up to 2 months. If you’ve frozen the dough, you needn’t defrost it before baking — just slice the logs into cookies and bake the cookies 1 minute longer.)

GETTING READY TO BAKE: Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Line two baking sheets with parchment or silicone mats.

Working with a sharp thin knife, slice the logs into rounds that are 1/2 inch thick. (The rounds are likely to crack as you’re cutting them — don’t be concerned, just squeeze the bits back onto each cookie.) Arrange the rounds on the baking sheets, leaving about 1 inch between them.

Bake the cookies one sheet at a time for 12 minutes — they won’t look done, nor will they be firm, but that’s just the way they should be. Transfer the baking sheet to a cooling rack and let the cookies rest until they are only just warm.

This one takes the cake: Pear upsidedown gingerbread

This is the best cake I have ever made. Do not take that lightly. A dense, spicy gingerbread cake topped with thin slices of apples in ooey, gooey, caramelized sugar. This is the type of cake you can make equally as the grand finale to a fancy dinner party or as the cake that sits on the kitchen counter and gets slowly devoured, one sliver or bite at a time. This is the cake I will make over and over again every winter. This is the cake I will forgive for stealing the spotlight from my first ever pumpkin pie. And of course, this is a gingerbread cake deserving of a post well into spring, when all things molasses and pear seem to have gone out of season.

It’s equally good made with apples. Both apples and pears are a good recovery food for athletes. So allow the lightweight athlete in me make the claim that this cake is excellent recovery food. It’s also wonderful served with a dollop of maple whipped cream.

The recipe comes from Seattle’s Macrina Bakery. It can be found here.

Ginger Pear Upside-Down Cake
Adapted from Leslie Mackie’s Macrina Bakery & Café Cookbook

For the topping:
3 Tbs unsalted butter, at room temperature
½ cup light brown sugar
1 ½ tsp ground cinnamon
4-5 medium to large ripe pears, peeled, cored, and quartered lengthwise

For the batter:
8 ounces (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
¾ cup light brown sugar
2 Tbs peeled, grated ginger
3 large eggs
2/3 cup molasses
3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 ½ tsp baking powder
1 ½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
1 ½ cups buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Oil a 9-inch springform pan, and line the bottom with a 10-inch circle of parchment paper.

To make the topping, combine 3 Tbs butter, ½ cup brown sugar, and cinnamon in a medium saucepan. Melt the butter over medium heat for about 1 minute; then pour the mixture into the prepared springform pan, completely coating the parchment paper. Place the quartered pears on top of the butter-sugar mixture, lining the pieces up tightly in a decorative circle so that none of the bottom shows through.

To make the batter, cut 2 sticks of butter into 1-inch pieces, and put them in a large mixing bowl. Add ¾ cup brown sugar, and cream the mixture on medium speed for 3-5 minutes, until it is smooth and a pale tan color. Add the grated ginger, and beat 1 minute more. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula. Add the eggs one at a time, beating on low speed and making sure that each egg is fully incorporated before adding another. When all the eggs have been added, slowly pour in the molasses and beat to fully mix. The mixture will look as though it is “breaking” or curdling, but don’t worry—it will come together when the dry ingredients are added.

In a separate medium bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Whisk to fully combine.

Alternately add small amounts of flour and buttermilk to the batter, stirring and folding with a rubber spatula until the dry ingredients are just absorbed. Do not overmix the batter. Pour and scrape the batter into the pear-lined pan, smoothing the top with a rubber surface. The pan will be nearly full.

Carefully transfer the pan to the center rack of the oven, and bake for about 1 hour and 45 minutes, until a skewer inserted in the cake’s center comes out clean. Let the cake cool in the pan for 10 minutes on a wire rack. Cover the pan with an upside-down serving plate; then carefully invert them together. Release the sides of the pan, and lift it away. Gently lift the pan’s base off the cake, and peel away the parchment paper. Allow the cake to cool for a half hour or so, and serve warm, with whipped cream.

Just a note, this cake does not work equally well as cupcakes. The sugar topping becomes unequally distributed and overpowers the smaller amount of fruit on each cake.

Twelve little girls in two straight lines: Almond Madeleines

A madeleine is a simple pleasure, one savored with a cup of tea on a quiet afternoon, perhaps as the rain drips off the windowpane. It is a simple comfort, one that continually reminds you of home even as the treat may never have been a part of your first home. It is delicately sweet, distracting variations of flavor — overpowering orange and chocolate in replace of the quiet butter, which appears without its inherent bitterness — often serving only to unnecessarily detract from its appeal. For me there is nothing more comforting than a pair of madeleine pans on the kitchen racks. It isn’t often that I get to put them to use, so this weekend I went all out and used all the pans, the traditional-sized ones and the mini ones.

I made a slight variation on the traditional madeleine, from Technicolor Kitchen. I liked the subtle almond flavor (almond extract isn’t something I often come by at college) but think I will decrease the salt a bit next time as the cookies had a bit of a salty aftertaste. My madeleines often come out quite a bit more buttery than the Starbucks variety, which are a guilty pleasure of mine. Next time I might experiment with decreasing the butter by a smidgen but that next time is far and far away, as my madeleine pans are now thousands of miles away.

Almond madeleines

2 large eggs
1/3 cup superfine or baker’s sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
¼ teaspoon almond extract
1⁄3 cup all-purpose flour, sifted twice after measuring (I only sifted once, and directly into the mixing bowl)
3 tablespoons finely ground almonds
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled

Preheat oven to 375ºF. Butter and flour your madeleine pan.

In the bowl of a standing mixer, combine eggs, sugar and salt. Beat on medium speed until pale, thick and fluffy, about 4-5 minutes. Mix in vanilla and almond extracts.
On low speed, mix in the sifted flour and almond meal until just incorporated. Using a rubber spatula, gently fold in the melted butter until blended.

Fill each mold almost completely full. Bake the madeleines until the tops spring back when lightly touched, 10 to 12 minutes.
Cool in pan for 2 minutes. Remove madeleines from pan and allow them cool completely on cooling rack.

I made 12 full-size madeleines and 12 minis (which are about half-bite sized).

Sweet and savory: Strawberry chevre corn muffins

I used to be the pickiest eater ever. Just ask anyone in my family. Or any of my friends’ families, who were charged with feeding me on all my play dates. I used to hate going over to my friends’ houses because I knew I’d face the challenge of having to eat some strange, unknown dinner. Even spaghetti with tomato sauce was ruined if the sauce had a chunk or two of tomato or was speckled with green herbs. Cheese was ruined if it wasn’t grated finely enough. I imagine I was quite a hassle to deal with.

Luckily I’ve grown up a bit since then. Not only do I now like chunks in my tomato sauce, I also heartily embrace most of the food crazes of the blogsphere, even the weird ones. Take bacon infused chocolate for instance. I would never have touched bacon with a ten-foot poll much less as a dessert; coated in milk chocolate? That is such a weird combination, not to mention counterintuitive. But now I’m sitting on a 5-hour plane ride happily making my way through a Vosqes Vo’s Bacon Bar (I swear it’s only half gone…). I have been meaning to bake with bacon and chocolate forever, but have never quite been able to bring myself to do it. As a former vegetarian, the thought of mixing bacon fat into cookies and watching the grease sizzle on the frying pan still makes me a little sick. But I have answered the calls of other blogsphere crazes, like the savory quickbread.

This isn’t the same quickbread you’ve seen floating around other blogs, you know the one with the olives and the cheese and the herbs. Rather this one has roots in my childhood. Early weekend morning, my mother used to cook up a batch of cornbread in a black cast iron skillet. It was wonderfully old-fashioned, making for crisp and curved outside edges and a rich, slightly sweet crumb. I used to cut large slices from the middle and eat it still warm with a fork. Later in the day, it was great toasted with some butter and honey or jam. The recipe comes on one of those worn down recipe cards, written in my grandmother’s handwriting, which can be found in the old wood recipe box (which I hope will someday be passed down to me). It’s for Johnnycake, a funny name I have never actually heard to modern talk. I baked it up in muffin tins, topped with a couple sliced strawberries that were reaching the end of their good days and a couple crumbles of chèvre.

My mom uses all brown sugar instead of the mixture of white and brown. I cut the brown sugar down to ½ a cup in order to make it more of a savory cornbread. My mom likes to use half-white flour, half whole-wheat, which I prefer to using all white flour. However, the whole-wheat flour bin was empty, so all white it was. When I ran out of strawberries, I sprinkled the few remaining muffins with cinnamon-sugar, which my brother happily delegated for himself.

Recipe to come in a few days.