You may notice that the TWDers are not all posting the same recipe this week.  We’re able to tackle the month’s chosen recipes in any order we like, and I’ve decided to start off with Dorie’s Sugar-Topped Molasses Spice Cookies, picked by Pamela of Cookies with Boys.  I think I’m easing into November…it’s probably the least complicated of the month’s four recipes to make.  But don’t think it’s simple in flavor…molasses adds a complexity you don’t get with white sugar, and the spices here really shine through.  It’s a perfect cookie for this time of year. (I am having wicked thoughts of stirring some bittersweet chocolate chips into the dough the next time I make them, though.)

Dorie intends these to be crisp cookies, but mine were soft and chewy.  What can I say…I forgot to flatten my balls of dough before putting them in the oven.  As a result, they also didn’t spread quite as much.  No matter though…crispy or chewy, I like them equally, so I am pretending that they were meant to be that way. 

For the recipe, see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan (Pamela may not have it up until mid-month).  Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll and see what everyone else made!

A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by a publicist about a new cookbook called DamGoodSweet: Desserts to Satisfy Your Sweet Tooth New Orleans Style by David Guas and Raquel Pelzel.  She showed me a couple of recipes…this book is chock full of classic New Orleans sweets (think beignets and pralines), with stories and gorgeous photos to boot.  I was drawn to a recipe for Banana Pudding with Vanilla Wafer Crumble…odd, since I’m not usually that into bananas, but I am a “selective appreciator,” and the husband loves nursery desserts.

This is definitely a high-class version of the dessert I remember as kid– all the traditional bits are there, but they’ve been optimized.  With five yolks, it is a rich and delicious pudding, and with a nice glug of booze, I made mine decidedly not-child-friendly.  Frankly, I wouldn’t use anything but Nilla Wafers in banana pudding, and the crumble is an easy way to jazz them up and keep them crispy.  Whether you live in New Orleans or in New York, I think you’ll like this recipe!

BTW, book author David Guas will be hosting a live chat every Sunday morning (starting today!), November 1- December 20, from 9:30-10:30 am.  Chatters can log on and ask Chef Guas dessert questions or get advice.  If you’re interested, go to his website and click on the Red Velvet Cake.

Banana Pudding- makes 6 servings
from DamGoodSweet by David Guas and Raquel Pelzel (Taunton Press, 2009)

For the pudding:
5 large egg yolks
1⁄2 cup sugar
1⁄4 cup cornstarch
1⁄4 teaspoon salt
2 cups whole milk
3 tablespoons banana liqueur (or 1 teaspoon banana flavoring)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 ripe bananas

For the crumble:
1 cup vanilla wafers (about 15 cookies)
2 teaspoons sugar
1⁄4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Pinch salt
1 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted

-To make the pudding:  Whisk the egg yolks, sugar, cornstarch, and salt together in a medium bowl and set aside. Bring the milk to a boil in a medium saucepan. Remove from the heat and whisk a little at a time into the egg mixture. Once the bottom of the bowl is warm, slowly whisk in the remaining hot milk. Pour the mixture back into a clean medium saucepan (cleaning the saucepan prevents the pudding from scorching), add the banana liqueur, and whisk over medium-low heat until it thickens, about 2 minutes. Cook while constantly whisking until the pudding is glossy and quite thick, 11/2 to 2 minutes longer. Transfer the pudding to a clean bowl.

Add the vanilla and butter and gently whisk until the butter is completely melted and incorporated. Press a piece of plastic wrap onto the surface of the pudding to prevent a skin from forming. Refrigerate for 4 hours.
 
-To make the crumble:  While the pudding sets, heat the oven to 325°F. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside. Place the wafers in a resealable plastic bag and seal (make sure there is no air in the bag prior to sealing). Using a rolling pin or a flat-bottomed saucepan or pot, crush the vanilla wafers until they’re coarsely ground. Transfer them to a small bowl and stir in the sugar, cinnamon, and salt. Use a spoon to evenly stir in the melted butter, transfer to the prepared baking sheet, and toast in the oven until brown and fragrant, 12 to 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool. (The crumbs can be stored in an airtight container for up to 5 days at room temperature or frozen for up to 2 months; re-crisp in a 325°F oven for 6 to 7 minutes if necessary.)

-To serve:  Slice the bananas in half crosswise and then slice in half lengthwise so you have 4 quarters. Slice the banana quarters crosswise into 1/2-inch pieces and divide between 6 custard cups or martini glasses (sprinkle with a squeeze of lemon juice if you like—this helps prevent browning). Whisk the pudding until it is soft and smooth, about 30 seconds, and then divide it between the custard cups. Top with the vanilla wafer mixture and serve. (If not served immediately, the pudding will keep in the refrigerator for up to 3 days, with plastic wrap intact. Sprinkle the crumbs on just before serving.)

In order to keep myself from unloading a bag of fun size KIT KATs straight into my mouth, it’s time I bake up my annual Halloween cupcakes…annually featuring these black and orange sprinkles.  What??  I only get one chance a year to use them!  I just hope they never go bad, because I’ve still barely made a dent in the jar (so expect to see them for years to come!).

This is a recipe that I came across in Everyday Food, so not only are they easy cupcakes to eat, they are also ridiculously easy to make!  And the flavor’s just a simple vanilla on vanilla, so they’d be good anytime of year.  The cakes had a good texture– they were nice and moist, even on day three (stored in the fridge, and brought to room temp before eating).  I don’t often whip up this type of powdered sugar and butter frosting.  While it may not have the refined, melt-in-your-mouthiness that my favorite Swiss meringue buttercreams have, it’s homey and familiar, and I like it a lot.

Vanilla Cupcakes- makes 12
from Everyday Food (October 2005)

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour (spooned and leveled)
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2/3 cup reduced-fat sour cream

-Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a standard (12-cup) muffin tin with paper liners. In a small bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt; set aside.

-With an electric mixer, beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Beat in eggs, one at a time, until combined. Beat in vanilla.

-With the mixer on low speed, gradually beat in flour mixture and sour cream in alternating batches, beginning and ending with the flour. Divide batter evenly among prepared muffin cups.

-Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center of a cupcake comes out clean and the top is springy to the touch, 20 to 25 minutes. Cool 10 minutes in the pan, then turn out onto a rack to cool completely before spreading with frosting.

Vanilla Frosting- makes 1 cup
from Everyday Food (October 2005)

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
2 cups confectioners’ sugar
2 tablespoons milk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 pinch salt

-In a small bowl, beat together butter, sugar, milk, vanilla, and salt until light and fluffy. Use immediately, or cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate up to 3 days. Before using, bring to room temperature.

Having spent several years working in the restaurant biz, I’ve made a lot of macarons.  These sweet little almond-meringue sandwiches are a standard confection on fine-dining petit fours plates, so if I spend long enough at any one place, I know they are bound to come up in the rotation at some point.  (I worked for one pastry chef who used to have side-by-side piping races with me everyday…he usually won, but then again, he had years more experience and he would always try to slow me down by making me giggle.)  Macarons are also quite en vogue right now, both in pastry shops and in the blogoshpere, but this is their first appearance here…in fact, I had never made them at home before Ami chose them as this month’s Daring Bakers’ challenge. 

Macarons can be tricky little things, even when you have made countless batches.  Sometimes you pipe them out and are convinced that they will be perfect, only to bake them and have them come out misshapen or with no feet.  Other times you are convinced that something has gone wrong, and then they bake up spot-on.  And you really never know how it will go when you make a recipe that is not the one you are used to.  I will say that this is not my best batch ever, but…ummm…it’s not my worst either.  I think I underbaked them a bit, but that is an easy enough problem to fix.

The recipe that follows makes very basic almond macarons.  But think of it as just a starting point…you can experiment by combining different nut flours and flavorings or add coloring.  Some good filling options include buttercream, ganache, caramel and jam.  There are endless possibilities for experimentation here, and that, to me, is the cool thing about macarons.

I took inspiration from what I had in the house to come up with a strawberry cheesecake flavored macaron.  I blitzed some freeze dried strawberries (bought at TJs) that I had in the cupboard to a fine dust in my spice grinder.  I added a few grams of this powder, along with a tiny bit of powdered red food coloring to enhance the pink hue, in with my dry ingredients.  To fill the macarons, since I didn’t feel like making a large batch of buttercream and I didn’t have any cream to make a ganache, I whipped a little cream cheese with some powdered sugar and vanilla bean paste.  I piped a little blob of this “cheesecake” mixture onto one half of each macaron and smeared a little strawberry jam on the other half before sandwiching them together.

P.S.: The chocolates you see alongside my strawberry cheesecake macarons are from Bond Street Chocolate, a funky little shop here in the East Village.

French Macarons
adapted from The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern by Claudia Fleming

2 ¼ cups (225 g, 8 oz.) confectioners’ (icing) sugar
2 cups (190 g, 6.7 oz.) almond flour
2 tablespoons (25 g , .88 oz.) granulated sugar
5 egg whites (room temperature; whites that are a few days old are best)

-Preheat the oven to 200°F (93°C). Combine the confectioners’ sugar and almond flour in a medium bowl. If grinding your own nuts, combine nuts and a cup of confectioners’ sugar in the bowl of a food processor and grind until nuts are very fine and powdery. (Steph’s note: Even when using purchased almond four, I like to grind it, along with the full amount of confectoiners’ sugar and any other dry flavorings or colorings, in the food processor to throughly incorporate the dry ingredients.)

-Beat the egg whites in the clean dry bowl of a stand mixer until they hold soft peaks. Slowly add the granulated sugar and beat until the mixture holds stiff peaks.

-Sift a third of the almond flour mixture into the meringue and fold gently to combine. If you are planning on adding zest or other flavorings to the batter, now is the time. Sift in the remaining almond flour in two batches. Be gentle! Don’t overfold, but fully incorporate your ingredients.

-Spoon the mixture into a pastry bag fitted with a plain half-inch tip (Ateco #806). You can also use a Ziploc bag with a corner cut off. It’s easiest to fill your bag if you stand it up in a tall glass and fold the top down before spooning in the batter.

-Pipe one-inch-sized (2.5 cm) mounds of batter onto baking sheets lined with nonstick liners (or parchment paper).

-Bake the macaroon for 5 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and raise the temperature to 375°F (190°C). Once the oven is up to temperature, put the pans back in the oven and bake for an additional 7 to 8 minutes, or lightly colored.

-Cool on a rack before filling.

The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

Let me begin this post with a PSA:  Texting while baking can lead to accidents in the kitchen.  For instance, if, while you are baking Dorie’s Cherry-Fudge Brownie Torte for TWD, you are also texting one friend about meeting for lunch and another friend about meeting for drinks, it may not register that the recipe calls for cherry preserves and extra chopped chocolate to be stirred into the brownie base .  Trust me, I know!  Lucky for me it happened with a forgiving cake.

This is definitely a dense and super-rich dessert.  The base is essentially a double-height brownie.  It was a little too full-on for me, actually.  But the mascarpone mousse topping…that is was really nice and light as a feather.  While I probably won’t be making this complete dessert again, I think the mousse would make a fantastic cake filling and I’ll keep it in mind.

For the recipe, see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, or read Short + Rose, as it was April’s choice this week.  Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll!

Did you notice my new header?  I felt like a change…I hope you like it!  Alyson from seventy and sunny did the work for me.  I think she did a wonderful job coming up with something perfectly cute and eyecatching…and while it’s totally different from what I had before, it still works with my existing blog design.  I love it!

Also, I’ve decided to shorten my URL (typing “awhiskandaspoon” is long enough on its own, right?) and get my own domain name.  You can now find me at www.awhiskandaspoon.com

The Cake Slice Bakers have shifted gears, and we’re now baking from the book Southern Cakes by Nancie McDermott.  I’ve actually had this book for quite sometime, so it will be nice to do more than just admire its words and pictures.  Although I’ll miss making a fancy layer cake each month just for the heck of it, this book has cakes of all types– like this here Cinnamon-Pecan Coffee Cake, for instance.

This was a nice cake to wake up to (it freezes well, so you really can make it ahead and save it for a weekend morning).  It has a whopping amount of cinnamon and pecans, so you know right there that it’ll be tasty. I replaced the raisins in the recipe with dried wild blueberries (they came from TJ’s and I was surprised at how flavorful they were!), and subbed in a bit of whole wheat flour for some of the AP.  Makes me feel better about eating cake in the morning if there’s a little whole wheat in there!  And it didn’t seem to harm the nice texture of the buttery crumb at all.  So that I wouldn’t be tempted to gobble up too much cake, I made a third of the recipe and baked it in a loaf pan. 

Here’s a printable link to the recipe.  Or get your hands on a copy of Southern Cakes by Nancie McDermott.  Cruise through the list of The Cake Slice Bakers to check out all of our coffee cakes this month!

Two TWD brekkie posts in a row– it’s a good month!  This week we’re cooking up Dorie’s Sweet Potato Biscuits, thanks to Erin of Prudence Pennywise. 

These biscuits have a bit of brown sugar in them, but I wouldn’t really call them sweet (although maybe that’s because I didn’t use the canned sweet potatoes in syrup that the recipe calls for…I used a unsweetened organic mashed purée instead).  They’re just as tasty with turkey bacon and eggs as they are slathered with maple butter.  Trust me on the bacon and egg thing…this little sandwich was one of the tastiest breakfasts I’ve made in awhile…if you are a fellow HP addict, don’t forget to bring the bottle to the table!  

For the recipe, see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, or read Prudence Pennywise.  Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll!

My friend Min from The Bad Girl’s Kitchen (we were Taste&Create partners awhile back) invited me to her virtual housewarming extravaganza.  I love a good party and checking out a new house, and I can’t say no to great food either (did I hear there will be southwestern tapas and homemade sangria??).

Of course I am a well-mannered guest and will bring along something yummy myself.  When I think of southwestern food, I immediately think of chiles…and when I think of tapas, I immediately think of gambas al ajillo.  I knew that punching up traditional Spanish gambas with some chiplotle in adobo and cilantro would make a great party appetizer (although you do have to make it last minute, so hope Min won’t mind if I use her oven!).  Below, I’ve just given a recipe for two servings, but I’m pretty sure it can be successfully multiplied to feed a few more.  Don’t forget a little bread on the side to dip in the garlic oil….it’s just as tasty as the shrimp!

I’m also bringing along guac with spicy toasted squash seeds and oven baked tortilla chips.  Truth be told, I could eat the whole bowl myself, but it’s more fun to share.  Congratulations, Min and family!  Now, where’s that sangria?

Southwestern-Style Garlic Shrimp Tapas- serves 2 as an appetizer

6-8 ounces large shrimp, peeled and deveined
chopped canned chipotle chile and adobo sauce to taste (I used 1/2 of a chile and 1 t sauce)
3 medium garlic cloves, minced or pressed
1/4 c olive oil
1/8 t salt
1 bay leaf
1 T chopped cilantro

-Place an oven rack in the middle position and preheat oven to 500°F.  In a bowl, combine the shrimp with the chopped chipotle and adobo sauce, about one third of the minced garlic, one tablespoon of olive oil and salt. Let shrimp marinate for 30 minutes at room temperature (this should be long enough for your oven to preheat).

 -Once the oven is hot, pour the remaining three tablespoons olive oil into a small, shallow casserole or baking dish (or a seasoned Spanish cazuela).  Add the remaining minced garlic and the bay leaf and bake until sizzling, about 3-5 minutes.

-Add the shrimp and marinade to the sizzling oil, and return the dish to the oven.  Bake (stirring once) for another 3-4 minutes, or until the shrimp are cooked through. Throw out the bay leaf, season with additional salt (if necessary) and sprinkle over the chopped cilantro.  Serve immediately, straight from your baking dish or cazuela (keeping in mind that it’s super-hot before you set it on your table!) .

I’m pretty slow-going in the morning, so don’t do that much breakfast baking.  That being said, I was happy to have the lovely Kayte of Grandma’s Kitchen Table chose Allspice Crumb Muffins for TWD this week.  It’s good to have my routine switched up every once and awhile.  And it’s hard to not like having a fresh, homemade muffin (especially one with streusel topping!) with my morning coffee.

Allspice isn’t a spice that I usually have on hand.  In fact, before I made this recipe I had to pay a visit to my most favorite tea and spice shop, Two for the Pot in Brooklyn, to score some.  Allspice in hand, I subbed just a bit of whole wheat flour for the AP in both the streusel and the muffin itself.  I also added in the optional lemon zest…this muffin doesn’t have bits of fruit in it, so I think the zest went a long way towards amping up the flavor a bit.  They baked up with kinda flat tops, but I can overlook that in favor of their ease and pleasant simplicity.

For the recipe, see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, or read Grandma’s Kitchen Table.  Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll!

P.S.:  I’m taking a quick trip out of town on my days off this week.  I won’t be in front of the computer for a few days, so please forgive my lack of comments!