Lemon yogurt cake with raspberry sauce

I had a reunion on Friday night for my trippees from the community service trip I led a few weeks ago to the Orient Land Trust down in the San Luis Valley. Dinner and dessert both went quite well- I made savory crepes with a vegetable egg scramble and some stir-fried rainbow chard, tofu, and onions on the side. For dessert, and the recipe I'm sharing with you today, I came up with a lemon yogurt cake topped with vanilla icing and a raspberry sauce. It came out wonderfully! The yogurt in the cake keeps it moist and dense, and the sweet and sour flavors comes together to create a perfect blend.

Ingredients
(adapted from SmittenKitchen's lime yogurt cake)

For the lemon yogurt cake:
•1 C plain unsweetened yogurt
•1/3 C vegetable oil
•1 C sugar
•zest of one lemon
•1/4 C lemon juice
•2 eggs
•1 2/3 C all-purpose flour
•1 1/2 t baking powder
•1/2 t baking soda
•1/8 t salt

For the icing: use your favorite vanilla icing recipe or favorite storebought (although we all know my thoughts about storebought...)! Stay away from a buttercream on this cake, however.

For the sauce:
• 12 ounces fresh or frozen raspberries (if using frozen, start with half the water)
•1/4 C water
•3 T sugar
•1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice, depending on how sweet you'd like your sauce

Directions
For the cake: Preheat the oven to 350˚F. Grease a 9-inch cake pan and line the bottom with baking parchment if the pan is not springform. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the yogurt, oil, sugar, lemon zest and juice. Add eggs one at a time and mix well. Mix flour baking powder, baking soda and salt together in a mixing bowl, and add dry mixture to yogurt mixture. Stir with a spoon until just combined. Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan and bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until the top is golden brown and a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Transfer pan to a cooling rack and let stand for 10 minutes. Run a knife around the pan to loosen. If you’re using the springform pan, remove the sides. Otherwise, flip the cake onto a plate and flip it back on the rack.

For the sauce: Combine raspberries, water, sugar and lemon juice in blender or food processor. Purée until smooth, then press through a fine mesh sieve to remove the seeds. Cover and refrigerate until cold.

Frost cake and pour syrup over individual slices. Enjoy!

Strawberry tartlets with chocolate crusts

So it may not be strawberry season, but I've been loving the fruit theme lately. Maybe it's because of the lack of fresh fruits we can get in the winter, or maybe I've just made so much chocolate my body is craving a change of pace. Either way, I was browsing my books and my favorite foodie blogs for something simple, delicious, and new, and came across a recipe for strawberry tartlets with chocolate crust on PurpleFoodie. I didn't end up using her recipes, but that's where the idea stemmed from.

These are simple tartlets: I made the dough when I had a chance earlier in the day, and then the pastry cream a few hours later. After they'd both chilled I baked the tartlet shells and threw the two together with slices on top of the freshest strawberries I could find.

Ingredients
Chocolate tart dough, or pâte sucrée au chocolat
(adapted from Michel Roux's Pastry)
•1 3/4 C all-purpose flour
•2/3 C unsalted butter, cut into small pieces and softened
•1 t salt
•1/4 C unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder
•1/3-1/2 C confectioner's sugar
•1 large egg
•1 t vanilla extract (I used a Godiva chocolate liqueur a friend had on hand, but a little more than a tsp. Experiment!)

Crème pâtissière
(adapted from Julia Child's The Way to Cook)
•6 egg yolks
•1/2 C white sugar
•1/2 C all-purpose flour
•2 C milk
•2 T butter
•1 T vanilla extract (you could also use a vanilla bean, and let it sit in the cream throughout the process)

Directions
For the dough: Mound flour on work surface and make a well in the center. One at a time, place butter, salt, sugar, and egg in center of well and mix together using your fingers. Slowly incorporate flour into butter mixture, using fingers, until a slightly crumbly dough forms. Slowly incorporate milk until dough begins to come together. Using the palm of your hand, knead dough until smooth, 4 to 5 times. Roll dough into a ball, wrap with plastic wrap and refrigerate until ready to use. Dough may be kept refrigerated, up to one week or frozen up to 3 months. If you plan to use the dough within the next day or so, make a disc rather than a ball, and refrigerate it that way instead. To bake them, let the dough thaw until it is a workable texture. Roll out to 1/16th of an inch and use a round cookie cutter a little larger than your tartlet molds to cut out circles for the tartlets. Place in tartlet molds and bake with weights for ten minutes at 375˚ F, then remove weights and place back in oven for five minutes. Let cool before filling.

For the pastry cream: Heat milk to boiling and remove from heat immediately. Set aside. Place the egg yolks in the saucepan, and with a wire whisk gradually beat in the sugar. Continue beating for a minute or two until the mixture is a thick, pale yellow, and forms ribbons. Beat in flour, then beat in the hot milk in a thin stream. Set over moderately high heat and stir slowly and continuously with whisk until mixture thickens. Continue beating vigorously to rid the cream of lumps it forms. Bring cream to a boil over medium heat and let bubble for two minutes. Be cautious not to scorch the cream on the bottom of the pan; heavy-bottomed saucepans work quite well, and make sure you are constantly stirring and your heat is not too high. Remove from heat; beat in butter and vanilla. Clean off sides of the pan with a spatula. Film top of the pastry cream with confectioners sugar or little flakes of butter to prevent crusting over the top. Chill (pastry cream will keep 3 or 4 days under refigeration or may be frozen up to a month). Pipe pastry cream into tart shells and top with strawberries or other fresh fruit of your choice. Serve and enjoy!

Tres Leches cake

In White Center, there is a bakery called the Salvadorean Bakery that serves the most delicious tres leches cake I have ever had. It's been a staple in my family for birthdays and the occasional weeknight treat when everyone needs a pick-me-up. For Camila's birthday, I decided to try my hand at this delicacy. The cake was devoured that night, and I had to force everyone's forks away for two minutes so I could snap a photo. This is a very rich cake, but the moisture makes it impossible to stop eating. Often, there is also a liqueur poured in with the tres leches mixture at the end, but I opted out on this occasion, sticking with the traditional.


Ingredients
(the least vegan cake you'll ever make)
1 C white sugar
5 egg yolks
5 egg whites
1/3 C milk
1 t vanilla
1 C all-purpose flour
1 1/2 t baking powder
14 oz. can sweetened condensed milk
12 oz. can evaporated milk
1 pint heavy whipping cream

Directions
Preheat oven to 350˚F. Butter and flour a 9-inch springform pan (I don't have one here, so I just used a 9-inch cake pan). In a large mixing bowl, beat the egg yolks with 3/4 C sugar until doubled in volume. Add in milk, flour, baking powder, and vanilla and mix well. In a smaller bowl, beat egg whites until soft peaks form, and then slowly beat in the rest of the sugar. Fold egg whites into batter, and pour into pan. Bake for 45 minutes.
While cake bakes, mix 1/4 C whipping cream, condensed milk, and evaporated milk together. Discard approximately one cup of this mixture, a little less if you'd like your cake even more moist. Let cake cool, and then pierce the top all over with a fork. Pour milk mixture over the top slowly until absorbed. Place in refrigerator. Whip the rest of the whipping cream with a bit of sugar and vanilla, and then frost the cake with whipped cream. Garnish with fruit and serve chilled.

Enjoy!

The Flavor Thesaurus

As a celebrator of Chrismakuh, Christmas is often a time to realize what you wanted for Hannukah and forgot to ask for. Just kidding, sort of. But in this case, for Christmas I got a book I have been dying for after reading about it countless times on PurpleFoodie: The Flavor Thesaurus, by Niki Segnit. I was browsing through it the day after Christmas, skimming all of the mouth-watering flavor pairings, and one that I stumbled upon happened to be Blueberry and Vanilla. There was a delicious-sounding recipe for a blueberry vanilla cake, but I wanted to see what more I could do with all of the frozen blueberries we have sitting in our freezer from this summer. I did a little google-ing, and came across a recipe for blueberry vanilla cupcakes with blueberry ganache. I did a little adapting to make it into a cake for our belated family Christmas dinner and gift exchange.

Ingredients
Recipe adapted from Bake It After All's Blueberry Vanilla Cupcake recipe
Cupcakes
1 C flour
2 t baking powder
1 t salt
6 T unsalted butter
1 C sugar
1 t vanilla extract
2 eggs
1/2 C milk
1 C blueberry puree*

*Puree, as directed by Bake It After All: Fresh or frozen blueberries, pureed in a food processor or blender and strained through a fine-mesh sieve. Approximately 1 cup of frozen blueberries was enough for me to get 1/2 cup puree. To facilitate straining the puree, whisk the blueberry mixture as you strain it through the sieve.

Helpful hint: If you are using frozen blueberries, run them under a little warm water first to thaw them. They'll puree much faster that way.

Blueberry ganache
12 oz semisweet chocolate (you can use chocolate chips if you'd like!)
2 C frozen blueberries
1/2 C sugar
1/2 C heavy cream
4 T butter

Directions
For the cupcakes: Preheat oven to 350˚F. Mix dry ingredients together and set aside. Whisk the milk and blueberry puree together and set aside. In a large mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Add eggs one at a time to mixing bowl, and then add the vanilla. Alternate adding dry ingredient mixture and blueberry/milk mixture to the mixing bowl--half at a time worked for me. Mix until just combined, and pour on to cookie sheet lined with baking parchment. Spread evenly; the cake will be divided into two layers later. Bake for 20-25 minutes.

For the ganache: Place chocolate/chocolate chips in mixing bowl and set aside. Heat blueberries and sugar over medium heat in a small saucepan until mixture becomes sauce-like and bubbly. Pour into sieve and strain over the chocolate. In a saucepan, bring cream and butter to just below boiling over medium heat, and pour into chocolate mixture. Let sit for 30 seconds, and then stir mixture until smooth. Once cooled, you can chill the ganache as well if you would like to pipe it, but since I was making a cake instead of cupcakes, as the recipe called for, I used it when it was still more liquid than frosting consistency.

Once the cake is out of the oven, slice it into two equal-sized rectangles. Put a layer of ganache on top of the bottom layer, and then stack the second. Frost the rest of the cake and top with blueberries and dusted powdered sugar.


Unfortunately the blueberries were a little less present in taste than I was hoping for, but I used the extra blueberries I had left over from straining to put in between cake layers with the ganache, which added just a little more flavor. I'd even put in a few more next time. One of the best things about this cake is the lovely lavender color it adopts once you've added the blueberry puree. I dusted the top with powdered sugar and lined it with blueberries. The presentation could have been a little better--but at least everyone devoured it!

Apple Blueberry (Pear) Crisp and Mashed Potato Sculpting

As I sat at my dining room table (ah, to be home) eating remnants of my Apple Blueberry (Pear) Crisp for breakfast, I realized I still had yet to post about Thanksgiving! I didn't do half as much cooking as I did for our RA Thanksgiving, but everything was there in full and oh-so-delicious. I made a crisp and after I realized my picture perfect dinner rolls were ruined (the shortening was from...well, I won't tell you when), I threw together an adapted version of Trader Joe's quick cornbread.

Upholding the single Thanksgiving tradition we have in our family, we also brought our annual mashed potato sculpting event from our house to the Pickels'. Read on...

Apple Blueberry (Pear) Crisp

Ingredients
•1 C flour
•1/2 t salt
•1 t baking powder
•1/2 C sugar
•1 1/2 t cinnamon
•1 egg
•1/3 C butter, melted
•5-6 C chopped fruit (I used apples, blueberries, and one pear)

Directions
Preheat oven to 375˚F. Fill an 8x8 square pan with fruit until just barely below the rim. Mix all dry ingredients together in a large or medium mixing bowl, and then add egg, stirring until mixture is coarse. Spread dry/egg mixture evenly across the top of the fruit in the pan. Drizzle with melted butter as evenly as possible, and bake for 30 minutes, or until top is just browned.

This crisp is great, simply because it is SO easy to make and it turns out delicious! Definitely a nice alternative to pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, and also a great way to use up all of the frozen fruit that is hiding in your freezer.

5th annual mashed potato sculpting event!
Buy a large box of instant mashed potatoes. Make them using only water--adding butter and/or anything else is just a waste, and takes away from prime sculpting optimization! Divvy up the potatoes into 5 or 6 different bowls, leaving a large amount of white in the pot for a base color. Color the mashed potatoes in the bowls using food coloring to your liking, but remember, a little bit goes a long way. Make sure you pick up a cheap plastic WHITE table cloth to sculpt on, or get some large white paper plates. Then you're ready! 1, 2, 3...sculpt!

Harry Potter cupcakes

Sorry for the delay in posting this! I came down with a cold two nights ago and it has been unrelenting. In light of the upcoming Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I premiere, I hosted a Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince showing on Sunday night so those with a less acute knowledge of Harry Potter than I could have a refresher on the subject matter. And of course, to accompany the movie...Harry Potter cupcakes!

I made two kinds, chocolate and chai spice. The chocolate cupcakes turned out great, if a little plain. The chai spice cupcakes were delicious! Their consistency was was a little strange. Very crumbly out of the oven, crispy on the outside and moist on the inside when cooled--possibly because the recipe called for butter instead of oil--something a little irregular for cupcakes.

Chocolate cupcakes
(adapted from AllRecipes' Easy Chocolate Cupcakes)

Ingredients
•10 T butter*
•1 1/4 C white sugar
•4 eggs
•1/4 t almond extract
•1 t vanilla extract
•1 1/2 C all-purpose flour
•3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
•2 t baking powder
•1/4 t salt
•3/4 cup milk**

Directions
Preheat oven to 350˚F. Beat butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add in eggs and almond and vanilla extracts. Mix well. Combine dry ingredients in separate bowl, then mix milk in, alternating pouring in dry ingredient mixture and milk until well blended.
Pour into lined cupcake pans. Bake for about 20 minutes.

Next time I make this recipe, I would also add some chocolate chips. These cupcakes were a little plain for my taste, but still moist and delicious. Make sure not to overcook them!

Chai Spice Cupcakes
(Adapted from V-Spot's Chai Cupcake recipe)

Ingredients
•1 C butter*
•1/2 C vegetable oil
•1 1/2 C white sugar
•2 eggs
•2 t vanilla extract
•1 t cinnamon
•1/4 t ginger
•1/4 t allspice
•2 1/2 t baking powder
•1/4 t salt
•2 1/2 C all-purpose flour
•1 1/4 C milk**
•2 chai tea bags or equivalent loose tea
(We used one Celestial Seasonings' Bengal Spice and one Tazo Tea Original Spiced Chai)

Directions
Preheat oven to 352˚F. Combine milk and tea in a saucepan and stir gently until almost boiling. Remove from heat, remove tea bags, and let cool.
Beat butter, oil, and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs, spices, and vanilla and mix well. In another bowl, combine the rest of the dry ingredients. Add dry mixture to wet mixture, alternating pouring with tea mixture until well-blended.
Pour into lined cupcake pan and bake for about 20 minutes.

We also took these out a little early and they were VERY crumbly right out of the oven. Don't worry! See the above note--once they cool, they will turn out fine.

*Next time I make this, I may substitute half of the butter for oil or applesauce.
**I used vanilla hemp milk in both the chocolate and chai cupcakes.


Sarah and I used cream cheese frosting (store-bought, don't kill me!) to frost both kinds of cupcakes, then decorated them with a Harry Potter theme using (also store-bought) cake decorating icings.

Enjoy!

Vegan chocolate mousse

Eat dessert first; life is uncertain.
I figured this was an appropriate recipe to start off this blog with. I know the prospect of anything vegan being rich and delicious is a long-doubted one, but this dessert is one that will easily seduce the most dubious foodies.

Ingredients:
•1 package of silken tofu*
•1 package of dark chocolate chips (usually about 10 oz)
•1 t vanilla or almond extract
•2 T maple syrup

Directions
Blend the tofu in a blender until smooth. Melt chocolate chips either over a double boiler over low heat or in a microwave. (Note: if using a microwave, microwave chocolate chips at half power for 40-second increments, stirring between each time). Add maple syrup and vanilla, and then pour into blender with tofu immediately. Blend until the mixture is creamy. Pour mousse into small bowls or one large one and refrigerate until set (usually 2+ hours).

The wonderful thing about this chocolate mousse is that since its main ingredient is tofu, instead of egg whites and whipping cream, it can almost be considered a healthy post-meal decadence, at least in comparison. Enjoy!

*Make sure you use silken tofu! The first time I attempted to make vegan chocolate mousse, my boyfriend-at the time and I made the mistake of using extra-firm tofu, which resulted in a somewhat-grainy and and much less delicious version of this. We also happened to accidentally blend part of a wooden spoon in the mixture as well. Lots of laughs, but a splintery stomach ensues.