Baking Challenge Week 28 (Late!) - South American - Marraquetas

From this recipe.  There's nothing wrong with them, but aside from the shape, they're incredibly basic, and a little boring.

Though my husband did walk into the kitchen and say, "Why are the rolls undergoing mitosis?"

We had them with some broccoli cheese soup, and all was well, but I doubt I'll be making these again.

Cooking Challenge Week 28 (Late!) - Citrus - Jalapeno Sorbet

Best. Sorbet. Ever.

I'm no stranger to heat in my food, and my husband revels in it.  So when I found a chilli sorbet recipe in The Ice Cream Book, I knew I would try it someday.  Lemon-lime sorbet studded with bits of red chilli?  Sign me up!

Of course, the week I wanted to, there were none of the specified red chillis to be found at my grocery.  So I came home with a jalapeno instead.  Not that I minded.

Lots and lots of the flavor of the jalapeno came through, but basically none of the heat--not surprising, since I deseeded it.  Who wants seeds in their sorbet?  But that makes me curious to try this again with a habanero, which has a lovely fruity flavor but more heat than I can really deal with in most other forms.  (My husband's favorite commercial salsa is Mrs. Renfro's Habanero Salsa, which I think smells lovely, but tastes like I licked brimstone.)

Jalapeno Sorbet

• 1 jalapeno, deseeded and chopped fine
• finely grated zest and juice of 2 lemons
• finely grated zest and juice of 2 limes
• 1 cup sugar
• 3 cups water

Combine the jalapeno, lemon and lime zest, sugar, and water in a small saucepan.  Heat gently and stir while the sugar dissolves.  Bring to a boil, then simmer 2 minutes without stirring.  Allow to cool.

Stir in the lemon and lime juices.

If using an ice cream maker:  Refrigerate the mixture for one to two hours before freezing, following the general directions given for your model.  (I churned mine for about 25 minutes to soft-serve consistency before transferring it to the freezer, but of course your mileage may vary.)

To make by hand:  Pour the mixture into the large shallow pan and freeze until partially frozen, about 1 to 1 1/2 hours.  Beat with a hand mixer to break up chunks and work in some air.  Return to freezer for another hour.  Beat again, freeze another hour, then beat one final time.  Transfer to an airtight container and freeze until firm.

In both cases, soften in the refrigerator 20 minutes or so before serving.

Baking Challenge Week 27 (Late!) - Tarts - Blueberry Galette

My parents are having us over to dinner this week--they're providing the steaks and the beer, and I'm responsible for the potato salad.  Because I needed to cross the W27 challenge off my list, I'm bringing a dessert too!

I even managed to take pictures during the process so I could do a pictorial recipe.  Haven't seen one of those here in a while, have you?  (/pats self on back)

Blueberry Galette

• 1 pie crust (use your favorite recipe or buy one!)
• 6 lemon creme sandwich cookies
• 1 pint blueberries
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 tbsp cornstarch
• 1 egg

 First thing's first--wash your blueberries and allow them to dry on paper towels while getting everything else ready.  Not pictured:  Preheat your oven to 375 F; line a baking sheet with foil or parchment paper; roll out your pie crust to at least 11" in diameter.

These are the cookies I opted to use.  Doing my research for this challenge, some (but certainly not all) galette recipes use frangipane or crushed cookies on the bottom to absorb the juices of the fruit.  Because blueberries are gooey in the extreme, I thought this was a good plan, and I had these around.  Vanilla creme would be good too, I'd expect.

Take your six cookies and chop them roughly...

...then scatter them on your pie crust that you'd already laid out on your baking sheet even though I didn't specifically tell you to!  It's hard to see in the photo, but I lightly pressed the rim of my 9" pie tin into the dough as a guide--strictly optional for a neater tart.

Combine the blueberries, sugar, and cornstarch in a small bowl and toss to coat the berries.

Spread that over the cookie bits.  You can see there's a bit of loose sugar, and that's okay, the juices from the blueberries as they cook down will take care of it nicely.

Fold up the edges to cover the filling.  You can be as neat-and-fancy or as rough-and-rustic as you like here.  I went super-basic.

Beat the egg in a small bowl and brush over the top of the crust.  Bake 30-40 minutes, until the filling is nice and juicy, and the crust is golden brown.

I'm so pleased that I only had one tiny leak!

Cooking Challenge Week 27 (Late!) - BBQ - Slow-Cooker Pulled Chicken

Not going to set the culinary world on fire with this one, am I.  But something that's both tasty and easy has its place!

All I did was throw four chicken thighs in my slow cooker with about 3/4 cup bottled bbq sauce--in this case, Sweet Baby Ray's Hickory & Brown Sugar.  Cook all day, de-bone and shred, serve on buns from your favorite local bakery (I love mine so much!) and add a little tater salad to your plate, and that's it, the lazy woman's barbeque.

Baking Challenge Week 26 (Late!) - Gluten Free - Three-Ingredient Cookies

'Tis the saddest cookie picture ever, I know.  But the recipe only makes twelve, and we did actually get all the way down to the last one before I realized there was no evidence I'd ever made them at all.

I've heard rave reviews about three-ingredient cookies in the past, how tasty and simple they are--and it's all true.

Three-Ingredient Cookies

• 1 cup crunchy peanut butter (smooth is okay too, but I like crunchy better)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 egg 

Preheat the oven to 350 F. 

In a small bowl, mix all ingredients until smooth.  Drop heaping teaspoons of dough onto a baking sheet, two inches apart.*  Flatten the cookies slightly.

Bake 8-10 minutes, until dry on top and nearly set.  Allow to cool on the sheet for 1 minute before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.

*My recipe specifies an ungreased sheet, but I found they stuck very badly.  They also sagged into the spaces in my wire rack, leaving dimpled bottoms.  Next time I intend to bake these on foil-lined sheets so I can lift the foil off to cool them all at once and avoid the misshapen bottoms.

Cooking Challenge Week 26 (Late!) - Pizza - Bacon and Portobello Mushrooms on a Spent-Grain Crust

  

The general how-to is easy.  Be a homebrewer, have spent grain from your last batch of beer, and mix some in your favorite pizza crust recipe.

The actual how-to is a little more complicated.  I like this recipe, but a single batch isn't enough to cover my baking sheet, so I've taken to making a quadruple batch but only dividing the dough into thirds to get the right coverage.  (I freeze the other two for later.)  Judging by other spent-grain pizza crust recipes, they mostly use less than half as much grain by volume as flour, so I added 2/3 cup per 'batch', for a total of 2 2/3 cups grain.  The texture seemed good, I don't think it really needs more.

Top with sauce, cheese, and fixin's, and bake at 450 F for 16-18 minutes.

Baking Challenge Week 25 (Late!) - Coffee Cake - Cardamom-Pecan Coffee Cake

It's hard to bake when you don't have a working oven.

I went to put something in the oven, and I saw a spark and heard an awful hissing/buzzing noise.  Then there was an incredibly tiny fire in the back of my oven, which actually put itself out, it was so small.

I thought I had just gotten lazy and let my oven get too dirty, and something had built up on the bottom and caught on fire.

As I discovered the next day when I went to clean it, that is not, in fact, what the problem was.  The spark had come from the lower heating element when it snapped clean through.

My landlady is a lovely woman, who promptly ordered a replacement, which didn't get here until our resident handyman was on vacation....of course.  Hence, the delay.

Not that I missed baking much in that heat wave, so I suppose that was the best time of year to have the oven break!

Time to catch up, though.  Here's my coffee cake, based on the yabluchnyk I made for the Russian week of the cooking challenge.  I liked it enough to play with some variations...

Cardamom-Pecan Coffee Cake

Cake

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 1/3 cup milk

Streusel

• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup graham cracker crumbs
• 2 tbsp flour
• 2 tsp ground cardamom
• 2 tbsp cold butter
• 1/3 cup chopped pecans 

Preheat the oven to 375 F, and lightly grease an 8x8" baking pan.

Sift together the flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder. Cut in the butter until the mixture is crumbly.  In a separate bowl, stir together the egg and milk, then add to the flour mixture and combine thoroughly.

In another bowl, combine all the streusel ingredients except the butter and pecans.  Cut in the butter until crumbly, then stir in the pecans.

Press half the cake dough into the prepared pan.  Sprinkled half the struesel mixture on top, then repeat with the rest of both.  (As the dough is quite sticky, getting even layers is challenging, so don't worry too much if the top is a bit rough.)

Bake 25 minutes, or until the struesel is crisp and brown, and a cake tester stuck in the middle comes out clean.