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Thanksgiving Files: Cranberry Upside-Down Cake
This is by far the most requested dessert I make. This time of year every dinner I attend, this is what I am asked to bring. I’ll be making two tonight to take to various get-togethers this week. Easy, easy, easy and foolproof, but always a beautiful presentation. If you’re looking to wow, try this one. From 2009:
Cranberries are on sale! Buy them now, because I’ve got some great cranberry recipes coming up. I’m starting with this one, because if you’re going to be a guest at someone else’s Thanksgiving dinner, this is the dish to take. It’s pretty to look at and it’s both sweet and tangy, perfect after a big dinner. You’ll wow everyone with it and it’s foolproof to make.
Cranberry Upside Down Cake
- ½ cup butter
- 1 cup sugar
- 2 cups cranberries, chopped*
- ½ cup walnuts, finely chopped
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 tsp orange zest (rind)
- 1 ¼ cups flour
- 1 ½ tsp baking powder
- ¼ tsp salt
- ½ cup milk
Topping
- ½ cup powdered sugar
- 1-1/2 tbsp orange juice (more as needed)
- 2 tsp butter, softened
8×8 glass baking dish & mixing bowl
Preheat oven to 350°
Melt 3 tbsp of butter and pour into baking dish, spread to cover bottom and up the sides. Add ½ cup sugar, mix with butter on bottom of pan. Add cranberries & walnuts, spread over bottom of pan. Cream remaining butter & sugar, add vanilla, egg, orange zest, mix well. Add flour, baking powder & milk, mix until well blended, don’t over mix. Pour batter over cranberry mixture. Bake for 1 hour, or until golden brown and center bounces back at the touch. Invert on plate. Let cool.
Topping: Mix together butter, orange juice & powdered sugar, pour over cake and serve.
* if you don’t have a food processor, you can leave cranberries whole.
Perfectly Crispy and Chewy Dark Chocolate Chip Cookies
It’s another cold day here in the Rocky Mountain State. Snow again tomorrow. This calls for baking.
We’ve been here before, but I’ve updated a few techniques I’ve learned for chewier cookies with a deep toffee, chocolate taste. Changes are in purple.
I love my little cookie scoop. Good for perfect cookies and filling muffin tins.
Let cool slightly before moving to baking rack.
Dark Chocolate Chip Cookies
(this is a half-batch)
- 1 stick butter, melted and slightly cooled
- 1 egg
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1/4 cup granulated sugar
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- dash of salt
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 cup + 1 to 2 tbsp flour
- 1 cup 60% Cacao Bittersweet Chips
- 1 cup walnut halves
mixing bowl and cookie sheet
Preheat oven to 375 degrees
Cream together butter and sugars. Add eggs and vanilla, mixing well. Sift together salt, soda, and flour, then add to butter mixture, blending well. Add nuts and chocolate chips. Refrigerate for 15 minutes or longer. Keep remainder refrigerated while baking each batch. Spoon onto cookie sheet and bake at 375 degrees for 10-12 minutes. Cool on cooling rack.
Melting the butter gives you a chewier, crispier cookie. Letting it rest in the refrigerator enhances the toffee flavor from the brown sugar. Big cookie bakeries let theirs rest over night before baking. I don’t have that kind of patience. Though I’ve been known to double or quadruple this recipe and refrigerate for a week and make a fresh dozen each day.
You can also freeze the dough balls on parchment paper on a baking sheet and then store in an airtight container for quick baking later.
Apple Crisp Revisited: Now with Pictures
Couldn’t let JeffW and Mrs. J outdo me, so I got the camera out today when I decided to bake today. Going on a picnic tomorrow, so I thought it would be a good time to make some more Perfect Apple Crisp to take along.
I made it in the skillet, but then transported it to a glass baking dish because I think it browns better in it and I have a cover for it and it will be easier to pack.
Oh, and where are we going on this picnic? The Wild Animal Sanctuary. Where there are lions and tigers and bears….oh yeah and a beautiful black panther that had his very own television show on Animal Planet. I’ll try and get pictures.
Perfect Apple Crisp
So my bowl of McIntosh apples left me wanting apple crisp. I had seen a recipe that pre-cooked the apples in a cast iron skillet that looked really good and since I’m all about cooking in my cast iron skillets, I thought I’d give it a whirl. And I have to say, that yes it did make the best apple crisp ever.
Cast Iron Apple Crisp
- 2 lbs apples – mix of sweet and tart (about 3 apples)
- 2 tbsp butter
- 1/4 cup brown sugar
- dash of cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger to taste
Topping:
- 1/2 cup brown sugar (more as desired)
- ½ cup butter, melted
- 1 cup rolled oats (not instant)
- 1 cup flour
10 inch cast iron skillet and small mixing bowl
Core and cut apples into small pieces (about 1/2 inch). Peeling is optional, but with this method the peels cook nice and soft, so it isn’t necessary.
Melt butter in skillet, add apples and sugar, stir until apples are well coated. Cover and cook on medium heat until apple mixture is soft and caramelized, stirring occasionally. About 20-30 minutes.
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
In mixing bowl, stir together butter, sugar, flour and oats, mix until crumbly. Crumble over the apple mixture. Bake for 10-15 minutes, just until top is crispy golden brown. Let cool 10 minutes and serve warm.
What makes this so good is that because the apples are cooked on the stovetop, you can use a much higher heat in the oven and get a good, crisp top without drying the whole mixture out or under cooking the apples. Really, this is one of the best apple crisps I’ve made.
Alternately, if you don’t have an oven-proof skillet, you can transfer the cooked apple mixture to a glass baking dish, add topping and bake that way.
Garlic sourdough
I don’t know how well these loaves will work as routine bread but they smell amazingly good. Didn’t add any yeast at all, all the rise was from the incumbent flora in the starter. Into the starter went a cup of warmish water and 4 cups of flour. I added a good squirt of honey, and dusted on some salt, about a half tablespoon, and gave it a good squirt of olive oil. The star of the recipe will be the huge amount of chopped elephant garlic. Don’t know if you’ve seen any of it but it is identical to regular garlic only the cloves are ten times “normal” size. The taste is more subdued, not as sharp as the regular cloves.
The dough mixture spend a good ten minutes in the stand mixer getting beaten about by the hook before I turned the dough out into a buttered bowl. The first rise took 4 hours to get a doubling, and it had another couple of hours rise after it was divided and shaped into loaves. It spent about a half hour in a 350 oven. I’m tending to use temperature rather than time, I let the temp in the center of the loaf get to 200 degrees F.
Road Trip Requires Orange Cookies
I’m heading out tomorrow and won’t be back until mid-week, so JeffreyW will have to keep you entertained. I’ll be spending my time at a spa/retreat, soaking in various mineral springs and mud pools in NM. Not to mention the massage, pedicures and other treats that await. No phones, no computers allowed. Woo. Hoo.
It will be a 5 hour drive for us to get there, so treats are necessary. I decided Orange Cookies would be a good choice. The original recipe is great, but as usual I did not plan ahead and had no zest of any kind on hand – I used it all up on the Sour Cream Lemon Poppy Seed Cake. What to do, what to do? I decided that instead of using orange juice, I would use the same amount of orange juice frozen concentrate, undiluted. This upped the orange flavor without adding excess liquid. That worked so well, I think I will do it that way from now on. That is also how the recipe ended up with sour lemon milk instead of buttermilk. I was out of buttermilk powder and knew I could substitute the sour lemon milk (2 tsp lemon juice to 1/4 cup milk) this added an additional citrus flavor to the cookies that buttermilk would not have done and is now part of the original recipe.
Next change comes courtesy of Cook’s Magazine. Cookie dough that rests in the refrigerator for 15 minutes makes a much more flavorful cookie that is crisper on the outside and chewier on the inside. Also sets up better in the oven. So that’s what I did. I also put the dough back in the refrigerator between batches.
All in all, I think this batch of Orange Cookies exceeds any that have come before. Yum.
Sour Cream Lemon-Poppy Seed Pound Cake
This one turned out much better
Last month, I was not happy with the 7-Up pound cake, it was very dry. I added extra flour as is usually needed to make a cake at altitude. It didn’t need it, so I also suspect it doesn’t need the full 3-1/2 cups below 5000 feet either. I’ve amended the entry to reflect this.
I was going to make it again to see for sure, but at the last minute decided to go a different route and adapt a sour cream pound cake to include lemon and poppy seeds. This is what we call baking by committee. When I polled everyone at work to see what they wanted, well this is what happens. Though I must admit, the citrus is all me. Besides chocolate desserts, I love citrus desserts, especially in summer. So lemon cake it had to be.
Sour Cream Lemon-Poppy Seed Pound Cake
You’ll want to prep the lemon juice, lime juice and zests ahead of time.. You’ll need 2 lemons and 3 limes to complete the recipe.
- 2 ½ cups sugar
- 6 large eggs, room temperature
- 1 tbsp lemon zest
- 1 tbsp lime zest
- 2 tbsp lemon juice
- 2 tbsp lime juice
- 2 sticks (1 cup) melted butter, cooled slightly
- 1 cup sour cream
- Dash of salt
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 3 cups flour
- 2 tbsp poppy seeds
Bundt or Angel Food pan, greased and floured
Preheat oven to 300 degrees.
Mix sugar, eggs, zests, lemon, juice, limejuice, sour cream, butter and salt until well blended. Mix together flour and baking soda. Add flour mixture in three sections to egg mixture, mixing until blended, but do not over blend. Fold in poppy seeds. Pour into prepared pan and bake for 75-90 minutes until toothpick comes out clean. Cool 10 minutes, or until cool to touch, then remove from pan to cool completely, about 2 hours.
Glaze:
- 1 cup powdered sugar
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- 1 tbsp lime juice
- Dash of vanilla extract
Whisk together until smooth. Pour over the top of cooled cake. Let set about 10 minutes until set.
Links to some of my other citrus desserts:
Easy Tomato Soup
My neighbor brought over a tray of tomatoes yesterday evening.
I looked around for something to use them up on, considered making a pint of awesome sauce but I wasn’t quite ready to boil the juice that long today. That got me thinking soup. I’ve made tomato soup before, and it was good, but it seemed like it took a lot of different veggies and spices, so when I came across this recipe I had to look twice to be sure I hadn’t missed anything. I had to try it.
The recipe calls for a slice of onion. I went pretty thick on my slice, I like onions.
The recipe didn’t mention garlic, but I had to have a clove. Your taste may vary, but I like garlic.
It came out really well for such a simple ingredient list. I left out the sugar, can’t say it needs to be in there but add it, like salt and pepper, to taste. The color would have been enhanced with the addition of a dollop of tomato paste but I didn’t want to open a can and I am out of the kind in a tube. I need to order another batch of those. I think I may do a more involved tomato soup later on today just to see how they compare.
Hoagie rolls
Took another stab at hoagie rolls today. I think I have the recipe down, the real trick is in getting all the rolls the same size. The recipe is pretty simple:
4-1/4 c flour
1-1/2 c water
1 T yeast
1 T sugar
1/2 T salt
1/8 c oil
Most recipes I read want you to mix the sugar and the yeast in a half cup of water and let it work for five minutes or so, I never do. I dump everything into the bowl of my stand mixer and let it work. I do drizzle the oil in as it starts to come together. I let the machine work the dough for 7 or 8 minutes and then turn it out into a greased bowl to rise, covered with plastic, for 40-45 minutes.
I weighed the dough this time, and then divided by 9-that’s how much room I had on my perforated baguette pan with the three sections. I wanted about 110 grams per piece. I rolled the whole thing into a log and stretched and nudged until it was as long as 9 squares on my plastic dough mat. I cut on the line and weighed the piece and was rewarded with a reading of 113 grams. About as close as I could have hoped. I quickly chopped the remainder into equal parts, rolled them into rough ovals, and set them all on the tray. Slash the tops and brush with egg white, bake at 400 for about 14-15 minutes.
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