Heavenly Chocolate Cake Roll

Wednesday was my final day at home before starting my new job. (Yay!) Since I’ll have less time to cook and blog now (as evidenced by the fact that it took three days to get this post written), I wanted to make to make the Heavenly Chocolate Cake Roll to celebrate. Although not a time-consuming cake to make, it is a technique-intensive cake. This cake is flour-free, and gets its structure from egg whites. It takes a not-overwhelming amount of chocolate, and a similarly reasonable amount of whipping cream. And 6 eggs.

There are two tricky parts to making this cake. The first is separating and successfully whipping egg whites, which still makes me a little nervous. (Folding them into the chocolate is tricksy too, I guess.) The second is rolling the cake without breaking it. I can say that I succeeded at perfectly whipping egg whites, but my cake did break some as I tried to assemble it. Luckily, as long as a cake tastes good (as this one did), I forgive it its appearance.

Heavenly Chocolate Cake Roll

Hainan Chicken and Rice

Happy Lunar New Year! There are a variety of foods that one is supposed to eat for the lunar new year, but unfortunately, in spite of having spent a year in Japan, I don’t know enough about what those should be. I apparently should have studied food a little more while I was there.

I made sure we ate some noodles for longevity (don’t bite or break them!). For dinner for the new year, I made Hainan Chicken and Rice, because it sounded delicious and had a simple ingredient list.

In spite of the simple ingredient list, I made a mess of my kitchen making this. First you poach a chicken. You set aside the chicken, and use the rendered chicken fat and stock in the rice. You also make dipping sauce(s) for the chicken. None of these steps are particularly difficult, but it does mean you’ll mess up a few dishes in the process. Or at least, that’s how I felt.

Hainan Chicken and Rice

Garlic Roasted Salmon and Brussels Sprouts

Happy Lunar New Year! I wanted to tell you about the dinner I made tonight for it, but I want to have the leftovers before I finish my blog post about it. Instead I’ll tell you about last night’s dinner, which was also very delicious and satisfying.

As an adult, I’ve discovered that I like several vegetables that I hated as a kid. Most of this comes down to textural issues. As a child, I learned to tolerate broccoli, but now I enjoy it, as long as it’s still relatively crisp after it’s cooked. Brussels sprouts are another of those vegetables that earned a bad reputation to my young self. Little did I know, until a few years ago, that they are delicious when they retain their structure and texture, and when flavored boldly with soy sauce or garlic. Roasting the vegetable brings out a hint of sweetness and mellows out their bitter tendencies.

I was definitely interested when I came across the recipe for Garlic Roasted Salmon and Brussels Sprouts. It had a satisfyingly short ingredient list (garlic, olive oil, white wine, oregano) and would be fast to make. It was the perfect thing to make with the pound of salmon that I’d bought but had no clue what I wanted to do with. The original recipe made 6 servings, but I decided that it would be best if I halved it.

Garlic Roasted Salmon with Brussels Sprouts, straight from the oven

Lemon Sugar Crunch Buns

Japanese bakeries make amazing pastries. One of the things I discovered while I was there years ago was melon pan. Pan is the Japanese word for bread, which was borrowed from Portuguese language when bread was introduced by traders and missionaries in the 1500s. The bread isn’t flavored like melon – rather, it’s called melon pan because it looks like a melon due to its round shape and scoring pattern. In the Midwest, I’ve only ever seen things like melon pan in Japanese bakeries, although I must admit I haven’t looked too hard for them.

What exactly is melon pan? It’s a soft, sweet yeast roll topped with cookie dough before baking. I didn’t realize until recently that there was a separate cookie topping on it – that’s one more mystery of my life, solved. If I’d realized that melon pan was just a roll topped with a cookie, I would have made them long before now!

I fell in love with melon pan,  and in addition to being delicious, it always brings back good memories of my time spent abroad. Thus I was particularly excited when the King Arthur Flour blog wrote about the recipe for Lemon Sugar Crunch Buns, which are essentially melon pan. I had to make them.

Lemon Sugar Crunch Buns, so incredibly similar to melon pan

Slow Cooker Applesauce

I know I’m not alone in buying produce and not being able to eat it all while it’s still perfect. Recently, I have been notoriously bad for buying bags of apples – with every intention of eating them regularly – and letting them languish in a bowl on the dining table. Sure, we eat a few of them. I like dicing them and cooking them in a skillet with a tiny bit of brown sugar and cinnamon, then putting them over pancakes or just eating them as a side dish.

That leaves the other 8 or so that we haven’t eaten.

Applesauce is the perfect thing to make with old-ish apples, and it’s the perfect thing to make in a slow cooker. I think you’d have to work hard to overcook the apples. They gently steam and break down. You don’t have to do any work after you peel and cut them – and an apple peeler/corer makes this so much easier as to be practically no work at all. (My friend Kate got me one similar to this years ago, and I rediscovered it this year. It’s amazing!)

Also, you don’t have to add sugar to it. You pay a premium at the grocery store for no-sugar-added applesauce. I find that if I buy a jar of applesauce, I’m never in the mood for it and forget to eat it. Not so with this stuff. When I make applesauce, it disappears from my fridge within two days.

Slow Cooker Applesauce. I love the way perspective disappears with the closeup. This could be a 6-cup Pyrex, but it's really just a little 1-cup bowl.

Chocolate Chip Pie

My friend and coworker Sue enjoyed making lots of yummy things and bringing them in to work to share. She was a consistent reader of my blog, always excited to check it and see what I was baking. I often thought about her when I cooked, but Sue passed away last month, and she’s been in my mind much more since then.

One of the things Sue brought in now and then was Chocolate Chip Pie. She would bring in the pie with some whipped cream, and we’d all cut little wedges of pie, warm them up, and enjoy, usually at about 9 in the morning. I didn’t ask for the recipe from her, unfortunately, but I think the recipe that I’ve linked to here may be the one that she would bring in.

Chocolate Chip Pie

Grapefruit Scones

Inspired by the successful Grapefruit Yogurt Cake, I began imagining all the things I could do with the rest of my grapefruit last winter. Grapefruit sorbet. Candied grapefruit peel. Grapefruit curd. I ended up not doing nearly as much as I dreamt of with my grapefruit, I did devise a recipe for grapefruit scones.

I’d never come across a recipe for grapefruit scones before, and I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to look. Why shouldn’t I come up with my own recipe for it? When I did a cursory search last year, there weren’t many grapefruit scones recipes around. The few I found were grapefruit-and-fruit scones, which means that they take grapefruit zest as a flavoring (much like lemon zest is used), but the primary flavor will be whatever berry you add. Not really what I wanted. I wanted a scone that tasted only of grapefruit, nothing else.

Grapefruit Scones with Grapefruit Glaze

So I adapted the scones recipes I’d used a few times from Joy of Baking. I increased the baking temperature to 425F but decreased the baking time to get the scones to begin to brown (although not too much). Grapefruit zest was a must in this recipe, as it would add lots of flavor. I replaced some of the milk with grapefruit juice, and made sure to use some baking soda to react with it. These two additions gave the scone a gentle citrus flavor, but I wanted them to have a little more oomph, so I added a grapefruit glaze after the scones are baked. The grapefruit flavor is brighter that way, but not overwhelming.

How I used up the rolled oats in my pantry (making Power Bars and lots of granola)

I’ve published a new blog post every day for the past 14 days. So exciting! I didn’t get blog posts up so regularly even when I was doing my 365 recipe challenge in 2010. It’s addictive; I don’t want to stop! I’ve more-or-less blogged about everything interesting that I’ve made recently, so I’m reading some old drafts of mine to see what I meant to tell you about but never got around to.

I wrote the majority of the following in July and August, while I was preparing to move from our house and while we were house-sitting, and in fact, before we had rented our current apartment.

How to Make Vanilla Extract

I make a lot of desserts. In fact, no fewer than 78 of my recipes have been desserts. And that doesn’t necessarily count the 15 posts I’ve tagged “brownies” or the 41 posts I’ve tagged “cookies.”

Thus, I use a lot of vanilla extract. Real vanilla extract is expensive in the grocery store. Sometimes you’re lucky and you find a sale on it; the best sale I’ve ever found has been a dollar for a 1 ounce bottle. If you’re a baker, you buy about 5 bottles to stock up.

I don’t know exactly how I came across the how-to on making vanilla extract. I don’t even remember what gave me the idea, but once I learned that I could make vanilla extract at home, I had to.

I first started making my own vanilla extract two and a half years ago (May 2009, to be exact). I got the tutorial from Vanilla Review, which doesn’t seem to be updated very much anymore. It’s a nice walk-through that I’ve linked to, with lots of great pictures. I ordered my vanilla beans (both then and now) from a store on eBay, but you could get yours from Amazon.com or other places.

Regular vanilla beans that you buy in the grocery store are usually for baking or cooking. For extract, you actually want extract grade beans, which have less water content and aren’t as plump or nice-looking – and they should be cheaper. You could make vanilla with regular vanilla beans, but it would kind of be a waste unless that’s all you could get your hands on.

So, you know what vanilla beans are. What makes them extract? Basically, you steep vanilla beans in alcohol of some kind (usually vodka, sometimes rum or another clear liquor). The extract you buy in the grocery store usually has a little sugar or corn syrup added to it as well, but it’s really not necessary.

Doesn’t that sound simple? Yes, it is actually that easy.

Vanilla extract at 3 months. This is minus some extract decanted into 1 oz bottles, but plus some extra vodka

Baked Potato and Bacon Soup

Winter has finally arrived in St. Louis. Yesterday we reached a balmy high of 56F, and Alex and I took our dog for a leisurely walk. Today, we’ve had a few inches of snow, and when I walked my dog, it was 17F and felt like -1.

I decided this winter weather made tonight perfect for soup. As always, I just happened to have some potatoes and bacon around, and thought that a hearty and thick bacon and potato soup was exactly what the change in weather demanded.

I’m a somewhat picky eater, and discounted all recipes involving any kind of cream cheese, shredded cheese, or sour cream in the broth. That essentially brought me to this Baked Potato and Bacon Soup recipe, which I’ve adapted below. I liked the simplicity of the ingredient list – potatoes, bacon, onion, garlic, milk, and chicken broth, with a few seasonings.

Baked Potato and Bacon Soup