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Banana Peach Pudding

(Very loosely) adapted from this persimmon pudding recipe, mainly because I don’t like persimmon but I like pudding. The texture of this pudding is reminiscent of a Yorkshire pudding, almost cakelike. I like it. This version of the recipe is slightly sweet, so you can increase the sugar if you want.

2 cups bananas and drained canned peaches, mashed
2 eggs
2 1/2 cups milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
spices to taste – I used allspice and clove, which worked well

This is another one of those recipes that consists of mixing all the ingredients together and putting it in the oven.

Preheat oven to 325 ºF. Grease a 9″ by 13″ baking pan.

Mix the fruit, eggs, milk, and vanilla in one bowl. Mix the flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and spices in another bowl. Mix the contents of the two bowls, put in the baking pan, put in the oven. Bake until just set, about 1 hour.

Cultured Butter

Ever seen cultured butter in the grocery store? This is butter in which the cream has been cultured before the butterfat is separated from the buttermilk, yielding a butter with a tangy flavor. Cultured butter looks delicious, but it can go for upwards of $10 a pound. So I decided to try making it at home.

First, culture your cream. You can use yogurt starter, fresh yogurt, kefir granules or even let the cream sit around a while to pick up microbes from the air. I went with yogurt starter.

I was skittish about the 24-48 hour incubation that most cultured butter recipes called for, so I decided to culture the cream in warm water for 8 hours. Here’s the setup:

It worked. By the end of the afternoon, the cream looked and smelled like yogurt.

I’ve read advice to get your cream good and cold before trying to churn it and I’ve also read to work at room temperature. One way seems to work for some people, the other way seems to work for others. The method of churning also seems to depend. As you’ll see below, the cream for me was a fickle beast.

I split the batch in half and beat the first half with a hand mixer. I got whipped cream pretty quickly:

Then I got really stiff whipped cream:

Then I got whipped cream that looked wrong, but the fat globules still wouldn’t separate from the liquid:

At this point I had been standing there beating the cream for half an hour, when the instructions I’d read said it would take 5-10 minutes. I gave up and tried the other batch in the food processor:

Boom! Butter. Those globs of butter you see there took less than a minute to form. Don’t know why, never did get the hand mixer batch to work.

Anyway, I took the mixture of butter and buttermilk out of the food processor and ran it through a strainer. I saved the buttermilk, then I rinsed the butter off, added salt, and formed it into a glob. The next morning in the refrigerator it had seeped out more buttermilk, so I drained it. That’s it.

The verdict on taste? The buttermilk tastes exactly like store-bought buttermilk. The butter is tasty, like a very rich cheese. But I think I would want to find a less messy way to do it if I was to make this again.

Lemon Cake Pudding

I felt like making pudding, so I dug around James Beard until I found a recipe that caught my eye. This one’s simple (mix all the ingredients together and put them in the oven) and delicious.

You will need:

3 egg yolks
3 tablespoons flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon melted butter
6 tablespoons lemon juice*
1 tablespoon grated lemon rind*
1 1/4 cups milk
3 egg whites

* I used lime juice. It worked great.

Preheat oven to 350 ºF. Stir together all the ingredients except the egg whites. Beat the egg whites until they form stiff peaks (more on that below), then mix the egg whites into the rest of the ingredients. Pour into a 9″ baking pan and bake until it’s set, about 35 minutes.

That’s it. It’s an easy pudding.

Zesting the limes.

This is what egg whites beaten to stiff peaks look like. The protein in the egg whites traps tiny air bubbles, which give the pudding its fluffiness. Isn’t science cool?

The finished product. It isn’t a very imposing-looking pudding, but it’s deliciously tart. You can get away with adding extra lime juice and cutting down the sugar if you like that sort of thing (I do!)

Toasted Crickets

So I’ve been on a hard sci-fi kick lately. And I’ve heard people suggest in a few places that insect protein might make a good meat substitute for people in the future. Curious, I wanted to try them out.

I used this website as a guide: www.insectsarefood.com. It’s a great resource that’s full of reasons people should try eating bugs, recipes, and advice. I wasn’t ready to try eating something that wriggles, but I was okay with eating something that hops, so I went with the crickets. Insects Are Food says that crickets from the pet store are safe to eat.

They were a lot more expensive that I expected. That’s two bucks’ worth of crickets right there. Here’s another view:

I’m guessing cost wouldn’t be as much of an issue if you raised the crickets yourself, though.

First, stick the crickets in the freezer for a few hours to kill them. This also preserves them. Once they’re dead, they’re like seafood and don’t keep well.

Bring a pot of water to a boil and boil the crickets for two minutes. Drain.

Sprinkle the crickets on a baking pan. The IAF recipe said to cook them plain, but I added a touch of olive oil.

Toast them in the oven on low heat (250º F) for about an hour. Make sure to check on them!

Here’s what you get:

They taste like toasted sunflower seeds. And since toasted sunflower seeds are cheaper, easier to find, and don’t require special prep, I was kind of disappointed with the experiment. But hey, insects ARE food. They turned out perfectly edible.

Coconut Cake

Traditionally, coconut cake is lighter than air and sweeter than a marshmallow, which is not what I’m looking for in a cake. I’m looking for a cake that’s got a nice, firm texture, tastes like cake, and also has an intense coconut flavor. After the umpteenth online recipe told me to use boxed white cake mix to make the coconut cake fluffier, I Frankensteined this recipe together out of a couple of non-coconut sources.

Ingredients for the cake:

9″ round cake pan
1 2/3 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 stick butter, room temperature
1 cup white sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup coconut milk
1 cup sweet flaked coconut (did I mention it’s supposed to be coconutty?)

Ingredients for the frosting:

3 ounces cream cheese, room temp
1/2 stick butter, room temp
pinch salt
2 cups powdered sugar
2 tablespoons coconut milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon rum

For the topping, lots more sweet flaked coconut!

Set oven to 350° F.

Mix together the flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl. Set aside. Cream together the butter and sugar. Then, beat the eggs into the butter/sugar mixture. Add part of the flour mixture, stir it in, add part of the coconut mixture, stir, and go on until it’s all combined. Finally add the vanilla and sweet flaked coconut.

Grease the baking pan and pour the batter in. Bake for about 30 minutes, but check on it early! The cake is done when a knife stuck in the middle comes out without chunks of batter on it.

Let the cake cool completely. Meanwhile, making the frosting couldn’t be simpler: put all the ingredients into a bowl and beat the heck out of them.

Once the cake is cool, turn it out onto the plate and frost. Sprinkle flaked coconut on top. Enjoy.

Here’s some photos of the process:

The batter.

Frosting the cake.

Place frosting in the middle of the cake and spread outward with a circular motion.

My boyfriend asked for please no coconut flakes on his slice, so that’s why the cake is half-flaked.

A portion of the cake the next morning. This is what it looks like when it's not under crappy artificial light.

A portion of the cake the next morning. This is what it looks like when it’s under natural light.

Grown-up Gingerbread

I always thought I didn’t like gingerbread. Just the word conjures up images of those his-and-hers bathroom signs that you stamp out of dough in kindergarten and slather in royal icing. They’d do a better job as hockey pucks than food items. Then last December, I went to a holiday potluck that opened my eyes. The gingerbread at the dessert table wasn’t a bread or a hockey puck cookie but a cake, rich, dark, and spicy. I tried to find out who’d brought that cake so I could get the recipe, but with no success. So since then, I’ve been searching for a recipe I could use to recreate real gingerbread at home.

The following recipe is a simplification of a recipe I found in an old cookbook at my folks’ house. It’s different from the potluck gingerbread, but just as good.

Grown-up Gingerbread

1/2 cup butter, room temperature
1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
2 eggs
3/4 cup sour cream
1/2 cup molasses
1 cup raisins
3 tablespoons rum
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg, 1/2 teaspoon allspice, 1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ginger or some fresh grated ginger
1/2 cup apple jelly

Grease a 9″ square baking pan and preheat oven to 350°F.

Cream together the butter and sugar. Beat in the eggs. Mix in the sour cream, molasses, and 1 tablespoon of the rum.

In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking soda, spices, and salt.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet, then add the raisins to the whole thing. Scoop the whole thing into the 9″ pan. Bake for 45 minutes in a water bath (see picture below.)

Once the cake’s done, let it cool for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, melt together the apple jelly and the rest of the rum. Once the cake has cooled, poke holes in it and pour the rum jelly glaze on top.

Enjoy!

Pictures:

It’ll make a really stiff dough.

This is a water bath for baking. Put your pan inside of a bigger pan and add enough water to come about 1/4 inch up the sides.

The finished cake.

Just poke holes all over it and pour the glaze on top.

Check out that squidgy cross section!

Reverse Engineered Sour Cream Raisin Bars

So, the co-op grocery store in my neighborhood has this really great bakery aisle. They sell brownies and cookies individually wrapped in plastic wrap that they get from a bakery in St. Paul – and these are big fat brownies, covered in peppermint frosting and just as dense and squidgy as homemade ones. Sometimes there’s weird stuff there, like these cookie bars called hobnails and Almond Joy cookies. And every once in a while, if you hit the co-op at just the right time, you can find sour cream raisin bars.

They resemble no other cookie bar I’ve had, really. They have this pudding-like layer in the middle, the bottom is like a cake, and the top is sort of like a granola bar. Out of curiosity and since they don’t have them for sale at the co-op all the time, I decided to try and recreate them.

This is a more complicated recipe than I usually post, but the bars are well worth it.

Reverse-Engineered Sour Cream Raisin Bars

To start this recipe, you’re going to need five bowls.

1. Cake Dry Ingredients

1 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
dash salt

Just stir ’em together.

2. Cake wet ingredients

1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup sour cream
1/4 teaspoon vanilla

Beat together the butter and the sugar until the mixture is creamy (if you don’t have an electric mixer, you can use a pastry blender for this). Then add the egg, sour cream, and vanilla, and mix it up until it’s completely blended.

3. Raisins

2 cups of raisins

Pour warm water over the raisins until they are completely covered. Set them aside somewhere where they can soak.

4. Granola topping

1 cup granola
1 cup rolled oats
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Just stir ’em together.

5. The Pudding

3 egg yolks (how to separate an egg)
1 and 1/2 cups sour cream
1/2 cup sugar
2 and 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 teaspoon vanilla

Put everything but the vanilla in a saucepan, but don’t turn the heat on just yet.

Now that you’ve got everything set up, you’re ready for the cooking part of the recipe. (Please, have everything set up before you start because this part goes fast!) Grease a 9″ by 12″ baking dish and set the oven to 350°. Add the cake dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and stir just until the lumps are gone. It should be a pretty thick batter, which you spread out in the bottom of the baking dish. Put it in the oven.

The cake needs to cook for about ten minutes, or until the cake in the middle of the pan starts looking dry on top. In the meanwhile, start cooking the pudding. Put the pan of pudding stuff onto medium heat and stir it often. It’ll look like this.

Keep heating and stirring until it starts to get thick. If you need to take the cake out of the oven and set it aside, go ahead and do that. Once the pudding is thick, drain the raisins and mix them in. Turn off the heat, mix in the vanilla.

Next, it’s time to assemble the bars. I’m sorry I don’t have any pictures of this, but I was working fast. Take half of the granola mixture and sprinkle it onto the cake. Then put dollops of the pudding around the pan on top of the granola. Very gently, spread the dollops out so they make an even layer. Sprinkle on the rest of the granola mixture and pat it in.

Now you’re ready to bake!

Everything is already fully cooked at this point, so all you really need is for the flavors to meld and for the granola to get toasty brown and delicious. I found 20 minutes worked well.

Let the bars cool before you try to slice them. When it’s all done, here is what you get:

Enjoy!

Kale Chips

It’s November in Minnesota and it’s getting flipping cold outside. (Highs in the 40’s Fahrenheit, that is.) It makes me want to eat lots of hot soups, root vegetables … and kale. Kale looks intimidating in the grocery store because the leaves feel like they’re as tough as a leather suitcase. Not to fear! If you bake kale in the oven, it will come out crispy and not tough at all.

You will need:

Two baking sheets.
One bunch of kale.
3-4 tablespoons olive oil.
3-4 teaspoons salt.
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese.

Preheat the oven to 350°. Grab the bunch of kale by the stem.

Rip pieces off of the leaves. Keep going until you’re down to the midribs.

Rinse the kale pieces in a strainer and blot dry. Add the oil, salt, and Parmesan and toss it like a salad. Spread the mixture out evenly on the two baking sheets.

Bake the kale in the oven for 12 minutes. They will come out looking like this:

The picture doesn’t really convey it, but these are delicious. They taste like fresh, hot potato chips that happen to be green.

Plum Upside-Down Cake

It’s midsummer and plums are cheap right now, so I decided to do a baking experiment.

This is plum upside-down cake, which is pretty much pineapple upside-down cake but with plums. The principle seemed like it would be the same: lay some fruit in the bottom of the pan, pour cake batter on top, cook then flip, so I decided to take James Beard’s general recipe for upside-down cake and play around with it. Oh, yes, the experiment was a success. This cake didn’t last very long in my apartment.

Plum Upside-Down Cake (Adapted from James Beard)

Fruit part:

Four medium-sized plums
2 tablespoons butter
1/8 cup brown sugar

Cake batter:

1/4 cup butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 cup flour (JB calls for cake flour, but mine turned out fine with all purpose)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon allspice and 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves (or use cinnamon or ginger or whatever spices you like)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
just over 1/3 cup of milk

Preheat the oven to 350º. Wash the plums and slice into wedges. Remove pits. Put the 2 tablespoons of butter in the bottom of a 9-inch round baking pan, then put the pan in the oven just long enough for the butter to melt. Take the pan back out, then sprinkle the brown sugar over the bottom. Lay the plum wedges in the bottom of the pan (you can do it decoratively if you want).

Cream together butter and sugar until fluffy, then beat in the egg, then mix in vanilla. In another bowl, mix flour, baking powder, salt, spices. Add part of the flour mixture to the butter-sugar mixture and mix, then the milk, then the rest of the flour mixture. Mix only just enough so that everything is combined.

Pour the cake batter into the pan, over the plum wedges. Gently press the batter into the edges of the pan so it’s well-distributed. Bake for 30 minutes or when cake in the center of the pan is springy and not wet. Take the cake out of the over and let it cool before you try to flip it out of the pan!

Once the cake is quite cool, put a dinner plate on top of the pan and hold the edges of pan and plate together firmly. Flip. Once it’s upside-down, if the cake’s not coming out of the pan, you can whack it against a countertop. If all goes well, you will have a cake with lovely wedges of plum laid into the top. Enjoy!

What do I do with all these radishes?

I scored a bunch of radishes at the Asian food store the other day, brought them home, then realized: this is a ton of radishes.

This is only about 1/3 of the total radishes

What was I going to do with all of these? Why did I buy so many? You only need about one radish to slice up and put on your salad, so this pile represents about 30 salads’ worth of radishes.

Fortunately, the Internet is a wonderful place, so I went searching around for radish recipes. Turns out you can roast them like any other root vegetable.

First, I sliced the radishes up thinly.