Cheesecake! Cranberries!

As you may or may not know, the latest season of Top Chef is coming to an end. Some friends had a few people over for dinner last night and to watch the episode. Naturally, I brought dessert. They made grilled sandwiches with cheddar, braised pulled beef short ribs and pickled onions. YUM! I brought a cheesecake. Just a plain vanilla bean cheesecake, the way the good lord intended it, and I made a spiced cranberry jam to go on top. It was a hit.

This is the New York cheese cake from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook. It's a great book, I highly recommend it! Unfortunately, I thought I had more sugar than I did when I went to make it. It was also 7:00 AM and I had been to the grocery store one already (needed a cheap aluminum roaster for the water bath) and wasn't about to go back. Oh and it was raining like crazy. I still can't believe I ran out of sugar. I have four kinds of flour and malt syrup for pete's sake! Anyway, the recipe calls for 2 1/4 cups of granulated sugar. I used 1 1/4 cups of granulated sugar and 3/4 cup of brown sugar. It worked really well! It's not quite as snow white as the picture, but darn tasty. I also used cinnamon graham crackers as the crust. It worked really well. (Someone at the dinner thought I used teddy grahams. I like the idea of grinding up teddy bears to make cheesecake crust. I may have to try that.) Oh, I also used a half of a vanilla bean instead of the extract. The cheesecake baked for about 15 minutes longer than the book called for because my oven is a little slow.

The only problem with the recipe is that it made too much batter. I could have filled up the springform pan the whole way, but that would have been precarious to say the least. It just so happened that the left over batter filled 12 muffin cups perfectly. I baked these at 300 degrees, a little lower than the whole cake. I also didn't use a water bath. I wasn't so concerned with cracked tops like I was with the big one since I'll most likely be eating these in front of the fridge with the door open they are just for me. Next time I would cut the recipe in half.



This is the cranberry jam I made to go with it. It was the easiest thing in the world. Rinse a bag of fresh cranberries, place in large sauce pot. Add 1/2 cup of water, 2 cups powdered sugar, juice of three clementines, zest of one clementine, the left over half of vanilla bean, and a teaspoon of cinnamon. Simmer until the cranberries begin to break down and the juice thickens. It was, like, 10 minutes. For reals. Because there is a bit of cornstarch in powdered sugar, the sauce thickened quickly. Let it cool. It made about 24 ounces.

Fig tart with anise scented pastry cream

I'm off to a cookout at L&N's house. Here's what I'm bringing. Enjoy what's left of your weekend!

Brandied Cherry Pie, or I finally found the cable for my camera!

Earlier this week, I made pie. It had a homemade crust, a homemade filling and tastes divine. I know know the origin of the phrase, "easy as pie."

For the crust, I used the Pate Brisee recipe from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook. This book is fantastic! I highly suggest you add this to your collection. If you already have it, let me know what recipes you've made! I picked this book up the other day for 50% off at Williams Sonoma. Score! As I sat down to read it, I wondered why I didn't already own it. It has a lot of excellent basic recipes with pictures. Ever want to make your own puff pastry? Martha shows you how! It's an amazingly comprehensive book.

As for the filling, I was just winging it. A homemade pie filling is deceptively simple. No magic or pixie dust required. You need to taste it a few times, but otherwise it's crazy easy. I bought a bag of nice, ripe dark cherries at Kroger. Once I pitted and halved them, I added them to a bowl. I poured on 1/8 of a cup (or 2 TBSP, or 1 oz.) of brandy and let soak overnight stirring well. I actually had on hand a small bottle of Mt. Gay Sugar Cane Brandy from a trip to Barbados a few years ago. It's quite lovely! I try to use it only for cooking and special occasions since I won't be able to get it again in the US. The next day, I added about a half of a cup of sugar to which I had mixed in 3 TBSP of sifted cornstarch. This was the first time I tried cornstarch in a pie filling rather than just flour. I think it worked much better. I sifted the cornstarch to get out the lumps. I added the filling to the bottom crust, covered it with the top crust, made my super cute star-shaped vents and baked. I baked it on 350 degrees just as long as it took for the crust to get a nice golden brown and the filling to be visibly bubbly. Voila! We have pie.

You can see here that no filling fell out or leaked all over when it was cut. Okay, a little is falling out here, but that's because I put it in a bowl first then realized a plate would be easier for photographing, but trust me, nothing fell out until it had been moved several times.

The cornstarch worked beautifully here! The brandy really adds a richness to the cherries. I am not going to post a formal recipe here because there are just too many variables. My cherries were pretty sweet on their own and didn't need too much sugar. Your might need considerably more or even none at all. Shoot for about 2 pounds of cherries here. Taste them. Add the sugar gradually. Start with a third of a cup mixed with the 3 TBSP of cornstarch. Taste again. Needs more sugar? Add a little more. Trust your tastebuds here. Once you put it in the oven, pay attention. Give it 40 minutes on 350 then peek. Is the crust golden? Can you see the filling bubbling? No? Then give it another 10 minutes. Repeat as necessary. This is not the time to sit down to a movie or call your mother. As long as you measure carefully and follow the rules, baking is not hard.

I even had enough crust left over to make a few pocket pies with some fresh raspberries I had on hand.

Here is my pie warmed up with french vanilla ice cream. Yum!

I scream. You scream. We all scream for ice cream.

I was in Kroger yesterday, my favorite grocery store because it's so ridiculously cheap. They frequently put red and yellow "manager's specials" stickers on highly perishable things close to their expiration date thus making them even cheaper. For example, on many occasions, I have picked up a 4 oz log of goat cheese for 99 cents, four dollars less than full price. Word. Tofu for 99 cents a week before the expiration date. Same with lettuces, other cheeses, and the list goes on.

Peeps, I would swear it's already like a hundred degrees here. Yesterday, I bought a half gallon of 1% milk for 75 cents. You know what that means, don't you? Yup. Ice cream. Or more specifically, ice milk. I also bought a pint of heavy cream. I mixed the cream with five cups of milk. I added enough sugar to make it sweet, but not too sweet. Maybe a cup? I mixed it until the sugar was dissolved and included a tablespoon of vanilla extract. I split it in half to make two batches, strawberry and chocolate chip. I simply followed the instructions for my ice cream maker. About thirty minutes in the frozen bowl is enough. Once the ice cream is about doubled in volume, I add it to a 2 QT container and mix in the strawberries. I gave my strawberries a quick whiz with the ol' stick blender, so they were pretty soupy. Normally you should add the "add ins" during the last couple spins in the mixer, but the ice cream had grown considerably and the strawberries were quite juicy, so I mixed them in the container. I found these great plastic containers at Kroger that are the same size and shape as a paper ice cream container. I am impatiently waiting on the ice cream to set up a bit more before I dive right in. My long and rambling point is...I have 4 QTs of homemade ice cream for about $2.00. How can you beat that? Everyone needs an ice cream maker. It doesn't take up much room in the kitchen. They aren't too expensive. You can also use them to make frozen drinks too! I have a Cuisinart Frozen Yogurt-Ice Cream-Sorbet Maker.

If you choose to get one, and I highly suggest you do, here are some rules to which you should strictly adhere. Everything else is completely negotiable. In no particular order:

-Shoot for a two quart batch. If you're adding something in, decrease your milk/cream/dairy/soy/etc product accordingly. In other words, instead of using eight cups of milk, add two cups of fruit and use six cups of milk. Remember that this milk mix is going to grow in volume significantly.

-I find that adding corn syrup to a sorbet makes it scoopable. Otherwise, it seems to turn into a Popsicle. Some kind of a liquid sugar would work, in as small as a 1:4 ratio of liquid sugar:granulated sugar. I'll bet honey or maple syrup would work. Maple syrup would be excellent in a blueberry sorbet. (Oooh, I'll have to try that.)

-You really can add anything to ice cream. One of my personal favorites is the hard, over cooked edges of brownies chopped up. They really hold up well in ice cream. Add fruit, cookie dough, brownies, candy, marshmallows, the sky's the limit.

-Keep your mixing bowl in the freezer. That way you know it'll be good and cold when you're ready. My ice cream maker came with two mixing bowls. One is always in the freezer. If your bowl isn't extra extra cold, you can forget about making ice cream. Trust me on this one.

-If you want to be all fancy-schmancy and make a custard ice cream (the cooked kind with eggs), make it a day ahead of time. The milk mix needs to be very cold when it goes into the very cold mixing bowl.

-Turn on the mixer and pour in the mixture. Not the other way around. What happens is the part of the milk mix that touches the bowl freezes.

-When adding mix-ins, add them when the milk mix is set in the bowl. Give it a spin or two then turn out into your container. To be honest, I've always had a tough time getting my chocolate or caramel ribbon to look like Breyer's. If you figure it out, holla.