Mmm, etc., etc.

Have you ever done a Google Image search for "mmm doughnuts"? Here, try it. I'll wait. Hmm hmm hmm, la la la. You back? Now I ask you, how badly do you want a doughnut right now? Pretty badly, right? That is how I feel pretty much nonstop throughout the months of September through November. I want, no, I NEED doughnuts on a daily basis. With fresh apple cider. Served hot. With a cinnamon stick.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite places to go when the air got brisk was Uncle John's Cider Mill in St. Johns, Michigan. For years afterward, no doughnut has ever compared to the memory I had of the ones at Uncle John's -- even the phenomenal lavender doughnuts at The Doughnut Plant left me strangely unfulfilled. So last fall, during one of my trips home, I insisted on heading out to St. Johns to fill the void.

The first thing I noticed was that the cider mill has become a rougher place in recent years.


The second thing I noticed was even more devastating. The doughnuts? Not that good. There! I said it! Are you happy? They were dense, over-sugared (yes, it's possible), and worst of all, stale.

What was I to do? My cinnamon-sugar doughnut craving had now ballooned to the size of an aging Hell's Angel's stomach, and if I didn't do something to feed it, I would die. Die from an acute lack of doughnuts. Like any self-respecting amateur baker, I turned to the Internet. I wasn't terribly optimistic, since most doughnut recipes call for a deep fryer, and while we don't suffer for kitchen space as badly as most New Yorkers, we still keep things fairly minimal. Luckily, the brilliant Heidi Swanson at 101 Cookbooks had just what I needed (just what I needed!): a recipe that delivers light, fluffy, yet satisfyingly chewy baked -- yes, baked! -- doughnuts.

A word to the wise: I tried experimenting by rolling these in powdered sugar, and had a lot of trouble getting it to adhere. The regular sugar/cinnamon combo worked beautifully, and I bet glazing them would, too.


Baked Doughnuts

From Heidi Swanson at 101 Cookbooks.
Makes 1 1/2 - 2 dozen medium doughnuts, plus holes

• 1 1/3 cups warm milk, 95 to 105 degrees (divided)
• 1 packet active dry yeast (2 1/4 teaspoons)
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 5 cups all-purpose flour
• A pinch or two of nutmeg, freshly grated
• 1 teaspoon fine grain sea salt (Kat sez: I used kosher)

For the sugar dusting:

• 1/2 cup unsalted butter
  1 1/2 cups sugar
• 1 tablespoon cinnamon

Tools:

• Parchment paper
• Baking sheet
• Doughnut cutter OR two biscuit cutters, 1" and 3"

Place 1/3 cup of the warm milk in the bowl of an electric mixer. Stir in the yeast and set aside for five minutes or so. Be sure your milk isn't too hot or it will kill the yeast. Stir the butter and sugar into the remaining cup of warm milk and add it to the yeast mixture. With a fork, stir in the eggs, flour, nutmeg, and salt - just until the flour is incorporated. With the dough hook attachment of your mixer beat the dough for a few minutes at medium speed. If your dough is overly sticky, add flour a few tablespoons at a time. Too dry? Add more milk a bit at a time. You want the dough to pull away from the sides of the mixing bowl and eventually become supple and smooth. Turn it out onto a floured counter-top, knead a few times (the dough should be barely sticky), and shape into a ball.

Transfer the dough to a buttered (or oiled) bowl, cover, put in a warm place (the top of a preheating oven works well), and let rise for an hour or until the dough has roughly doubled in size.

Punch down the dough and roll it out 1/2-inch thick on your floured countertop. Use the cutter(s) stamp out circles. Transfer the circles to a parchment-lined baking sheet and stamp out the smaller inner circles using a smaller cutter. If you cut the inner holes out any earlier, they become distorted when you attempt to move them. Cover with a clean cloth and let rise for another 45 minutes. (Kat sez: I saved the inner circles and let them rise/bake along with the big guys -- why waste a doughnut hole?)

Bake in a 375 degree oven until the bottoms are just golden, 8 to 10 minutes - start checking around 8. If you're unsure, err on the side of underbaking. While the doughnuts are baking, place the butter in a medium bowl. Place the sugar and cinnamon in a separate bowl.

Remove the doughnuts from the oven and let cool for just a minute or two. Dip each one in the melted butter and a quick toss in the sugar bowl. Eat!

Kinda Healthy-ish Chocolate Chip Snacking Cookies

Sometimes I'm in the mood to eat a lot of little things, instead of one big thing, you know? Well, obviously somebody out there knows what I mean -- how else can you explain the success of White Castle? Is it healthier to eat ten little hamburgers rather than one enormous one? Debatable. Is it more fun? Unequivocally, yes.

Hence, the allure of the "snacking" cookie. It's not a full-fledged dessert, I tell myself, it's just a wee snack. When I first started making mini-cookies, I just used my grandmother's (cough, Tollhouse, cough) recipe, until one evening, when I was on my second handful and realized that it might be worth trying to make them just a touch healthier.

Don't get me wrong, these are not health food. As a general rule, I like to let a cookie be a cookie, which means that it's sugary and buttery and altogether fabulous. This cookie is not ooey-gooey decadent, but it does crisp up nicely, and the natural sugar gives it an almost spicy flavor. The fact that it also has a bit less saturated fat and less refined sugar and flour is just an added bonus.

Kinda Healthy-ish Chocolate Chip Snacking Cookies

NOTE: I don't have a food processor (if destiny has a heart, one day...), but a trusty spatula works just fine for this batter.

• 1 1/4 cup whole wheat flour
• 1 cup white flour
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
• 3 tbsp. unsweetened applesauce
• 1 cup Florida Crystals or other unrefined sugar
  
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 4 egg whites
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 1 cup miniature chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees, and place one rack in the middle of the oven. Have a baking sheet at the ready.

Whisk together the flours, salt, and baking soda. Set aside.

In a large bowl, beat the butter, applesauce, and sugars until light and fluffy. It might look a bit more liquid than you're used to, but trust me, it'll all be okay. Beat in the egg whites and vanilla, scraping down the sides as you go. Add the reserved flour mix in three increments, making each new addition when the previous one is just incorporated. Fold in the chocolate chips until evenly distributed.

Drop by teaspoons onto the cookie sheet, one to two inches apart (after all, they don't get too big) and bake for 9-10 minutes, until edges are barely golden. Cool on racks.

Makes about 90 mini-cookies, roughly 24 modest servings.

Cake-tathalon

This is what the inside of my brain looks like.

My Dude and I got engaged recently, and we decided that the easiest thing to do would be to have the wedding 600 miles from where we actually live. This means that the amount of time we have to meet and speak with photographers, florists, etc., must be limited to one short, jam-packed visit. Well folks, I have just returned from said visit, and I'm pretty sure I have wedding coming out of every orifice. Forreals, I am still yanking the tulle out of my ears.

Luckily, there was a big pot o' gold at the end of the rainbow, my saving grace after four exhausting days: the cake tasting. Confection bakery of Kalamazoo, I owe you my life. I do not think I would have had the strength to go on had you not provided me with no fewer than six kinds of cake, six frostings, and four fillings to sample, in various combinations.

Honey buttercream: this must be what angel poo tastes like

As you would expect, choosing my wedding cake is not a decision that I take lightly. In fact, I trained for weeks for this event so that I would be at the top of my cake-eating game. I was bench-pressing cupcakes, doing laps in a vat of ganache; it was a very demanding regimen.

At the end of the race, we had a three-way tie between the banana cake, the hazelnut with amaretto frosting, and honey-lavender cake with honey buttercream. After running through the play-by-play, my dude and I are pretty settled on the winner. And the prize is an all expense paid trip to my belly.

How to Choose?

Who is more reliable? This baker:

Or this baker:

There has been much talk of brioche at our house lately, and by "much talk" I mean I brought it up once or twice. This is opposed to never, which is how often we used to talk about brioche. As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I'm very eager to dive in to the gibassier recipe I managed to track down, but the idea made My Dude a little nervous. "Maybe you should try a basic brioche first, before you go throwing down a bunch of money for orange blossom water, whatever that is."

After I took a few minutes to grumble about how he had absolutely no faith in my abilities, I had to concede the point. If I blow it, I'll certainly be glad that I didn't drop a pantload of money on orange blossom water (whatever that is), and if I succeed in making excellent brioche, well, who doesn't like to have some extra brioche around the house?

Ordinarily I would just flip open my copy of How to Bake and get to it, but then I noticed Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques sitting on the shelf. When I compared the two recipes, I noticed a significant difference: while Nick Malgieri's recipe calls for a sponge or "preferment," Jacques's does not. So whom am I to side with here? The Italian-American baker who has yet to steer me wrong, or one of the most-respected French chefs alive today?

Ugh. I feel like the little kid in "Kramer vs. Kramer." Except that neither Nick nor Jacques know that I'm alive. But other than that? Exactly the same situation.

My fellow bakers, what would you do?

As If You Needed Another Reason to Bake

Hiring a "professional" to provide the baked goods for your special event is no guarantee. I'm not saying I'm the greatest baker out there, but I'd like to think that if I were running the cake decorating department at Kroger or whatever, I'd at least raise the standards to include functional literacy.

Comprehension gaps, hideous frostings, and terrifyingly lifelike cake babies (and more!) at the hilarous Cake Wrecks.

Whole Wheat Flatbread with Pesto, Potatoes and Farmer's Cheese

How big of an idiot am I? I achieved what was probably the height of my culinary career, and I did not take one. Single. Photo. Actually, it's more accurate to say that if I had taken two minutes to locate my camera, our party guests would've devoured the whole thing, and damned if I wasn't going to grab myself a slice. My dear friend Sarah was able to capture the moment when I stuffed it into my face before throwing down her camera and storming the food table herself.

This amazing flatbread/pizza is yet another treat inspired by our recent trip to Portland, OR. My brother-in-law to be was kind enough to take us to Clyde Common for lunch, and My Dude and I loved it so much that we went back the very next day. I had their vegetarian flatbread both times, because I was determined to re-create it for our engagement party. On our first visit, I let myself get lost in the restaurant's laid-back vibe, my cold glass of wine, and my light yet comforting meal. On the second visit, however, I covertly lifted away each layer and discovered just how easy it really was: pesto, thinly-sliced fingerling potatoes, and lumps of fresh farmer's cheese, placed under the broiler until golden.

My favorite thing about this recipe is that it satisfies a pizza craving while still being light and fresh enough to serve on the muggiest, most oppressive days of a New York summer, those days when the very thought of stepping into the un-air-conditioned slice joint on the corner makes me melt into a puddle of sweat and Clinique City Block.

I've posted the full recipe after the jump, but you could easily cut a few corners by using a pre-made pizza dough or crust and a decent jarred pesto and it would still turn out great. To be honest, the pesto is more My Dude's territory, so I think I'll have him write up his recipe in a subsequent entry. Anyway, without further ado...

Whole Wheat Flatbread with Pesto, Potatoes and Farmer's Cheese

Makes two 12-inch pizzas or one 13- x 16-inch pizza.

• One recipe Easy Whole Wheat Pizza Dough (see below)
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 5 or 6 large fingerling potatoes
• 1/2 cup pesto, jarred or homemade
• 1/4 lb very mild, soft farmer's cheese (I used Westfield Farm Capri from Murray's)
• 4 leeks, green parts only, sliced diagonally

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

Prepare and par-bake the crust in the center of the oven, about 9 minutes. Let it cool off a little on the baking sheet.

Peel the potatoes and slice them paper-thin, or as thin as you can reasonably get them without slicing off a finger. Heat about 1/4-inch of olive oil in a skillet on medium-low. Add potatoes and cook until tender, turning occasionally. If you notice the edges starting to crisp, turn down the heat. Drain the potatoes on paper towels.

Spread the pesto evenly over the crust in a thin layer. Top with another even layer of potatoes, followed by nickel-sized lumps of cheese.

Turn the broiler to low (if you have the option) and let it heat up. Place the pizza directly under the heat source and broil until the top of the cheese lumps are a nice, golden brown. Depending on the stregth of your oven, it should be about 5-10 minutes, but WATCH CLOSELY. This thing can go from zero to charred in no time.

Top with the leek and serve. But maybe grab yourself a slice first.

Easy Whole Wheat Pizza Dough

Adapted from Nick Malgieri's How to Bake

• 1 1/2 cups white unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup warm tap water
  
• 1 envelope (2 1/2 teaspoons) active dry yeast
• 3 tablespoons olive oil

Combine the flour and salt in a large bowl and mix well. In a separate bowl, whisk the yeast into the water, followed by two tablespoons of olive oil.

Make a well in the center of the flour and salt mixture. Pour the liquid into the center of the well and stir with a fork all the flour is incorporated and a soft, sticky dough forms. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it rise until doubled in bulk, about 1 hour.

Grease a cookie sheet with the remaining tablespoon of oil. Without stirring or folding the dough, use a rubber spatula to scrape it from the bowl onto the oiled sheet. Oil your hands and press, pull, and pat the dough into the pan. If it starts to get stiff and resist, let it rest for a few minutes before continuing. Let the dough rise in the pan uncovered until it starts to puff up slightly, about 30 minutes.

Apricot and Pistachio Tart

Folks, if you want to impress the holy hell out of your future mother-in-law, run, don't walk, to your local fruit stand, buy some apricots, and make this tart. This picture doesn't do it justice, so please don't let my high school photography skills deter you.

In our little household, my dude holds the title of alpha chef, since he has a superhuman palate and claims to be able to tell the difference between varieties of bottled water (Him: "Volvic is more mineral-y. You don't taste that?" Me: "Um.") -- it's like if Jeffery Steingarten and Ruth Reichl had a love child, is all I'm saying. For this reason, when we have guests for dinner I generally leave the menu to him, except for dessert, which I guard with a jealous fury. So when we cooked our first-ever dinner for his parents, I went into compulsive baker overdrive.

Stone fruits have been stunning this season here in New York, so I decided to go from there. Since I don't even buy flour without consulting Nick Malgieri first, I opened up How to Bake, and there it was: an Apricot and Pistachio Tart.

This was only the second tart I've ever made, and the first ever sweet one. I was a little apprehensive, since the first tart I made went largely untouched -- although I think that's because I made it for the Fourth of July, and everyone was drunk and full of hot dogs by the time I served it. But still, that kind of rejection sticks with you. It also didn't help that when I expressed my nervousness to my future mother-in-law, she waved her hand and said, "oh, tarts are easy." Which I read as: "...so if you can't even get this right, you're a class-A dumbass. And a slut."

When I pulled the tart out of the oven, the edges of the apricot halves were lightly browned, and the filling was puffy and golden. Everyone was silent as they dug in their forks and took their first bite.

"Wow." Said my future father-in-law.

"Can I have the recipe?" Said my future mother-in-law.

Victory! [Said like Entourage's Johnny Drama in his "Viking Quest" costume]

Apricot and Pistachio Tart

From Nick Malgieri's How to Bake

Makes one 9- to 10-inch tart, 8 to 10 servings

• One recipe Sweet Tart Dough

For the filling:

• 1 cup (about 4 oz.) shelled unsalted pistachios
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon almond extract
• 2 eggs
• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 12 medium (2 to 2 1/2 lbs.) apricots, washed, halved and pitted

For the glaze:

• 1 cup apricot preserves or jam (Kat sez: try to find preserves with little to no added sugar; the apricots pack plenty of sweetness on their own)
• 2 tablespoons water or white rum

Prepare and chill the dough.

To remove the annoying skins from the pistachios, place them in a saucepan and cover with water. Bring the water to a boil. Drain the pistachios and place them on a clean kitchen towel. Fold the towel over the pistachios and give them a good rub; this should help to loosen the skins and make it easier to pick 'em off.

Coarsely chop 1/4 cup of the pistachios and set aside for finishing the tart. Dump the rest into a food processor, along with the sugar, and pulse until the mixture is finely ground (about 1 minute). Add the almond extract and one of the eggs and continue to pulse until the mixture becomes a smooth paste. Cut the butter into 8 or so small pieces, and add to the work bowl, pulsing a few times after each addition. Continue to pulse until the butter is smoothly mixed with the nut mixture. Add the remaining egg and pulse until smooth. Allow the machine to run continuously for 30 seconds and scrape down the inside of the bowl. Add the flour and pulse until just incorporated. Set aside, covered.

Set a rack at the lowest level of the oven and preheat to 350 degrees.

Roll out the dough and line the pan.

Spread the pistachio filling on the dough. If you have a circular tart pan, arrange the apricots, cut side up, in 2 or 3 concentric circles. (I have a square tart pan, so I placed them in evenly-spaced rows.)

Bake the tart for about 35 minutes, until the crust and filling are baked through and the apricots are cooked. Cool the tart on a rack.

To make the glaze, bring the preserves and water or rum to a boil, and reduce until it gets thick and syrupy. Strain out the pulpy bits. Brush the hot glaze over the surface of the cooled tart. Sprinkle the reserved 1/4 cup chopped pistachios around the edges.

Unmold tart. Impress the holy hell out of future mother-in-law.


Sweet Tart Dough

• 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened)
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 egg yolk
• 1 1/4 cup bleached all-purpose flour

Combine butter and sugar in a mixing bowl and beat on medium speed for 5 minutes, until the mixture is soft, fluffy, and almost white in color.

Beat in the vanilla and the egg yolk and continue beating for another two minutes, until the mixture is soft and smooth and resembles buttercream.

Place the flour in a strainer of sifter and sift it, all at once, over butter mixture. Using a rubber spatula, fold the flour into the butter mixture until no traces of flour remain visible.

Shape the dough into a rough 12-inch disk, about 1/4 inch thick and cover in plastic wrap. Refrigerate the dough.

To use the dough, fold it in half and line the long edge up against the interior diameter of the pan. Unfold. Gently press - using the palm of your hands and fingertips - the dough against the interior surfaces of the pan.

To finish the top edge of the tart shell, position your floured thumb and index finger of one hand so that the thumb and index finger of one hand so that the thumb is inside the pastry and the tip is against the bottom of the crust. The tip of your index finger should rest against the top edge of the crust. Press gently with both thumb and finger to make the top of the crust straight and even.

If possible, chill until the crust is firm. This will minimize shrinkage. Bake according to the instructions in individual recipes.