Runeberg Redux

Happy Runeberg Day!

I've moved, and taken up a new job, and now I'm back in a place with at least one Finnish colleague. A conversation we had made me reminisce about the days in graduate school when I would make Runebergintorttuja -- aka: Runeberg cakes -- for my Finnish professors on Runeberg Day, aka: February 5th, the national day in Finland celebrating the poet Runeberg (more about Runeberg here).

So I decided to brush off my rusty baking skillz and dig the cupcake molds out of their box (in my still-box-filled new apartment), and revisit my old Runeberg recipe. This time around, I made the cakes in cupcake molds, rather than their usual, tall 3-inch cylinders, so that they would be easier to transport to campus. I also took a bit of artistic license with the icing: traditional Runeberg cakes have only a simple ring of icing around the raspberry jam topping. There are other licenses as well, just because I could. ☺️ The cakes are now soaked in a syrup of calvados (apple brandy) rather than straight up rum, and the jam is now a combination of raspberry and grapefruit marmalade. You know, cause I can't help but make things schmancier. :P

Now I just have to suffer through having these cupcakes sit in my office all day until teatime! With the ginger and icing and almond and raspberry wafting out, they smell too good! Woe.


Continue for recipe...

Traveling Desserts: Vanilla Pudding and Fifteens

What do you do when you're living at an AirBnB and having super foodies over for dinner? I was faced with this predicament when I was in Scotland for the summer (more on that later!), trying to make new friends by impressing them with my foodie skillz. :) It turns out, without an oven, or many of the conventional tools and ingredients of the trade, one can still turn out a simple but fun dinner party!

The main star of dinner was chicken soup, which sounds like a funny main! But, I had promised a good expat friend of mine (of easiest chocolate chip cookies fame) who pined for American-style chicken soup that I would make him some when I visited, so soup it was. The rest of the menu was cobbled together by whatever looked good in the local markets:

Chicken noodle soup

chicken (from a local butchery), celery, carrots, fresh tagliatelle

Pan-roasted butternut squash salad

ras el hanout-spiced pan-roasted butternut squash and red onion, sliced D'anjou pear, bee pollen, rocket, honey dijon red wine vinaigrette

Bread & cheese bruschetta

pan-roasted cherry tomato and garlic, mature Scottish white cheddar, sourdough toast

For dessert, my friend was going to make brownies to bring over, so to complement the chocolatey squidgy-ness of the brownies, I put together vanilla pudding pots (for which you really just need a whisk, pot, and jars!), with kiwi coulis and fruit. These were also a joy to make in a country in which vanilla paste is actually a standard and easy ingredient to come by! Yum. :)

Finally, I also made some fifteens, which are an Irish cookie! that another one of my Scottish-based expat friends made for me during my visit. Fifteens are a no-bake cookie that is made out of crushing other cookies (ahem, "biscuits") and mixing them with more ingredients. It's like cookie cannibalism! Traditional fifteens have candied cherries and coconut, but my friend, Jefferson, made them with candied citrus peel and almond, which I thought helps cut the ultra-sweetness of the cookie well. So here is Jefferson's version of fifteens!

Hope everyone is having a super fun summer. If you find yourself traveling but in need of a few super simple but totally yummy dessert recipes, here you go!

Happy ☀️!

read on for recipes...

Apricot and Poppyseed Crostata

A few years back when I was last in Rome, we lived in the neighborhood of one of the best biscotterias in town. Amongst display cases stacked with amazingly buttery cookies in the shop were cakestands with cloches covering beautifully made jam crostatas. There were only two flavors to choose from: "light" and "dark," which denoted the differences in jam filling. The "light" crostatas were usually filled with something like apricot jam or an apple or citrus marmalade, while the "dark" crostatas usually featured a core of dark berry jam. The crostatas wouldn't be pre-sliced. The proprietress behind the counter would ask us to indicate how large of a slice we want, then she would take a bench scraper and cut the desired slice, charging by weight. Along with the cookies, those slices of crostata were some of my favorite dessert items in Rome.

Since Rome, I've been increasingly infatuated with crostatas and jam tarts. As someone who is a bit obssessive-compulsive in collecting good jam and marmalade, jam tarts are some of the easiest ways for me to finish off large amounts of jam quickly. A while ago, I happened to be visiting at Blue Chair Fruit when Rachel Saunders (jam maker extraordinaire) was serving up slices of her take on an Italian crostata, and I've been hounding her for the recipe ever since. And finally, at last, the crostata recipe appears in the latest Blue Chair Fruit cookbook: Blue Chair Cooks. Naturally, it's the first recipe I turned to.

With a few tweaks on Rachel's recipe, I made an apricot-poppyseed version of the crostata, adding some meyer lemon zest, a sprinkle of lavender buds, and some orange blossom water to the crust for some extra floral flavor against the apricot. The poppyseeds add a satisfying crunch to the top of the crostata. In true Roman biscotteria fashion, I proudly presented the crostatas as my contribution to the annual holiday cookie swap this year. Because, if crostatas have a place in Italian biscotterias, they are more than good enough "cookies" for me.

Read on for recipe....

Chocolate beet cake with kale chips and almonds, or the otherwise known as the "Eat Your Salad and Have Cake, Too" Cake.

Every now and then, I come across a post sitting in my Drafts folder that I never got around to publishing. There are a few usual reasons for this languishing of posts: either I'm dissatisfied with the photos, or I want to save the recipe for the right moment (which never seems to appear), or I'm being too lazy to finish the post. This recipe has sat in my Draft Posts folder for a few months now, and yes, I was never 100% happy with the photos, and yes, I wanted to save the recipe for the right moment, and yes, I was being just darned lazy, but the real reason I haven't shared this one until now is because I haven't gotten the guts to do so. Because after today's post, in which I try to convince you to eat your salad and have your cake, too, with this kale chip and beet root chocolate cake, all y'alls might declare me criminally insane and ostracize me from the food blogosphere for the rest of eternity. But what the heck, right? Life isn't worth blogging without the risks, so here goes....

Kale chips! Okay, yeah, I'm a little late to the game, but finally DfB is jumping on the kale chip bandwagon. A few months ago, I discovered that such thing as baby kale existed, and publicly declared on twitter and facebook (you know, because that makes things, like, official) that it was my new favorite salad green. This comment prompted Irvin Lin (of Eat the Love) to dare me to follow the food bloggery fad and post a recipe for kale chips on this website. To which I answered, "Not unless I can put them into a dessert!"

.... of course, this got me thinking. I actually really appreciate sneaking an unexpected touch of traditional savoury-ness into my desserts (e.g., apricot-thyme brûlée tart? or rosemary peanut butter cookies?), and I always say that having chocolate cookies without salt is a crime and travesty. So why not kale chips? Flavor-wise, they are nice and salty with just a hint of earthy bite, and kale chips are also texturally fascinating, all crunchy and curly, but almost lighter than air. These two properties alone immediately made me think that they'd go perfectly with a soft, extra moist, dense, and rich dark chocolate cake. Naturally!

So here it is. My "Eat your salad and have your cake, too" Cake. Or my "Eat your cake and have your salad, too" Cake. Whatever. The point is: we can have it all, dark green kale AND dark red beets AND dark, dark chocolate. And a handful of toasted almonds for good measure. (You know, protein. Part of a balanced diet.)

But really, joking aside. I'm here to tell you that this cake seriously is dessert-worthy. The beets add a level of rich moisture to the chocolate cake, which is then enveloped in a deep layer of smooth dark chocolate ganache. The kale chips add a much needed crunch to the cake as well as that hit of salt that is so necessary with anything chocolate. And the almonds bring all the oddities together with a bit of familiar nuttiness.

...Or, maybe you might think that I'm now a bit nutty, too.


Read on for recipe....

(mis)Fortune Cookies: Matcha-Orange Flower and Brown Butter

A good deal of ink has been spilt chronicling the trials and tribulations of being a graduate student. And with good reason, since said trials are many: the long hours, the miniscule (if any) pay, the annoying ridicule we're subject to from grumpy old professors who don't see the point of the modern probability theory revolution .... ahem and eye roll. And we graduate students undertake all of this knowing full well that only very few of us will make it into academia in the long run (we just really, really hope it's us!).

Part of what makes it all live-able, however, is the fact that we are also terribly good at laughing at ourselves and at our own predicaments. Take PhD comics, for instance, or #whatshouldwecallgradschool. Poking fun at grad students is easy. Even Tina Fey does it!

So last week, when I was scheduled to speak at the year's final lab meeting, my linguist-cum-baker partner-in-crime Andréa and I thought we should celebrate the end of the year with some special fortune cookies for the lab. Yes, these fortune cookies were special in that some were matcha and orange flower fortune cookies and others were brown butter and almond fortune cookies (flavors far superior to your normal run-of-the-mill types), but really the special surprises were the misfortunes tucked inside. My favorite? p = 0.06.

A full list of our misfortunes is available here.

The misfortune cookies managed to elicit some great hand-to-forehead-smacking reactions at the lab meeting, which was quite gratifying. But really hidden behind these misfortunes was some optimism for fellow students: grad school might suck every now and then and we might not all make it, but at least cookies, laughs, and some good old reflexive schadenfreude can make everything seem better for now.


Read on for recipe....

Passionfruit and Espresso Tosca Cake

I've always maintained that the best desserts I make are ones that are designed with a specific person in mind. There's something about crafting the perfect personal dessert, targeted and fine-tuned to one person's unique palate... it's a challenge in how well I know someone, how well I've figured out their tastes and likes and dislikes and favorites (that sometimes they don't even know they had), and when I get it right, it's better than any general, all-purpose dessert that I make, no matter how high the bar is to begin with. In a sense, this is my ultimate definition of the practice of baking with love.

(This is also why I realized a long time ago that I couldn't ever do cooking contests. Cooking for myself is just never as rewarding--and never tastes as good!--as cooking for someone else.)

This cake was for a friend of mine who has this unique talent in making sense of the world in the most lucid manner, no matter how convoluted the situation. Her advice has helped me through many major scrapes in the past few years, and after nearly eight years of knowing her, I *finally* got her to reveal her birthday this year, so I had quite a few birthdays and years to make up for! This surprise cake had to be nothing short of perfection.

One of my favorite things about how this passionfruit and espresso Tosca cake turned out is that the cake boasts this quiet and understated drama. It's a natural layer cake without all of the boisterous pomp and circumstance of a traditional, tall cake-and-frosting-and-cake-and-frosting layer cake: the nutty and slightly crunchy topping of the toasted almonds melts into the salty-sweet, espresso-tinged caramel, which soaks into the top of the underlying, fluffy but moist genoise cake base, which itself bursts with the tart, tropical boldness of passionfruit. It might seem like a lot going on at once, but the beauty of the cake is the simplicity with which all of these complex flavors find a balance together in the continuous layers of the dessert. Somehow, they just all make sense together here, which I thought was particularly befitting of my friend.

Her response to the cake:

"Best. birthday. cake. ever."

Mission accomplished.

(Special shout-out to Emma of Poires au Chocolat for posting about Tosca cakes.)



Read on for recipe...

Cranberry Clove Linzer Torte, and Happy Holidays

Christmas was a quiet affair this year, without much of the usual hubbub or raucous festivities. This was partly a purposeful calm-down for me: while I usually revel in the holiday season, 2012 has been such a whirlwind that it felt good to just spend a day taking a deep breath, seeing close family and closer friends, and watching the rain pound down outside. No usual holiday dessert insanity for me this year, either. Just a simple, almost-rustic cranberry clove linzer torte: tart, buttery, spicy, sweet, and cakey, with a side of chocolate red tea that I got from a visit to the Netherlands a few years ago. The idea for a cranberry filling inside a linzer torte, which typically has a raspberry jam center, came from a colleague of mine (thanks, Beth!), and I actually like this cranberry version much better than the original. Because the cranberries are tarter, the torte isn't cloyingly sweet as it can sometimes be, and the contrast between the tart center and the sweeter, clove- and cinnamon-infused, nutty crust is such a perfect balance. The torte was so good that I made three of them, cutting large wedges as gifts to neighbors, friends, and family (and saving a fair portion for myself for breakfast this week! ;)).

What did you all have for Christmas dessert/breakfast this year?

[click on photo above for larger image]

Despite the quiet Christmas, I'm actually looking forward to a more lively New Year's this year. In years past, I've hosted a small game night on New Year's Eve for New Year's orphans (read: antisocial introverts like me who don't get invited to your stereotypical boisterous NYE extravaganzas), but this year, I have proper plans to attend a proper NYE party, which I'm properly excited about! :D My friend and I are going to make this gorgonzola and pear galette, which the host has eloquently renamed, "Galette de Poires à la Gorgonzola"--everything sounds way more festive in French, doesn't it!

Then, a few days after New Years, I'm off to Boston for a short business trip. It's been years since I've been to Boston last, but I'm excited to get to explore the city again. Please, please, please--if you have any recommendations for must-eat or must-see places in Boston, please leave them in a comment below!

I hope you all are having wonderful holidays, be it Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, or Yay-no-work-or-school-for-a-couple-of-days-and-the-freeways-aren't-crowded-at-all Week! Happy Holidays!


Read on for recipe...

Peach and Lemon Verbena Pie, and a virtual pie party!

A few weeks back, Sarah (of the vanilla bean blog), Hannah (of honey & jam), Beth (of local milk), and I were a-tweeting and a-twittering (or whatever kids do these days) about pie, lamenting the fact that we were too far away to try each others' scrumptious-sounding crust-and-fruit creations. But, not to fear!, we decided that an on-going virtual pie party was the second best thing. Sarah hosted us all last week on her blog with tiny little peach pies-in-jars, and it's my turn now. :) So, welcome all! to the Virtual Pie Party, part deux.

Like Sarah, I just couldn't let the last of the season's peaches at the market pass without one final hurrah. I love late season peaches. There's this one stand in particular that has these beautiful and super sweet giant yellow peaches that only come out late in the season, with the flesh of the peach falling effortlessly off the pit inside. I used these last summer for one of my favorite cakes on this blog, and I've been waiting and waiting for them to show up again since. This peach and lemon verbena pie showcases these peaches perfectly, with a deep dish form so as to stuff as many peaches into a single pie as I could... naturally. :) I've also been itching to use the leaves off my finally-flourishing lemon verbena plant (especially after I managed to kill one already earlier in the summer!), and the touch of lemon verbena lends an incredibly bright and fresh streak to the sweet cooked peaches inside the pie. The crust itself also has a bit of almond flavor thrown in, for an amazing scent fresh out of the oven, and of course I couldn't resist finishing off the thick lattice with an extremely generous sprinkling of turbinado sugar for a crunchy, candy-like top.

Sarah served her peach pies with a side of Ella Fitzgerald playing in the background--a detail that I love and appreciate, especially because my undergraduate honors thesis was all about Ella. But in my current tired and sleep-deprived state, the song that kept popping into my head when I thought of my peach pie was this. Yeah, very cultured. Okay, okay... the next song that popped into my head was at least a little bit higher up on the culture scale: Nina Simone's Four Women ... which, on some level I guess is fitting for this virtual pie party of made up of four women bakers. :) (though this is definitely not what the song is about!) Of course, thinking of Nina Simone led me to think of Rene Marie's "O Nina!" tribute (sorry, couldn't find a recording online), which appears on the same album as one of my favorites. Of course, you can't get me talking about my favorite jazz artists/albums/tracks without mentioning Diana Krall's cover of "A Case of You", Carmen McRae's Great American Songbook (this album is seriously life-changing), and--this is how we get back to Ella--Ella Fitzgerald's Harold Arlen Songbook. Jazz vocalists are a dangerous subject to bring up around me...I could go on and on about this forever and bore everyone here to death!

Hm... somehow I don't think I've been the greatest host of a virtual pie party, prattering on about music instead of pie and blogs and photography. But "quirky" sort of comes with my territory. :) Sarah, Hannah, and Beth: here's to hoping that one day we'll all be able to get together in one place to share pie and coffee and long discussions of music!

(Ack! I realized that this very meandering post turned into a music link fest. Might as well throw this one in there and be done with it. ;P)

Read on for recipe....

Rhubarb Jam Tart and Postcards from Seattle

I've been so horrible about posting regularly, but it's summer and there's this incredibly geeky thing called Diablo III that I've been sort of ...er... preoccupied by. *shifty eyes* I did, however, manage to dig my head out of monster-slashing long enough to make this rhubarb jam tart, which was inspired by my recent BlogHer Food trip to Seattle (p.s. If you haven't read yet seen the recap of our talk, here it is!). But first... a few foodie postcards from the city that sparked my craving of rhubarb jam.....

Seattle is a city that, for me on this trip, was characterized by three things: flowers, coffee, and seafood. These three things were everywhere you turned!, especially in Pike Place Market....

-- for breakfast --

Le Pichet

Macrina Bakery (the cookies!)

Piroshky Piroshky Bakery

Piroshky Piroshky Bakery was a place that I'd read about from Kelly's blog, and we happened to stumble into it our last morning in Seattle when we were following the wafting smells of cinnamony baked goodness from all the way down the street. There, in this teeny tiny shop, the bakers were churning out extremely large numbers of magnificent Russian baked goods pulled fresh from the oven every couple of minutes. We split a poppyseed cinnamon roll that was so hot and gooey and delicious that we had to get back in line for more to bring home to California after we'd finished.

The morning after BlogHer Food ended, Annelies managed to round us up for a brunch at Le Pichet, an adorably French French cafe close to Pike Place Market. Of course, my heart lies with La Note in Berkeley for French breakfasts, but what really stole the show at Le Pichet was when we asked for jam with our bread and butter, the server brought out not the usual strawberry or raspberry preserves but a small ramekin of rhubarb jam. Heaven! *and now cue my obsession with rhubarb jam*

-- for lunch --

Sitka & Spruce

Pike Place Chowder (excellent, excellent chowder - try the salmon one!)

Sitka & Spruce was probably the darling restaurant of BlogHer Food: I think every person I talked to that weekend came here for one meal or another. -- And with good reason, too. The space was frighteningly gorgeous and the food--served family style, so this Asian girl approves--was uncomplicated and deliciously and elegantly put together.

-- for an afternoon stop --

Victrola Coffee Roasters

Since we were in Seattle, we couldn't resist taking part in the local culture and parking ourselves at a coffee house one afternoon for a few hours of work. Victrola's was a perfect spot, with spacious tables, lots of plug space, and some really thoughtful drinks.

-- for dinner --

Crab Pot (for the seafood-crazed)

The Walrus & the Carpenter

Serious Pie (get the root beer--it's wonderfully licorice-y.)

We didn't have any means of personal transportation while we were in Seattle except walking (and forms of public transportation like buses), so we stuck mostly to the city center and places within a few-mile radius.We did manage to make it out to the Fremont and Ballard neighborhoods, though, stumbling on an awesome outdoor market in Fremont by the waterway that was super fun to wander around in. Then, I dragged Anita and Jessi on a two mile walk to The Walrus & the Carpenter in Ballard--a walk for which I'm not sure they've yet forgiven me, since I was in sneakers but both of them were in boots. Thankfully, the Walrus & the Carpenter made up for it, I think! Jessi did most of the oyster eating (I had one, and despite not normally liking the sliminess of oysters, it was really good.), while Anita and I loaded up on the other seafood small plates on the menu. Sardines and tiny spiced prawns = :)!

So despite all of the seafood and flowers, the rhubarb jam at Le Pichet was one of the highlights of the trip, since rhubarb isn't so common in California. (Conversely in Seattle, rhubarb was everywhere! in the markets.) I was just beginning to scheme about getting my hands on enough rhubarb to make my own jam when Kate from Blue Chair Fruit mentioned to me that they had a few jars of rhubarb jam left -- score! And so I whipped up one of the quickest desserts I could as a vessel for delivering rhubarb jam into my mouth: a super simple, crumbly, and nutty rhubarb jam tart, adapted from the blitz linzer torte recipe in Alice Medrich's latest book. In addition to ground almonds, the crust also has a dash of lavender, cardamom, and lemon zest, which adds a sweet complexity alongside the tart rhubarb jam filling. (which is the best characteristic about rhubarb jam: it's not too sweet so you can spoon mouthfuls of it without the toothache. :))

Thank you all who provided recommendations for Seattle eateries! I'm really quite itching to get back to the Pacific Northwest with a car this time so that I can explore some of the wilderness and nature around the area.


Read on for recipe....