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....

Apricot brûlée tart, with thyme and vanilla bean

When my parents came to visit me this past weekend for my birthday, my mom handed me a small paper bag as she walked through the door. Peeking inside, the dim light revealed jewels of glowing, blushing orange at the bottom of the bag: a few, small delicate gems, slightly fuzzy, and nestled amongst large, verdant tree leaves. Apricots! from my parents' tree that stands right outside the kitchen window of my childhood home. Birthday apricots!

You see, these apricots are particularly special because our tree rarely produces much fruit. Most years, what little fruit there is is quickly claimed by squirrels and birds before we humans can get to it. But when we do hit upon a year in which the tree decides to produce more fruit, the apricots are sweeter, juicier, and more delicious than any I've ever tasted in a store. (I have no idea what variety these are....)

While I was growing up, my grandmother would split her time between living in Taiwan and living with us in California, helping take care of her grandchildren on both sides of the Pacific. For some reason, our apricot tree would only produce bountiful amounts of fruit during the years my grandmother was with us--we used to theorize that our tree didn't like us but that it really loved my grandma because she would tend to it much more carefully and diligently than we would. Then, when it bore fruit, my grandmother ingeniously fashioned her own fruit picker stick, out of old fabric and chicken wire, to reach the topmost limbs of the tree. I have memories of looking out our kitchen window and seeing her standing on the patio, reaching for those impossible apricots way out on the edges.

My grandmother

Nowadays, my grandmother can't travel anymore and lives permanently in Taiwan. Every year around June, I always think about our apricot tree, and wonder if it misses my grandma's visits as much as I do. Maybe the tree does (if trees can), because it fruits even less frequently now than it used to, or maybe I'm just too good at projecting emotions onto inanimate objects. (A skill I've acquired no doubt by being an only child who had to grow up with imaginary friends.... I've been told I have an uncanny ability to vocalize for teddy bears.) So whenever the apricot tree does decide to bear fruit, it's always seem to me like a sigh of relief--like, yes, this world is still a happy enough place that magical apricots can appear in bountiful amounts!

[click on photo for larger image]

Even though I'm supposed to be on a self-imposed Dissertation Vacation, in which nothing happens during vacation except the writing of the thesis (also, I've been listening to too much Sarah Vowell), I couldn't resist heading into the kitchen to make something of these rare apricots: an apricot brûlée tart. Since they were already so perfect on their own, I wanted to make something that highlighted the au natural taste of the apricots without doing too much to them, so instead of baking them down in the oven, I put them fresh on top of a cream tart, and lightly brûlée-ed the tops, adding a crunchy, dark caramelization to the apricots. The result is this  fascinating blend of hot and cold, with the crispy caramelized sugar lining a juicy burst of fresh apricot underneath.  As a backdrop, the pastry crust is flaked with thyme, to add an earthy and almost savory counterpart to the sweetness of the apricots. And the tart is filled with vanilla bean pastry cream--vanilla bean instead of extract because of its clean, almost nutty taste that I really adore with apricots. I think my grandmother and our apricot tree would approve!

On another note, how is it July already?!



Read on for recipe....

Chocolate Jam Sandwich Cookies, and more Rome

I really hope you all aren't Italy-out-ed yet--I promise that I'm coming to the end of my Italy trip photos! It just seemed that breaking them up into individual 'stories' made for the best approach so as not to overload a single blog post. And I really like the process of coming up with cohesive visual stories/essays and accompanying recipes to present. It's the academic in me. :)

Here was the first portrait of Rome from a few weeks ago, a story of alleyways and the reds, pinks, and oranges of the external face of the city. Today, this portrait of Rome is about its internal treasures, the blues and golds and the history that seeps from the corners and shadows.

[inside Ancient Rome]

Literally outside our door in Travestere, we discovered an ah-mazing pastry shop -- Biscottificio Innocenti -- that we became obsessed with. And by "obsessed," I seriously mean obsessed. All of the pastries are sold by weight there, and over the course of the week between the three of us traveling together, we polished off a neat 4.5 POUNDS (that's 2 kilos!) of cookies. Yes, we were obsessed. (Thank goodness for all the walking we did in Rome--we needed it between the cookies and the constant gelato!) Note also that this does not include the crostata slices that we kept getting, too!

There were so, so many different types of cookies at Biscottificio Innocenti. Many were based around a basic shortbread and then either slathered in jam, studded with cherries, sprinkled with sugars, or dipped in a soft, yielding chocolate ganache. My favorite one, I quickly discovered, were these small sandwich cookies that had it all: apricot-apple marmalade in between the buttery shortbread cookies, half-dipped into chocolate. Marmalade! Cookie! Chocolate! All in one satisfying bite--what more really do you want?

(Also! The proprietress's name is Stefania! What are the odds of that?! Because she loaded us up with so many buttery and sugary treats, she quickly became one of our favorite people in all of Rome.)

[inside Il Vaticano. Top to bottom: the Egyptian exhibit; a room based on the Pantheon; the ridiculously gaudy ceiling of the map room; the Sistine Chapel; the famous Vatican staircase. Last two photos: inside Santa Maria church in Trastevere; the Tiber]

After the insane number of cookies we ended up consuming, we all felt a bit of withdrawal suddenly getting cut off from our source when we came home from Italy, so I set out trying to concoct my own version of chocolate-dipped jam sandwich cookies. The Italian kind from Innocenti were good because the cookies themselves weren't too sweet, which allowed for a sweeter but very thin layer of jam inside. For my version, I used a sweet apricot-orange jam from my favorite local jam company (yay, Blue Chair!), and dipped the shortbread into a dark chocolate ganache. The ganache firms up just enough after an hour or two so that you can safely eat the cookies without dripping chocolate everywhere, but because it's a ganache, the chocolate gives as soon as you bite into it, almost like it's melting into the buttery shortbread inside. Mmmmmm... a piece of Italy in my own kitchen. :)

[click on photo for a larger image]

If you missed any of my previous Italy trip posts, I encourage you to go back and catch up:

Rome, part I

the Amalfi Coast

P.S. If anyone happens to know what these cookies are called in Italian, I would love to know! I managed to learn the names of a few types of cookies, but the name of these still eludes me.

Read on for recipe....

Apricot Plum Crisp with Maple Nut Froyo

As my parents get older, I worry more and more about their future health.  My family has never been a very active one.  While my mom spends most of her days on her feet at her hospital job, my dad works in an office and has been sitting for a good portion of his life.  Aside from my ballet dancing when I was younger, exercise was always an "Event" in our family rather than a daily routine--to exercise, my parents would drive us forty-five minutes to this reservoir to walk a mile or two.  (Arguably not the most efficient way to exercise!) And, all of us in my nuclear family have a soft spot for ice cream.  So... statistically speaking, this does not bode well for any of our health(s) in the future!

So this year, for my dad's birthday (and Father's Day), I decided to reinvent his favorite birthday dessert that I make him every year into something healthier.  He adores maple nut ice cream, and so this time around, I came up with a maple nut frozen yogurt, accompanied by an apricot, plum, oat, and buckwheat crisp.  The frozen yogurt is made with 2% fat Greek yogurt--still thick and creamy, but without the actual heavy cream, milk, and eggs.  The only sugar in the frozen yogurt comes from the maple syrup, which is pretty much unavoidable when you're making maple nut ice cream. :-)  As for the crisp, my family likes tart and not-too-sweet desserts, so the filling of apricots and plums really relies on natural sweetness in the fruit, with only a bit of sugar sprinkled in.  The crisp topping is made with equal amounts of butter and thick yogurt to help cut down on the amount of butter needed--an idea that I 'borrowed' from 101 cookbooks.  The topping is also made with no gluten--just oats and buckwheat flour, both of which add a natural nutty sweetness to the crisp.

Even though this dessert was waaaaaaay healthier than my dad's normal birthday fare, it worked out really deliciously.  The slight tang of the yogurt went perfectly with the sweet maple syrup in the maple nut froyo, and the crisp was bursting with juicy goodness, which mixed so well with the melting nutty froyo scooped on top--all in all, I deem this Healthy Dessert Success.

Anyone have any favorite healthy dessert tips to share?  I of course remain very much committed to heavy cream and butter, but it's always good to explore the options!


Read on for recipe...

Apricot and Blackberry-Marzipan Hamantaschen

Hamantaschen!  Oh man, it seriously took me a week to learn how to say and spell the name of these cookies correctly.  The first time I told my roommate I was going to make hamantaschen, it came out something like "hama-stor-stat-tatch-tashen."  To which her bewildered response was a..."wha?  Are you trying to speak German?!"

Anyways, regardless of difficulty for me to wrap my apparently failing linguistic skills around, these cookies are delicious nonetheless.  And they are related in part to a German word, so I wasn't so far off, right?  Right?

The first I'd ever heard of these little triangular cookies was from my friend Starr, who started telling me about them at the beginning of last week.  Then, once I knew about them, I couldn't stop seeing them everywhere--they were in the coffee shop I went to to do work, they were in the supermarkets, they were all over the internets--even though I had never noticed them before.  Does anyone else ever do that, like notice how many other people seem to have your car?  So when Starr mentioned that she wanted to try her hand at making hamantaschen, I jumped at the chance to try them out.

It turns out that the cookies are pretty awesome and simple, a shortcrust pastry-like cookie on the outside with different sorts of jam or paste fillings inside.  Poppyseed and prune are two traditional flavors, I think, as is apricot, but, like any sort of filling-cookie combo, I couldn't help but get really excited to see what else I could stuff inside the cookies instead.  Starr and I ended up making four different flavors of hamantaschen, but these were the two that we liked the best: a more traditional dried apricot quick jam filling and a more non-traditional blackberry preserve and marzipan filling.  The apricot jam was deliciously tart, made from dried California apricots that are supposedly tart-er than their Turkish counterparts, and packed with juicy, fruity flavor, and the tartness was the perfect accent against the sweet crust of the cookies.  In the blackberry-marzipan hamantaschen, the almond paste melded beautifully with the pastry outsides for a rich, nutty center top with seedy berry preserves.  Starr mentioned that these looked reminiscent of the prune-flavored hamantaschen, but in my opinion, I'll take marzipan and blackberry over prune any day.  :-)

On that note, Happy belated Purim to everyone!  Make sure to grab a hamantaschen on your way to the recipe....

(and yes, I'm still working on pronouncing "Purim" correctly, too.)

(P.S.  In case you were wondering, the other two flavors we tried were poppyseed and mascarpone-fig.)

[Edit:  Upon eating these, Starr's husband, Alan, broke out into spontaneous song.  To the tune of Frere Jacques:

Hamantaschen, hamantaschen

I eat you, I eat you

You are very tasty, you are very tasty

nom nom nom, nom nom nom

Thanks, Alan!  :-)]

Read on for recipe...

Apricot Pistachio Chocolate Mousse Tartlets

Last week, I promised more stone fruit, and here they are!  Apricots!  Apricots always remind me of my grandparents because when my grandpa and grandma would tend the wonderful apricot tree in our backyard, it would bear the most amazing fruit in the largest quantities you've ever seen for us.  We'd have more apricots that we could ever imagine what to do with, and my mom would futilely try to stuff the ones that we couldn't eat into our already over-packed freezer. (Yeah, apricots never taste quite as good after they've been frozen.)  Too bad that I didn't bake back then or else I would have made this: apricot pistachio chocolate mousse tartlets. 

There's something about the chillier nights that we've been having lately that really had me craving a dessert more substantial than a simple apricot tart (though there is absolutely nothing wrong with a simple apricot + pastry tart!).  I wanted something darker and more robust (I think this goes along with me being a very mood-oriented baker)--hence, enter the dark chocolate mousse and the layer of velvety dark chocolate painted on the bottom of each pistachio tart shell.

Years ago when I first started learning about cooking and watching the Food Network religiously, I, for some reason, came to think of mousse as this ridiculously difficult dessert to make and avoided it because of that, but in actuality, as I discovered a few years later, it's super simple, especially with chocolate mousse!  The mousse filling for this tart is adapted from a chocolate mousse recipe out of my chocolate bible, and the hardest part is just folding the cooled chocolate custard into the whipped cream--but even that is hard to screw up, I promise.  Then, the chocolate does all of the setting work in the fridge with no fuss required.

The tartlet crusts here are flavored with a hint of ground pistachio, just enough to give the crust a bite of nuttiness and earthiness.  They turn out with the faintest trace of green if you squint your eyes and look really closely for it, but I love that they aren't the bright, in-your-face-food-dyed-unnatural green pistachio you sometimes see.  Then, the rich creaminess and smoothness of the dark chocolate mousse is perfectly off-set by the almost-crispy, fresh, and mildly sweet apricot slices on top--I try to pile and stack as many of them as tightly as I can on top, because I like to have as much fruit as possible.  Finally, a sprinkling of roughly chopped and toasted pistachios hint at the flavor in the tart crust, amidst all of that fruit and dark chocolate.

My serving suggestion for this tart would be to pair it with a nice, light dinner, as summery as you could possibly go (I opted for Vietnamese spring rolls), because this tart is so rich and hearty that you'll want to save most of your stomach for it--and a dark, straight-up black tea to go along.

Read on for recipe...

PotW: Whole wheat pancakes with almond fruit and mascarpone cream

I don't know if anyone else gets this, but sometimes, there are just certain foods that you tend to cook with certain people.  And, for my awesome Icelandic roommate, Maria, and I, it's grilled cheese sandwiches and pancakes.  We've gone through several incarnations of pancakes already, and there's nothing more I look forward to on a Saturday morning than to wake up to the newest version of pancakes that we can think and cook up.  So, I'm starting a new weekly feature here on Desserts for Breakfast: the Pancake of the Week  (aka: PotW), since pancakes are, after all, a dessert.  :-).

[last week's PotW: vanilla pancakes with white peaches, caramelized brown sugar, and ricotta cheese]

This week, we had some leftover almond-berry-stone fruit mix from the night before, so we decided to concoct something that would complement this last hurrah of summer fruits:

Whole wheat pancakes

with summer fruit - almond mix

and almond mascarpone whipped cream

The whole wheat pancakes here aren't very sweet, so they were the perfect accompaniment to the summer fruits and mascarpone whipped cream.  And, the slight almond flavoring in the whipped cream went well with the slivered almonds in the fruit.  All in all, definitely a good send-off of summer fruits... looking forward to fall!

For the recipe, read on.