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...

Blackout Chocolate Birthday Cake

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I don't find myself with much time to make huge celebration cakes very often anymore these days, but I did put this one together for a friend's birthday over the summer. The only thing I knew about his dessert preferences was that he loves chocolate, because every time we'd go walking their dogs, he'd order a chocolate sundae with chocolate brownie pieces and more chocolate fudge on top at the local ice cream stop. So, hence the invention of what I deemed, the true blackout chocolate birthday cake. Like this one, with moist black chocolate layers of cake and dark chocolate fudge frosting and embedded chocolate chips and cacao nib brittle on top, is truly a sentence of death by chocolate. Everyone needed milk, but it was glorious.

In other notes, I've been finding myself avoiding blogging recently, mostly because time constraints on the tenure track keep me from "perfecting" blog posts. Sure, I've still been cooking and making fantastical desserts, but I haven't had time to write down recipes and create picture-perfect set-ups with brand new props and mood lighting each time. In fact, I've just been living and cooking in real life. Which is kind of a refreshing change of pace. It's freeing, to cook creatively and spontaneously without having to note down every minutiae, but I miss the blogging aspect, the interacting and sharing with you all part.

So here it is, the start of a new chapter in the blog: the imperfect chapter. This is now going to be Desserts for breakfast: the notebook, the journal, the not overly-crafted diary. There aren't going to be perfectly written recipes. Instead, I'm going to share a glimpse into how I normally write down recipes for myself: jotted notes, lists of ingredients. Because cooking ultimately shouldn't be about following a recipe to a t. Cooking should be about following such finely-honed instincts that you have about flavors and textures and tastes to make a recipe your own. And then sharing it with others.

So sorry but I'm not sorry for the casual tone this blog is going to take on from here on out. It's going to be this way because blogs, like everything else, need to evolve. To grow. To develop. And so this is the phase in Desserts for breakfast life where we learn to love the imperfections. Where I learn to share just because that's how people connect. Where I figure out how to live parts of my life contently, to value what's in front of me, rather than always trying to make every action serve some purpose of getting ahead. Because there's enough of that rat race for my career. And dessert should just be about dessert.

Matcha Green Tea & Meyer Lemon Mochi Cake

Dear DfB readers,

It has been so long! I've missed wishing you a Happy 2015, and an entire month has already flown by of this new year, faster than we can even inhale a piece of cake. It's February already. Goodness gracious.

You guys, tenure track is no joke. It's always so funny to hear that undergrads think that our jobs just involve showing up to lecture and teaching them. Maybe holding some office hours, too. Bwahahaha. Allow me to set the record straight right now. Teaching is about, like, 20% of our jobs. The other 80% is filled with research, grant-writing (and grant-crying when you get rejected), service to run the department, the university, other teaching duties like proposing and evaluating new classes, majors, minors, degree programs. Oh, did I mention the research? That's what really matters. Publish or perish, folks. It's real.

So yeah, sorry, blog. Any energies to write and think have largely been sucked into academic writing. Hours and days are now measured by the yardstick of, "is this time that I would make a cake better spent writing a few pages of that overdue paper?" The answer is... nearly invariably, yes.

But, let's not talk about all that for today. Let's talk about fun, yummy news today! Let's take a brief reprieve from the crush of tenure track and academia, and talk about beautiful, delicious, happy moments of sugar and fruit. Of friends and tea. For you all today, I have some extraordinarily exciting news: a cookbook shot by yours truly and written by Annelies Zijderveld all about cooking with tea is coming to a bookstore near you!!! STEEPED: Recipes infused with tea is coming in April!!!

^ There it is! The physical, advanced copy of STEEPED. In all of its beautiful, printed glory. During the summer, between moving cities, and ending grad school, and starting professor-hood, Annelies and I hunkered down in my old studio space for one final hurrah there. Over the course of three weeks, Annelies cooked up a storm downstairs in my kitchen with her wondrously creative recipes using tea in all different ways, and I snapped away upstairs, styling food, dipping my fingers in everything to try, wading through a room full of props (more linens and plates and forks than Downton Abbey likely has), racing sun and light ... to produce the photos for her book. I'm so thankful to Annelies for her amazingly collaborative spirit, entrusting me with the huge job of translating her mind's eye vision in her words to the visual world, making her recipes come alive on the page. I hope I did her food justice. And, if I may sound ever so proud, the final book is quite gorgeous. ^^

When our advance copies of the book arrived in the mail, Annelies and I got together for an afternoon to celebrate (and to make some promo photos). Upon hearing that I'd basically been shut up in my ivory tower headspace for the past several months, Annelies insisted that I take the afternoon and make a cake. I've been so obsessed with matcha lately--ever since shooting the book, and also since going to this cafe in Portland, which specializes in matcha tea lattes--and have been fantasizing about making a matcha mochi cake for the upcoming Chinese New Years'. At the same time, my meyer lemon tree has been bursting with fruit, and stares at me forlornly through the window every day because I haven't had time to go harvest it. So, I at last picked off some of the lemons for some matcha cake.

The result: a matcha green tea and meyer lemon mochi cake, which I like thinking of as a preview of the spring!, embodied in cake form. The luminous candied meyer lemons--just ever-so-slightly carmelized on the edges from baking--meld into this earthy, chewy, layer of grassy matcha mochi cake. It's a cake with such a satisfying, toothsome texture. There's nothing crumbly or fluffy here. Instead, it's dense mochi that seems almost paradoxically light-hearted from the brightness of the matcha and meyer lemon flavors.

I know things have been too quiet on this blog lately, but at least, thanks to Annelies, I have this wonderful news about the book to share, and a cake recipe for you, just in time to wish everyone a Happy Lunar New Year! See? I didn't miss New Year's after all.

GO PRE-ORDER STEEPED!

More sneak previews from the book coming soon, I promise.

Read on for recipe...

Vanilla Bean and Thyme Madeleines

Madeleines are one of my favorite ways to have cake: they're shaped like cookies, which makes them like a portable version of a cake, and they're so toothsome and fluffy, all at once. I realized recently to my surprise that I have never actually posted a madeleine recipe publicly before, even though I've been making them for years and years! So, for my Anthology Magazine Blog post this month, I decided that this situation must be remedied.

I've made madeleines in so many different flavors before--saffron, berry, pumpkin, etc. etc.--but for my first public post, I wanted to go with something much more classic. Because sometimes, you don't have to mess with a good thing. So here they are: vanilla bean and thyme madeleines. My base recipe also uses a bit of coconut oil, for just a hint of floral aroma from the coconut underlying the cake. You can find the recipe on the Anthology Blog here. (All blog posts that have Anthology recipes will be updated one month after the initial posting with the recipe here on desserts for breakfast.)

My favorite moment with these madeleines is when I took a box of them into work, and offered one to a particularly prominent scientist in my department. While most people focus on the pretty, scalloped side of madeleines (versus the humpy backside -- which reminds me, this would be my totally non-classy theme song for madeleines :P), my colleague took a madeleine and flipped it scalloped side down. Holding it sideways, he looked at me with a smile and said, "Look! it's like a little boat! Toot toot!" while scooting the madeleine over imaginary waves. When I grow up, I want to maintain that sort of child-like playfulness in creativity and imagination!

Also, I picked these "wild" roses from my backyard. I sort of love how delicately imperfect they were, so fragrant but at the same time, completely fleeting in their beauty.

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In a few weeks, I'm headed to Hawai'i (Oahu and Kauai), ostensibly for a work-related conference! I am. so. excited. If you have any recommendations for places to see or eat on those islands, please leave them in the comments below! Thank you!

A Citrus Dessert Re-issue

It was brought to my attention by a reader recently that (sadly) the recipes that I did for Anthology's Holiday Gift Guide a year or so are no longer online! So, I'm re-issuing them here in a more permanent home on the blog. Even though it's not the holidays anymore, citrus season is still going strong, so maybe these recipes will get some love this year after all. And if not this year, there's always bookmarks! ;)

Below are three recipes, based around a few of my favorite citrus fruits: orange rosemary bundt cakes with dark chocolate glaze, meyer lemon pecan cookies, and a blood orange-grapefruit white chocolate tart (gluten-free!). Grab your citrus squeezer and zester, and let's go!

Read on for recipes...

Passionfruit & Red Bean New Year's Cake

Life has been extraordinarily hectic as of late. I feel like (actually, I know) I spend more time on airplanes, in the car, or in the office these days than at home or in the kitchen or behind the camera. But I'm busy with things I love, so I don't mind that most of the time, I feel like I've been treading water nonstop in an attempt to keep from drowning in the deep end of the pool. As long as my nose stays above the water, I'm good. And it helps that I like the water. (I'm a water Zodiac sign, after all. :))

Then, there are these rare, glistening moments of calm in between. Extraordinarily rare, but they're like such a gulp of fresh air when they happen, as if someone has temporarily thrown me a flotation ring to hang onto. Like this one rainy Sunday a few weeks ago, when I was at a friend's house for lunch. You know what happens when you get three friends together who have a love a desserts? Impromptu dessert bar. For lunch. Cause that's just how we roll.

I brought a passionfruit and adzuki red bean Chinese New Year's Cake (gluten-free, pictured above, recipe below), and some poached, vanilla-scented, late season quince that were cooked to just a touch of pink. My friend, Rob (of dessert tour fame), showed up with a bagful of goodies from Tartine Bakery: banana creme pie, lemon-poppyseed almond cake (my personal favorite), chocolate hazelnut tart, and meringues. And my friend who was hosting the lunch busted out these beautifully wrapped gold-bar nuggets of hazelnut chocolates that she was recently sent from Switzerland (because, you know, it pays to have foodie friends in foreign places). Yes, I know, it's excessive to have a dessert bar so extravagant for a lunch that consisted of only four people total, but hey, you know what they say: work hard, play eat desserts harder!

Recipe for the passionfruit & red bean cake follows. It's my modern spin on my mom's old family recipe for baked New Year's Cake that is one of my favorite things she makes. It's satisfyingly mochi-chewy, and the pop of passionfruit brightens the whole cake like bursting, exotic streak of sunshine. (Oh goodness, excuse the cliches, I don't get much sleep these days!)

Read on for recipe....

Grapefruit raspberry flourless chocolate cake

So many changes have been happening behind the scenes here at DfB that I've been waiting and waiting to have time to properly write about, but alas--that is all going to have to wait again for another post. Today, however, I'm being a good blogger: here's a recipe for Valentine's Day (or, you know, any day). And uncharacteristically, I'm actually posting it before Valentine's Day has already come and gone. Ah, #thelittlevictories.

This is a (gluten-free) recipe that I developed for my monthly Anthology Magazine Blog partnership (past posts for Anthology can be found here and here). Lately, I've been finding the desserts I make to be more and more maximalist (like this set of miniature quar-tarts that I never managed to post here). Maybe it's because I find myself with so little time in the kitchen these days that when I do go and design a dessert, I feel as though it has to, you know, somehow encompass the whole world. All this of course goes against my very nature of wanting to practice restraint with desserts--too much, after all, is too much. So I'm always really thankful when my time to design a recipe for Anthology rolls around each month. Given Anthology's wonderfully restrained nature, it's the perfect external force to require me to strip down my flavor instincts to the bare beauty of "simple" complexity, to let the bold flavors of a few carefully picked ingredients shine on their own. Anyways, click through to Anthology for the recipe, more description about the recipe, and more photos.

In the meantime, I'm really hoping to be able to steal some time somewhere to wrap up 2013 and talk about all of the big changes that have been going on already in the short time that has been 2014. Hopefully soon!

Read on for recipe....