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...

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....

Grapefruit Rosemary Olive Oil Cake

This is my belated Valentine's Day dessert entry (so shoot me, I'm a horrible blogger, always posting desserts after the actual occasion. :)). I got so tired this year of seeing the annual flood of horribly saccharine pink and white desserts unleashed on the internet around February 13. I'm not even quite sure what particularly prompted my annoyance this year, given that I usually relish this holiday (and, as evidence, this blog is full of wonderfully pink Valentine's Day desserts).... Let's chalk it up to to the Grumps that come with old age for now! ;)

Instead, I wanted to represent love in its complex glory, beyond whatever pink, fluffy, on-the-surface feel-goodness that we so often idealize it to be. Anyone who's ever loved someone else before--be it your family or friends or significant others (so this is basically everyone, I'd think)--can probably agree that love is at once sweet and savory and simple and complicated and bitter and tart and dense and light and fragrant all together. Love can simultaneously cause delirious joy and be cripplingly and forcibly painful (okay, not that this cake is painful, but you get my drift), and it goes down so much more easily in my experience with a nice, strong, delicate cup of hot tea (or a nice, strong bear hug, whichever one you can get at the time!). And, the oddest, most curious thing about love is that, despite all of its convoluted manifestations, it is the one emotion that somehow manages to provide enough hope to make life worth living. This is what I thought I should be celebrating on February 14.

So here it is, this year's Valentine's love cake: a grapefruit and rosemary olive oil cake. Thanks to the olive oil, the cake is just so in terms of balancing heft and moisture with airy-ness and fluff. The grapefruit provides a hint of citrus and some bite from the zest but also, at the same time, the grapefruit gives the cake a dash of bitterness--just like a strong marmalade--that you wouldn't normally find in an orange- or lemon-based cake. The bitterness is quite well offset by the light glaze of sugar syrup brushed on right after the cake comes hot out of the oven and by the copious amounts of powdered sugar topping that one should serve the cake with. Finally, the rosemary really rounds out the flavor, with just enough complexity to keep an otherwise simple and straightforward cake nicely interesting.

In other news, things have been quite busy at work, hence the sad, neglected state of my kitchen and studio lately. Sigh. It's come to that point in time in one's graduate school career when you don't really quite know what's going to happen next: it's a stressful way to live, and I'm terribly eager to figure it all out soon. I'm so thankful that I have this blog to escape to when I need it. Thank you, readers, and happy belated Valentine's! ❤.

(P.S. In the spirit of multi-tasking, which seems to be the story of my life these days, this cake is also partially inspired by Lunar New Year's, what with the citrus and all representing prosperity. :))
(P.P.S. This song seems like a fitting soundtrack for this post.)

Read on for recipe....

Fresh Squeezed for Anthology Magazine

For all you who are suffering desserts for breakfast withdrawal, there are THREE! citrus-inspired recipes of mine in the new 2012 Anthology Magazine Gift Guide released today. :D! I'm so thrilled to have contributed to the gift guide, especially since I spend many a long hours drooling through the uber-clean and beautifully designed pages of Anthology whenever it hits the shelves.

The recipes include Meyer Lemon Snow Balls (a lemony spin on one of my favorite holiday cookies that my mom made when I was little), Orange Rosemary Bundt Cakes with Dark Chocolate Glaze (something sophisticated to eat by the fireplace while watching the Christmas lights sparkle on the tree), and a Winter Citrus and White Chocolate Tart (a super easy and gluten-free wow-factor dessert for the holiday table!).

Happy Friday, everyone!

Almond and Stanford Citrus Marmalade Crostata

It is surely one of the laws of the universe that grad students are the only people who inhabit campus 365 days a year, even over the holidays, and even during that vacation week between Christmas and New Year's. But, you know? I don't care. Because this means that I had first dibs to the bountiful citrus harvest from the trees on campus this year! Haha, suckers! So the lesson? When life gives you lemons and forces you to work over Christmas break...   ....make marmalade! :D

I don't often say a lot of nice things about Stanford (after all, I have to maintain allegiance to my undergraduate alma mater--Go Bears!), but one thing I'll give it is the wonderful plethora of fruit trees on campus (plus, I would be hesitant to eat anything out of Berkeley trees, for I've heard those stories of toxic waste run-off in the creek!). In the corner where the history department is located on the Stanford campus sit loads and loads of citrus trees, with branches brimming full of white grapefruits! and oranges of all types! and lemons! Usually, when classes are in session, the low-hanging fruit gets picked off pretty quickly, but during the winter break, far more fruit remains in reach. So when two good friends (incidentally, from my undergraduate days at Berkeley) came to visit after Christmas, we made sure to go and plunder the Citrus Corner to our hearts' content.

With the resulting pounds upon pounds of random citrus fruits I ended up with on my kitchen table, I figured that the only course of action was to make marmalade--a Stanford citrus marmalade, to be exact--so that none of the fruit would go to waste waiting for me to eat it all. ... of course, then I had to figure out what to do with the resulting jars upon jars of the at once sweet and bitter but delicious through-and-through marmalade I ended up with after that. :)

Enter the almond and citrus marmalade crostata. For some reason, I used to be unconvinced that jam could make a robust-enough filling for a tart, eschewing it in favor of other types of tart fillings, like cream or even plain candied oranges. But then, at a recent Blue Chair Fruit event, I had my first encounter with a jam-filled crostata (an Italian-style tart). The nutty, substantially thicker, crumbly crust and the tightly-woven lattice top of a crostata, it turns out, make the perfect vessel for a thin but flavorful layer of sweet jam--better, in my opinion, than your average, more delicate pate sucree-style tart crust. Armed with my jars of marmalade, I jumped at the chance to try a crostata again, this time with the slightly bitter filling of the Stanford citrus marmalade.

I have to say that I think I prefer the marmalade version to a berry-based jam crostata, mainly because the sharp tangs of bitterness in the citrus punctuate the sweetness of the marmalade and almond buttery-ness in the crust. And, I also really liked the chewy chunks of candied citrus peel in the marmalade that texturally lend the tart a bit of bite every now and then. To serve, pair the crostata with some tea that has a spoonful of citrus marmalade mixed in for good measure. :)

Who says grad students can't have (delicious) fun over winter break?


Read on for recipe....

Lessons from 2010, and Grapefruit-White Chocolate Macarons

While I'm not the biggest believer in new year resolutions, I am a big believer in taking time at the end of each year to think about what's happened and what I've learned.  This year, 2010, was, for me, one of those incredible years in which so much happens and so much changes--one of those years in which nothing goes according to plan and the universe throws literally everything it can think of at you.  But, all of it, in the end, turned out for the best (I think!), and I've taken quite a few important lessons to heart along the way, which I hope you don't mind that I share here.  (And, I'd love to hear what you've learned in 2010 in the comments below!)

Lesson 1.  It's important to be scared.

One of the major changes that happened this year was that I switched from my original and intended field of study in school to a different one altogether, basically upsetting every plan I'd ever made for myself within linguistics.  When I confessed to one of my advisors how deathly scared I am of being in this new field, she calmly said to me, "Being scared is good for you, Stephanie. You need it."

My advisor, as usual, was completely right.  Being scared really kicked my once-lazy butt into gear.  And, having to constantly face up to and overcome things that scare me taught me that, when I put my mind to it, nothing is insurmountable, even if it may seem that way initially.  Sure, I'm still pretty terrified about my new position in linguistics, but the important thing is that I'm not petrified by it.

Lesson 2.  Hard work pays off.

Growing up, my mom always accused me of skating by on "talent," that I never worked hard for anything I did.  And I can admit now that she was right.  But lacking "talent" in this new field of study I'm in, having to play catch-up this late in my graduate career, and being plain ol' scared forced me to work harder this year than I've ever, ever worked before.  (Side effect, though: sleeping less than I've ever, ever slept before...!)  Practice and dedication, it turns out, can make up for a lot.

For example, at the beginning of one of my school terms this year, I remember being so afraid and so intimated by this one professor that I seriously considered dropping out of her workshop because I thought that I just didn't know enough about the topic to keep going.  Thankfully I didn't, because by the end of the term, I'd learned and practiced so much that I could carry on a proper and in-depth conversation on the topic with the professor and offer insights that she hadn't thought of!  That was one of the best and exciting moments of 2010 for me--realizing that through all of the late nights and painful work, I'd actually improved!

Lesson 3.  Be super thankful for the people around you.

I would have never, ever gotten through the vicissitudes of 2010 if it weren't for the incredible support of those around me.  At every point throughout the year when things took a turn for the worst, someone always stepped in to help me out of it, making me realize how unspeakably lucky I am to have an invaluable support structure to lean on when I need it most.  Now more than ever, I am appreciative of people who have faith in me even when I don't: just knowing that someone out there believes in me forces me to work harder and try to live up to that expectation.  It's the one of the best motivators!  (On a related note, never let nay-sayers get you down, either!)

For the final recipe of 2010, I really wanted to make macarons because they represent to me a perfect embodiment of the lessons that I've learned this year.  I started out 2010 making successful macarons before I had read very much about them.  Then, as I started reading more and more about macarons and hearing about how fickle they are, they became incredibly intimidating to me.  Suddenly, every batch that I pulled out of the oven was a huge failure--cracked tops, sunken tops, lack of feet, under-baked, completely brown--you name it, it happened.  Finally, I just gave up and stopped making macs altogether.

One day, I realized how foolish it was of me to completely abandon macaron making just because I was scared of them, and I decided that I would make macarons and only macarons until I got them perfect again.  It turns out that what happened was that I'd memorized the recipe wrong, (stupidly) placing the rack in the wrong section of the oven, but even after I figured that out, I kept practicing batch after batch until the macaron shells came out consistently and to my liking.  And now, I can make macarons.

These grapefruit and white chocolate macarons (grapefruit shells with white chocolate buttercream and grapefruit curd) are for you all--a little tart and sweet (just like 2010 was) to accompany your midnight flutes of champagne--as a thank you for all of the support that you've given me on the blog this year!  It's truly been an extraordinary year, and knowing that there are people out there that I can share my love of desserts with (even virtually) is always a comfort for me and makes me so happy!  :-D!  So, thank you!  and Happy New Year to everyone!  May 2011 bring us even more valuable lessons--and more importantly, even more delicious sweets and eats!

--Addendum--

In 2010, I...

visited Baltimore.

had my first photography exhibit.

stayed in the Northern California redwoods--one of my favorite places on earth--for a week.

ate rhubarb for the first time.

met hosts of fabulous food lovers.

was cited for the first time in an academic journal.

made two wedding cakes.

went to Los Angeles to visit one of my best friends--twice!

took a photo-walk at Monterey Bay Aquarium.

wrote roughly 2600+ tweets.

had so many wonderful friends over for dinner and dessert.

submitted my first academic article for review.

had finger surgery.

attended two schools.

went to Bouchon and Tartine bakeries.

posted 12 different pancake recipes.

had Korean fried chicken to celebrate Hanukkah.

Read on for recipe...