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...

Peanut Butter Jelly Ice Cream Sandwiches, with Rosemary and Marionberry

This post has something of an odd musical soundtrack. First off, just to get it out of my system is this "song", which I cannot for the life of me get out of my head ever since I started thinking about peanut butter.

To understand why peanut butter's been on my mind, I have to rewind the story to this music, which started it all: the Mendelssohn piano trio, no. 1 in d minor. I first heard this piece when I was at that young impressionable age when you want to do everything your older siblings are doing. Every morning at 6am during middle school, I would wake up to the sounds of my older cousin (who grew up with me, like a sister) practicing the piano part--the arpeggiated d minor chord in the opening was my alarm clock. It became so internalized that without even seeing the music, I found that I could play the first few pages of the piece, too.

Suffice it to say that I fell in love with the Mendelssohn. I once convinced my cousin to let me turn pages for her in one of the concerts in which she performed the piece, and I would just sit, completely mesmerized by the gorgeous dark tones of the cello melody and the hanging high A of the violin in a dramatic mid-movement pause, nearly forgetting to actually turn the pages! (She never asked me to turn pages for her again....) But the sticking point was that I've never actually had the opportunity to play the piece myself. For some reason, my musical path took me into jazz and percussion, and I never got to do chamber music with classical piano when I was still playing seriously.

In early graduate school, I did get the chance to do some classical chamber music (the Brahms horn trio, namely), but the Mendelssohn eluded me still--I never seemed to know quite the right combination of people to make up the instrumentation. Until one day, I discovered that my friend Rob plays cello. (the same Rob from the SF Dessert Day! --Apparently, some people just never broadcast their talents, sigh.)

Long story short, at long, long last, I got to play the Mendelssohn! And let me tell you--the experience was so divine. On violin, we had another linguist (whom I played with a few years ago). And to finally hear the two string parts after years of only being able to hear myself play the lonely piano part--to hear the gestalt--was amazing, like the universe was being made whole again. (not that we played it anywhere near perfectly. I missed probably a good 35% of the notes!, but still!)

Anyways, we're getting to the peanut butter. I invited everyone to stay after we'd played for dinner to celebrate. It turns out that Rob's favorite dessert flavor is peanut butter, which, despite my love of Americana, is just one all-American ingredient that I've never really gotten into. So I wracked my brain for a good week or so trying to reconcile the strong, sometimes-overpowering flavor of peanut butter with the type of desserts I like to make: something sophisticated, subtle, many-layered. What I came up with was my play on PB&J sandwiches: a peanut butter jelly ice cream sandwich, made with rosemary-peanut butter cookies and peanut milk + marionberry swirl ice cream.

Peanut butter cookies are something of a classic, and I found that the rosemary really helps lend some complexity to the cookie, with just an extra hint of something special peeking through the peanut butter nuttiness at the end. These cookies are chewy and hit with a dash of turbinado sugar and smoked sea salt right before baking for a bit more sophisticated oomph.

For the ice cream, I took inspiration from a visit last summer to State Bird Provisions, where they serve this peanut milk drink with dessert. I wanted something that wasn't so boisterously PEANUT BUTTER!-y, and peanut milk--made by steeping peanuts and vanilla in milk overnight--was the perfect solution. The ice cream ends up with this smooth and softly subtle nutty flavor and a beautiful golden cream color. It was incredibly lucky that I happened to stumble upon freshly-made marionberry preserves at the local market the day I shopped for peanut butter because it made a great mix-in for the ice cream: sweet and dark and wonderfully purple. Blackberry jam would probably work just as well, if you don't serendipitously happen upon marionberry preserves. :)

Along with the PB&J ice cream sandwiches, this was our menu that evening:

Tartine's walnut bread

with brie and Seville orange marmalade

goddess salad

romaine, Point Reyes blue cheese, cherry tomatoes, roasted cacao nibs, and avocado-creme fraiche green goddess dressing

beets in apricot marmalade

with goat cheese

curried roasted carrots

pizza

#1: chipotle bbq chicken with apricots, smoked gouda, red onion, avocado

#2: margherita

grapefruit-blood orange soda

ginger-lime soda

apple cider

PB&J ice cream sandwiches

Given how prevalent peanut butter is as a dessert ingredient, it's funny that it's taken me so many years to actually post a peanut butter-related dessert on the blog. But, I think I just needed time to get it right--to find the right combination and to make it my own. I guess that's just how life works sometimes, like with the Mendelssohn, too: it took a lot of years for me to finally get to play the piece, but when I did, it was with a couple of my favorite people, and it was just right.


Read on for recipes...

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....

Plum, Rosemary, and Brandy Cakes

Autumn denial again. Knowing plums would very soon disappear from the markets, I of course woke up on Sunday morning with a mad craving for plums... and plum cake. So I managed to scavenge a few good specimens from the couple of vendors at the market still left who were selling plums (most of the market has now moved onto grapes!), and set about to make a good, simple plum cake for Sunday/Monday morning breakfasts. ..."simple" with rosemary and brandy, of course! :) (because since you're eating cake on a Monday morning, might as well have it with plums soaked in brandy, amiright?!)

Lately I've been craving simple butter cakes like these, laden with fruit (exhibit A: last week's cake). I think it's just because everything else in life is so insane and potentially stress-inducing that I need my desserts at the very least to be comfortable, easy to understand, straightforwardly good. The rosemary in here (homegrown! My brown thumb has successfully kept rosemary alive for at least one summer so far!) adds just enough complexity and surprise to make it intriguing at the same time. It's the best kind of comfort food.

Here's wishing everyone a happy and productive week, filled with enough relaxing moments to breathe here and there to keep us all sane. :)


Read on for recipe....

Berry, Apple, and Rosemary Shortbread Bars

M'dears, cookie season is officially upon us! My fridge is stocked with butter, Costco has rolled out the huge packs of parchment paper that they only carry during this time of year, and I've already had to refill my sugar and flour jars twice. Ah, the holidays!

A couple of years ago for the holidays, one of my oldest friends, Priscilla, gifted me with a box of assorted homemade cookies. In them were these amazing, amazing raspberry jam shortbread bars--so good that ever since then, I've been begging Priscilla to make the bars for me again every Christmas. For some reason, however, my begging skills are apparently not up to snuff (NTS: practice Puss'n'Boots face) because I have yet to convince Priscilla to make them for me again! Alas, great sadness. :(

But then, in the midst of a desperate craving for jam shortbread bars, it suddenly dawned on me that, as a baker, I am perfectly capable of taking matters into my own oven-mitted hands. So, enter my spin on this bar-cookie: berry, apple, and rosemary shortbread bars. Before you go and accuse me of once again going off the deep end with potentially insane flavor combinations, allow me to explain where the inspiration for this one comes from. A couple of days ago, a few local San Francisco Bay Area food bloggers and I were brainstorming flavors of blackberry jam that Sean should make (backstory: we were at an event promoting blackberries). Of course, brainstorming flavors is one of my favorite pastimes--I swear a psychologist would have a field day doing food-related free word association analysis on me. Anyways, we all threw out a bunch of suggestions: blackberry-rose! blackberry-ginger! blackberry-vanilla! And somehow, admist all of this, Irvin and I both arrived at a consensus on blackberry-apple-rosemary jam.

Over the next few days, the idea of dark berries paired with apples and rosemary stuck with me. Tart chunks of green apples seemed to be a fitting companion to supple and ultra-sweet berries, and rosemary lends the combination a more sophisticated, rustic air. Together, this trio formed the perfect storm for my long-desired shortbread bars, with homemade blackberry and wild blueberry jam and large pieces of baked apples sandwiched between crumbly layers of almost-savory rosemary shortbread. It's like having jam and apple pie all at once! :)  (For a more standard variation, the rosemary can easily be left out of the shortbread, which is flavored with lemon zest as well, so it will still taste plenty yummy.)

As if these bars weren't awesome enough, I realized, after pulling them out of the oven, a fact that makes them even awesome-er. You see, these little squares of delicious are called "Berry, Apple, and Rosemary Shortbread" bars. Now, if you acronym-tize that, you get.... BARS bars. Oh yes, dear friends. Pun-age! (Okay, cue collective groan and facepalm from most of you out there and a mild applause from English major dorks like me who appreciate a good pun when they hear one!)

[click on photo for a larger image]

Anyways, Priscilla--if you're reading this-- I'm still waiting for you to make your awesome raspberry jam version of these bar-cookies again! *hint hint* And for the rest of you: what cookies are you planning to make this season? Share below!


[full disclosure: thank you to Driscoll's for the blackberries used in this recipe, and thank you to my mom for the apples used herein. As always, I wouldn't be telling you about any products that I don't myself use and love.]


Read on for recipe....

Strawberry and Rosemary-Caramel Buckwheat Tart

My friends seem to be getting a wee bit spoiled.

Case in point: last weekend was a combined birthday bash for Richard and some of the folks in his family who have birthdays in May and June.  My line of thought on this party was "Oh, perfect! I'll make cupcakes of some sort to bring, which will be nice because I haven't made cupcakes in quite a while."  Perfectly reasonable, no?  So, I asked Richard what kind of cupcakes he would like for his birthday.  This is what he says to me:

"No, I don't want cupcakes.  I want a tart."

Wait wait wait--back up--come again?!  Now, you all must understand something about Richard.  He's not a food enthusiast like I am.  Not in the slightest.  This is the guy who, when I met him years ago, would have been perfectly content eating the same turkey-cheese-iceberg lettuce-mustard sandwich for lunch every single day for years on end.  People who meet us nowadays are constantly scratching their heads about how we're together, since Richard feels as dispassionate about food as I feel passionate about it.  Over the years, I've managed to train him well on certain things--for instance, he now has a fine appreciation for well-made tapioca tea or fresh, finely-rolled, raw-fish-incorporated sushi.  But he often still snubs his nose at my culinary... er... creations.  So, imagine my incredible surprise upon discovering that I'd actually trained and spoiled him far more than I had even thought, Mr. "I Want a Tart and not Cupcakes for my Birthday."

So once his choice of desserts was settled, I set about working on designing a tart worthy of a closeted dessert connoisseur's birthday.  And there's possibly no food item Richard loves more than strawberries.  I've never seen anyone inhale the same vast amounts of the fruit like he does.  Hence, I knew it had to be a strawberry tart.  Because there would be so much strawberry-age involved, I wanted to darken up the rest of the flavors more and to develop a robust earthiness to the layers underneath the sweet summery berries, so I went for a strawberry, rosemary-caramel, and buckwheat tart.

The tart has a base of buckwheat pastry--slightly nutty and sweet from the buckwheat but with a darker tang than with a regular, white flour crust.  The pastry is coated with a light layer of rosemary caramel that is just salty enough to cancel out the sweetness, and the rosemary offers a hint of brightness and uniqueness to the strawberries on top.  (The rosemary isn't overpowering at all.)  The strawberries sit on a bed of simple vanilla pastry cream and are brushed with a generous amount of freshly-reduced strawberry syrup, basically packing double the amount of strawberry flavor into a single fruit layer.  With patience, you can slice the strawberries and arrange them around the tart, or, go for the rustic look by plopping entire tiny whole strawberries on top.

Richard's a man of few words (yet another big difference between us, since I'm prone to blathering on and on and on), but given that he pretty much polished off the entirety of the two tarts that I made on his own, I'd say that this was a fair success.  Next year, though, he's getting cupcakes....


Read on for recipe....

PotW: Garlic-Chive Goat Cheese + Whole Wheat Rosemary Pancakes + Fresh Peas

[last Pancake of the Week: Sweet Corn Cherry Pancakes with Sour Cream]

This savory pancake recipe comes from the pancake tasting menu that I made in Los Angeles a few months ago, and it has its original inspiration in Los Angeles, too--all starting from this garlic-chive goat cheese spread.

^My best friend, in Malibu, post garlic-chive goat cheese picnic

Every once in a while, I head down to LA to visit my best friend who's there studying Important Medical Stuff.  Every time I'm there, without fail, she asks me to make this goat cheese spread, which we "invented" during my first Thanksgiving visit back in 2008. (OMG, 2008 sounds like so long ago!)  And I totally know why she does--because it's GOOD.  Like, on everything.  We slather this garlic, chive-y, creamy goodness on basically everything that we can get our hands on, from crackers to leftover Persian lamb wraps.  It even tastes better by the beach. (Because, really, what doesn't? ;-P)

So when it came time to come up with a savory pancake to accompany all of the sweet ones on the pancake tasting menu during this past visit, I reached for the foremost thing sitting in her fridge that I could think of: our tub of garlic-chive goat cheese spread.  The rest of the pancake idea fell right into place with all of our loot from the awesome Wednesday morning Santa Monica Farmers' Market: rosemary and sugar snap peas.  (Thankfully, also, we've been having a really long pea season this year on the West Coast.  I'm still seeing loads of fresh peas at the farmers' markets in my area!)

While this isn't the first time I've put rosemary in pancakes, it is the first time I've paired them in a savory pancake dish, and I love the way they, along with the robustness of the whole wheat, worked out, providing a wonderfully herb-y undertone to the whole dish.  The garlic-chive goat cheese spread packs most of the punch and flavor here.  Finally, fresh, crispy sugar snap peas lightly steamed and tossed in a bit of olive oil and salt add the perfect textural crunch and snapiness to lighten up the creamy goat cheese and dense whole wheat pancakes underneath.

Note that the recipe provided for the garlic-chive goat cheese spread below might yield more goat cheese than you'll need for the pancakes.  But, don't fret!  Grab some crackers or a baguette or a Persian wrap (I know, some will call me sacrilegious!) and your leftover goat cheese will disappear before you know it.

Read on for recipe...

Oreos grow up: rosemary lemon sandwich cookies

As I mentioned sometime last week, I've been a little obsessed with sandwich cookies.  It all started when I sat down to try to think of what to get my cousin for her late October birthday.  Of course, the natural answer was desserts!  This was all well and good, except for one giant hitch: Ting lives in New York City.  That's ..., well, over 2500 miles away from me.  Hm.  But, enter in the modern miracle that is 2nd day mail!  (I <3 USPS.)

So my thoughts turned to what kinds of desserts would travel best.  Ice cream was obviously--though quite unfortunately because Ting loves froyo--out.  As was cake, since I wouldn't want to send anything unfrosted and DIY unfinished.  That left breads and cookies.  I decided that while breads would be a great care-package type item, they weren't really all that festive and therefore were inappropriate for a birthday, so cookies it was.  Then, I knew it had to be some form of more robust cookies, since I didn't want the treats to end up arriving in New York as a big package of crumbs.  That would be a huge waste of postage.  And, I don't know how it hit me but suddenly... *sandwich cookies!*  They would travel perfectly, and I could make two different flavors to send for variety.  :-D

Rosemary-lemon sandwich cookies

Chocolate-vanilla "oreo" sandwich cookies

So, Ting's birthday package ended up with two kinds of "oreos": rosemary-lemon and good old nostalgic chocolate-vanilla.--both recipes that I'll be posting this week, starting with the rosemary-lemon ones today.

 

The rosemary-lemon sandwich cookies were definitely the more "grown-up" flavor out of the two, but they were a great complement to the traditional oreos.  The rosemary in the cookies isn't overpowering, and, together with the lemon, lends a subtle excellent fragrance to the overall cookie.   I thought the combination might be a little too exotic, but when I took both types with me to the office after I'd made them, the rosemary-lemon were definitely the more popular of the two (probably also thanks to that exoticism--everyone wanted to try them)!

I heard from Ting a few days after I sent the cookies telling me that they arrived completely intact and were still delicious, even after having survived a couple-thousand mile journey across the country.  :-D  Hope you had a very happy (and yummy!) birthday, Ting!

Make sure to tune in later this week for the traditional chocolate-vanilla oreo recipe.

Read on for recipe...

PotW: Rosemary Pancakes with Poached Pears

[last week's PotW: Pumpkin maple chocolate chip pancakes (with pomegranate mimosas)]

At this week's Saturday morning Palo Alto Farmer's Market, I found a stand tucked in a back corner selling the most amazingly priced fresh flowers, and tucked in the back of that stand was a huge bucket full of amazingly fragrant rosemary.  And I couldn't resist.  So now I have a gorgeous bouquet of sunflowers and rosemary beautifying and fragrant-fying my dining room!

But you can't just waste awesome rosemary like that--I *had* to find a way to make pancakes with it.  (My friends and I have a joke that every time I see something, the first thing that pops to my mind is, "Can I cook it?"  It's actually not too far off....)  And, another obsession of mine during the fall is pears, of which I had many extra-ripe ones lying around that desperately needed to be used.  So was born this week's rosemary pancakes with poached pears!

Rosemary pancakes

with poached pears

This was much more delicate fare than the extravagant creaminess of previous weeks' Pancakes of the Week (like here or here), but it was perfect for the overcast day we had.  The subtlety of the poached pears with sweet white wine comes through when you first take a bite and then the rosemary suddenly comes in at the end, leaving a great spiciness in your mouth.  Yum, yum!

Poached Bosc Pears

I am going to have to think about what else I can do with all this great rosemary sitting on the kitchen table right now.  Exciting!  :-)

Read on for recipes!...