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...

Morning hazelnut plum tarts

It's been a long (or too short?, depending on how you look at it) summer of dissertation writing, but I'm almost there. My oral defense has now finally been scheduled (meaning I've somehow convinced my thesis chairs that I'm worthy of attempting the last rite of earning a PhD), and now it's just a matter of final details, filling in the blanks in the argumentation, and writing the intro and conclusion. Almoooooost.

This is the first dessert I've made in months. Given my self-imposed thesis hermitude, I've missed so much of summer's great fruit, so I wanted to take advantage of the tail end of stone fruit season before it disappeared altogether. This hazelnut plum tart is sort of a hybrid of a cake-y tart, with a thick, almost linzer-torte-like base and slices of fruit baked in on top. The secret to this "morning" tart is that the dough itself is spiked with orange zest and just ever so subtle of a hint of Turkish coffee and cardamom--enough to give the tart a dark and complex depth without stealing the scene with too much coffee flavor. It's a barely-there roasted spice flavor that helps to enhance the hazelnuts, alongside the brightness that the orange and plums provide.

It's going to be a bit slow-going while I try to reacclimate to "normal" life after my myopically-focused dissertation summer, but hopefully this also means the beginning of many more desserts coming out of the kitchen again.


(P.S. See that teacup in the photos? It's a UC Berkeley Wedgewood set! that I found at the antique fair a few months ago. I first saw these Berkeley Wedgewood place settings when I had dinner at the Chancellor's House as an undergrad, so I'm quite excited by the fact that I now too have a tea cup designed especially for my college alma mater. :D #geekpride)

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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....

Tropical Meringue Tart, with lime, coconut, and sesame

First off, I'm quite honored to be a finalist for Saveur Magazine's Best Baking and Desserts Blog! Thank you to whoever it is out there who was a big enough fan of this blog to submit a nomination. I heard the news in the middle of a week that was riddled with rejection letters and hearing a lot of "no"s and "you're not good enough"s, so it feels pretty good to be recognized for some accomplishment, even if it's just me prattling away here and in my kitchen every week or so!

Lots of off-line things have been happening for me this week (things so big that the Saveur news only registered as a tiny blip on the radar), but I'm still in the middle of processing them all before I feel like I can talk about them here on the blog. In the meantime, though, I wanted to share one of my latest flavor obsessions: limes.

Oddly, this year more so than in any previous year, I've become horribly impatient about wanting warmer weather. It's uncharacteristic of me, because I'm so warm-blooded that I usually prefer the cold. Maybe, though, it's a symptom of too much non-stop stress, and I just need some sun, sand, a warm ocean, and a couple of nice, deep breaths. Barring a currently-impossible trip to the beach, limes have been the next best thing, their sweet, tart crispness reminiscent of frozen drinks and fish tacos. Ah, the fish tacos.

This tart des tropiques is my 'I wish I were in the tropics' spin on my favorite kind of pie: the lemon meringue. Here instead, nestled in a slightly nutty sesame seed crust, is a sweet and tangy and lusciously creamy lime curd--not quite as bright but more subtly flavored than lemon curd--covered with fluffy and puffy clouds of lightly-caramelized coconut meringue and sprinkled with some toasted sesame seeds and dried coconut chips for some extra crunch. The lime flavor here is definitely the star, with just a whiff of coconut, like the faint scent of the tropics that wafts through the warm night air when you're sitting in a rocking hammock strung between two palm trees on the beach, soft sand at your tiptoes and the ocean gently, softly ebbing away in the close darkness.... sigh.

Lastly, in other news, the second issue of sated is almost done! More news on that front to come very shortly. Stay tuned!


Read on for recipe....

The Café au Lait Tart, for breakfast for dessert

Well, here's one for recursion: it's dessert for breakfast for dessert! :) This idea has been floating around in my head for quite a while now, but I hadn't had a chance to properly realize it until a friend requested this week to have "breakfast for dessert," since she found herself too busy to ever properly have breakfast for breakfast. I'm never one to let friends go hungry, and so, at last, the café au lait tart was born.

My inspiration behind this tart was to make it a beautiful homage to the first meal of the day, pulling together the flavors and textures that we'd normally associate with breakfast into dessert form (minus the scrambled eggs and bacon--that's so overdone). The crust has a hint of nutty sweetness from a tinge of oat flour, and then there are layers of milk jam, whole-fruit wild blueberry jam, and espresso dark chocolate ganache, all topped with golden oatmeal praline and flaked seasalt. (You can see my diagram of the dessert in the planning stages here.) The end result is at once rich and bitter and crunchy and creamy and sweet and salty--pretty much one of the most sophisticated ways to start your day, all compressed into a single bite.

[for larger image, click photo above]

...Now, if all days started this way!

[My apologies on the short post, but hopefully the recipe makes up for it. I find myself far too lacking in words these days, having used up my quota for work purposes.]



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...

Strawberry Passionfruit Tart

This weekend was packed with so many birthdays and trying to squeeze in developing, baking, and eating two birthday desserts between birthday dinners and work and friends visiting from afar and gearing up for the imminent sated launch! -- Clearly everyone and their mothers are born in May, so if you're a May baby: Happy Birthday!

Anyways, though I didn't manage to get very many photos of this dessert, I have to say that this strawberry passionfruit tart is one of my favorite developments recently. Richard, the spoiled bf who knows to request tarts and not cupcakes for his birthdays, is a mad-lover of strawberries, so for years now, I've tried my hand at various ways to incorporate strawberries into his birthday desserts: strawberry cheesecake ice cream, strawberry rosemary tarts, actual strawberry cheesecake, strawberry cream puffs. But then I realized that he really wants just one thing: the strawberries--cut the whole 'dessert' crap. So this year, I attempted to make the most unadulterated strawberry dessert I could, with straight-up strawberries (and just strawberries!) filling a meyer lemon-scented crust and brushed with tart passionfruit jelly, since passionfruit is one of Richard's other fruit obsessions. And success! basically, a dessert vehicle for delivering strawberries to the mouth. :)

For this tart, make sure to look for small, ultra-sweet strawberries. Since the strawberries are the main focus of this dessert, it's paramount that they are delicious specimens. The bigger ones this time of year don't pack nearly as much flavor. Small strawberries are also easier to fit into the tart shell, and if they're small enough, you can (if, like me, you're short on time) skip the step of hulling the inner white of the strawberries out.

Don't forget to enter for a chance to win a copy of sated magazine when it comes out, if you haven't already! Pre-orders should be starting sometime in the next week or so, so stay tuned!

Read on for recipe....

Passionfruit Tapioca and Lemon Cream Tarts

Happy Valentine's Day! Or otherwise known as, Happy stuff-your-face-with-desserts day! Now, I realize that I'm a little bit late to the Valentine's Day party, but this being a journal and all, I wanted to share what the dessert I'm actually having for Valentine's Day rather than making something weeks ahead of time that I wouldn't actually make again. ... and, I'm just running behind, so please forgive me! :)

It seems that, whenever I think about Valentine's Day desserts, I always come back to passionfruit. It's not your typically romantic fruit, like red strawberries dipped in chocolate--and frankly, it looks like dinosaur eggs, with its bumpy skin and bizarre, seedy insides. But, I think it's the name that gets to me, with passion, and I like that it's a little bit tart and sweet, like love.

This year for Valentine's Day, I decided to mix passionfruit with another thing that my bf and I are obsessed with: tapioca. I've always joked that you can't date me unless you like tapioca (with tea, that is), and one of the first things that happened years ago in our relationship was that Richard learned to like tapioca milk tea, just to hang with me. That's the sign of a keeper! Then, a few days ago, he showed up with a bag of lemons from his backyard (<3), which I also wanted to incorporate into the dessert.

Hence, passionfruit tapioca and lemon cream tarts! with passionfruit curd filling, which is super luscious and studded with small rounds of soft tapioca pearls, and mascarpone whipped cream, which is flavored with fresh-squeezed lemon juice and zest for an overall brightness to the dessert. It's one of those desserts that make you feel like you're eating pure rays sunshine, even if the weather outside and stormy and cold (as it finally is here in the Bay, after a winter of no rain!).

Even though it's a bit late, here's wishing you all a Valentine's Day filled with sugar and candy and delicious desserts (forget love and romance, all we need is sugar anyways)!


Read on for recipe....

Beet Tart with Blue Goat Cheese and Frisee, and a visit to Portlandia

Portland, you are awesome--and a food-lover's dream. I spent five days in your misty city-straddling-the-river at the beginning of January, and not once in those days did I eat a single un-delicious bite. Every mouthful was beautiful and fresh and thoughtful, and made me wish that we could have our national linguistics conference in your city every year (no offense to Pittsburgh or Baltimore, where the last two conferences were held in previous years). Of course, I have to include the customary mention of the mammoth Powell's Bookstore, but by the time I made it there at the end of the conference, the impressively-large linguistics section had already been pretty picked over, and there are only so many hours (and, more restrictively, dollars!) one can spend in the cooking section, so instead, we ate our way through the city once all of our official business was through. (Also, thank you all for your suggestions via Twitter and blog comments and email on where to visit and eat in Portland! :D)

[pictured top to bottom: Thai Peacock's tofu tom yum soup, Stumptown coffee, Salt&Straw's ice cream tasting]

My favorite, favorite, favorite thing we had in Portland was the tofu and vegetable tom yum soup at Thai Peacock, a few blocks away from Powell's. Seriously, you guys, this version of the soup was the best I've ever tasted: rich, spicy, delightfully sour, a bit sweet from the stewed tomatoes and vegetables, and all around, incredibly soul-warming. It was so good that I went twice in two days, and seriously considered trying to take a thermos of it home with me (darn TSA security restrictions!). Other stand-out favorites that we tried were the fabulous Salt & Straw ice cream (recommended by many of you, so thank you!), with their inventive and perfectly creamy flavors (particularly, the sea salt ice cream with caramel--yes, the ice cream base is sea salt flavored!--and the lemon-basil sorbet); freshly-made and fantastic Japanese curry from Kalé (not heavy like you normally think of Japanese curry, but light and oh-so-spicy and flavorful!); and the adorable Little Bird Bistro, on the recommendation of Language of Food writer, where we ordered a plethora of small French plates to share, including butternut squash+parsnip+apple soup and beet tart. We even managed to spend one night at the cozy Living Room Theater, watching Melancholia, and feeling oh-so-hipster amongst the cool, twenty-something crowd that populated the place.

Here's a list of where we ate--all wonderful.

Kalé - so good I'd like to beg the owner to open a branch in the Bay Area.

Little Bird - the bread served here comes with local butter, salted with crunchy Maldon salt. 'Nuff said!

Rogue Brewery - they have homemade root beer! (which I'll take over beer any day. :))

Salt & Straw - dare I say it's better than some of the gourmet ice cream places I've had in the Bay!

St. Honore Boulangerie - the Normandy apple tart. Try it.

Stumptown Coffee - though I maintain allegiance to Philz here in SF

Thai Peacock - the tom yum soup: you won't regret it.

Voodoo Donuts - to my surprise, I particularly liked the Butterfingers doughnut/donut

Wildwood - wonderful, wonderful food. The garlicky butter of the mussels is perfect with the crusty toast it comes with, the caesar salad is inventive and novel, and the lobster risotto was exactly what a risotto should be.

One of the marks of a fantastic food experience is that it should inspire you, and my visit to Portland most definitely did. Over the following few days, my friends and I recreated at home some of our favorite dishes that we had had in Oregon: butternut squash, parnsip, and apple soup; crunchy, Maldon salt-flecked butter; and this beet tart with blue cheese and goat cheese and frisee salad.

Before having a version of this tart at Little Bird Bistro, I seriously never thought I would like a beet tart. Beets have just never been a vegetable I voluntarily run to, even though I've had very good beets before in my life (also very bad ones, like the canned beets my parents would insist on putting in our salads when I was growing up, which probably contributed to my aversion). But, for whatever reason, the beet tart looked really good on the bistro's menu, and when I had my first bite of it, it was even better than the menu's description. I think what really did it for me with this tart was how the saltiness of the blue and goat cheeses balanced out the sweet juiciness of the al dente roasted beets, with the buttery, flakey crust and the slightly bitter and acidic frisee on top.  It's something I would never dream up on my own, but once I did have it, I had to have more!

One last thing, though not food related: right around my Portland visit, I managed to watch all of Portlandia. I had a few Portlandia moments while I was there (e.g., waiters volunteering detailed information on the origins of the food; little birds everywhere), so watching the show made for was a very hilarious representation of my own experience. I would highly suggest it, in addition to this beet tart. :)


Read on for recipes....

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....