Waterfront Kitchen Mixes Old and New

We 've written about Waterfront Kitchen on numerous occasions, both on this blog and in our books. The incredible view from their airy dining room, the emphasis on fresh, seasonal ingredients in their cuisine, and the friendly atmosphere have always been a constant. The menu itself has changed over the years as each new chef has brought his own personal spin on the restaurant's traditions. Chef Cyrus Keefer, who's become well known in Baltimore for his inventive cuisine, is the current chef at Waterfront Kitchen and he brings a whole hosts of new ideas to the menu. We were eager to check it out. 

The Minx started off with the Strawberry & Basil cocktail made with basil vodka and muddled strawberries. I've finally come around to drinking gin in the summertime so I ordered the gin-based Cucumber & Lavender. Both drinks were light and refreshing for a warm day.

While our plan was to focus on some of the more popular dinner menu options, Chef Keefer had put together a special tasting menu for a group coming to the restaurant that night and he wanted us to sample some of the items. The pork belly pizzette was served on a soft crust topped with romanesco cauliflower, two kinds of cherries, and edible flowers from the BUGS greenhouse down the street. As we've mentioned in other posts, Waterfront Kitchen gets a great deal of their fresh fruits, herbs, and vegetables from the Baltimore Urban Gardening with Students (BUGS) Greenhouse, which is on the Living Classrooms campus on Caroline Street. Kids from low-income neighborhoods develop social, academic, and creative skills by learning how to grow food. They also sell some of the produce at an annual farmers’ market event.

We fell in love with Chef Keefer's calamari when he was working at Birroteca, and it's still amazingly tender in this latest incarnation, served with baba ganoush made black by squid ink and a green olive insalada. The delicious house-marinated green olives are also available as a separate dish with some hummus, greens, and flatbread. Also on the dish are some of the edible flowers from the BUGS Greenhouse which bring a floral dimension to the dish I've never experienced before.

These shumai-style dumplings held a mixture of confit chicken and housemade 'nduja, a spicy, spreadable, pork salami. N'duja has become a new favorite thing of mine and this combination, nestled in a tender dumpling wrapper, took me to my happy place. At first glance, I thought the flecks in the sauce were grains of rice, but it turned out to be chopped up pieces of that tender calamari we love so much, Chef Keefer never stops inventing.

Okay, so now we're moving on to the regular dinner menu. We wanted to focus on the tried-and-true sorts of dishes that summer tourists might order, so we started with the clam chowder. This version of the New England staple has a bisque-like miso-enriched broth. The clams are served in their shells, and chunks of sunchoke, also called Jerusalem artichoke, stand in for the potatoes.

We had to try the crab cakes because - Baltimore - and we were intrigued by Chef Keefer's pronouncement that the cakes have no filler in them whatsoever. What they do have is plenty of lump crab and just the right amount of seasoning and another element that we won't give away. The result is a meaty yet light crab cake that's quite flavorful. The cakes were served with deviled asparagus, a subtle chorizo vin blanc, and a romesco sauce made with shishito peppers.

Our final entree was another New England classic, the lobster roll. The roll itself was the classic toasted split-top hot dog bun. From there, things take an eclectic turn as green curry and avocado sauce redolent of kaffir lime are tossed into the hefty pile of lobster meat and delicate pea shoots are sprinkled on top. Served with a side of French fries, this is a lobster roll that is a cut above.

Waterfront Kitchen's pastry chef, Kelsey Willis, is only 21 years old but she shows a finesse with desserts that belies her youth. Our dessert had squares of moist chocolate cake filled with a beer-flavored custard all enrobed in a classic chocolate ganache. Housemade Old Bay-seasoned caramel corn is sprinkled on top and the plate is decorated with white chocolate tinted in yellow and red, making the dessert resemble an abstracted Maryland flag. On top of all that, it tasted great.

We're happy that Chef Keefer is working at Waterfront Kitchen these days, giving us an excuse to eat there more often. Not that we need an excuse, it's just that we don't get to Fells Point as often as we should.

Waterfront Kitchen
1417 Thames St.
Baltimore, MD 21231
(443) 681-5310


Posted on Minxeats.com.

Super Moist Chocolate Sour Cream Bundt Cake

The last time I was in my brother's apartment, he plied me with a package of bacon and a big container of sour cream. The bacon would come in handy later in the year when I made a big batch of bacon jam for holiday gift giving, so that went directly in the freezer. The sour cream, however, needed to be used much sooner. The sell by date was nigh; by the time I had the opportunity to open the container, it had passed. But only by one day, so the stuff was still plenty fine. (I'm still alive, aren't I?)

I like sour cream, but how was I going to use up two cups of it immediately? Who said "baked potatoes!" Nah. I don't like sour cream on my baked potatoes. Butter all the way for me. But sour cream goes well in chocolate cake. It makes it nice and light and moist. I wasn't going to be able to use the entire container of sour cream, but I could at least employ half of it.

This cake is very moist and tender. You could glaze it, I suppose, but powdered sugar is really all it needs. Oh, and maybe a scoop of your favorite ice cream or a cold glass of milk or cup of coffee.

Chocolate Sour Cream Bundt Cake

1 cup unsalted butter
1/3 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 tablespoons liqueur of your choice (I used Kahlua)
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 3/4 cups granulated sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
2 large eggs
1 cup sour cream
2 teaspoons vanilla

Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease and flour a 10 cup Bundt pan.

Combine the butter, cocoa, salt, and 1 cup of tap water in a saucepan over medium heat. Cook only until butter is melted and mixture is completely combined. Stir in the liqueur.

Place the flour, sugar, and baking soda in a large bowl. Pour in the chocolate butter mixture in 2 or three batches, stirring between each to combine. Beat the eggs with the sour cream and vanilla and stir into the flour mixture. Whisk until fully incorporated.

Pour batter into the bundt pan and bake for 40-45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Place pan on a wire rack. After 20 minutes or so, invert the cake onto the rack to cool completely.

Posted on Minxeats.com.

Birthday Cake

Mr Minx had a birthday recently, and I made him a chocolate cake. Chocolate cake is his favorite kind, preferably plain, un-iced, unadorned. I usually default to a bundt cake, since that looks the nicest when served naked, but I never use the same recipe from year to year. Why? Because I usually forget which one I've used. Certainly it's always one that requires cocoa powder and sour cream or yogurt because we always have those two ingredients in the house. If the recipe calls for buttermilk, forget it. Buttermilk almost always comes in quarts, if one can actually find it, and neither of us are going to consume 3 1/4 cups of buttermilk. Yes, I know I could make fried chicken, but as I've never made fried chicken in my life, I'm not about to start doing it now just to use up a quart of buttermilk.

Sour cream is always the best answer.

I used this recipe this time, and it turned out very well. The cake was moist and chocolate-y, took exactly 45 minutes to bake, and popped out of the pan easily. And so I don't forget which recipe I used, I'm documenting it right here, right now.

Happy Birthday, Mr Minx!



Posted on Minxeats.com.

Chocolate Pound Cake

We ran out of Christmas cookies recently (yes, we did bake a lot!) and needed something else to put in our weekend bowl of ice cream (along with the ice cream). Mr Minx suggested chocolate pound cake, so I searched through our cookbook collection for a recipe that: 1) required regular cocoa powder; 2) did not require buttermilk or sour cream. Because I wasn't going to run to the store.

The cookbooks let me down, so I consulted teh Innernets. Martha Stewart offered a recipe that fit the bill, but I went back to Google to find something better. And I did - at Cook's Country. Hey, if the folks at America's Test Kitchen/Cook's Country come up with something, what with all the intense noodling around they do with recipes, I figure it's worth a try.

They say, "We retooled the classic pound cake recipe to make it plush and ultra-chocolaty. We did away with the need for chemical leaveners by properly creaming the butter and sugar." And damn if the result wasn't indeed plush - the cake's crumb is very fine and dense, resembling suede. And beating the hell out of the butter, sugar, and cocoa mixture before adding the eggs did create a cake that rose high in the pan without the use of baking powder or baking soda. The Martha Stewart recipe called for only 1/4 cup of cocoa powder, plus chocolate chips. It's probably not as chocolate-y as a recipe with 3/4 cup of cocoa plus an additional 2 ounces of milk chocolate. Oh, and while it calls for Dutch process cocoa, because there's no leavening in the cake, regular cocoa (Hershey's) works just as well.

Tastes marvelous with ice cream, and on its own as well.

Posted on Minxeats.com.

Satisfying a Need

I don't know what turned me into a cupcake baking fool all of a sudden, but here I am. Every once in a while, I get an uncontrollable urge that must be satisfied. The other day, I needed some chocolate cupcakes. I also needed fresh cherries, but my allergy to fruits in the genus Prunus prevents me from eating them raw. So I chopped some up and added them to chocolate cake batter. In case that wasn't cherry enough, I added some cherry preserves to a batch of cream cheese frosting, which turned it a lovely shade of pink that went beautifully with the dark brown of the cupcakes.

About the frosting: I'm not a huge fan of the chalky flavor of confectioner's sugar, which is why I won't make the standard butter + sugar style of buttercream frosting. But frosting needs a certain amount of sugar to achieve that perfect, fluffy, pipe-able texture, even if doing so makes the result too sweet. After adding one cup of powdered sugar to a box of cream cheese and declaring it sweet enough, I decided to boost the texture by adding some of the Ultra Tex 3 that I had received in my box of samples from National Starch. It worked like a charm without affecting the flavor one bit.

Chocolate Cherry Cupcakes

1 cup light brown sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 tsp vanilla
3/4 cup + 2 tablespoons flour
1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 tablespoon instant coffee
3/4 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup boiling water
1/2 cup pitted fresh cherries, chopped

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Fill muffin pans with 12 cupcake liners.

Stir together sugar, eggs, oil, milk, and vanilla. Add dry ingredients, and beat with wooden spoon until incorporated. Add boiling water and beat until blended. The mixture will be very thin. Stir in cherries.

Spoon into lined muffin pans. Bake for 22-25 minutes until tops spring back when pressed lightly (a toothpick test won't be accurate because of the cherries). Remove to wire racks and cool. Frost with Cherry Cream Cheese Frosting.

Cherry Cream Cheese Frosting

1 8-oz package of cream cheese, softened
4 tablespoons softened butter
1 heaping tablespoon cherry preserves
2 cups powdered sugars OR 1 cup powdered sugar and 1 tablespoon Ultra Tex 3

In a large bowl, beat together cream cheese, butter, and preserves. Beat in powdered sugar, or sugar and Ultra Tex. Spoon into piping bag and frost cooled cupcakes.

Posted by theminx on Minxeats.com.

Chocolate Yogurt Snack Cake

I'm a stickler about proof-reading. The amount of bad writing out there is appalling (but often good for a laugh). Hoping not to contribute to it, I check my blog posts two, three, and even four times to make sure: 1) everything makes sense; 2) there are no egregious typos or misspellings. Even then, I miss one or two things here and there.

While it's important to proof-read (and correct) posts in general, it's especially important to double-check recipes. If one makes a mistake as simple as typing "baking powder" instead of "baking soda," someone attempting to cook with that recipe might be screwed. It's often difficult for a blogger to achieve even a modicum of credibility, so why risk losing it through carelessness?

So what does my mini-rant have to do with chocolate cake? I'm getting to that....

The other day, realizing that I probably wasn't going to eat the entire tub of Greek yogurt I had purchased earlier in the week, I searched the Interwebs for an interesting cake recipe. There were a goodly number of French yogurt cakes with lemon flavoring, but it was a chocolate yogurt cake that caught my eye. I quickly jotted down the ingredients--which included baking powder--made the batter and threw it in the oven. The original recipe said the cake would be thin, and would take 18-20 minutes to bake. After that much time, my cake was still so raw, it hadn't yet spread to fill the pan. I read the recipe over again, this time paying more attention to the method.

The ingredient list said "baking powder." The method said, "baking soda."

A quick e-mail to the blogger gave me the answer I wanted, albeit after my cake was already in the oven: "baking powder." Considering my nicely-risen cake took 35 minutes to cook, I suspect that her answer was still wrong and that she had used baking soda.

The cake turned out fine, although a bit dry, denser and more pound cake-y than the average fluffy chocolate cake. Something that I would categorize as a "snack cake," good with a cold glass of milk. Mr Minx didn't think the cake was sweet enough, so I tinkered with the recipe quite a bit, upping the sugar, decreasing the amount of flour, and changing the method completely. The result was lighter, with a moister crumb, yet still fairly dense, tasting chocolatey with a definite yogurt tang.

Chocolate Yogurt Snack Cake

3 tablespoons butter at room temperature
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
3/4 cup plain Greek-style yogurt (I used Dannon)
1/4 cup milk
1/2 cup white chocolate chips
1/4 cup roasted unsalted peanuts

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place a square of parchment in the bottom of an 8" square pan and spray with Pam or other release spray.

In a medium bowl, mix together cocoa, flour, salt, and baking powder. Set aside.

In a large bowl or mixer, cream butter and sugar together. One at a time, beat in egg, vanilla, yogurt, and milk. Add flour mixture and combine well. Pour into prepared pan and bake for 30-35 minutes, or until toothpick inserted into cake comes out with a few moist crumbs.

Posted by theminx on Minxeats.com.

National Chocolate Cake Day

Today is National Chocolate Cake Day, and to celebrate, I'm putting this lovely image in your head to sustain you while you're shoveling out from Thundersnowpocalypse 2011.

Sure, you'll probably only get a cup of hot cocoa - if you're lucky - but if you feel decadent and have a surfeit of eggs, you can whip up this dessert for yourself.

Morton's Legendary Hot Chocolate Cake

1 1/2 cups unsalted butter, at room temperature, plus more for the souffle cup
Granulated sugar
12 ounces bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
8 large egg yolks, plus 7 large eggs
1 1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
18 fresh raspberries
6 scoops of vanilla ice cream

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Generously butter six 6-ounce soufflé cups and sprinkle each with granulated sugar. Tap out the excess sugar.

In the top of a double broiler set over barely simmering water, melt the butter and chocolate together. Remove the top of the double broiler pan from the heat.

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment and set on low speed, beat the egg yolks and eggs for about 2 minutes, or until light and smooth. With the mixer running, pour the melted chocolate into the bowl and mix for about 2 minutes longer.

Put the confectioners’ sugar and flour in a fine-mesh sieve and sprinkle into the chocolate mixture. With the mixer on medium speed, beat for 30 seconds, or until well mixed.

Pour the batter into the prepared soufflé cups, leaving about ¼ inch of space below the rim. Set the soufflé cups on a baking sheet and bake for 18 to 20 minutes, or until puffed and about 1 inch higher than the rim. The centers will be soft but not sticky.

Remove the cakes from the oven and immediately invert each onto a serving plate. Remove the cup and garnish each plate with three raspberries and a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Serves 6
-----------------------------------------------

If you don't have fifteen eggs hanging around, Morton’s is participating in Baltimore Restaurant Week through Sunday, so you can get them to make the cake for you.  Call 410-547-8255 or visit www.mortons.com for reservations.

RIP Dom Deluise

I've long been a fan of Dom Deluise, a man who was not only funny, but also a man who liked to eat. He was even the doppelganger of New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme. 

Mr Deluise died last night at the age of 75, suffering from kidney failure and respiratory problems, among other things, no doubt in part due to his love of food.

It seems fitting to celebrate the famously-obese comedian and cookbook author by sharing one of his recipes.

Dom Deluise's Outrageous Yum-Yum Cake

2 cups flour, sifted
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups sugar
1 large egg
1/2 cup room-temperature unsalted butter
1 cup sour cream
1/2 cup water
2 teaspoons vanilla
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons cocoa
12 ounces semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Sift flour, baking powder and baking soda on waxed paper. Butter and flour two 9" cake pans.

In large mixing bowl, beat sugar and egg until sugar is dissolved. Add butter and mix into egg mixture. Add sour cream, water and vanilla; beat again. Add flour mixture and cocoa; beat slowly until flour is absorbed. Do not overbeat. Fold in chocolate pieces. Divide mixture in prepared pans.

Bake 35-40 minutes or until tested done. Cool cakes on wire racks for 10 minutes. Remove from pans and cool completely. Frost with Chocolate Butter Icing.

Chocolate Butter Icing
6 ounces semisweet chocolate chips
3 tablespoons strong coffee
3/4 cup unsalted butter, softened

In a small saucepan, melt chocolate chips in the coffee over very low heat. Remove pan from heat. Beat in butter, 1 tablespoon at a time, until smooth. Set pan in bowl of ice and beat until icing is spreadable and holds its shape.

"Dangerous" Chocolate Cake

I'm sure you've all received at least one copy of the microwave chocolate cake recipe that's been flying around the Innernets recently.  I got at least three. One of my friends made it the other day and wasn't impressed, so I thought I would give it a try. Because nothing I do ever fails, right?

My experience was pretty good. The cake was dense, but cooked all the way through with no raw spots. Some of the chocolate chips had melted, and some had not. I'm wondering what it would be like with nuts. Or toffee bits. The cake was pretty huge too - two generous servings.

I served it up on my best ancient Corelle with a scoop of French vanilla ice cream and some orange segments that had been macerated in rum.  Yes, I was too lazy to make supremes - it was nearly 9pm, after all.

Here's the recipe, for those rare few of you who don't have it already.

5 MINUTE CHOCOLATE MUG CAKE 
4 tablespoons flour 
4 tablespoons sugar 
2 tablespoons cocoa 
1 egg 
3 tablespoons milk 
3 tablespoons oil 
3 tablespoons chocolate chips (optional) 
a small splash of vanilla extract 
1 LARGE coffee mug 

Add dry ingredients to mug, and mix well. Add the egg and mix thoroughly. Pour in the milk and oil and mix well. Add the chocolate chips (if using) and vanilla extract, and mix again. 

Put your mug in the microwave and cook for 3 minutes at 1000 watts (high). The cake will rise over the top of the mug, but don't be alarmed! Allow to cool a little, and tip out onto a plate if desired.