Making it Work

I have experienced quite a bit of disappointment recently. Our latest book, Maryland's Chesapeake, which took nearly a year to research and write, hasn't yet found an audience. The recent election has me facing the five stages of grief; I fear I will be stuck in the fourth stage - depression - for most of the next few years. Friends and family have let me down. Christmas is right around the corner, and as a childless adult, I wonder why I bother celebrating it at all.

Despite all the shit, life goes on. It must. I cannot allow myself to wallow. After all, there is cheesecake to eat!

The cheesecake in question is itself the result of another recent disappointment. I had tried to recreate Starbucks' Cranberry Bliss Bars at home. They seemed like underbaked blondies with cream cheese frosting and dried cranberries - how difficult could they be? As with many things in life, more difficult than anticipated.

I did consult some other "copycat" recipes on the Internet before proceeding. While some were merely cut-and-paste copies of the same recipe offered without credit to the original author, others had little differences, like adding ginger to the frosting. I decided to go ahead with my own relatively plain concoction, adding dried, juice-sweetened, organic cranberries (which are not the bright red of Starbucks' berries) and white chocolate chips to a straightforward blondie batter (essentially Toll House cookies, without the semi-sweet chips). After 20 minutes in the oven, I realized that underbaked blondies will just be gooey blobs of dough. Baked for the proper amount of time, they'll be too chewy, and crusty on the edges to boot. In any case, I pressed on, making a cream cheese frosting while the bars were baking. It's a simple enough process - just beat a couple cups of powdered sugar into cream cheese and butter and add a touch of vanilla. Voila! - frosting.

Once the bars were cooked and cooled, I topped them with some of the frosting and a sprinkle of cranberries. And then I did a taste test.

They were diabetes in bar form.

The cookies were too sweet, the white chocolate chips were completely unnecessary, and the frosting make them even sweeter. They were a disaster. Disgusted, I scraped the frosting off the bars and into a container with the extra frosting (there was quite a bit left over) and put it in the fridge. The scraped bars were still too sweet, but we managed to finish them off. But lesson learned: never again will I put white chocolate chips into an already sugar-laden bar cookie (unless I am making these).

I wasn't in the mood/didn't have time to make a cake for the cream cheese frosting, which languished in the fridge for an entire week, unloved and getting in the way. However, I did realize that it was just a couple ingredients away from a cheesecake batter. So the following weekend I pulled it out of the fridge, whisked in eggs, more vanilla, a bit of lemon, and some milk. We had blueberries, so I tossed in a handful of those as well. While it was in the oven, I made a little blueberry sauce for the top.

Damn if they weren't just fine. More custardy than cheesy, which is the way I prefer my cheesecake, they were surprisingly not too sweet, considering the source material.

I guess you want a recipe. It's kinda hard to give one, but cheesecake is one of those baked goods that isn't an absolute science, so just make it work, like I did.

Blueberry Cheesecake
I used three 4-inch springform pans and the maximum amount of crust materials. If you want thinner cheesecakes, or just like round numbers, use four pans.

1 to 1 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs
4 to 6 tablespoons salted butter, melted
1 1/2 cups homemade cream cheese frosting
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon lemon zest
Pinch salt
1/4 to 1/2 cup milk
Blueberries
Sugar

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Combine the crumbs and butter in a bowl until crumbs are well-coated. Press firmly into three or four 4-inch mini springform pans so they cover the bottom and go up the sides a bit. Bake for 10 minutes. Remove to a cooling rack.

Put the frosting in a large bowl. Whisk in the eggs, vanilla, lemon, a pinch of salt, and enough milk to make a pancake-batter consistency. Toss in a handful of blueberries, if you're so inclined, but they're not absolutely necessary. Spoon batter into pre-baked crusts and bake until puffed and set (they may jiggle a wee bit in the centers, but shouldn't be wet), 30-35 minutes.

Cool cheesecakes on a rack. After about 15 minutes, use a sharp knife to loosen them from the sides of the pan, then gently remove the pan sides.

While cheesecakes are cooling, make the topping. Add a couple handfuls of blueberries to a saucepan with about 1/4 cup of granulated sugar. Add a pinch of salt and some lemon and/or cinnamon, if desired. Cook over medium heat until thickened, 15-20 minutes. Allow to cool before spooning over cooled cheesecakes.

Serves 6.



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.

Birthday Cupcakes

I always take off work for my birthday because going in would be like adding insult to injury. This year, with my free day-time, I decided to try out yet another cupcake recipe with the Scharffen Berger Chocolate Adventure Contest in mind.

Because I like pumpkin, and we had a small amount of purée in the fridge, I thought to make pumpkin cupcakes. But of course Scharffen Berger is a chocolate company, so I had to find a way to work chocolate into the recipe. There are lots of recipes that combine those two flavors, but honestly, that's not a mix I particularly enjoy. So I challenged myself to come up with a combo that I did like.

I concocted a brownie batter (with the help of my new Fat Witch Brownie Cookbook, courtesy of my brother), put a tablespoon of it in the bottom of each cupcake liner and baked it for 7 minutes until it started to set. Then I topped it with the pumpkin batter and baked it an additional 25 minutes.

Leftover bacon grease ended up as a substitute for some of the butter in my new favorite frosting recipe. I also added some cocoa powder and spices, to pick up similar flavors in the cupcake. And I made a brittle with hazelnuts and bacon chunks, with the help of my new candy thermometer.

Cupcakes, unadorned.

Bacon hazelnut brittle. Oh yes, I said "bacon."

Cupcakes, frosted, garnished, and Photoshopped.

The verdict? The concoction needs a whole lot of tweaking. The brownie wasn't chocolate-y enough, and the texture was too similar to the pumpkin part. The bacon frosting also didn't deliver the chocolate flavor I needed, and I realized that the tips on my decorating set are just too damn small for cupcake icing (which I have remedied by ordering bigger tips) so the overall look was quite...sloppy. As for my first attempt at brittle? It was ok, maybe a little more burnt-tasting than I like my brittles but I think that was due to the base recipe I used. And it could have used a lot more nuts. The pumpkin part of the equation, however, was delicious - super rich and moist, nicely spicy and pumpkin-y, despite the relatively small amount of vegetable used. And the longer the cupcakes sat in the fridge (and I mean days) the better they got. Actually, the frosting got more flavorful, too.

I would make them again, with a simple cinnamon-flavored buttercream.

Pumpkin Cupcakes  

3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup almond flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
2 large eggs
1/2 cup canned pumpkin purée
1/2 cup whole milk ricotta cheese
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup light brown sugar, lightly packed
1/2 cup vegetable oil

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line cupcake tins with liners.

In a large bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cardamom.

Stir in the eggs, pumpkin, ricotta, sugars, and oils. Mix until well combined.

Divide batter among prepared tins and bake for 25-30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in a cupcake comes out clean. Cool completely.

Makes 10