When it comes to citrus, I reach for lemons, limes and oranges for juicing and for baking. They’re probably the most popular citrus when it comes to cooking, although the order in which you prefer them varies from person to person. One of the more often overlooked citrus fruits is the grapefruit. Grapefruits are popular when eaten whole (with sugar, usually) and juiced, but they’re rarely included in baking - especially not when you compare them to the popularity of lemons, limes and oranges.

So that the grapefruit wouldn’t feel left out, I decided to tweak my usual lemon meringue pie into a grapefruit meringue pie. Grapefruit has a hint of bitterness to it where lemon has a sharp acidity, so the merinue of this pie serves to take the edge off of that just as the meringue does for a lemon pie. The grapefruit curd has a relatively mild flavor and a great creamy texture. It is thickened with both flour and cornstarch so that it is thick enough to slice easily and cleanly, even though the custard remains tender and soft.

I really recommend using fresh grapefruit juice in this pie to get the best grapefruit flavor. If you must use store-bought juice instead of fresh squeezed, choose something that is 100% juice - no water or anything else added to it to take away from the flavor. This pie will definitely appeal to grapefruit fans, and even those who like meringue pies but are a little ambivalent about the fruit. If you dislike grapefruit, this might not be the pie for you. That said, if you want to give it a shot but take a little bit of the edge off the grapefruit, add in some lemon or orange zest to the filling in place of the grapefruit zest to soften the grapefruit flavor a bit more.

(more…)

The August 3rd deadline for the Threadcakes Cake Contest is just a few days away, meaning that if you intend to throw your chef’s hat and artistic abilities into the ring, you had better get started. I’m one of the judges this year - along with Jen from Cake Wrecks, Louise from Cake Journal, Jennifer from Bake or Break and Mary Alice from Charm City Cakes/Ace of Cakes - and I have to say that based on the entries so far, all of us are going to have a tough decision to make!

If you’re still thinking of entering, all you need to do is peruse the Threadless t-shirt design gallery and pick out your favorite design - then translate that design into a cake. The cakes can be 2D (flat, with a design) or 3D, as there are prizes available for both categories. You can go ahead an enter as many times as you wish with as many designs as you can come up with before the deadline.

I’m not giving any hints as to who I like so far, but below are a few images to show you what the competition looks like. Check out the full gallery to take a look at the entries so far!

(more…)

Pie crusts are usually made with butter, shortening or a combination of the two. The solid fats are rubbed into a flour mixture, creating a dough that resembles coarse, wet snad before some liquid i added it you can press it together into a ball. The procedure is the same, but the two fats will give you different results in your recipes.

Butter is about 80% fat and 20% water, give or take a few percent depending on the brand and whether you are using European-style butter. In a pie crust, the butter is distributed in small pieces throughout the dough and because the dough is chilled before it is baked, these pieces are solid. When the pie crust bakes, two things happen: the butterfat melts and the water evaporates. The melting butterfat makes the crust tender and a little bit crumbly, contributing to a melt-in-your-mouth type feel. The evaporating water creates a little pocket in the dough where steam tried to escape, giving the crust a flaky, layered texture. The flakiness of a well-made butter crust would have a little bit of the flakiness of a croissant, rather than just the crumbliness of a shortbread cookie. It also has a great butter flavor.

Shortening (and this applies to hydrogenated and nonhydrogenated, although I recommend you work with trans-fat free shortening) is 100% fat. This means that it has plenty of fat to melt into the dough and create a tender, melt-in-your-mouth type of crust, but no water to create a flakiness. A crust made with just shortening will seem a little lighter than a crust made with butter alone, but since shortening doesn’t have much flavor, it will be a little on the bland side. Lard is also a viable option for a fat in pie crusts. Lard - also 100% fat - tends to have more flavor than shortening, but it acts just the same way, making the crust tender and short, but not adding the flakiness of butter.

My personal preference is to use mostly butter and a small amount of trans-fat free shortening in a crust to get the flavor and flakiness of butter, but a little bit of the extra tenderness of shortening. I usually use 3/4 butter and 1/4 shortening, although sometimes I will use a little less shortening. Preference aside, I make all butter crusts like the one pictured above more often than not, since even though they don’t have that little bit of extra tenderness, they are still just as flaky, tender and tasty as I could want.

Silver dragees are the small, shiny, jawbreaker-like balls that often adorn fancy looking cakes and cupcakes. They’re a type of sprinkle, made of sugar, but have a coating made of real silver to make them sparkle. They’re really beautiful sprinkles. You can’t buy them in California, since an activist’s lawsuit persuaded vendors not to ship dragees or sell them in the state, so many bakers - home and professional - have had to look for alternatives to the shiny little sprinkles.

One option I found on the baking aisle recently is Wilton’s Pearlized Sugar Sprinkles. These are round sprinkles, a tiny bit larger than your average dragee, that look like small pearls. They have an opalescent shine to them and, while they’re more white than silver, they still look very elegant. They’re made of sugar and are completely edible, but like most sprinkles, don’t taste like much on their own. I’ve been using them to dress up cupcakes and make the center of frosting flowers look a little more interesting.

Apples are often associated with fall, but apple trees are often ripe with fruit early into summer (depending on climate and weather conditions) and when you know someone with an apple tree who generous enough to save some for you to bake with, you can’t say no just because apples aren’t quite as “summery” as strawberries are. Apples are delicious all year round and this coffee cake is, too. It is so packed with fruit that it borders on being an apple crisp, held together with a little bit of cake batter - which isn’t a bad thing, of course! It means that the cake is very moist and very flavorful. It also means that it isn’t quite as filling as some more bread-like coffee cakes, so it is easy to make room for a second slice.

Since the cake reminded me of other fruit-heavy desserts, I decided to take a cue from my Nectarine and Cherry Brown Betty and make a crumb topping for the cake that is literally a crumb topping. It is made with bread crumbs, finely processed and mixed with some melted butter and brown sugar. The breadcrumbs make for a very simple topping that has a great flavor and texture. I was very generous with the amount of crumbs I used to top the cake because I tend to enjoy the topping on coffee cakes just as much as the actual cake portion!

Check this coffee cake with a toothpick to test for doneness. It is easy to undercook it very slightly in the center because there is so much fruit in it giving off extra liquid into the batter as the cake bakes. Fortunately, in the event that you overbake it a bit, the fruit also keeps the cake very moist. This will keep well for a day or two at room temperature, and also refrigerates (covered, in an airtight container) well for a day or two if you live somewhere too hot to keep food out on the counter.

(more…)

• Truthfully, I don’t know if I can say that a croissant is a “real” croissant if it isn’t made with real butter - and lots of it - but I am very impressed that Bittersweet was able to make Homemade Vegan Croissants without using a bit of butter. These croissants actually use margarine, but the method of making a “butter block,” encasing it in dough and folding it over and over is much the same as for the classic versions of this pastry. The results look flaky and delicious, butter or not, and are really a fantastic option for those who don’t eat butter for one reason or another.
• In cookies n’ cream ice cream and cakes, the cookies n’ cream part both come from chocolate and vanilla sandwich cookies. This is also true of yumBug’s Chocolate Vanilla Cream Cookies. They are sugar cookies that have had a generous amount of Oreo type cookies ground up and incorporated into the dough. This gives them a very nice traditional cookie texture, while preserving most of the flavor of their cookies n’ cream side. Heavily speckled from the chocolate cookie crumbs, these cookies also have a great look to them.
• A blueberry buckle is a type of cake that is so laden with fruit that it can actually buckle under its weight. It is more like a coffee cake, or even a fruit cobbler, than jus your average cake. Savory Sweet Life decided to play up the cake aspect of a more traditional buckle with a Blueberry Buckle Cake. Baked in a bundt pan, this cake is packed with fresh blueberries and topped with a crumb topping. The topping ends up on the bottom of the cake when it is time to serve, but it really preserves that coffee cake feeling that you might get from a buckle and makes the cake stand out from other blueberry bundt cakes.
• Ice cream sandwiches are usually described as being indulgent or decadent, but Cannelle and Vanille’s Raspberry and Red Currant Swirl Ice Cream have the distinction of being prettiest ice cream sandwiches out there - in addition to being tasty, etc. of course! These sandwiches have homemade ice cream sandwiched between raspberry palmier, which have a pink tinge and a light raspberry flavor. The ice cream matches the hue in its fruity swirl for a treat that is a bit pink and girly (not a bad thing!), but also very elegant.
• If you’re a fan of the tangy, creamy filling used in key lime pies, made with lots of fresh lime juice and sweetened condensed milk, you’ll probably love Erin’s Food Files’s Key Lime Pie Ice Cream. It has some milk and whipping cream added, but is otherwise very similar to the basic pie filling. It comes out of the ice cream maker bright with lime flavor. And if you decide you miss the contrast of a graham cracker crust, you can always serve this in a waffle cone to get that extra bit of flavor and texture.