Archive for May, 2010
Some ingredients appear more often in savory dishes than sweet ones. Saffron and olive oil are clearly two instances of this. Saffron is a spice – the most expensive, by weight, in the world – that is renowned for the bright yellow color it gives to dishes. It has a slightly grassy, sweet flavor to it and it is usually found giving its brilliant color to savory rice and couscous dishes. Olive oil, of course, has many savory applications from salad dressing to cooking oil. But both are versatile ingredients and they come together very nicely in this simple cake.
This Saffron and Olive Oil Cake was inspired by a recent trip to Spain, where both saffron and olive oil are very common in the food. Of course, I didn’t have the two of them together in a cake while I was there, though! Olive oil, much like wine, can have many layers of flavor to it. In addition to the flavor of olives, many also have very floral notes (just as dark chocolate, coffee or wine can have), nutty tones and grassy or earthy flavors. You can really smell the olive oil in the cake batter, but once the cake is baked all of these subtle notes come out and the once-strong olive taste settles mildly into the background. Saffron will impart a yellow color to the cake and will highlight some of the earthier notes in the olive oil. The result is a cake that starts with a very simple recipe and ends up with a surprisingly complex flavor to it!
For this cake, you can use any kind of olive oil, but since you’re going to taste it in the finished product, more complex extra virgin olive oils are the best choice (I actually used Crisco’s Extra Virgin Olive Oil, which I found had a nice fruity flavor to it when I tried it during an olive oil tasting last year). The cake is moist and tender, with a texture somewhere between a sponge cake and a pound cake. You can bake it in a regular 9-inch pan, but I think it is easiest to get it out of a springform pan. I finish this off with a dusting of confectioners’ sugar to give it a little sweetness, but it is also good served plain or with a little bit of lightly sweetened whipped cream.
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Fans of cookbooks like Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World and other great vegan baking books will find that Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar is a good addition to the bookshelf – and bakers who aren’t experienced with vegan baking will find a lot of great recipes in here, as well. Cookies are great treats to make because they generally require minimal time and equipment to make. This book embraces that fact and keeps the cookie recipes simple and tasty, focusing on ingredients that you probably already have in your cupboard to make delicious cookies that just so happen to be vegan.
The book has 100 recipes, ranging from classics like Oatmeal Raisin Cookies to more contemporary cookies, like Roasted Almond with Fleur de Sel cookies. There are drop cookies, slice-and-bake cookies, bar cookies and even a category for wholesome cookies (the kind that you won’t feel too guilty about eating with your breakfast). The recipes are straightforward and easy to follow, with plenty of great photos throughout to remind you of all the recipes that you want to try next. There are lots of tips sprinkled throughout the book about baking, too, and plenty of suggestions for flavor variations on each recipe.
Although these cookies are vegan, this book is first and foremost a book about baking great cookies. There are many suggestions offered for bakers looking for gluten free recipes and other dietary substitutions, and the wholesome chapter is for cookies that use minimally processed sweeteners and whole grains. That said, most of the recipes read just like their non-vegan counterparts, calling for all purpose flour, sugar and spices (although canola is far more common in these cookies than butter is, of course!) and bake recipes that will evoke favorite childhood cookie memories.
The key to a good peanut butter cookie is to make sure that it has a lot of peanut butter flavor. You can achieve this in a number of ways. One is by simply using a good, flavorful brand of peanut butter (always a good idea, actually). Another is to stuff the cookie with a peanut butter filling, or sandwich two cookies together with a smear of peanut butter. Adding peanuts will add crunch and highlight the nuttiness in the peanut butter, too. Yet another way is to use a peanut butter glaze, which is how I gave these tasty Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies a peanut buttery boost.
The cookies themselves are sweet and chewy, with a good peanut butter flavor to them. The oatmeal mixes very well with the flavor of the peanut butter. You might not know there was oatmeal in the cookies if no one mentioned it, but it does add a subtle oaty flavor that makes the cookies a little more addictive than a plainer cookie. The quick cooking oats keep the cookies tender and chewy.
But as I said before, the icing on the cookie is what takes these from good to great – for fans of peanut butter cookies, anyway! It’s a simple glaze of peanut butter mixed with a little bit of milk to make it drizzle-able. It couldn’t be any easier to make. Once it’s on, it is like doubling the peanut butter flavor in every bite. I used a plastic bag with the corner snipped off to pipe on my peanut butter glaze, but you could also just drizzle it on with the tines of a fork after dipping them in a small bowl of the glaze.
Don’t forget to serve these cookies with a big glass of milk.
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Banana bread has a reputation for being a bit dull, partially due to the fact that it is quite common, and partially due to the fact that it comes out of a plain, rectangular loaf pan. The common part is difficult to change – although getting a reputation for baking really great banana bread recipes will help that a lot – but the boring loaf pan aspect is easier. Just get something with a little shape to it, something like the Nordic Ware’s new Banana Loaf Pan. This cute, tropical pan is has a half-cylinder shape to it, rather than a rectangle, and it is decorated with bunches of bananas and a palm tree. The ridges that run along the loaf are good guidelines for slicing, too. The cast-iron pan has a nonstick interior to help with an easy release, but greasing and flouring a pan like this will help the design come out even better because it will make the exterior of the loaf look just a bit darker. It is a bit longer and less deep than your standard loaf pan at 5-in x 13-in x 3-in, so be sure to check your recipe a little early when you start to bake with a pan like this, as it will probably need a little less time in the oven as a plain old rectangular loaf.
An oatmeal raisin cookie sounds like a simple thing – and it can be, judging by the number of totally mediocre oatmeal raisin cookies that are out there – but when you get a good one, it can be heavenly. It will have just the right amount of cinnamon to set off the buttery notes in the nutty, oatmeal-packed dough, and highlight plump, sweet raisins. They are all great flavors, and there is no reason why they should only come together in cookie form. This is what inspired this Oatmeal Raisin Coffee Cake.
This cake is delicious, and perhaps doubly so for fans of oatmeal raisin cookies! It is sweet and buttery, with great flavor from brown sugar, oatmeal, cinnamon and raisins. Unlike a cookie, this cake isn’t chewy. It is moist and tender, with just enough richness to make it just as suitable for dessert as it is for breakfast or tea.
The cake is a simple buttermilk cake with oatmeal added to the batter. I prefer quick cooking oats (not instant) because of their not-too-big size and finer texture, and you can make them by pulsing regular rolled oats in the food processor a few times if you don’t have them. The filling and topping for this coffee cake are made with the same mixture, but raisins and chopped pecans are added to the filling of the cake. The topping will melt a bit into the cake itself as it bakes, but this just distributes all its brown sugar, cinnamon and butter goodness over the entire cake. +Continue Reading
