Archive for February, 2011
Tartlets make beautiful desserts. Bite sized and elegant, these desserts aren’t usually the first choice for home chefs to put together because it is a little bit of a hassle to cut the pastry and press it into dozens of individual mini tart shells before baking. Imagine that all of those tart shells were not separated, but were all together in a single pan, like they are in this Tartlet Baking Set. This very neat set streamlines the tart-making process by allowing you to make all of your tart shells at once. For pastry shells, you can roll out one large sheet of dough over the whole pan, then use the included tamper to press the dough into each of the wells and the included cutter to snip off the excess pastry. For shells that don’t require a rolled dough, you can simply add a scoop of your crumb mixture or cookie dough, the use the tamper to push it into the form, and again remove the excess with the cutter. The tart shells can be baked and filled with all kinds of fillings, like chocolate ganache and lemon curd for treats that look like they came from a bakery because of their uniformity, but really took just a few minutes to put together. It’s an idea that just might take tartlets from a once-in-a-while dessert to regular feature after dinner.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you can’t go wrong with a chocolate chip cookie. With that in mind, a chocolate chip cookie makes a great jumping off point for other flavors in a cookie and you can transform an old classic into a new one without missing out on anything. With these Apricot Pecan Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies, I was looking for something to put a little bit of a twist on oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. I added in dried apricots, toasted pecans and milk chocolate chips for a cookie that offered a variety of flavors and textures.
All of these ingredients come together for a great cookie combination that seems not only delicious, but a bit unusual, since you don’t usually see them all together in once place. The chocolate adds sweetness, while the apricot adds some chewyiness and a bright, fruity flavor, and the pecans add a toasty crunch. The cookies themselves are buttery, tender, have just the right amount of crunch around the edges and make the perfect backdrop for all of the ad-ins.
The reason that I opted for milk chocolate is that I really feel it is a better match for the apricots than dark chocolate would be. Dark chocolate can have such a strong flavor that it is easy for it to overpower the light, flower flavor of the apricot. Milk chocolate adds some great sweetness to the cookies and still allows the apricot to be a standout flavor on its own.
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Long, slow cooking is great for all kinds of foods, from stews to roasts, but not everyone has the time to sit around the kitchen for hours a day babysitting a hot oven. The slow cooker is the solution, an appliance that does the slow cooking for you while you go to work, run errands or are out and about. Slow Cooker Revolution is a cookbook from America’s Test Kitchen that can help you take full advantage of the potential of a slow cooker.
The book (also available directly from America’s Test Kitchen) has 200 recipes and they range from soups, stews and roasts to pasta sauces, barbecue, breakfast and even desserts – all of which can be made in the slow cooker. Unlike some other slow cooker cookbooks, ATK doesn’t take a hard line with the “fix it and forget it” concept. While the recipes are easy and are largely hands-off, there are recipes where they direct you to prepare some of the ingredients on the stovetop to draw out additional flavors before putting them into the cooker and there are also a few recipes that are best finished with a little bit of time in the oven or under the broiler. This adds a little time to the overall preparation of a recipe, but it’s just a small fraction of the 5-10 hour cooking time that the slow cooker handles on its own. The details are things that will take food from good to great, and they are the kind of details that fans of America’s Test Kitchen have come to expect from their recipes.
In addition to the recipes, you’ll find product reviews and recommendations for specific ingredients that work better in slow cookers than others. There are also lots of great tips for preparation and serving, as well as a few quick-fix recipes for sauces and side dishes that make great accompaniments. You might be surprised at the wide range of things that you can do with the slow cooker and could very well find yourself using it more often to prepare great dishes with minimal work.
The next time you have overripe bananas in your kitchen, don’t make a banana bread. Instead, make some Banana Whoopie Pies. The classic whoopie pie is a chocolate cookie with a vanilla filling. This is a great combination in many types of desserts, but there is something about the soft, cake-like outer cookie and the creamy filling that make whoopie pies almost irresistible. This banana version is even better.
Soft, banana bread-like cookies are the base of these whoopie pies. The batter is somewhere between the thickness of banana bread batter and cookie dough, which lets the whoopie pies hold their shape well during baking, but spread out enough to make a good-sized sandwich. The cake is tender and very moist, with just a little bit of cinnamon and vanilla to highlight the flavor of the banana – which comes through very clearly. I used a cream cheese filling to sandwich the pies together. The cream cheese goes very well with the banana, and adds a little bit of tanginess that contrasts with the sweetness of the cake.
This recipe doesn’t make a huge batch of whoopie pies, but the pies are generously sized. You can easily double the recipe to make more, or scale down the size of your pies (and reduce the baking time by a couple of minutes) to get smaller, bite-sized pies and get more of them. These keep well when stored in an airtight container at room temperature, but they are so moist and flavorful that I bet you’ll find them as difficult to resist as I do.
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One thing that comes up in baking recipes almost as often as butter, flour, sugar and eggs is parchment paper. It is recommended for lining baking sheets, lining cake pans and being used to roll out pie crusts and cookie dough. But what is parchment paper?
Parchment paper is a heavy duty grease and moisture resistant paper that is used in baking and cooking because it provides a heat-resistant, nonstick surface to bake on. Parchment paper is made from paper that is treated with an acid during production to give it a high stability and high heat resistance. The paper is then coated with a nonstick material, typically silicone, to give it its nonstick properties. Parchment paper is safe to use to temperatures up to 420-450 degrees Fahrenheit (exact temperature depends on the brand) and is best used in a regular or convection oven, not under a broiler. At higher temperatures, the paper will become brittle and will start to turn dark brown. Both sides of parchment paper are identical, so both sides can be placed “up” when using it.
The best thing about parchment paper is that it is nonstick, so it eliminates the need for greasing cookie sheets when you put a piece of parchment down before you portion out your cookie dough. The cookies will come off very easy, with no sticking and absolutely no mess. In fact, you probably won’t even need to was the baking sheets afterward! Parchment paper can be reused several times, especially when using it to bake cookies, but will become brittle after several uses of a single sheet and should be replaced at that point.
When using parchment to line pans, greasing the pan is also usually recommended. This is because a little bit of vegetable oil in the pan will help the parchment to stick to the pan, meaning that no batter will creep under the parchment when you fill your pan up.
