Archive for September, 2011
Carrot cakes have a very comforting feel to them, with their warm spices and the rich cream cheese frostings that top them off. But there is no reason that a homey carrot cake can’t be dressed up a little bit by changing the presentation around and keeping the classic flavors that make it so delicious. This is a Carrot Cake Roulade is a jelly roll style carrot cake that is stuffed with a Cinnamon Cream Cheese Filling.
The base for the roulade is a sponge cake that is spiced with cinnamon, ginger and cloves and packed with plenty of shredded carrots. More traditional carrot cakes tend to be very moist and heavy, but this one is light and fluffy. The sponge cake is made by beating whole eggs until they have tripled in volume. It’s important to use room temperature eggs to get the best results. The sponge is the perfect base for a rolled cake because it holds its shape easily, and is also durable enough to be unrolled to allow the filling to be spread inside the cake before it is rolled back up again. I’ve used orange and lemon zest to give the filling a little extra depth in the past. This time around, I played up the spicy notes of the carrot cake by adding some ground cinnamon to the cream cheese filling.
In this dessert, the sponge cake is soft and the filling is rich and creamy. To add a little bit of texture to it, I sometimes add in a generous handful of finely chopped walnuts or pecans to the cake batter before it bakes. Large nuts can make the cake difficult to roll and to slice. Finely chopped nuts are much easier to work with and still add a little bit of crunch to the finished cake. I usually just dust my roulade with confectioners’ sugar before serving, but a few whole nuts make for a nice garnish, as well.
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Several months ago, two Girl Scouts started a campaign to encourage the Girl Scout organization to remove palm oil from their cookies. Rhiannon Tomtishen and Madison Vorva were working on a project to raise awareness of endangered orangutans and discovered that part of the reason that their habitat was being destroyed was to make way for palm oil plantations. Palm oil is a popular fat for processed food products because it worked as a substitute for some of the partially hydrogenated oils that companies, including the bakeries that supply the Girl Scouts, used in their products.
The girls campaigned to get the Girl Scouts to either remove palm oil from their cookies or switch to sustainably farmed oil. Initially, Girl Scouts spokespeople say that there was no viable alternative to using this mass produced palm oil in their cookies because they need them to be “sturdy” and have a long shelf life. After the girls spent months on the campaign, raising awareness with other troops and through the media, the Girl Scouts have finally announced that they are making a change. In a statement released Wednesday (9/28), the Girl Scouts said that they have directed their bakers to use as little palm oil as possible, and that they want their bakers to move to a segregated, certified sustainable palm oil source by 2015. In the meantime, the Girl Scouts will buy GreenPalm certificates, which offer a premium price to producers of sustainably farmed oil, to support the sustainable production of palm oil.
The girls both say that they will continue their campaign to promote the use of sustainably farmed palm oil elsewhere in the food industry, but having the Girl Scouts change their policies is a milestone victory. It also means that Girl Scout cookies in the future will be just a little bit better for us and for the planet than they are now. Of course, so are palm-oil free, all natural homemade Girl Scout cookies if you’re looking to have an excuse to make some cookies between now and next cookie season.
Honey is a sweetener that isn’t used all that much in cookie recipes. You can’t really cream it with butter to create a fluffy base for cookie dough (although honey whipped with butter makes an amazing spread for biscuits), so you can’t simply substitute it for sugar and expect to get the same results. Used properly, honey can be a great sweetener in cookies – and other baked goods – because it lends a rich and complex flavor to the finished product, helps with browning and also keeps baked goods moist so that they stay fresher longer.
These Honey Walnut Cookies are a very simple recipe that is a twist on an eggless chocolate chip cookie recipe that I’ve made many times. They use honey as a sweetener and vegetable oil where regular cookies usually call for butter, and like the recipe that inspired them, they are egg free. The dough can be mixed up in just one bowl and doesn’t require anything more than a spoon to bring it together. The recipe makes a small batch, but can be doubled if you want more than a dozen.
Because the honey adds so much moisture to the cookies, they don’t get crisp around the edges after baking. Instead, the cookies have a beautiful golden color and a slightly soft, chewy texture when they come out of the oven. The honey is very fragrant and gives the cookies wonderful flavor that reminds me both of nougat and baklava. The walnuts add some much needed crunchiness and their buttery flavor brings out the richness of the honey even more. Don’t overbake these, or they’ll dry out a little.
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I have a very large cookbook collection and, while I never have a problem finding a recipe that I’m interested in making just by flipping through the pages, it’s not always easy to find a recipe right away when I’m looking for something specific. For instance, if I want a recipe for pork chops with apples for a fall dinner, it may take me a while of hit-and-miss searching through books that I think might have such a recipe. This whole process is streamlined with a little help from Eat Your Books.
Eat Your Books is a cookbook search engine that allows you to index all of the recipes in all of your cookbooks to find exactly the recipe that you’re looking for. You can search by book, by author and by recipe title or ingredient. You can even further narrow your search by looking for a specific course. The search engine takes only a few seconds to work, leaving you plenty of time to pick out the book you need and start cooking. The only things that it doesn’t necessarily include are the recipes from your grandma’s old school or church recipe booklets and some of the more recently published cookbooks – and those newer ones are constantly being updated, especially as more people join the site.
If you’re not a member, you can use their search function, but the list of books that the results include will come from EYB’s whole library and it may take some additional time to find a recipe listed for a cookbook on your shelf. As a member of the site, you can select all of your own cookbooks and the results you get from the search will be tailored to those books. They do charge to become a member, but the fees are relatively small and the fact that the site allows you to more fully utilize your existing cookbook collection could very well make the investment worth it.
Pears are a great to bake with when they come into season because they have a wonderful flavor, work well with all kinds of fall spices and add a ton of moisture to baked goods. In this Nutmeg-Spiced Pear and Walnut Cake, I added a lot of fresh pear into a nutmeg-laced buttermilk cake, along with some walnuts for texture. The cake is sweetened with sugar and a hint of maple syrup, and the combination of the pears, the nutmeg and the maple makes this a delicious and memorable fall treat that can be served for brunch or paired with ice cream for a dessert.
The cake is easy to make and comes together very quickly. Diced pears and walnuts are folded in just before the batter is poured into the pan to bake. I will use fresh pears that have been peeled when I have them available, but canned or jarred pears (packed in juice or water, but not syrup) will work just as well if you drain them well before using them. Canned pears will be a little more tender than fresh pears and you will have to fold them into the cake batter carefully to avoid smushing any small pieces. The cake is not too sweet, so the delicate pear flavor comes through beautifully in every bite. I think that buttery walnuts work well here, though pecans make a great addition, too.
Because this cake is very moist, I think it comes out best when baked in a tube pan with a removable bottom, although I have it pictured here in a bundt pan. With the tube pan, you don’t need to worry about the tender cake or fruit sticking to the sides of the pan. If you’re using a bundt pan, be sure to grease and flour it even if you are using a nonstick pan to ensure that you get a clean release. If some of the pieces of pear still stick to the pan, simply pop them back into place on the unmolded cake and dust with confectioners sugar and no one will know the difference.
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