Category Archives: Baking

Quick-n-Easy-Sticky-Sweety-Monkey-Bread Breakfast Huzzah!

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IMG_1725Do you know monkey bread?

You need to know monkey bread.

Monkey bread is a Southern staple, super easy to make, and stupid delicious.  We used to have it on the regular after church on Sundays, but I rarely make it as an adult.  Perhaps because of this scarcity of monkey bread in my life, I’ve come to think of it as significantly a Christmas thing, an integral part of breakfast, served alongside some kind of spiced juice-tea concoction my mother has served in mugs shaped like Santa and Mrs. Claus’ heads, and after which consuming I will fall asleep on the floor under the tree in a bathrobe or perhaps sweats and a 26-year-old Def Leppard shirt as soft as The Baby Jesus’ fanny.

After making it at home this year for a solo Shannon-&-Jason Christmas, though, I think I’ll be making it on the regular again.  Perhaps Mom always brought it out on Christmas because it’s so damn easy.

And because it’s so sticky sweet gooey yummy blam!

To make monkey bread all you need is Continue reading →

Quick, Somebody Give Me a Christmas Cookie I Can Make in Twenty Minutes

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Cookies

Here are pictures of a lot of cookies I didn’t make.

I’d like you to know that I am not a total slouch at some aspects of Christmas. I like thinking up gift ideas, and I can wrap a mean present. My less-than-perfect pitch is balanced with caroling gusto. I’ve been planning dishes for Christmas Eve dinner for weeks now. But man, I’m bad at Christmas cookies.

Christmas cookies are one of those things, along with cards (and really, bless all those people who still send me Christmas cards, surely knowing that they are getting nothing in return), that I’m just bad at making myself do. My mom saved me a newspaper section that was completely comprised of cookie recipes. I have read it approximately twenty times without actually making any moves toward baking them myself. When my friend Mignon mailed me some whimsical sugar cookies (including one that, I’m pretty sure, was a teeny tiny albino dolphin), my first thought was, “Thank goodness. This buys me at least another two days.”

But let’s face it—it’s now or never. Help me out bakers: what’s your absolute easiest cookie recipe?

Baking in a Blender

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Pie close-upO come, all ye baking inept, and I will show you the way, for its name is Buttermilk Pie and it will make you feel better about your poor pie-making skills.

Okay, so it’s no secret that I’m not really that great of a baker (see: my idea last year to “bake my way through the alphabet,” during which I gave up at about D when all the good stuff that started with Chocolate was behind me). So when my mother-in-law made us a delicious pie during a visit to Virginia a few weeks ago, I didn’t really harbor any illusions that I would be able to emulate it. Imagine my surprise then, when she sent us the recipe and it actually looked like something I could handle. It involves throwing a lot of things in a blender, and after a summer of making gazpacho and pesto, I am in tip-top blender-operating form. And that’s pretty much it! There’s Bisquick in the blended concoction, which forms a sort of crust, so you don’t even have to pretend that you made the crust yourself. I tried the recipe out last night, and it turned out so tasty that I might even try to engineer a smaller, tartlet version for the Sugar Sweets Festival that is coming up on October 25 (mark your calendars!)

buttermilk pieLet’s give credit where credit is due: the recipe comes from a friend and fellow teacher of my mother-in-law, but the almond kick-it-up-a-notch flourishes are all Katie Leahey. Leave it to teachers to set you on the right path, toward education and pie.

Bonnie Thompson’s Impossible Buttermilk Pie Continue reading →

Anthropological Study of Brooklyn Male Making Banana Bread

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anthropology

“It’s true that I wasn’t paying attention to the recipe,” subject admits. “My plan was to just mix everything together.”

4:58 p.m. Subject announces desire to “whip up” some banana bread. Makes telephone call to sister-in-law, the source of excellent banana bread recipe, to discuss some possible alterations. Subject is heard to become very distracted, however, and start talking about horses instead.

6:10 p.m. Observer enters kitchen to see if it will soon be clear for dinner preparation. Banana bread still in early stages.
“Do we have a sifter?” subject asks, eyeing the brown sugar.
“I think you’re supposed to pack brown sugar,” observer offers.
“Ah, right,” subjects says, and then adds sugar to dry ingredients.
“Doesn’t sugar usually go with the wet ingredients?” observer asks innocently.
Subject becomes bashful and starts to pick out chunks of brown sugar with a fork. Mentions that maybe it won’t matter since he is substituting Greek yogurt for butter. Observer begins to have serious doubts about edibility of final product.

6:47 p.m. Subject becomes very dejected about de-sugaring process. Decides to wait until after observer has cooked dinner to finish banana bread endeavor. Subject then remembers the foraged black walnuts that have been in the refrigerator for months due to both the subject and the observer being too lazy to hull them. Subject retires to front stoop to smash them with rocks.

8:30 p.m. Observer tries to assess subject’s confidence level. Subject responds: “You know, I’m feeling more confident than ever. I feel like you are losing confidence, but mine is only growing. It may have been a rough start in some ways to some people, but I’m not worried.” Continue reading →

Brace Your Sweet Tooth. It’s Festival Time.

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Sugar-Sweets-Poster-webHear ye, hear ye, worshippers of the sucrose! Get thyselves to Havemeyer Street, because it’s time for the Fourth Annual Sugar Sweets Festival this Sunday! It’s the bake sale to end all bake sales, and proceeds will benefit the City Reliquary, a fun and funky museum in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

It just so happens that this year Pitchknives will be represented at the festival in the flesh! Get there earlier enough and you can snap up the sweet treats that we’ll be whipping up on site. Fans of the site will know that we consider ourselves more the cooking and gardening type rather than skilled bakers, but have no fear gentle readers: we’ve come up with the perfect way to circumvent this obstacle. We’ve cooked up a sweet version of Jason’s famous masala peanuts, and we’ll be unveiling them in all their sugary glory this Sunday.

So come on down to hipster-town, eat our peanuts, watch some fun baking competitions and nab some treats from some of the hottest bakers in Brooklyn. Entry is free, so what’s not to like? You can find more details right here.

The Dessert Cure: Down in the Dumps Pudding

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novel-cure-coverLately, I’ve been hearing a lot about The Novel Cure by Susan Elderkin and Ella Berthoud, a book of literary “prescriptions” to alleviate whatever ails you. I know this sounds a little impulse-buy-at-the front-table-of –Barnes-&-Noble-ish, but two facts caught my attention: 1) the authors do not limit themselves to the illnesses of the mind that you might expect, but also bridge the gap between physical discomfort and psychological panacea (they suggest Shantaram for constipation, for instance), and 2) the book is indexed both by illness and book, for handier use as an actual reference.  I really am going to try their suggestion for “Dinner Parties, Fear of.”

Why don’t we already have something similar for food? There are homeopathic guides, of course, but I’m thinking more of something that would tell me the perfect dish to cure my headache or the muscle strain in Jason’s shoulder. For instance, preparing and eating bibimbop will rid you of hangnails. Actually, that’s not true, but I’m not saying that I want to write this book; I just want to have it at my disposal.

In fact, the only recipe that I could think of that wears its medicinal target baldly on its sleeve is the Down in the Dumps Pudding that my mother used to bake at the end of summer vacation to usher in the first day of school. Though I grew up in the Midwest, this is a very British use of the word pudding–more of a cake, if you ask me. It’s a molten chocolate number that should be eaten hot, so make sure that you’re adequately depressed to take on the whole pan or have some friends around to help you polish it off. Either way, you should feel better by the time it’s gone.

Down in the Dumps Pudding Continue reading →

What Puts the Key in the Lime?

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key lime pieFlorida is a good place to contemplate important matters of nature like the mating habits of bottlenose dolphins (colorful) and the take-off techniques of loons (unfortunate). On a recent trip to visit my parents, I also found myself thinking about the mysterious fruit, the key lime. Even though I spent many of the Christmas vacations of my childhood throwing fish heads to pelicans on Marathon Key, I believed that key lime pie was just lime pie that you ate in the Keys. I’m not sure it fully sunk in that the key lime is actually a fruit unique from the Persian lime (also known as the gin and tonic lime, at least to me). Here are some fun key lime facts:

  1. They’re not green. Or rather, the ones you should be eating are not green. The ripe ones are bright yellow.
  2. Most of them don’t come from the keys, at least not since the 1926 hurricane that wiped out most of the lime groves of Florida. Now we get key limes from Mexico.
  3. They’re native to Southeast Asia, so I was probably eating them all the time in Cambodia in place of Persian limes without ever realizing it.
  4. They’ve been known to cause phytophotodermatitis upon contact, making human skin extra sensitive to light. No word on how long this effect lasts, but it sounds like bad news for sunburned tourists in a tropical climate.
  5. They are smaller and seedier than their Persian brethren, and their flavor is more tart and bitter.

Okay, so none of those facts make them sound terribly appealing, particularly the last two. But because they have a stronger flavor, you don’t need much juice to get a strong limey flavor, which makes them ideal for cooking.

I suspect, though, that the real reason that key limes and the pies they go into are so popular is because we associate them with sunshine and sand and Ernest Hemingway and pelicans and fish heads. They’re a vacation on a plate. I mean, look how happy this guy looks. Continue reading →

ABCs of Baking: Cheese of Wonder, Cheese of Light

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cream cheese frostingNothing sounds more relaxed and delightful than a potluck (just listen to the word roll off your tongue—a combo of steaming, cozy kitchen and good fortune), but as the holiday potluck at the literacy center approached, I admit that I was feeling anxious. Looking at the list of suggested dishes, I began to suspect that I didn’t really have the same taste in food as many of the other people attending—half of the list was meat, which I don’t eat, and I wasn’t even sure what mauby was. (It’s a drink, in case you’re interested, though I still haven’t had the chance to try it.) So I took a deep breath, thought of my winter baking initiative and volunteered to bring a cake.

I have, in fact, made cakes before, but only of the packaged cake mix variety, so this seemed the perfect opportunity to expand my horizons. Because it is the season of root vegetables, I decided to dwell in the C section of the alphabet a touch longer and make a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. The recipe in Better Homes and Gardens seemed a little work intensive (three cups of finely grated carrot = almost certain thumb abrasions) but rather simple, and I had a pleasant reunion with an electric hand mixer that had been tucked away on a shelf in our kitchen for many moons. It wasn’t until the cake was in the oven that I realized I’d only put in about half of the baking powder and baking soda that the recipe called for. Here is a good baking lesson: you really should read the lettering on those measuring spoons, no matter how strongly your intuition tells you which one is a full teaspoon.

As it cooled, the cake was looking a little dense. Had it risen enough to be edible? It actually didn’t matter much, because here, dear reader, is an even more important lesson: Continue reading →

ABCs of Baking: Cornbread (and Stuffing, Too?)

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corn mealHardly could one find a more emblematic Thanksgiving food than cornbread. It is a “New World” food, a staple of the natives of this continent for centuries, unleavened and cooked over a fire. (I believe that the Little House on the Prairie Cookbook called this form corn pone—an unfortunate name, but still more palatable sounding to me as a child than the recipes for hardtack and headcheese.) But the Europeans couldn’t keep from meddling with the pone any more than they could its cooks, and their eggs and baking powders brought it closer to the cornbread we know today. Long after we’d solidly colonized the cornbread, however, controversy continued to rage, with Southerners preferring a more dense and savory variety, Yankees adding sugar to give it a more muffin-y taste and Midwesterners being too polite to definitively vote either way.

With Thanksgiving close at hand, I could hardly ignore this most complicated and divisive of foods, and I decided to try my hand at my first batch of cornbread stuffing from scratch. First, of course, I needed to bake some cornbread. But with which regional version to cast my lot? Savory seemed right for a stuffing, so I sought out Paula Dean to guide me. I’ll be honest—I’ve never made anything by the Food Network queen of Southern cooking, but I had recently heard an old NPR interview in which she explained how to deep fry an ottoman (“Oh, it’s easy, honey, you just dip it in egg first.”) and it had thoroughly charmed me.

cornbread

Does the color of this batter make me look Irish?

So I dutifully scribbled down the ingredients for her cornbread and stuffing recipes and headed to the grocery store. The store, however, had already been ravaged by pre-Thanksgiving shoppers, and the only variety of self-rising cornmeal they had left was made with white corn. I hemmed and hawed over this. I had had in mind the deep golden color of waves of grain, and I didn’t want my stuffing to look pallid. I was loath to walk to another grocery store, though, and besides, I’m used to being one of the whiter things in this neighborhood, so I grabbed it and headed to the checkout. Continue reading →

ABCs of Baking: Banana Nut Bread

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banana nut bread

The obvious next step, alphabetically, after apple pie...

Alright, let’s get this out of the way first—YES, I was the one who told you all the bananas are dying. Clearly, I haven’t managed to completely wean myself off of our delectable tropical friends. While I was training for the Race That Never Was, Jason often bought me bananas as a good source of potassium after a run. But somehow, no matter how many he purchased, it always seemed to be one banana too many for me to finish before they turned off-puttingly brown and mushy. I’d heard long ago that when this happens, you’re supposed to peel the banana and stick it in the freezer to use later for banana bread, and I’d adhered to that wisdom. Of course, that solution supposes that you can bake, so I’d always just sort of skipped the last step and had been left with a Ziploc bag of scary permafrost bananas to throw out every time I changed apartments.

frozen banana

Um, not the best way to do this.

But no longer! This time I yanked those babies out of the freezer, along with one that I’d neglected to peel. (I was in a hurry, okay?) After letting them defrost, I managed to free the unpeeled one from its skin. And the defrosted bananas really were easy to use in the recipe.

One baking technique that I have yet to master is trusting that something is cooked all the way through when the recipe says it will be. I think I overdid it on the banana bread a little, and I was worried that it would be dry. But luckily, it seems to be a pretty forgiving baked good, and it tasted quite yummy, especially after it sat overnight. For breakfast, Jason liked slices of it toasted, making it crispy and buttery on the outside, moist and cake-y on the inside. So dive into the freezer and give it a go:

Continue reading →