Nutella love & the first pumpkin baked good of the season

Usually this is how I like to eat Nutella. Although it's really good on graham crackers too.

 

Over the weekend I made Nutella shortbread cookies with a recipe from Serious Eats/Cakespy. These cookies are a little more labor intenstive because you shape two flat pieces, fill them and seal the sides, so a little more work than your normal scoop and bake cookies.

They are super buttery/crumbly but very, very good.

 Saturday morning, before I made shortbread, I made pumpkin doughnut muffins (recipe from Martha). Last week in Memphis it was so nice weather-wise. The mornings and evenings were cool and even the day time was nice. Today and tomorrow temps are creeping back into the 90's but hopefully we'll cool down again soon. The cooler temperature put the desire for pumpkin baked goods in my belly so I made these muffins. They were easy and buttery and gave me the first hint of fall. 

They were also really good with this.

Middle-of-the-week chocolate cake

Some times Wednesdays just call for chocolate cake. I was itching to bake something last night, but nothing too involved since it was a weeknight. When I was home at lunch I thumbed through my growing collection of cookbooks and found this recipe for a simple chocolate loaf cake from At Home with Magnolia. I like this cookbook but most of the desserts in it require hours of letting it 'set' before eating. Luckily, this loaf cake did not, it was more of a throw together, bake, let cool for half-an-hour and then devour. I used natural cocoa powder and made the adjustment suggested by Deb at Smitten Kitchen. The loaf cake turned out perfectly and didn't 'rise and fall'.

Doug and I had our still-slightly-warm slices with vanilla Haagen-Dazs, very good.

Some things to keep you cool

For several years now I've heard about Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams in Columbus, Ohio via Ravelry via TNNA. I was seriously close to ordering pints online before but the pricey shipping stopped me. Lucky for me (and everyone really) Jeni Britton Bauer (the Jeni) has written an ice cream 'cookbook'. I picked it up a few weeks ago and it has so many delicious-looking recipes in it for all seasons of the year. I cannot wait to make the Pumpkin Five Spice in the fall. My favorite part of all the recipes is that none of them use eggs. I just don't like homemade ice cream with egg yolks, the texture always seems weird to me. Instead the ice creams in Jeni's book are made with whole milk, heavy cream, sugar, salt, cream cheese and then whatever the flavor components are. Perfect! The book is also just really well put together with lovely photos and cute artwork.

 

The first recipe I made was Pistachio and it is perfect! I used pre-roasted/pre-salted pistachios but other than that I followed the recipe exactly. I was so anxious to try it and it did not disappoint. The pistachios make the ice cream a pretty pale green. 

The second recipe I made was the Roasted Strawberry Buttermilk. We've passed prime strawberry season here but I picked up some non-local berries at the grocery store. To achieve the maximum strawberry flavor, you slice the berries, toss them with sugar and lemon juice and roast them for about eight minutes in the oven. After that you puree them in the food processor. Since you only use 1/2 cup of the puree, there's a lot leftover and I'll tell you what I did with the leftovers below.

I love, love, love this flavor. The pistachio is wonderful too but the strawberry is my favorite of the two. However, I managed to get some tiny cornstarch clumps so I guess I didn't get the cornstarch mixture fully incorporated. The flavor of the ice cream wasn't hurt though but I'll be more careful next time.

With the leftover strawberry puree I added a small amount of vanilla bean paste and a small container of vanilla yogurt. After I whisked it all together I poured the mixture into some of my popsicle molds and froze them.They turned out really well, not too sweet and lots of strawberry flavor. These particular molds remind me of a unicorn horn.

I love this book so much and I anticipate making many more of the recipes, mainly the Sweet Corn Black Raspberry!

Patriotic Pie & Lemon Blueberry Buckle

On Monday we lazed around our house most of the day watching a Roseanne marathon on Oxygen (don't judge). Later in the day we were due at the home of friends for dinner. I had wanted to make an actual-real-from scratch cherry pie for awhile and the 4th of July seemed as perfect a day as any to make it. Since we don't get sour cherries around these parts I used the sweet cherry pie recipe from Smitten Kitchen. I used the butter-based pie dough recipe too. I feel like I worked the dough a little too much and it chewier than it should have been. The pie turned out well but it didn't slice up into neat triangles since there was no gelatinous goo to hold the cherries together. I attempted to use a USA shaped cookie cutter for the vent in the center. It looked somewhat abstract but most everyone knew what it was supposed to be. 

I have a lot of cookbooks, most of them are baking-themed, and I'm trying to do better about using them. Over the weekend I pulled out Rustic Fruit Desserts and made the Lemon Blueberry Buckle recipe. It was very, very good. I did manage to accidentally caramelize the lemon syrup but it didn't diminish the overall taste. If have access to blueberries you need to make this. You also might consider doubling the crumb topping - just a suggestion...

Shiny

Let's talk about this:

This is my new kick-ass, awesome range with a convection oven. Hell yes. After a lot of back and forth between myself, Maytag and the Home Depot, it arrived Saturday afternoon and was installed within minutes. It is glorious and beautiful. The matching range hood was out of stock but should be delivered this weekend and hopefully installed sometime next week. After I ooohed and awwed over it for awhile, I got to baking.

 

First I made Nutella sandwich cookies. The recipe is from the (newish) Barefoot Contessa "How Easy is That?". The cookies are super buttery shortbread with ground up hazelnuts in the dough. The dough is really sticky and I added flour to make it easier to work with. I could have made the dough thinner (I think the recipe says 1/4 of an inch). I liked these so much. I took some to my aunt and my grandmother and they both really liked them.

The jam muffins are a recipe from Serious Eats and I used a jar of Bonne Maman Four Fruits preserves. Very yummy, especially warm.

I think New Oven and I are going to be very happy together.

Orange Chocolate Macaroons

I doubt these could be more simple, egg whites + sugar + chopped bittersweet chocolate + orange zest + sweetened flaked coconut, that's it. Prep time - somewhere around ten minutes (chocolate chopping and orange zest-ing). Baking time - 26 minutes (at least in my oven). From bowl to belly in around 36 minutes. Recipe from the Sweet Melissa Baking Book.

Lemon Poppyseed Cake & Almond Macaroons

Here are two items I made a few weeks ago and forgot to post about. The first is a simple, one layer lemon-poppyseed cake with a recipe via Epicurious (click here for recipe). It's quick, sweet and spring-y.The second thing are these Almond Macaroons from Martha Stewart's Cookie book, recipe also found here. They aren't the sandwich cookie macarons and they aren't the coconut macaroons. They're just a little cookie made with almond paste, egg whites, confectioner's sugar and vanilla, a lot of almond flavor in little airy cookie. Word to the wise keep an eye on these, the first batch I put in the oven were a little overcooked.I'm going to be on a baking-vacation for the next few days, I'm headed out this morning to Colorado with my friend Kenan. We'll be visiting Colorado Springs, Denver, Estes Park and maybe Boulder and going to as many bakeries and yarn stores as we can. As always I'm excited to visit a state I've never been to and see mountains! However, I am not excited to fly. Flying with a friend makes it a little easier, at least I have someone's hand to hold!

Jammers

I love baking cookbooks, I haven't counted how many I have but it's most of my cookbook library. I heard about the Grand Central Baking Book via a few other blogs I frequent. Somehow in my trips to Portland and Seattle I managed to not visit any GCB location so I really had no clue about them. But I ordered the cookbook and it came last Thursday and I started pawing through it immediately making my weekend baking plans. One of the first recipes I found was the Jammers recipe. Jammers are essentially biscuits filled with jam and then baked. Similar to the idea behind thumbprints (like yesterday's). They reminded me of a muffin I had at Macrina Bakery in Seattle. I toyed with the recipe a little, subbing some whole wheat flour for some of the white flour and added about 1/4 cup of ground flax seed. They were delicious, I used Bonne Maman raspberry preserves for the jam.I can't wait to make more things from the GCB cookbook, there are so many recipes packed into the book. The sandwich cookies look especially tempting and I bet they travel well too.