The Last of the Hurricane Posts

This is the third and final post about how I cooked my way through the hurricane.  While it’s been good for my blogging productivity, let’s hope there are no more natural disaster-induced motivators, hmm?

Anyway, having survived Irene basically unscathed, I found myself with far more time than I expected the day after.  So I baked, but just because I had the time doesn’t mean I had the inclination to pull out all the baking stops and do something stupidly “Thank God, we’re alive!” manic like eclairs (though I did make eclairs during the blogging hiatus, because there is, in fact, a correct time and place for stupidly manic cooking).  I just wanted something comforting, low on the effort scale, and, since I didn’t know if commuter rail was going to be back up in time for me to go to work on Monday morning, capable of keeping an extra day if necessary.  What fit that particular bill excellently was gingerbread.

As we all know, my quest for ever more obnoxiously in-your-face gingery things is a lifelong one, and in that quest, I had tried the Classic Gingerbread Cake recipe in this January’s issue of Cook’s Illustrated. Apart from the bordering-on-foolhardy quantities of both fresh and powdered ginger, the recipe had two other things going for it: the clever use of stout to deepen the flavor, and the promise of eliminating the sunken and damp middle gingerbread is so often prone to. The recipe delivered on both intense gingery flavor and structural soundness, and was particularly well-received by the coworkers, who as we’ve established are surprisingly amenable to having their palates challenged via their weekly baked goods.

The one snag was that I had no stout on hand, and because I live in a state with patently absurd liquor laws and was not going to make a special trip to the beer distributor on the day after a hurricane to buy stout by the full case, I had to substitute what I did have: a nice hard cider.  To make up the required volume and add some more depth, I spiked it with some really spectacular rum we picked up on our now-annual summer jaunt to the Berkshires with His Lordship’s community orchestra. Despite the fact that the CI people said it wasn’t worth making the recipe with anything but stout, I noticed no dumbing down of the cake once baked.  The cider, rum and very dark blackstrap molasses I had in the pantry contributed more than enough low notes to support the double-ginger assault.  Honestly, I think it’s just as good with the substitution, and since we have not much use for stout while I adore hard cider, I’ll be going with this combination from now on.

For ease of distribution, as usual with Monday treats, I converted the recipe to cupcakes, which I spread with a cream cheese and lemon curd frosting. The frosting is seriously optional, and if it were up to His Lordship there would be no question about leaving it off, since he didn’t care for the additional sourness.  For those of you who are similarly less obsessed about citrus than I am, feel free to eat them plain or with a dab of salted butter for just the merest bit of decadence.

Gingerbread Cupcakes with Lemon Curd Frosting
(Adapted from Classic Gingerbread Cake, Cook’s Illustrated, January/February 2011)
Makes 30 cupcakes

For the gingerbread:
3 cups all-purpose flour
4 tablespoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon sea salt
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 bottle (11.2 ounces) hard cider plus enough dark rum to make 1 ½ cups
1 teaspoon baking soda
⅔ cup blackstrap molasses
⅔ cup honey
1 ½ cups packed light brown sugar
½ cup granulated sugar
4 large eggs
⅔ cup canola oil
2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger

For the frosting (utterly optional):
4 ounces (half a block) of cream cheese, at room temperature
4 tablespoons butter, at room temperature
½ powdered sugar
2 pinches sea salt
Half a (10.5 ounce) jar of lemon curd, or more to taste

Whisk together flour, ginger, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and black pepper in a large bowl and set aside.

Bring the cider and rum to a boil in a small pan over medium heat.  In the meantime, set the oven rack to the middle position, preheat the oven to 350 F and line 2 ½ muffin trays with cupcake liners.

Pour the hot cider and rum into a medium bowl and stir in the baking soda, which will foam up aggressively, then stir in the molasses, honey, and sugars.  Once the sugar has dissolved and the mixture is a bit cooler, whisk in the eggs, oil and grated ginger.

Add the wet mixture into the dry ingredients a third at a time, whisking vigorously between additions until completely smooth before adding the next third.  (For once, you need not be afraid of over-mixing.)  The batter will be quite liquid after the final addition, so use a ladle to divide it evenly among the lined muffin cups.

Tap the filled muffin trays gently against the counter a couple of times to release any air bubbles, and bake 25-30 minutes, until the tops are firm to the touch and a tester comes out mostly clean.  Cool briefly in their tins before lifting out by the liners onto a wire rack and cooling completely.

While the cupcakes are cooling, beat the cream cheese, butter, powdered sugar and salt together in a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment until light.  Beat in the lemon curd and taste, adding more if you want a more pronounced lemon flavor.  Spread the frosting thinly over the cooled cupcakes.

Unfrosted cupcakes will keep for several days at room temperature in an airtight container.  Once frosted, they really should be refrigerated, though you should bring them back to room temperature before serving since the chill will blunt some of the spicy kick.

Notes:

I could have stretched the batter among three full muffin tins, yielding 36 cupcakes, but they would have been slightly smaller than I wanted.  If you prefer that many, start checking them at 20 minutes for doneness. If you want to make a large sheet cake instead, pour the batter into a 9×13 pan, greased and floured, and bake 35-45 minutes.  Cool completely in the pan before frosting and slicing.

The quantity of frosting here is just enough to thinly cover the full batch of cupcakes.  If you want to be much more generous or to pipe designs with it, double the quantities.

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Drama-Free Rye Bread

While there are a number of advantages to living in our neighborhood, which is one of the outermost zip codes but still technically-within-the-urbs, access to stores is not one of them. We have just one tiny mom and pop convenience store within walking distance, so any real grocery shopping requires a car trip.

Even then, the stores that are handiest to us do not, alas, offer particularly good pickings when it comes to the bakery section. During the summer and fall months, there’s a farmer’s market near work at which I can conveniently pick up artisan bread along with vegetables during a lunchtime walk, but that hasn’t started up yet. Since we aren’t going to make a special trip into the city every weekend just for the bakeries or the farmers markets that have already phased in, that frequently means settling for whichever of the supermarket’s bland offerings don’t have a shelf life of eight months thanks to corn syrup or transfats.

This ongoing frustration is what recently prompted me to resume my long-dormant habit of baking bread on the weekends. I have neither the time nor the patience to maintain a sourdough starter again, but I have been making some lower-impact breads every few weeks while the oven is already warmed up for the Monday office treat baking.

One of my newfound favorites is this dark rye bread, which gives you deli-style payoffs with just a little more time and effort than your average quick bread. It uses a bit of a cheat, getting the complex, tangy flavor that usually comes from long fermentation from buttermilk instead, but you’d never know the difference if I didn’t tell you. It also packs in some extra heartiness by using one third whole wheat flour and a spoonful of wheat germ along with the rye and some bread flour for stretch and lift. You’d think, given all that whole grain, that it would be a dense and heavy bread, but it’s actually delightfully soft and easy to slice.

While it makes great sandwiches, the best topping I can think of for a just-baked slice of this bread is a smear of cream cheese and a glistening, sweet and tangy layer of my mother’s pepper jelly, which she was kind enough to make and mail to me after I expressed nostalgia for it. Should you have a less accommodating mom, raspberry jam or currant jelly work very nearly as well.

Buttermilk Rye Whole Wheat Bread
(From Bernard Clayton’s New Complete Book of Breads)
Makes one loaf

1 package (2 1/4 teaspoons) dry yeast
1 cup dark rye flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 tablespoon wheat germ
1 tablespoon caraway seeds
2 teaspoons salt
1 cup buttermilk
3 tablespoons molasses
2 tablespoons canola oil
2/3 to 1 cup bread flour

In the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the yeast, rye and whole wheat flours, wheat germ, caraway seeds, and salt. Run the mixer briefly to integrate the dry ingredients.

Heat the buttermilk, molasses and oil together in the microwave or a small saucepan until hot, 120-130 F. Add to the dry ingredients and mix at medium speed for 3 minutes. Gradually add just enough bread flour for a firm but not stiff dough to form.

Exchange the paddle for the dough hook and knead the dough in the mixer for 8 more minutes. If necessary, add more bread flour, but err on the side of a slightly sticky dough.

Place the dough in a large greased bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise in a warm place until doubled in bulk, approximately 1 hour.

Pat out the dough on a lightly floured surface to a 14 x 7 inch rectangle. Roll the dough up tightly, pinch the edges to seal, and tuck into a nonstick or greased 9 x 5 inch loaf pan. Lightly cover the pan with plastic wrap and let rise again until doubled, 1 to 1 1/2 hours.

Preheat the oven to 375 F. Bake for 35-40 minutes, until it’s well browned and sounds hollow when thumped on the bottom.

Turn out of the pan and cool completely on a rack before slicing.

Notes:

As with all yeast breads, resist the urge to slice it when it’s still warm, since the steam will promote gumminess in the still-cooling crumb.

This loaf keeps well on the counter in a loosely folded brown paper bag for several days, but you’ll probably devour the loaf well before staleness is a going concern. You can also tightly wrap the loaf in plastic and a layer of foil and freeze it for later use.

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The End of An Era

It’s my last week at work, which means this was the last round of Sunday baking for the office.

I’ll miss doing it, and I hope that they’ll miss it (and me!) at least a little bit.  It was nice to have an excuse to bake, and rewarding to be able to give my coworkers something to look forward to on Monday mornings.  I’m sure there will be plenty of opportunities to bake for my classmates, but time works so differently when you’re a student that it won’t be the same.

That’s why there was a certain wistful quality to this Sunday evening, even if I didn’t go so far as to cry into my cookie dough.  That’s also why it seemed appropriate to be making a comforting prior favorite, the five-spice molasses cookies with bourbon I dug out of the archives while putting up the sesame cookies.

I’ll post the recipe, because I made a couple of alterations to accommodate what I still have in the pantry as well as to work through my notes from the last go.  It was already good, but nothing is ever perfect, and I think these small changes made it that much better. Since I had no more crystallized ginger, I increased the quantity of powdered ginger accordingly, and decreased the bourbon by a teaspoon.  I think both were the right call, since this combination allowed the five-spice to really come through.  I also found a box of bright-white pearl sugar way on a back shelf, and thought it would look even better than coarse raw sugar.  It did give the finished cookies a fabulous dotted-swiss mod appeal, but it also added a great crunch that would make me seek it out for future experimentation with texture.

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Sunday Night Cookie Blogging: Tinkering with a favorite

It’s been a while since the last round of Sunday night cookie blogging, and since I was nowhere near energetic enough to attempt any confectionary pursuits tonight, I decided to revert to one of my favorite cookies, the molasses spice cookie. Soft, chewy, warm with cinnamon and sharp with ginger, this cookie seems to please nearly everyone, and as an added bonus, the recipe I use most often is a snap to put together at the last minute because you melt rather than soften the butter.

The original recipe, from The Village Baker’s Wife, is fabulous on its own, but that doesn’t mean I can be trusted to leave well enough alone. I’ve been tinkering with it in various ways since the second batch, when I added crystallized ginger bits, and this time, I decided to push it even further. A while ago, I wondered what would happen if I added Chinese five spice powder to ginger cookies, and was pleased enough with the results to increase the amount this time from a very conservative 1/4 teaspoon to a full 1/2 teaspoon. I was also intrigued by a recipe for Joe Froggers, which added rum to the dough. I was reaching for the rum when I spotted the bottle of bourbon sitting next to it, and suddenly thought that would work even better with the five spice, since it’s more assertive.

The product of all this tinkering was an even better molasses cookie, with an exotic complexity from the additional spices and a lovely aroma from the bourbon, which does play exceptionally well with the ginger and star anise. Next time, I will probably add even more ginger, of both the powdered and the crystallized variety, because nothing is ever gingery enough for me, but I think the five spice/bourbon combo is a keeper.

Five-Spice Molasses Cookies
Makes approx. four dozen

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup molasses
1 large egg
1 tablespoon bourbon
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon Chinese five spice powder
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup crystallized ginger bits

1/4-1/2 cup raw or turbinado sugar, for coating

Preheat the oven to 375 F, and line several baking sheets with parchment paper.

Sift together the flour, baking soda, spices and salt.

Melt the butter and place in a large mixing bowl, allowing it to cool to room temperature. Once cool, add the granulated sugar, molasses, egg, and bourbon, and mix well. Add the sifted dry ingredients and stir until barely blended, then stir in the crystallized ginger. Cover the bowl and chill for at least 15 minutes.

Place the raw sugar in a small bowl or plate. Scoop out the cookie with a tablespoon-sized scoop and roll into one-inch balls, coating each ball with the raw sugar. Place the coated balls two inches apart on the cookie sheets. Bake 9-10 minutes, allowing the cookies to cool on the sheets for several minutes before removing them to a rack.

Notes: I would think that you’d want a good-quality bourbon here, with enough spicy undertones to compliment the spices in the cookie. Since His Lordship is picky about his bourbon, we keep the top-shelf stuff around anyway.

I keep the Ginger People’s crystallized ginger baking bits around for cookies and the like, since it’s easier than chopping bigger chunks of ginger, which tend to try to glom back into a mass rather than distributing evenly into the cookie batter. If you can’t find the baking bits or don’t want to bother with an additional product (and I’d hardly blame you), it would be a good idea to finely chop the larger chunks and then toss them in a bit of extra sugar so they’ll separate into discrete bits.

If you don’t have raw or turbinado sugar, you can use an additional amount of granulated sugar for dredging, but the bigger crystals add a really lovely glittery quality to the finished cookies, as well as a hint of crunch.

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