cake 18 orange upside down cake eleganza*

caramelizing fruit and baking in a cast iron skillet, to make an upside down cake is a perfect fit for radical muffin sensibilities. Pineapple is classic, of course, but the possibilities are vast. In the winter markets, citrus is reigning, so we piled perfect blood oranges, pink oranges and baby oranges still dressed in their leaves into the basket to carry home to become cake.

when we were in high school, the vending machine outside the cafeteria held shiny wrapped rolls of Daily-C. Someone from our table would buy a roll—an offering— bring it back to the table, and pass it round: “Don’t get scurvy,” we’d say, like a blessing. Spin-off humor from some horror story in history class; popping the vitamins like candy.

if it’s oranges it must be good for you—not to be confused with food group orange, comprised of the orange things like Doritos, nacho cheese and Crush—so we recommend this cake for breakfast. Mimosas or Bellinis at brunch elevate it to eleganza, yes?

five small oranges provided enough rounds for an 8-inch skillet. Slice the peel from the fruit and reserve it for something else like hot toddies or mulled wine; throw them in a bag in the freezer if not using right away. With a long serrated bread knife, slice the oranges into thin wheels.

separate 4 cold eggs and let them hang out to warm up.

melt 4 tablespoons of butter with ¾ cup of light brown sugar in a cast iron skillet and bubble away for about 3 minutes. If you have them, a few crushed cardamom seeds added now and picked out later are lovely. Allow to rest a few minutes then lay the fruit in concentric circles in the pan. Heat the oven to 350°.

the cake recipe we used called for a 10-inch skillet. We meant to pour off some of the batter as cupcakes but forgot. The utterly full pan baked up just fine, and although the cake to fruit ratio was greater, the cake is delicious and no one is complaining.

sift together 1 ½ cups of all purpose flour, 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder and ¼ teaspoon salt. Cream together a stick of soft butter and ½ cup white and ½ cup turbinado sugar. Beat in the egg yolks. Grate in the zest of an orange and a lime.  Beat in the sifted flour along with 3 tablespoons of cornmeal and 2/3 cup of milk.

clean your beaters scrupulously, and whip the egg whites until soft peaks form. Fold half of the egg whites into the batter then carefully fold in the other half. Pour the batter over the fruit, smooth and bake for about 45 minutes, until the cake is golden and set.

let cool in the pan for about 10 minutes then turn out onto a plate. You want to flip it while it is still a bit warm or all that gooey, caramel fruit will stick to the pan. Boooooooo….

with a successful flip—cake self decorated with gloriously sugared fruit. Relax and enjoy.

*in nod to the new season of RuPaul’s Drag Race xoxo

13 cake: Bûche de Noël

this Bûche de Noël turned out more log-like than imagined, though the woodiness is obscured by the fantabulous mushrooms and holiday slugs. Decorating meringue mushrooms is fun for the whole crazy family! Remnant stems became holiday slugs; holiday only in that they are on the holiday cake. That’s mom’s micro-handiwork in the placement of the teeny eyes.

the Bûche is a French tradition, and today versions are made in countries of franco-influence (and colonization) from Canada to Viet Nam. And by seasonally intrepid home bakers everywhere. Designed in myriad stumpy forms for Christmas, the log cake is typically génoise, sometimes chocolate, almost always has chocolate frosting yielding a simple bark effect. Traditionally filled with the same chocolate frosting, today’s Bûche coils around everything from chocolate mousse to chestnut brandy cream to nothing at all (Scrooge).

this rendition is a roll of vanilla génoise (glorious! as always) with filling of fig preserves, crushed toasted hazelnuts and a drizzled web of honey.

like any tree at yuletide, the dessert log begs to be decked. Meringue mushrooms are standard; ours took a bit of a Suessian bend. Inventive bakers worldwide decorate with fleets of wintery stuffs: marshmellow snow people; plastic santas, reindeer, elves, et al; filigreed white chocolate; glacé fruits; fake holly and sugared rosemary branches & cranberries. Julia Child dresses hers in a spun caramel veil. Mom questioned what that gold web represents. The magic of Christmas? She was unconvinced, and our broom handle remained free of sticky hanging caramel strands and log unveiled. The mushroom painting got a little involved as it turned out anyway.

powdered sugar often makes a snowing; we skipped in favor of the arty high-gloss of the frosting alone. This chocolate frosting is of butter and semisweet chocolate melted in hot instant espresso folded into the vanilla meringue left over from the mushrooms.

happy holidays. Eat well; be merry.

winter farmshare yields carrot cake

according to recent text messages, this is the best carrot cake EVER!!!

the sweet up-shot of a zillion carrots from the winter farm share.

presuming carrot cake a quintessential American dessert, I went to Joy for the measurements. Out of respect for its crumbling, moldered pages, the 1953 edition doesn’t do kitchen duty so the kitchen’s 1997 edition provided the basic infrastructure. As expected, carrot cake, page 935. Adopted as below; brilliant.

snuggled into bed with the booky stink of the old copy to see how the recipe changed over time. It ain’t in there. Scoured the index, staring blankly at places where it should fit…carrot, cake; cake, carrot… It wasn’t hiding out near the gingerbread where it lives in 1997, and the gingerbread lived in breads not cake and without the quaint introduction as the baked good with the oldest traceable roots with the exception of bread. Wouldn’t carrot cake be a logical runner up? Pineapple cake—perhaps leading to the crushed pineapple in the late innovation of carrot cake—was the closest thing. Seems Granny Rom didn’t put shredded veggies in dessert.

and I don’t put canned crushed pineapple in anything. So, happily abandoning that convention, peel an apple, slice it into quarters, and drop them into a small saucepan with 4 tablespoons of butter, the zest of one lemon and half an orange, and about an inch of fresh ginger peeled and minced. Cook covered over low heat, stirring once in awhile, until, essentially, you have a very fragrant apple mush.

heat your oven to 350° and butter and flour a 9” round cake pan.

sift together: 1 ¾ cup of cake flour with 1 ½ teaspoons of baking soda and a teaspoon of baking powder with cloves, cinnamon, salt and freshly grated nutmeg.  I am afraid the latter measurements are of the “as you like” variety.

in a large measuring bowl, whisk together ½ cup of sunflower oil, 3 eggs (at room temperature), and one cup of sugar. We went in for plain white sugar which left room for the intricate spicing to shine through. Stir in the cooled apples.

stir in the dry goods along with 1 cup each of walnuts and dried cranberries as well as 2 cups of shredded carrots. Admittedly, the peeling & shredding of so many roots out me off making carrot cake before. The sole available tool had been a finger threatening flimsy box grater. But the newly gifted mandolin shredded them so fine and so fast we had more than originally called for lickety-split. Thus—even more carroty carrot cake.

pour the lot into your cake pan and bake for about half an hour or until set in the center. Leave for 10 minutes before turning out of the pan to a rack for cooling then a plate for icing.

by the work of our hands

according to my mother, who shredded these carrots and made the spangled pocket in the photo, carrot cake’s ultimate role is as perfect accompaniment for cream cheese frosting. The key to which, apparently, is very cold cream cheese. Cream together an 8 oz block of cold cream cheese with 4 tablespoons of softened butter and 2 – 2 ½ cups of powdered sugar.

once iced, the whole cake will need to refrigerated as well as slices as they linger, if the linger. Happy if they do, this is the sort of cake that gets better when its been around a bit.

the feast of lights

from Chicago, Angel, who has lived in Sweden, posted:

It is no surprise you were born on the light-bringer’s day. Happiest of Birthdays. I love you. Mille Besos.

naughty fairies on the mirror of collective creation

even if you lie about your age—in this case, I publicly turned 95—the experience of birthdays via facebook is an almost overwhelming thing.  A dinner party, however, is less so. On the eve of my personal new year, which is also the feast of Saint Lucy, the saint of light (a coincidence my Sicilian Catholic great grandmother rapturously believed blessed), this radical muffin put out big time.

the preacher eater made the grand finale possible. His cousin, the cook from Sun in Bloom, might argue that the Rosemary Remembrance cake was the grandest thing on the buffet, selling it to everyone sidling up to the table and slipping the end bit in foil to go. Her aunt perhaps the white lasagna, with hand pulled noodles and slimly sliced marinated artichokes. Many were enthralled with the “prehistoric, fractal, underwater, alien” romanesca served whole like pine forested mini-mountains. For me, it was, as it always is, the pie.

this particular pie being Ohio Pie or Shaker Pie, a thing from the heartland, my homeland, humble and weird, sweet and tart. Made with whole lemons, sliced paper-thin. The recipe called from old church cookbooks and Joy, irresistible. So I raved and hinted and promised a winter of root veggies au gratin all the while with pie in mind thus the benevolent preacher eater gifted me a mandolin.

oh! this simple machine! I cannot oversell its virtues: swift and easy precision cutting; easy to clean; mad fine julienne potential; small, i.e. easy to store in teeny urban kitchens. The grace of fine design. If you’re most beloved kitchen witch doesn’t have one, find one for their tool box. ‘Tis the season.

offered presents early enough for cooking (the other being a seltzer maker; big party hit), I merrily slid three Meyer lemons down my new plane, shedding translucent sunny circles, pith and all. If you also have a fabulous mandolin then slice them right into a big glass bowl. Poke out the seed bits. Dump a cup of sugar and a bit of salt over the lemons, and let the whole mess sit. Hours. Overnight. In this case, as long as it took to make everything else with wonderful kitchen help from the preacher eater plus our charming guests from Takoma Park.

make pastry for a covered pie. Roll it out for your pan accordingly. Pat the bottom into place in your pan; cover its surface directly with something, like parchment paper. Roll out the top and likewise wrap it. Stash both in the freezer.

bring out four eggs to come to room temperature. Set ½ stick of butter, four tablespoons, in an ovenproof bowl to melt in your oven as it heats to 425˚. When mostly melted, pull it out, stir and let cool a bit.

whisk together the eggs. In a fine stream, pour in the butter, and sprinkle in three tablespoons of flour (a small fistful). Stir the macerated lemons into the egginess, pull out your pie pan, and pour it all in. Smooth out the lemons in the custard, and top.

to ventilate, cut out shapes into the crust with cookie cutters. We used a peace dove for this, with sweeping slices at its wings.

bake for half an hour. Lower to 350˚, and bake for another 20 minutes or so, until the crust is puffed and browned. Bring out to cool on a rack before serving. The custard has to set up, and if you cut into it right away, you’ll have lemon lava mess.

lemon for light

hopefully, the others ate their fill, because, admittedly, I ate the lion’s share the next day, Saint Lucia’s day, heaped in a bowl and drizzled with heavy cream. Eaten in bed under thick covers against the first snow and its accompanying shattering cold. Although not brought by girls with candles in their hair and no charming men sang the Star Boy song, Brooklyn being far from Stockholm, it felt as domestically magical.

aprons

Tori & Reshma showing off 'hansel & gretel's witch' and 'biased queerly'

just in time for the winter season – the freezing we warm by feasting and gifting – the radical muffin kitchen has turned workshop to compose aprons. Two new lines of aprons are now available, worthy of your most inspired feats of cooking and your most beloved kitchen witch.

’cause even the witch with everything can use another apron!

what's not to love?

click through the “APRONS” tab on this website’s main toolbar for more babbling on aprons as well as detailed descriptions and photos of all those currently available.

half a dozen of these semi-frocks are on hand. Another round of production in these two lines (Bootsy and Audrey) is scheduled for completion by Monday, December 13, 2010.

to request prices, join the e-mail list for in-person showings, or order an apron, please write me at radicalmuffin @ gmail.com

gratzi mille to Tom Martinez for the photos!

aprons pair well with wine & lady friends (my years old apron, l'arte d'arrangiarsi, the art of making something out of nothing)

the dessert that outdid itself: meyer lemon blueberry pastry

over this glorious pastry as it cooled (admittedly near the unpicturesque sinkful of dishes), our friend from India leaned in and cooed, oh, I don’t know what you usually do—but you’ve outdone yourself.

in a sudden fit of late winter, Brooklyn was covered in snow.  it was getting late.  the kitchen fugged with cookery; the laughter of the folks at table in the living room where the Christmas lights are still up at the windows.  the pastry was golden and layered with sunny lemons, smelling of lemons and buttered sugar.

this dessert is the best kind of cooking, ridiculously easy and utterly delectable.   because the Russian bodega on the corner sells frozen puff pastry for a buck o’five thus making the splurge on meyer lemons and grossly out of season blueberries doable.

thaw frozen pastry dough and gently stretch it until it is about a quarter of an inch thin.  I just carefully pull it and stretch it with my fingertips like pizza dough then drape it over a towel covered chair and let it hang out.  Depending on how your pastry comes, you may need to roll it out.  If you make your own, that’s all you my friend and kudos!

melt half a stick of butter over low heat.  When just foaming, turn off the heat and grate in the peel of meyer lemon and about an inch of peeled and minced ginger.  Cut the ends off a fresh, unzested, lemon and slice thinly.

heat your oven to 375°.  On a baking sheet covered with parchment paper, lay out your pastry dough.  Spoon lemon ginger butter over the surface and spread.  Gently fold over each edge of the dough to make a rimmed rectangle of pastry and smooth the seams with your fingertips.  Brush the newly revealed surfaces with butter, and sprinkle the center with brown sugar.  Lay in the slices of lemon, touching but not overlapping.  Drop two handfuls of the best blueberries picked from a pint over the lemons.  Drizzle the whole thing with the remaining butter and finish with a bit more brown sugar.  Bake for 20 minutes to half an hour or until the edges are golden brown and the center cooked through.  Cool enough to eat, slice and serve.

i prepared this before any of the dinner and set it out on our fire escape, putting it in the oven as we sat down to eat, and it was perfectly ready come dessert time.

lemon & thyme risotto

1 small sweet onion
1 ½ cups Arbario rice
1 cup white wine
5 cups veggie stock
2 organic lemons
fresh thyme
1 cup shredded parmesan cheese
3 tablespoons of butter

zest your two lemons, scrapping their bright yellow peel with the finest side of a grater or a file.   Pick the thyme leaves off their stalks, generating about 2-3 tablespoons of fresh herb.

heat a stockpot over a medium flame, and add in a tablespoon or two of olive oil and of butter.  Add in the rice and stir to coat and cook 3-5 minutes to toast.  Turn up the heat and pour in a cup of white wine.  Bring to a boil, stirring until the wine is absorbed.  Add another cup of wine and squeeze in half a lemon.  Stir until absorbed.  Add the veggie stock ½ a cup at a time, alternating with fresh lemon juice, and stirring until the liquid is absorbed each time.  Cook, adding liquid, until the rice is al dente and the risotto is creamy, about 20 minutes- ½ an hour.

stir in the lemon zest, thyme and cheese.  Pour in another slug of highest quality olive oil, a dash of salt and pepper.  Serve in big shallow bowls.

bread pudding

And since I’ve been an absentee blogger (a technical difficulty, my computer has gone lame and I am on bowered time-connected), I’m giving up a bonus recipe this edition. This is for the saucy wench in Chicago, for years of unflagging friendship. Though, you know, Sistergirl, you already have it; it’s in the ’zine.

Essentially, bread pudding is leftover bread buttered and baked in custard. One of those genius little recipes of frugality, a means to ensure remainders do not go to waste but are lovingly transformed into deliciousness.

The ingredients will vary based on what you have on hand, and the amounts will vary according to the size of your baking vessel. Please adjust accordingly and adopt to suit all your whims and fancies.

Basic Bread Pudding Instructions:

in a saucepan, heat about 2 1/2 cups of milk almost to a boil (scald it). Slice open a vanilla bean, drop it in and stir. Lower the flame and cook for about 15 minutes. Leave to cool.

butter both sides of thick slices of a leftover baguette, about half a loaf. Cut or rip into cubes. I think ripping is easier, because the buttered bread just sticks to your cutting board. Arrange the pieces in a casserole dish or baking pan. Whether you select a deep or shallow pan depends on your desired crispy to gooey ratio: deep pans make for more custardy, cakey pudding, and shallow pans allow for more crispy, golden top crust.

beat 3 eggs, or 5 egg yolks for lux pudding, with 1/3 cup of sugar and a dash of salt. Pour the scalded milk into the eggs in a thin stream, beating constantly. Pour over the bread. Let stand for at least half an hour, and it will be really happy if you wrap it up and let it sit in the fridge overnight. I set aside a bit of custard to drizzle over the top just before baking.

set your casserole in a pan that is larger around by about a quarter inch. Pour water in the bottom pan until the level is a quarter inch or so below the op edge of the casserole. This is a water bath. Bake at 350 for about an hour.

for breakfast, serve it with maple syrup, and maybe layer some raisins in. Pecans are good. For dessert, try it with dark chocolate bits and orange zest added, served with whipped cream or rum sauce. Or you can make it with pain au chocolate. No need to butter croissants, of course.  Making jam sandwiches out of the bread, buttering the outside, and breaking that into cubes also makes a mad good pudding.

pasta and fennel meet balls

uncork a bottle of respectable red table wine. Pour a half a cup into a wine glass with a generous bowl, swirl. Enjoying your wine, read this recipe entirely:

slice two yellow onions and one red bell pepper. Smash, peel, and mince five cloves of garlic. Setting aside the rest for your sauce, two of the cloves and a handful of the onion are for your faux meat balls.

mince this onion finely. In a mortar with a pestle, crush two teaspoons of fennel seeds with 2 teaspoons of coarse sea salt. In a big bowl, add these spices and a teaspoon of black pepper to the onions and garlic. Add a handful of quick cooking oatmeal and one egg. These are made with egg in a nod toward my grandfather’s original recipe, but you can omit the egg and the oatmeal and have tasty balls (note: the oatmeal or bread or cracker crumbs, is a good extender to make more balls for cheaper). Let this all rest together while you get on with the sauce. Stick it in the fridge if you are neurotic about leaving out egg at room temperature.

in a hot pot—a large stock pot with a heavy bottom, heated over a medium flame—toast a proportion to taste of hot and sweet paprika and red pepper flakes. I used about two teaspoons of sweet paprika and one teaspoon of hot paprika and red pepper flakes. Pour olive oil into the pot, about three tablespoons, bring to hot and pour the red pepper and onion and garlic into the pot. Cover and cook over medium-high for five minutes: in a series of 3 x 5, every five minutes for a cycle of three times cook and stir and cover the spicy pepper mix. Add sea salt and black pepper.

as this base cooks down, rub clean a pound of crimini mushrooms, ranging from a quarter in diameter to fungi the size of an egg. De-stem them, and slice the heads into threes, making fat slices. Add them to the pot, and do another round of 3 x 5 cooking and stirring.

stir in three tablespoons of tomato paste. Pour in two large cans (28 ounces each) of crushed tomatoes. By all means if you come by this recipe in the heart of tomato season then boil & peel and crush a whole pile of fruit, but in early spring in Brooklyn, the cans are fine and preferable. Add a smaller can of diced tomatoes. Bring to a slow, popping simmer and cook for an hour or longer.

about half an hour before you want to eat, put a big pot of water onto boil.

add a tube of ground beef style soy “meat” to the big bowl of eggy, spicy slop, and mix it together well with your hands. Roll tablespoons of mixture into balls.

heat a heavy skillet and when it is hot, add a few tablespoons of olive oil. Fry the balls until brown on all sides.

pour a few generous slugs of wine into your sauce and stir. Add your fried meet balls. Bring the sauce back to a simmer.

add a box of noodles to the boiling water: spaghetti is Italian-American classic; fettuccini is seductive; and penne, somehow, feels domestic and family-like. Cook until al dente and drain. Pile noodles on a plate or in a bowl as appropriate, top with sauce. Somewhere in this cooking, maybe put together a nice salad. Now sit down with you, and whomever you dine with if you are dining in company or family, and polish off the wine.

as it simmers, you can also read this blog:

http://thyme-for-herbs.blogspot.com/

and maybe, watch a little more labyrinth:

trifle

admittedly, not just any trifle. This is festival trifle. Trifle with Italian Christmas cake, pistachios, cardamom, heavy cream, and apricots soaked in hot sugared liquor (not in the original recipe).  make your own panettone for this, and we’ll do our own you-tube video.

as it came to me from Nigella via my favorite kitchen witch:

Here you go love ~ from Nigella’s Feast

4.5 C dried apricots

6 C water

3/4 C superfine sugar

juice of 1 lemon

juice of 1/2 orange or 1 tangerine

6 cardamom pods

1/2 pandoro or 1lb piece of pandoro or panettone

1 C heavy cream

1 C greek or whole milk yogurt

3 Tbs honey

1/4 C pistachios

1/4 C slivered almonds

amaretto if you like

Put apricots, water, sugar, juices in saucepan

Bruise cardamom, add to pan, stir

Bring to boil, turn down, add a few slugs of amaretto and simmer for 30 min

Drain apricots, discarding seeds and pods, put liquid back in pan, boil over high heat 15-20 min to reduce to syrup (to about 1.5 cups) – let cool

Cut pandoro into 1/2 inch wide, long slices. Line bowl with half of long slices, spread half of warm apricots over cake, pour half of suryp over this.

Repeat (placing slices opposite direction) – leave overnight covered with plastic wrap in fridge

Topping: whisk heavy cream till soft peaks, add yogurt and beat to combine – spread over trifle

Drizzle honey, scatter nuts