Tag Archives: Fall Desserts

Maple Pecan Shortbread

There are times that call for a simple, one-bowl, 10 minute drop cookie, and then, there are times that call for something a bit fancier, when you want to pull out all the stops. like, when you’re going to meet the parents of your son’s fiancé and want to bring something that says thanks for the hospitality. We travelled to Owen Sound, Ontario for Canadian Thanksgiving this past weekend, to meet the folks.

On the way to Owen Sound , my husband and I discussed the logistics of the initial meeting. Would we just shake their hand, or hug? What if we go in for the hug, both arms open wide and they stick put their hand for a shake. Awkward! We took a chance and went for the hug and so did they. We arrived as strangers and left as friends.

Saturday night was Thanksgiving dinner. Mom and daughter cooked us an unbelievable feast, complete with turkey, dressing, gravy, cranberry sauce, roasted squash, mashed potatoes, beets and cabbage salad! For dessert there was an early birthday cake for me (Mark Bittman’s coconut cake), baked by my son and THREE PIES (apple, pumpkin and pecan). Sunday we were treated to lunch at the charming Cobble Beach Inn. Both of her parents were charming and really made us feel welcome. Our son is a very lucky man.

These cookies were inspired by Emma’s Pecan Maple Shortbread Cookies. If you’re not familiar with Emma, you need to check out her blog and Instagram accound (@emmaduckworthbakes). She’s a brilliantly talented baker with clever ideas and her photos are off-the-charts gorgeous.

Emma dipped her cookies in a maple glaze and scattered maple glazed bacon bits over her cookies. I opted for a milk chocolate dip and a generous coating of maple glazed chopped pecans. These cookies are buttery, sweet, a tiny bit salty, crunchy and packed with maple flavour. If you can get your hands on maple sugar use it instead of regular granulated sugar.

After makling the dough, roll it out right away, while it is still soft, between 2 sheets of partchment paper. It’s so much easier than trying to roll out firm chilled dough. After rolling, chill the dough before cutting out your maple leaves. While the dough is chilling make the candied maple pecans. Mix together the pecans. maple surup and a pinch of salt.

I’m a bit of a perfectionist and I wanted an impeccable straight, clean line of chocolate and pecans. Just dipping the cookie into the melted chocolate wasn’t going to give me the edge I wanted, so check out my method for achieving perfectly decorated cookies.

Speculoos Apple Crisp

Here’s what date night looks like after 34 years of marriage. Gone are the days of candlelit dinners in the dining room at home. We stand at the kitchen island. He is peeling 12 pounds of apples and I am dicing them up to convert them into mini apple crisps for the freezer. We used to cook together all the time when we first started dating. But then I became a professional cook and took over kitchen duties. I had forgotten how nice it is to cook together. Granted, the CFL weekly highlights were on TV in the background, but still, it was quality time.

I had a big bag of my go-to crisp topping in the freezer so making these went really quickly. We still had about 5 mini crisps left to cover with the crumble, but we ran out of topping. I found a bag of oat crumble in the freezer, leftover from my Maple Crunch Birthday cake. My husband suggested we top the remaining apples with this topping so we tried it. We baked the tray of crisps and had a taste test. The oat crumble topping was fantastic.I played around with the recipe a bit and had the brilliant idea of using Speculoos cookies instead of oatmeal cookies. Gingersnap cookies would make an excellent substitute if you can’t find Speculoos (also called Biscoff). I added some chopped pecans and rolled oats for a bit more texture. This crisp topping is sweet but with a spicy ginger bite. A perfect complement to the apples.

With a scoop of vanilla ice cream, they were the perfect end to date night.

Click here to print recipe for Speculoos Apple Crisp.

 

Celebrating Blog Post #500 – Apple Cinnamon Ginger Crunch Cake


On May 19 2009, I wrote my first blog post . Today marks my 500th! I never set out to write a blog. It happened accidentally. I joined an online group who were baking their way through Peter Reinhart’s tome, “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice”. I was hoping to increase my bread baking skills beyond the simple challah I baked each Friday.

The premise of the group was that we would work our way through the book, alphabetically, from Anadama Bread to Whole Wheat , one loaf each week, for 43 weeks. Group members would share their experiences in a Google group. I noticed that some members were chronicling their journey via blogging. It seemed like a cool idea, so I stayed up all night and figured out, with the help of wordpress.com, how to do it.

Here is a shot from that first post. My bread turned out perfectly, but clearly my photography skills needed work.
There were 212 of us, from all over the world, who started the challenge together. Only 12 of us actually finished! I loved the whole process! At heart, I think I am a born storyteller, so blogging really spoke to my soul. I love to create, so baking, taking photos of the process and telling stories about it really fed my creative needs.

After I finished my final loaf, I just kept on blogging. Along the way, I bought a better camera, took some online classes in food writing, and photography and attended several workshops on food styling and photography. One of the best investments I ever made was purchasing this online course from Rachel Korinek, of Two Loves Studio. She is an amazing teacher and extremely generous with her time. I have also been inspired by the effervescent Bea Lubas. Her ability to tell stories is unparalleled.

Another outstanding teacher is Joanie Simon of The Bite Shop. Her youtube videos on food photography, released every Thursday, are the highlight of my week. I have learned so many tips and techniques from her. All of these mentors have helped me along my journey, but the most important tip I have learned is practice and perseverance. Nothing replaces these.

With 500 blog posts under my belt, I am excited to see where the next 500 take me. I have a loyal group of followers who encourage me by leaving me questions and comments. Thanks from the bottom of my heart. It’s so nice to know someone is out there reading what I’m writing!

I am so grateful for the community of food bloggers and photographers. For the most part, they are people who are generous of spirit. I adore the trait of generosity. My fellow food bloggers and photographers share knowledge and offer gentle and constructive criticism as well as heaps of praise. I feel like I have found my tribe.

To celebrate this milestone I decided that a special cake was in order. This cake is quite spectacular. It starts with three layers of moist apple spice cake. Each layer is covered in silky cinnamon Swiss meringue buttercream. To finish this gorgeous cake, I added a drizzle of apple cider caramel.
The cake batter is crammed full of diced apples. I used three huge Honeycrisp for mine. When you mix the batter together you will think you made a mistake because it is so thick. It basically looks like bits of diced apples, barely held together by batter. Don’t worry. As the cake bakes, the apples release their moisture and your cake will be perfect.

This cake recipe is barely adapted from John’s recipe on The Preppy Kitchen. His knowledge of  cake baking is mind-boggling. He taught me about cake strips. They help prevent domed and cracked tops and over-cooked edges.

 I went with a silky Swiss meringue buttercream, accented with cinnamon. While admittedly a bit more work than a simple American buttercream, I just adore the light and velvety texture of a Swiss meringue buttercream. If you are curious, here is everything you ever wanted to know about buttercream from the über-talented Stella Parks.

For the shiny caramel drizzle recipe, I went straight to Tessa Huff’s gorgeous book, Layered, for inspiration. In a traditional caramel sauce, you use water and white sugar. Tessa suggests reduced apple cider and brown sugar instead. The tang of apple cider is perfectly balanced by the toasty notes of brown sugar in the cooked caramel. It really helps to offset the sweetness of the buttercream.

I added a little surprise of crunch between each layer with a ginger-pecan crumble, because texture is important in everything.

Truthfully, we didn’t drink the Prosecco (in the first photo of this post) with this cake. My first slice I had with some ice cold milk, and the second (and third, if we’re being honest), I had with tea. My fourth slice I just ate standing in front of the fridge. I ended up making this cake three times, before I got it exactly where I wanted it, so we had lots of cake. Even the mistakes were delicious. The first cake was served at our Rosh Hashanah dinner, with a birthday candle for my cousin Barbara. The second and third cakes were sliced, photographed and then wrapped and sent off to my husband’s office, where most of my baked goods go to have a happy ending.

Click here to print recipe for Apple-Cinnamon Crunch Cake with Caramel Drizzle.

Pear Fritters

on gold platter 1As if I really needed another reason to be grateful that I am a Canadian and not an American citizen, I found one. The mighty tonka bean!  Turns out they are illegal in America, but perfectly safe to purchase here in Canada.

Tonka beans are a major source of coumarin, a highly aromatic organic chemical compound naturally occurring in many plants, including cassia cinnamon, lavender, and bison grass. The fear and confusion stem from the fact that coumarin is used in the production of Coumadin®, a blood thinner. But the chemical structure of coumarin is changed when it is used in the production of Coumadin®. Coumarin, naturally occurring in tonka beans and other plants will not act as a blood thinner. Yet, the FDA has banned tonka beans. Interestingly enough, they have not put a ban on any other plant naturally containing coumarin. tonka beansI discovered tonka beans while I was in Charleston South Carolina last month. I attended a cooking class and the chef whipped out a vial of contraband tonka bean. When we asked him how he got his hands on them he just smiled and said, “I have a guy.”

They grow in South America. While tiny in size, only 1-inch long, they are huge in aroma and flavour. They are reminiscent of vanilla, cloves, and cinnamon with a hint of nuttiness reminding me of almonds. To use them, they must be grated, much like whole nutmeg. A microplane grater does a great job of this.

I like Bosc or red or green Anjou pears for this dessert. They have a denser flesh than other pear varieties. They become more tender when fried, but they don’t turn to mush. horizontal pearsI left the peel on and just sliced them vertically so that each slice retained its pear shape. A basic fritter batter contains flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, egg, butter or oil and usually water or milk. To bump up the pear flavour I used pear cider for my liquid. I added half a grated tonka bean to the batter. If you can’t get tonka beans, add a bit of vanilla and almond extract to the batter. The second half of the grated tonka bean gets mixed into the sugar-cinnamon for topping the fried fritters.

Heat the oil to about 375°F for optimal frying. You want a crispy golden crust and a tender interior. They only take 2-3 minutes per side to fry.

Have a baking sheet lined with paper towels as well as your grated tonka bean-cinnamon sugar mixture ready before you start frying. Make sure to sprinkle with the topping while the fritters are still hot. Even if you omit the tonka bean, these fritters are freaking delicious. A burnished golden brown outer crust gives way to the sweet and creamy pear encased in the center.Sifting cinnamon and sugar 1They would be delicious with a cold glass of pear cider.on gold platter bite takenCould be a fun substitute for sufganiyah this year at Chanukah!fritters for 2

Click here for the recipe for Pear fritters.

Cider Glazed Apple Bundt Cake

with whole and sliced applesI happen to have a surplus of apples, so we’re baking apple cake around here this week. I have my go-to my favourite apple cake recipe, but I was intrigued by this recipe from the September issue of Cook’s Illustrated magazine. In addition to the apples in the batter, they added apple cider to the batter and glaze. A full litre of apple cider is reduced down to one cup to really concentrate the flavour.

The recipe fills a large 12 cup bundt pan, but because I can’t resist anything mini, I used my bundlette pan. I also made a small loaf with the leftover batter. loaf and minissingle miniThe batter comes together quickly. You don’t even have to bust out the mixer.

The baked cake gets brushed with some of that reduced cider and the remaining cider is mixed with icing sugar to create a yummy glaze.drizzling glaze 1

Click here to print the recipe for Cider Glazed Apple Bundt Cake.

with tea