This blog is my way of sharing recipes I love. I don't make a penny from the blog, it's just for fun! I do pay to keep it Ad-Free so it's a better experience for you. Please write a comment if you use a recipe! I'd love to hear your thoughts.
For this gorgeous loaf I made a few minor modifications to my stand-by European style bread recipe. This time I coated the outside of the bread with oil, giving it a crisper crust, and baked it in parchment paper. It contains 1/3 whole wheat flour. It’s still made using the same method, mixing the dough the day before and letting it sit for 12-18 hours – this slow fermentation is what gives the bread so much flavour. Very easy, very delicious, and economical too.
This loaf was served with salty butter, brie cheese, and some creamy duck pâté.
For this recipe you will need a large container with a lid. I use a le Creuset oval pot or a Romertopf clay baker. You also need parchment paper and plastic wrap.
What you need:
1 cup whole wheat bread flour
2 cups white flour
1 & 1/4 teaspoons salt
1/4 teaspoons yeast (I used Fleischmann’s active dry yeast)
1 & 1/2 cups water
canola oil for coating the bread
What you do:
Combine the flours, salt and yeast in a bowl. Add the water and mix; add more water if needed until you have a wet, sticky dough.
Cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a lid, and let sit for 12-18 hours in a warm-ish place, and out of direct sunlight. The dough should double in size and become dotted with bubbles. If your house is a little on the cool side you will likely need the longer rising time.
Cut a large piece of parchment paper and lay it on your kitchen counter. In the bowl, coat the top of the dough in oil, then turn it out onto the parchment paper. Coat the top of the dough in oil, using your hands. Cover with some plastic wrap, tucking it in loosely around the edges. Let the dough sit for 1-2 hours, until it has doubled in volume.
About 1/2 hour before you want to put the bread in the oven, set the temperature to 475 F and place your baking pot on a rack in the lower third of the oven. Let the pot heat up, and when the oven has reached 475 F, remove the pot from the oven. Remove the plastic wrap and pick up the dough by gathering together the corners of the parchment paper. Carefully (remember the pot is smoking hot!) place the dough in the parchment paper into the pot, as in the photo of the baked bread above.
Put the cover on the pot and bake for 30 minutes while the bread forms its nice thick crust. Remove the lid from the pot and continue to bake for 15-20 minutes more. The bread should become a deep brown when it is done, and if you tap on it, it should sound hollow. Remove the pot from the oven, lift the bread out of the pot, remove the parchment paper, and place it on a rack to cool. It needs to cool for about 1/2 an hour before slicing.
This bread has no preservatives, so if you don’t use it up of the second day, it should be frozen.
I’m really proud of this recipe – it turned out perfectly! My goal was to create a savoury pie crust using duck fat, and this one ended up being so perfectly flakey and flavourful. And the chicken and vegetable filling was super tasty as well.
I used half butter, half duck fat for the crust, because I wanted it to still have that awesome buttery flavour, which is even more decadent when paired with the duck fat.
For the filling I began with this recipe, and made a few changes. I used my own pastry recipe, used a store-bought rotisserie chicken instead of cooking the chicken breasts, used butter instead of olive oil for frying the veggies, omitted a few items, made less sauce, and added the mushrooms, leek, and potato. I also added some thyme and a lot of freshly ground pepper.
The keys to a successful pastry are using very cold ingredients, weighing rather than measuring, and not overworking the dough. One of my guests was surprised to see rather large chunks of fat in the crust, but leaving the butter and duck fat in pea-sized pieces allows the pastry to be flakey rather than dense.
This recipe would feed 6 hungry people. I served it with a salad of arugula and spinach, with a walnut dressing.
What you need for the crust:
350 grams flour
1 teaspoon salt
140 grams cold butter
140 grams cold duck fat
6-ish tablespoons ice-cold water
What you need for the chicken and vegetable filling:
meat from 1 small rotisserie chicken (I used a Whole Foods chicken)
1 egg plus 1 tablespoon water, for the pastry wash
What you do:
Begin a few hours ahead of time by preparing the dough. In a large bowl weigh and pour in the flour along with the salt. Cut the cold butter and duck fat into small pieces, then add that to the flour. Use your fingers (cold hands are the best for this – lucky me!) to rub the flour into the fat, only working until the fat is in pea-sized pieces. Add about 5 tablespoons of the ice-cold water, and stir it in using a spatula. Add a bit more water if necessary. Turn the dough out onto the counter and push it together into a ball. Cut the dough in half (or a larger piece for the bottom crust, smaller for the top) and form each piece into a disk. Wrap each piece in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for about 2 hours.
To make the filling, begin by chopping the onions and leek. Heat a large frying pan to medium, add a little butter. Cook the onions and leek, lowering the heat, for about 10 minutes, or until the onions are translucent. Clean and slice the mushrooms while the onions are cooking.
Remove the onions to a large bowl, then turn the heat up on the frying pan and add a bit more butter. Fry the mushrooms, possibly in two batches, until they are browned. Remove them to the bowl as well.
Cut the carrots into a medium dice. Blanch them for 2 minutes, then move them to the bowl.
Cut the potatoes to a medium dice, blanch for 2 minutes, then move them to the bowl as well.
To make the sauce, begin by heating the chicken stock and wine, and dissolve the bouillon cubes in it.
Melt the butter in the frying pan, then sprinkle in the flour. Stir constantly over low heat for 2 minutes. Slowly add the liquid, stirring to combine the liquid into the flour mixture as you add it. Simmer for about another minute, until the sauce thickens a little. Add the cream, ground pepper, thyme, and salt to taste (keep in mind the bouillon cubes contain salt, so don’t over-do it).
Cut the chicken into cubes and add them to the bowl with the veggies. Add the sauce to the bowl and combine everything. (Add frozen peas if you are using them. I had so much filling that I didn’t have room for them.)
Preheat the oven to 375F.
Remove the pie crusts from the fridge. Sprinkle a little flour on the counter and place one of the disks (the larger one) of dough on the counter. Roll the dough a little, then turn, roll, turn, continuing until you get a circle of dough that is 7-8 cm larger than your pie plate. Roll the dough over the rolling pin, being careful not to stretch it, then transfer it to the pie plate. It’s okay if it breaks in places, just pinch it back together. Roll the other crust out. Add all the fillings to the pie plate, then brush the edges of the bottom crust with the egg wash. Place the top crust over the bottom, cut off excess pastry, then crimp the edge.
Cut slits in the top of the pastry, then brush it with the egg wash, and sprinkle with salt and pepper.
Place the pie on a baking sheet, put it in the oven, and bake for 1 hour. The pie should look golden brown, and the filling should be bubbling.
This gorgeous little cake is drenched in a lemon glaze, making it irresistible. I found the recipe on Orangette. I was looking for a lemony cake, but I wanted to make a recipe that used olive oil. I altered the original recipe slightly by using olive oil, and adding a little more lemon zest.
One other change I made was in the preparation of the recipe, which I think is quite important. I added the zest at the beginning, along with the sugar. If you rub the sugar and zest together it releases the oils from the zest better.
I served part of the cake, then wrapped up a portion and put it in the freezer – just as good a few days later!
Prepare an 8 inch cake pan by spraying it or rubbing it with butter. Cut a circle of parchment paper to fit in the bottom of the pan. Spray or spread butter on the parchment paper. Preheat the oven to 350˚F.
Place the sugar and zest in a large bowl. Rub the zest into the sugar with your fingers.
Add the yogurt and eggs, one at a time, and stir until well blended.
Add the flour, baking powder, and salt, mixing enough to just combine the dry ingredients.
Add the oil a little at a time and stir until it is a smooth batter.
Pour the batter into the prepared pan.
Bake for 30-40 minutes, until the cake feels springy to the touch and a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean.
Cool the cake on rack for 10 minutes; then turn the cake out onto the rack.
Prepare the glaze by stirring the lemon juice and powdered sugar together. Place a plate or baking tray below the cake to catch drips. While the cake is still warm, use a pastry brush spread the glaze all over the cake – some of it will drip off, but keep going until the glaze is gone, as it will soak in.
Allow cake to cool completely.
Sprinkle with powdered sugar if you desire it and serve. This cake was still delicious a few days after baking.
These crispy crackers were a big hit at the New Years party I brought them to last night. They are reasonably easy to make, but take a little bit of time. It is so worth it though – they are nice an crispy, a little salty, and the bubbles are pretty cool.
My friend Sarah often buys La Panzanella Croccantini to serve with cheese. They are delicious crackers, but quite expensive. So this was my attempt to make a cracker like those. I also made some into uniform rectangles and poked them with a fork to get rid of bubbles like the store-bought version, but they didn’t get into the photo. For presentation I really liked these big ones, and the bubbles in them.
I served it with a red pepper jelly, an apricot and peach jam, and a beautiful Manchego cheese.
I found the recipe here. The original recipe had rosemary in it, which I will try next time, but for this appetizer I wanted to stick to this salted version to highlight the flavours of the jams and cheese. Also, it was a messy slushy afternoon, and I couldn’t be bothered to head out into that weather again for an herb. In the original recipe they were baked for 3 minutes per side, but I didn’t read that part of the recipe (oops), and it worked well to just bake them on one side.
It is really helpful to have a pasta machine for this, to roll the dough out to a uniform thinness. You can also do this carefully with a rolling pin.
What you need:
1 & 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp sugar
2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup cold water
spray bottle filled with water
more salt to sprinkle on top
What you do:
Combine the flour, salt and sugar on your countertop and make a well in the centre. Pour half the water and the olive oil into the centre. Little by little, add the flour to the centre, until you can mix and form it into a ball, adding more water as you need it (as you knead it). (Or you could do this all in a food processor by drizzling the liquid in as the food processor it running.)
Knead the dough until it forms a smooth ball, adding a little flour to the countertop if it gets sticky. Divide the dough into four pieces and cover with a towel for 10 minutes to allow the gluten to relax.
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Line baking pans with parchment paper. A pizza stone would be great here!
Use a pasta machine or rolling pin to roll the dough out as thinly as possible. I did the same process I would use for making pasta: start by running the dough through the thickest setting, then fold the dough over in thirds, run through again, and repeat one or two more times, until you get a nice rectangle. Change the setting to one thickness lower, run the dough through, then keep going until you get to the thinnest setting. Part way through you will get a really long strip of dough – you can cut this in half at any point.
Carefully place the dough flat on the parchment paper lined pans. Spray with a little water, then sprinkle some salt on top (I ground some kosher salt).
Bake immediately, starting to watch it after about 3 & 1/2 minutes. It should be slightly browned.
Place the crackers on a cooling rack. They will crisp up more as they cool. If they don’t seem crispy enough they can go back in the oven for a minute or so, even after they have cooled.
Once they have cooled completely, store in an airtight container. I have no idea how long they will keep because there were no leftovers this time!
Brownie-like, this chocolate rum cake is dense and rich without being too sweet, and it is packed with rum! I served it with vanilla ice cream and hot fudge sauce, but it’s delicious on its own too.
The cake is easy to make, and you get this perfect rectangle shape by putting another loaf pan on top and putting something heavy in it.
My recipe has, believe it or not, less rum than the original recipe. It was the dessert for our family Christmas dinner, and I thought some people might not appreciate quite so much booze in their dessert (no, the kids didn’t eat any!) Most of the rum cooks off, but the last 1/4 cup (1/2 cup in the original) it still potent.
Feel free to use different proportions of chocolate. The original recipe didn’t specify which type of chocolate to use. I settled on some semi-sweet and some bittersweet, but depending on how sweet you like your desserts, you could use all of one, or half and half.
Enjoy!
What you need for the cake:
4 ounces semi-sweet chocolate (110 grams)
2 ounces bittersweet chocolate (55 grams)
125 mL butter (1/2 cup)
250 mL black rum (1 cup)
4 eggs
125 mL granulated sugar (1/2 cup)
125 mL brown sugar (1/2 cup)
250mL flour (1 cup)
1 teaspoon baking soda (5mL)
1/2teaspoon baking powder (2.5 mL)
125mL cocoa (1/2 cup)
1/2 teaspoonSalt (2.5 mL)
What you need for the rum sauce:
125mL butter (1/2 cup)
60mL black rum (1/4 cup)
60mL granulated sugar (1/4 cup)
60mL more black rum (1/4 cup)
What you do:
Butter and flour a large loaf pan (5&1/2 by 10 inches). Preheat the oven to 350F.
Place the chocolate, butter and 1 cup of rum in the top of a double boiler, or in a large bowl that you can microwave. Heat in the double boiler on low, or microwave for 30 seconds, whisk, then repeat until melted.
Whisk the sugars into the butter mixture, then whisk in the eggs one at a time.
Sift the flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, and cocoa into another bowl.
Add half the dry ingredients to the wet, mixing completely. Now add the other half and mix again.
Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for about 45 minutes (original recipe says 1 hour), or until an inserted toothpick comes out cleanish (just not wet).
While the cake is baking, place the remaining butter, 1/4 cup rum, and sugar in a small pot. Boil for a few minutes. Remove from the heat and add the remaining 1/4 cup of rum.
When the cake comes out of the oven, keep it in the pan and poke it all over with a skewer or toothpick. Pour the rum sauce over top – it will all get absorbed into the cake. Place another loaf pan on top of the cake, and weigh it down with something heavy like a rum bottle.
When the cake has cooled completely, flip it onto a serving dish. Serve on its own, with a little whipping cream, or ice cream and hot fudge sauce!
My Oma used to make cookie like this, a spice cookie with damson jam inside, and coated in a crispy egg white frosting. As far as I know she never had a recipe, and I never got to learn to make them from her. Since she is gone now I’ve been trying to recreate, as best I can, her cookie recipe. This is year two in the attempt. This one was successful! Countless hours researching and working, but success nonetheless!
Oma called her cookies “ammonia cookies,” which never seemed unusual to me – that’s just what they were called. Now I realize it doesn’t sound very appetizing, so I’ve renamed them. Baking ammonia, also known as ammonium carbonate or hartshorn, is a substance that was used before baking powder and baking soda. It makes baked goods nice and crispy. But…
it smells soooo bad!
But only before they are baked. Then they smell heavenly.
I was surprised when I first opened the bottle of baking ammonia last year, after I finally tracked some down, and was assaulted by the foul smell. Ammonium carbonate is what was used in olden days to rouse a person who had fainted – also known as smelling salts. So this year I opened the patio door wide before opening the bottle and working with the baking ammonia. You can find baker’s ammonia at Gourmet Warehouse in Vancouver, or online here.
This might not seem like the most appealing recipe, but once you’ve dealt with the smell, mixing up the dough, rolling out and cutting circles of dough, filling them with jam and pinching shut, baking, making the frosting and going through the tricky process of coating the cookies with your fingers, well, after that you have some amazing cookies! The nostalgia of trying to make something that my Oma had made, and knowing that some of my family members would appreciate trying them, made the process enjoyable.
And the soundtrack for this lengthy process helped: The Over the Rhine Christmas album, Snow Angels.
The recipe I used is from the 1962 edition of The Mennonite Treasury of Recipes. With instructions like “flour enough to make soft dough,” beat egg whites “well,” cook sugar and water “until it strings??,”and no indication of how to mix, or what temperature to bake at or for how long, I did my best to figure out how to make this work. And (after one batch of cookies was too thick at the seams, and a batch of frosting had sugar lumps in it). . . success! Delicious, no jam leaking out (thanks mom for the extra thick damson plum jam), crispy exterior and frosting. So good! I think Oma would say I did a good job.
A word on the frosting method: last year the struggle was with the jam oozing out, but this year that problem was solved. Today I battled the frosting; the recipe didn’t specify how much to beat the egg whites, nor did it tell me what sugar and water forming “strings” meant. So after one bad batch (I was stubborn and used it on some of the cookies – not terrible, but they have a lumpy appearance), I managed to figure out how to do it right. I brought the sugar and water to a low boil AFTER beating the egg whites, so it was ready to beat in right away, and didn’t continue to cook or crystallize in the hot pot. Research revealed that the right temperature for the sugar and water is between 110 and 112C, but my candy thermometer isn’t so precise, so I overcooked it. In the instructions below I wrote about how to test when the sugar “strings,” or makes threads. Oh, and then there is the messy messy job of applying the frosting. Yay. I wish I had someone here to film it. My hands were too messy to do it myself.
Needless to say I’ll probably never make these again. Oma, how did you do this, with 5 kids, and all that other food to make? Amazing. Simply amazing.
For me these cookies brought back some good memories – I’m a sucker for nostalgia.
What you need for the cookies: (this is half a recipe)
1 cup very thick tart jam (damson plum jam is what Oma used)
What you need for the frosting:
1 cup sugar
4 tablespoons water
1 egg white
What you do:
Beat the butter and brown sugar together. Add the molasses and beat in, until fluffy.
Combine the dry ingredients.
Alternately add the dry ingredients and the milk, until it makes a soft dough. Remove the dough from the bowl onto a floured surface. Knead it until it is smooth.
Preheat the oven to 375F.
Divide the dough into 2 or 3 portions and roll them out thinly, about 3 mm thick.
Use a circular cookie cutter to cut the dough. Place about 1/2 teaspoon of jam in the centre of each cookie. If your jam isn’t very thick, sprinkle a little flour on top.
Fold the dough over and pinch the edges to seal each cookie. Place them on a parchment-lined baking tray. Bake for about 14 minutes. The cookies should look slightly browned.
Allow cookies to cool completely on a rack before making the frosting.
To make the frosting, learn from my mistakes. Beat the egg white until stiff peaks form when you pull the beaters out.
Put the sugar and water into a pot and bring to a boil. Test using a precise candy thermometer, at 110-112C, or use the finger test. Put a small amount of the syrup on a finger, then touch it with another finger. If a string forms between the fingers, it is done.
As soon as you reach the right temperature, slowly add the syrup to the eggs whites, beating on high, until incorporated and fluffy.
Now. Get ready to get messy. Place a cooling rack on the counter. Dip each cookie in the frosting, then use your hands to rub off some of the frosting. I know, if you’re doing this right now you’ve already spent countless hours making these cookies. And you’re wondering if they will be worth it… I sure hope so!
Place each frosted cookie on the cooling rack. Leave them to dry completely, for a few hours, before storing in an airtight container.
2025 edit: This isn’t the best stollen ever! I have improved this recipe and you can find the new one here. There are issues in this recipe with the alcohol inhibiting the yeast. The new version deals with that issue, making a much lighter stollen!
I had some of my cousins over the other evening, and I wanted to make something seasonal, since it is the Christmas season, and most of us were brought up in Mennonite homes in which we ate stollen at Christmas. Everyone who tried it said it was the best stollen they had ever had.
The most ringing endorsement, though, came from my parents. It was my dad’s birthday, so I made one stollen for the cousins, and one for my dad. Both of my parents said it was the best they’d ever had – and they’ve had a lot more stollen-eating years than all of the cousins have.
My memory of stollen involves what I consider to be nasty tasting preserved fruits, the bright red and green cherries, or whatever those things were.
The soaking of the fruit in the booze needs to be begun at least the day before, if not another day or two, so plan ahead accordingly.
I looked at several recipes, thought about my own preferences, and then mainly followed this recipe. I made a few changes: I forgot to add the orange zest -oops, but still awsome. I added a little bit of almond extract and slivered almonds, used dried cherries instead of currants, soaked the fruit for longer, added rum, and used a little more marzipan. Plus a whole lotta love (you have to do that if you don’t have a kneading machine – hand kneading is a labour of love). I also added one last brushing of butter after baking – who doesn’t love just a little more butter! And that way there’s something for the sugar to stick to!
You can keep the stollen, wrapped tight in the fridge for a few weeks, or in the freezer for a few months. I think one of the reasons why people enjoyed this so much was that it was served the day it was made. So if you can plan to have company the day you bake it, all the better.
What you need:
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/2 cup dried sour cherries
1/4 cup brandy
1/4 cup dark rum
4 to 5 cups flour, divided
2 packages active dry yeast (4 & 1/2 teaspoons, or 14 grams)
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup milk
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
a few drops of pure almond extract
2 eggs, at room temperature
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/3 cup slivered almonds, toasted
200 grams (7 ounces) marzipan (or a little more if you love marzipan)
Melted butter (1/4 t0 1/3 cup)
1/4 cup powdered sugar
What you do:
Combine the raisins, cranberries and cherries in a bowl and cover with the brandy and rum. Stir every few hours, and let sit for 12 – 48 hours. Drain the brandy and rum, keeping it for later use. Pat the fruit dry with paper towels and toss the fruit in 2 tablespoons of flour.
Toast the almonds until very lightly browned.
Stir 1 teaspoon of sugar into 1/4 cup warm water (110-115 degrees-any hotter will kill the yeast, colder and it won’t activate). Sprinkle the yeast on top and let it sit until the yeast starts to bubble, about 5 minutes.
Heat the milk, salt and 1/2 cup sugar in a small pot over medium heat, until warm (110-115 degrees).
Add the milk mixture, vanilla and almond extracts, and eggs to the yeast mixture and combine by beating with a fork. Beat in the reserved brandy and rum.
Add two cups of flour and use a dough hook in your machine, or a wooden spoon by hand, to combine. Cut the 1/2 cup butter into small pieces and beat in. Add enough flour, little by little, until the dough forms into a ball.
Continue working the dough with the dough hook, or if working by hand begin to knead for 10 minutes. The dough should become smooth and elastic.
(Update Dec 2021: move to step 9, allowing the dough to rise. Then add the fruit and nuts. The dough rises better this way). Either add the fruit and nuts to the dough in the machine, or flatten the dough out and work it in by hand, adding more flour to your kneading surface.
Shape the dough into a ball, then place it into a buttered bowl. Turn the dough butter-side up and loosely cover. Let the dough rise until it has doubled in volume, about 2 hours. I put mine on top of the fridge, where it was a little warmer , to make this happen.
Line a baking pan with parchment paper. Melt the remaining butter.
(Update, knead in the fruit and nuts now) Divide the dough into two parts. Roll one half into an oval and brush with melted butter.
Cut the marzipan into quarters and roll each one into a rope, the length of the dough. Place two of the marzipan ropes on top of the dough, leaving space between them, then roll the edges of the dough over the marzipan, pressing down in the middle. roll the ends of the dough over a little, and then gather the loaf and place it rolled-side down on the parchment paper. Repeat this process with the other half of the dough.
Brush the loaves with butter. Let the loaves rise until doubled in size. Heat the oven to 375F. Bake for 30-40 minutes; if you tap on the loaf it should sound hollow, and it will be dark golden brown.
Remove the loaves from the oven and brush with more butter! Dust them with powdered sugar and let them cool completely before packing.
In my grade 5/6 class we recently made these chocolate cupcakes. I like to have one big birthday party with my class where we all pretend it is each of our birthdays. We play games, give each other Birthday cards, and we bake these delicious cupcakes. It’s important for me to provide the kids with an opportunity to eat the best cupcake possible, since most of the time they eat the fluffy store-bought cupcakes with the oily icing. A birthday cupcake should be a real treat – and these really are.
I found the recipe on the Hershey’s website, and made up the icing recipe myself. It makes 24 cupcakes.
This recipe can be adapted to make a cake as well – see below for baking times.
What you need for the cupcake:
2 cups sugar
1 & 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup cocoa, sifted
1 & 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 & 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup boiling water
24 muffin tin liners
What you need for the icing:
1 & 1/4 cups unsalted butter, softened
4-5 cups icing sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 or more tablespoons whipping cream
What you do:
Heat oven to 350°F. Place the liners in the muffin tins.
Stir the sugar, flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt in large bowl. Add the eggs, milk, oil and vanilla and beat on medium speed with an electric mixer for 2 minutes. Stir in the boiling water. Pour the thin batter into the muffin tin liners to 2/3 full.
Bake for 22-25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean. Remove from the muffin tins and place on wire racks to cool completely.
To make the icing, beat the butter, using an electric mixer, until light and fluffy.
Sift in 4 cups of the icing sugar and beat in. Add the vanilla and gradually add 2 tablespoons of whipping cream. Add more icing sugar if it needs to be thickened, and more cream if it needs softening.
Ice the cupcakes and refrigerate. I like to eat them with the icing firm and cold from the fridge, but room temperature works too.
To make a one pan cake: Grease and flour a 13 x 9-inch baking pan. Bake 35 to 40 minutes.
To make a two layer cake: Grease and flour two 9-inch round baking pans. Bake 35 to 40 minutes.
To make a three layer cake: Grease and flour three 8-inch round baking pans. Bake 30 to 35 minutes.
Cake artwork by a previous grade 5/6 class
Cupcake collage art made by my grade 5/6 class this year, using painted pages from an old dictionary.
I made this cake a while ago, but misplaced the recipe, so it’s been on hold for a while. I finally tracked the recipe down, in Cakes and Loaves by Ilona Chovancova. The bottom of the cake has a bit of a green colour to it from the pistachios – I made it because I liked the colour contrast, and also enjoy a lemony loaf. At first I was hesitant to post this recipe because the colour didn’t turn out quite as green as it looked it the cookbook. But it ended up being really tasty, so I have almost gotten over the disappointment of the colour. And it still looks pretty good.
I just changed a little bit of the process of mixing this cake. The cookbook asks you to add the baking powder and soda at the end of the mixing, but I worried that I might have pockets of these ingredients that would cause an unpleasant eating experience. So I added the flour in two portions, with the baking powder and soda mixed in.
The only other thing I might change is to add a little more lemon zest, because I really like a more pronounced lemon flavour.
What you need:
100 grams (3 & 1/2 ounces) shelled pistachios
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons butter
3 eggs
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
2/3 cup flour
zest of one organic lemon
1/2 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
pinch of salt
What you do:
Butter and flour a loaf pan. Preheat the oven to 350F.
Grind the pistachios into a powder in a food processor or spice grinder.
Melt the butter.
In a large mixing bowl, beat the eggs and sugar until light and fluffy, and doubled in volume.
Gradually add 1/3 cup of flour, salt, melted butter, lemon juice and zest. Combine the last 1/3 cup of flour with the baking powder and baking soda, then gently fold in to the batter.
Divide the batter into two portions, folding the pistachios into one part.
Pour the pistachio batter in first, then the other one on top. Swirl together with a fork gently.
Bake for about 40 minutes, checking for doneness with a toothpick – there should be some crumbs clinging to the toothpick, but no wet batter. Let the cake cool slightly before removing from the pan to cool.
Because these cookies contain zucchini, we can pretend they are healthy. Because they contain three kinds of chocolate, we can call them delicious.
This summer I had a bumper crop of zucchini, so a gardener friend suggested I grate and freeze some of it. I grated and froze it in two cup portions, because my awesome zucchini loaf calls for that amount of zucchini. The other day I was looking for something to bring to work for my somewhat stressed-out colleagues (let’s just say the beginning of the school year isn’t just hard on the students) and I found this recipe. People liked the idea that they could trick themselves into thinking it was a somewhat healthy recipe, but mostly they loved the intense chocolaty-ness of the cookies. I use Ghirardelli semi-sweet chocolate chips because I think their quality it quite good!
The one change I will make next time I make these is in the fineness of the grated zucchini. I used the thicker side of my box grater, but I found that there were pieces of zucchini that stuck out of a few of the cookies, so next time I will use the finer grater.
The only thing I did differently from the original recipe was to bake for a minute or two less, and I put a little sea salt on top of each cookie before baking for an awesome chocolate and salt combination!
What you need:
2/3 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup butter, at room temperature
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup shredded and drained zucchini
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup semisweet, semi- or bitter-sweet chocolate chips
optional:sea salt
What you do:
Grate the zucchini and let it drain in a sieve. Press the zucchini down to extract some of the liquid.
Melt the chocolate chips in the top of a double boiler. Set aside to cool to room temperature.
In a large bowl whip the butter, granulated and brown sugars for 1-2 minutes, until light and creamy. Add the egg and vanilla and mix for about a minute. Stir in the grated zucchini.
Pour in the melted chocolate and mix.
Sift in the dry ingredients and mix on low speed until almost combined. Stir in the chocolate chips until everything is just incorporated.
Scoop the cookie dough using a tablespoon or small ice-cream scoop, and place them a few centimetres apart on the cookie sheets. Add a little sea salt to the top of each cookie before baking – optional but awesome!
Trust in Kim: an ad-free recipe blog! 