Took Mollie on a short walk today on the way to the grocery store. Tons of warm, sweet berries in the field, along with my beloved Queen Anne’s Lace. I can’t get enough of this “weed” and think I might just have to frame a collection of them. My favorite from today…
Anyway, we had nothing in which to carry our berries, so we snagged a nice bag in the produce department.
And since I had my camera at the grocery store, I couldn’t resist pulling it out of my purse. Any guesses?
(There were more, but I wanted just enough for one night.)
So what to do with the berries? Despite the many suggestions from my Facebook friends, I went with a gallette from Savour Fare. (Though as usual, necessity required some modification.) From Wiki:Gallette is a general term used in French to designate various types of flat, round or freeform crusty cakes. I didn’t want to make a big production out of this little project, and I didn’t want to have to wait for chilled dough (so no pie), so this seemed perfect.
3 oz. cream cheese, 2 T butter. (I didn’t have 4 oz. cream cheese).
4 oz. flour, 1 oz. sugar.
Mix together, knead briefly, roll directly onto a parchment-lined baking sheet. This dough was WAY to dry to be rolling out, so I added a couple tablespoons of milk.
Pour 2 pints of berries on top of the rolled-out dough.
That was way too many, I thought, so I ended up removing a handful or two.
Fold edges toward the middle, then brush with 1/3 c. cream and ¼ c sugar. Once again, that seemed excessive. If I’d put 1/3 c. of cream (I used whole milk), I think it would have made a soupy mess. I brushed it all over the dough and sprinkled some into the berries. Same with the sugar. I sprinkled approximately 2 T, max, over the entire thing.
Bake at 400 for about 30 minutes.
Very similar to a pie, but sososo much easier. Too bad I don't have any ice cream.
Yesterday afternoon on our way home from a weekend camping trip in the Wenatchee Forest, we stopped along one of the several fruit stands on our route.
They were at their peak, so I knew I needed to use them or lose them. Cherry cobbler, anyone?
I got the recipe from allrecipies.com, but made a couple changes.
My adapted recipe:
One cup of cherries. The recipe called for sour cherries. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a sour cherry. These cherries are sweet, though I have no idea what variety they are. It’s been a long time since I’ve pitted cherries. It will be a while before my fingers lose that lovely black tint that is now embedded in my cuticles.
Not pictured: white pants. Which are right this minute soaking in a load of bleached whites. Fingers crossed, ‘cause I really like those white pants. (I suppose I need to move my apron project to the top of my unfinished pile.)
While you’re mixing ingredients, preheat the oven to 350 and melt ¼ c. butter in a square baking pan.
In one bowl mix:
½ c. whole wheat flour
½ c. sugar (I used raw), ½ tsp. baking powder
Add ½ c. milk, stir until blended.
In the second bowl:
1 c. pitted cherries
6 T sugar
1 ½ tsp. whole wheat flour
When the butter is melted, pour the flour-milk mixture over the top. Do not stir. Mix the cherries, sugar, and flour, then distribute evenly over the top of the butter and cake batter.
Bake for 25 minutes, or until cake tester comes out clean and cobbler is browned.
How can you go wrong with butter, flour, sugar, and cherries? You can’t, really, but I think next time I’ll use less butter, a touch of vanilla (or almond?), maybe a little more baking powder, or an egg? It seemed a little flat to me, but I’m not sure if it was the whole wheat flour, or the excessive butter. It's almost clafoutis consistency, but without the puffiness the eggs provide.
Still yummy, though. And I’ve got cherries left over for a smoothie tomorrow morning, and maybe scones for the neighbor that doesn’t like chocolate.
Our neighborhood grocery store has a rack of doughnuts JUST inside the door as you walk in. It’s torture. I know they are probably stale and/or would be a huge disappointment if I caved and brought them home. But that doesn’t stop me from craaaaaving them. So I decided to make them.
But first the story of how the baking bug bit me. It was around 2001, and I somehow came into possession of this book:
I don’t remember many details about the plot, really – the wife of a successful Seattle executive gets dumped and gets a job in a bakery, finds herself, blah, blah, blah. But the way the author described how the character felt when she baked, what baking did for her emotionally, just how she connected with it, all that clicked with me. So I started baking bread. I’ve always enjoyed making desserts of all kinds, but I’d never really experimented with bread. I baked French bread – baguettes and ciabatta mostly. I was doing everything by hand. All of it. Eventually I started having problems with my wrists. Because I caption TV for a living and need my wrists and hands to be at 100%, I finally invested in a KitchenAid mixer. Best. Investment. Ever.
Anyway. An obsession was born. And the pounds slowly creeped up on me. (Hence all the low-glycemic index talk in past blog posts.) I eventually backed off on the bread and lost the weight, but the sight of a big bowl of dough is still a lovely sight to me. I love the smell, I love the texture, I love that first punch of deflation.
Back to doughnuts. I declared to Twitterverse that I was searching for a baked doughnut recipe (I won’t fry anything), and @jackhonky (who has his own fabulously named, entertaining food blog, Eat The Love) forwarded this recipe from @101Cookbooks.
I don’t have big enough cookie cutters, so I improvised and used a Crown Royal glass.
See those pillows of dough?? Just beautiful.
More improvisation.
Doughnut holes!
After a second rise, the holes had disappeared. I can’t say @101CookBooks didn’t warn me.
After nine minutes in a 375° oven, they look more like bagels than doughnuts.
Now the fun part.
So I finally got my doughnuts. (Though only one actually had a hole in it.) Sadly, so sadly, they were overcooked. I was warned about this too. They were good, but honestly, probably not that much better than the ones I could have purchased from the grocery store. But I enjoyed the process, and I know exactly what went into them, something I couldn't say about a store-bought doughnut. I just wish I could have shared them with the neighbors right as they came out of the oven. The majority of my baking is done late at night, and my neighbors are all in bed by the time I usually start baking, so they miss out on the really good stuff. Their kids, however, were thrilled with the box I brought over the next day.
