This is a recent cake that I did for a client who was throwing a Tinkerbell-themed party for her daughter’s 2nd birthday. This is a quarter sheet cake with a white almond batter and vanilla bean buttercream filling. The cake is decorated completely in buttercream. The client wanted the cake to have a depiction of [...]

Green apple and chocolate ?? … You’re wondering what a weird combination . Well weird it is, but ask me why this combination and it’ll all make sense. My baby who just turned 6 months old, loves green apples. There aren’t many options available to the little boy and with just pureed apples(red and green), [...]

As much as I want to jump onto the spring bandwagon and create plate upon plate of bright, sprightly salads, it’s, well, much - too - COLD. So today instead of turning to the beautiful bunches of chickweed, sunflower seed sprouts, and baby arugula that are overflowing the frig, I found myself instead spellbound by two homely little chorizo sausages. I started thinking about their savory, smoky flavor, and the next thing that popped into my mind was HOT SOUP. But not just any hot soup mind you, a Spanish soup called Zarzuela.

I’ve been waiting for months to write this post. The better part of a year, even. I’m positively itching to share this with you, so here we go. Late last summer (the lovely, gracious, talented) Luisa Weiss let me spend some time with the proofs of a baking book she was working on. She said she thought I’d like it. Which, it tuns out, was a dramatic understatement. The book she shared with me, Good to the Grain, is about baking with whole grain flours. It was written by Kim Boyce, and photographed by Quentin Bacon.

There aren’t many people writing contemporary books on whole grain baking. Among those few, this one is special. In a sentence, a top-flight pastry chef intersects whole grain flours in her home kitchen. To back up a bit, Kim is a former pastry chef with major chops (Spago / Campanile) who left the professional kitchen to raise her family. Her book delves into her exploration of a broad range of whole grain flours, each of the twelve main chapters explores a separate flour - whole-wheat flour, amaranth flour, barley flour, buckwheat flour, corn flour, kamut flour, multigrain flour, oat flour, quinoa flour, rye flour, spelt flour, and yes…even teff flour.

Here’s the quote I gave for the back of the book,”There was a point in my life when I realized limiting myself to baking with all-purpose flour was like limiting myself to painting with just one color. Kim Boyce’s collection of beautifully rustic recipes inspires us to move enthusiastically into the rich palette of flavorful whole-grain flours and explore all they have to offer. I just can’t get enough of this book.”

I wrote a good amount about baking with whole grain flours in SNC, but to see what someone like Kim is doing with them is both exciting and inspiring for me. I could tell at a glance, wow, she’s really excited about them too. It felt good to know someone like her was (mostly having fun exploring this range of flours and this approach to baking. I love seeing what she is doing, and now I know who to email when I’m stumped.

I could write an entire post about the photography in Good to the Grain, but I’ll save that for another day. Instead, I’ll leave you with a few notes related to the Figgy Buckwheat Scones I baked last weekend. They’re a bit of a project, but a fun one requiring two main components - the obscenely addictive fig butter (dried figs, port wine, red wine, spices, sugar) and the buckwheat scone dough. Make the fig butter ahead of time, and the scone dough is a breeze to pull together. They’re complex and jammy with a hint of sweetness and lots of flavor coming from the magical collision of the caramelized sugars in the fig butter and the hot baking sheet.

Related links:
- Kim Boyce (on twitter)
- Cheryl writes about Kim’s muesli (here)
- Good to the Grain: Baking with Whole-Grain Flours

Continue reading Figgy Buckwheat Scones…

From the recipe archive, for St. Patrick’s Day, enjoy! ~Elise

Last year for St. Patrick’s Day, my friend Suzanne had me over for dinner with her family and served the tastiest corned beef and cabbage dish. Usually we prepare corned beef and cabbage boiled, but Suzanne had baked her corned beef in the oven, slathered with sweet hot honey mustard, and sautéed her cabbage with onions on the stove top until they were nice and caramelized. I begged her to show me how she did it and recently we spent the day cooking together, making corned beef and cabbage both ways - oven baked and boiled. We did a taste test with the whole family that evening and the baked version won, hands down. Here I present to you both the baked and the boiled recipe versions.

Continue reading “Corned Beef and Cabbage” »

St. Patrick’s Day is a week away and there are certainly throngs of people preparing for all-green celebrations starting this weekend. Once the green beer starts flowing, you’ll be in need of snacks. Always a crowd favorite, I love any excuse to decorate sugar cookies, so I couldn’t let St. Patrick’s Day float on by [...]

The acid-and-salt combination of marinades was once used to preserve meats and fish. Now, we use marinades more for flavoring, tenderizing and moisturizing.
Though any marinade could be made from more or less of any of its parts, here’s a basic formula for making one:
acid (vinegar, wine, yogurt, citrus juice) + oil (olive, vegetable) + aromatics [...]