Picture Follow-up

Alas and Alack there is something fishy going on with blogspot. I am going to contact them today to try and get this fixed. Please stay tuned.

I am also heading out to LA for a week. I am hoping to meet up with my baking kindred spirit Derrick for a little baking fun and I also plan to hit up Sprinkles. LA! The land of Entourage and the inspiration for the vegan chocolate cupcake with mocha frosting. It promises to be great.

I will be sure to report back upon my return.

Citrus Carnival

My first key lime pie. And look how cute my mother's flower arrangement is with the fabu pie

So the blog before last I said I was going to make a key lime pie for my friend Eduardo. I was inspired to do so because I was in my favorite store ever - Trader Joes - and they had these fab little bags of key limes. I grabbed one and thought, since I have known Eduardo I have wanted to make him a key lime pie. I went on-line and started looking for recipes. I particularly like Martha Stewart's recipes although they can be overly complicated sometimes. While I was searching through her recipe index, I also found a recipe for Key Lime Sables. It is basically a shortbread cookie with key lime curd in the middle. Yum. I knew I was on my way to greatness. Around the same time as the discovery of the key limes my mother sent me some pages from a magazine on a lemon cake and super cute cake decorating ideas. This cake looked amazing and the idea of a lemon cake in summer sounded down right delicious.

I was at the salsa studio teaching one night and I felt the need to bake some lemon mini-cupcakes for my upcoming trip to the Cape - I hate to go empty handed. I got home, went to my fruit guy on the corner, bought some (teeny) lemons and was ready to go.

I decided to start with the Sables because both the curd and the shortbread needed to be refrigerated. The lime curd was SUPER easy except that key limes are teensy weensy and it takes a lot to get even a 1/4 cup of juice. So it was a little time consuming - ahem, to say the least. When I got through squeezing the limes and mixing everything together, I moved onto the shortbread - which I have never made before. I usually substitute butter for margarine and all that, but with Martha's recipes I really try to follow it to the letter. I did. I put the dough in the freezer for a quick cool down and moved onto the key lime pie.

My mother told me about this "AMAZING" key lime pie recipe that she had that used lime-aid, and was no muss no fuss, but I wanted to go the traditional route and really try and make this happen in a big way. Pies are not my specialty. I mean I can recall the time I entered an apple pie contest confident that even though I had never made a pie before I would make the best damn pie that ever existed. My pie smelled like it was made from the nectar of the gods and tasted like dirt. So I tread lightly when it comes to pies now.

So, so confident I would win the blue ribbon at the contest. Little did I know making pies took such skill...

I started with the pie crust. Graham cracker crust - no problem. Except for some reason mine was not dry and there wasn't much of it. Shoot. This doesn't seem like it is going well so far. So I start throwing in more graham crackers and more graham crackers hoping that eventually I would get the right consistency. I crossed my fingers, pressed it into the pie pan, and put it in the oven. Next was the curd. The curd was surprisingly easy. You basically pour all of the ingredients into a bowl and stir it up. The texture is really thick and looks delicioso. You pour the batter into the cooled pie crust, put it back in the oven for like 15 minutes and it is done. So easy. Oh yeah, except for juicing those pesky little key limes. I also made homemade whipped cream to top the citrus delight, but I walked away for a little too long - bless the stand mixer - and my whipped cream was borderline sweet butter. Ugh. Was that the start of an ill- fated baking adventure?

I then turned my attention to the shortbread that was all nice and cool. I have a new vintage rolling pin that I was super excited to use - they aren't just for chasing people around they yard you know - and I started rolling out the shortbread. It looked really good and smelled delicious. They showed so much promise. I put the cookies on parchment and popped them in the oven and went onto project number 3 the lemon cake. After 8 minutes I look inside my beloved oven and what do I see? A hot oozy mess. Omg! The cookies had spread like Jabba the Hut's booty. You think I am joking, but I am not. I was devastated. This did not bode well at all. The plan was the pie for Eduardo, the cookies for home, and the lemon cupcakes for my sister, now what? I had all of this delicious lime curd sitting in the fridge begging to be used. I no time to mourn I had a cake to make. So I grabbed the rest of the dough and put it back in the freezer and turned my attention to the vegan cupcakes. I mean cake is my specialty - although truly, I was pretty demoralized.

This lemon recipe was crazy easy. Easier than the other vegan recipes that I have done and there was a good amount of lemon juice and lemon rind in them. The secret ingredient that makes it all happen is the apple cider vinegar. It makes the cakes rise and gives them an unbelievable texture. Awesome. Those went in the oven, but they hardly seemed enough so I made another batch. I wanted to also make a lemon chiffon buttercream, but I ran out of lemons on the last batch of cupcakes. Drat. So I decided to go for a lighter vanilla buttercream than I usually make. The last time I made this recipe, however, I had a crater cake disaster - as you may recall. So needless to say I was nervous. But I do learn from my mistakes so I was VERY careful with the amount of soy milk I was adding. Slowly, slowly I turn(ed) - please let's not confuse my buttercream with Niagara Falls - and the texture was really good. The cupcakes smelled AMAZING when they came out of the oven and they had this really pretty yellow hue to them. Lucky for me I learned with the friands that I needed to use a spoon to aid in the removal of my cupcakes - this recipe said not to use cupcake liners. See...I do learn from my mistakes!

Mood lighting - Vegan Lemon cupcakes with vegan buttercream frosting. They needed a garnish because they were looking a little plain and my mother suggested blueberries. The suggestion was brilliance. They look summery, gorgeous & delicious.

I was so glad to see that these worked out because the sables were a disaster and the key lime pie was suspect at best. I envisioned gorgeous little lemon delights with vanilla frosting and cute little royal icing buttercups on top. Perfection for a summer barbecue on the Cape. But who was going to get what? I decided to turn on the sables not even giving them a second chance and brought the key lime pie and the lemon cupcakes to the Cape for the weekend knowing I wouldn't see Eduardo that week and the pie would go uneaten. Then I realized that I still had the Friands too. A lot of baked good for a 3 day weekend. Ah well...

Serving up the key lime BBQ style at the Rosebay.

Ode to the Aussie

The Friand - an Aussie Treat. These are made with almond meal, confectioner's sugar, and blueberries

As most of you know, one of my best girlfriends moved back to Australia. I was a very sad lady when she left and feared that without her incredible talent for the savory I would be nothing. Well lucky for me her fiance is one of the producers of the new Broadway hit "Title of Show" so they came back to New York for the opening. What did that mean for me!?!? The Aussie and the American were back together again. The ying to my yang, the savory to my sweet back and badder than ever.

In the past, whenever Lizzie would go home for a holiday she would inevitably bring back some sort of fabulous Australian baking gadget for me. This time was no different. She arrived with two suitcases, a bag of homemade pom-poms, and... a FRIAND pan. What is a friand you ask? Well that is a VERY good question. From your friends at Wikipedia:

"A financier, sometimes called a friand, is a type of pastry that originated in France but has become most popular in Australia and New Zealand. The financier is a light tea cake, similar to a sponge cake, and usually contains almond flour, crushed or ground almonds, or almond flavoring. The "financier" is said to derive from the traditional rectangular mold, which resembles a bar of gold. Another theory says that the cake became popular in the financial district of Paris La Bourse du Commerve (the former name of the Paris stock exchange). Friands served in Australia and New Zealand are baked in small oval shapes and typically have additional flavorings such as coconut, chocolate, fruit, and nuts."

Not only was I excited to have my bosom buddy - I watched Anne of Green Gables last weekend what can I say - back, but I was also excited to have a new baking toy and recipe! Since most of the recipes she brought with her were in the metric system, Lizzie and I made a pact that we would make friands together before she left. We of course got side tracked with copious amounts of shopping, making enormous sushi dinners, posing for pictures for the beloved site hotchickswithdouchebags.com - some of our finest work to date - and salsa dancing our faces off under the stars.

I didn't realize until after Lizzie - sniff and gulp - left that we never got around to the friands. More importantly, who was going to make the grams to lbs conversions? Truthfully, I was really bummed when she left. When she moved back in May we knew that she was coming back in a couple of months, but this time? Who knows when we will see each other again.

I was pretty down in the dumps so I went to my kitchen and I did what I do best: bake. I was a lunatic. I baked for probably 5 hours straight and I started with the friands as an homage to my dear friend now flying 22 hours back to the her motherland.

The reason I chose this recipe is VERY scientific: it was the only recipe that was mostly in lbs and not in grams. I mean I figured I could fudge the rest. I thought what a great alternative to the everyday muffin and probably A LOT better for you. Ahem, thanks to Bloomberg we - New York City - have all the calories listed at chain restaurants now. A LOW-FAT muffin at a Boston-based donut fave has MORE calories than a cruller. WHAT!?!?! Anyway, I digress. So I got to making the friands. It was so easy. A little almond meal, a little confectioner's sugar, some melted butter, vanilla, a little of this and a little of that and viola it was ready.

Not so fast... The recipe said the batter should be a moderately thick consistency. Hmmm... mine was down right soupy. Crapola. I didn't have Lizzie to call or even text. At this point I think she was over the South Pacific, so I started improvising. For the record, with baking this - experimenting - can be brilliant or downright dangerous. I added a bit more of the flour, the almond meal, and the confectioner's sugar. I greased the hell out of the pan because I am out of my pesky baking spray and I followed the directions: one blueberry on the bottom of cup, fill cup 3/4 of the way, place 2-3 blueberries on top, and move on. Two to Three blueberries?!?! Okay... I popped them in the oven and prayed.

I came back in a half an hour and the frainds smelled really sweet and were a golden brown, but where did the blueberries go? The baking powder in the batter made it rise over the blueberries. How brilliant is that? If there had been more than 3 blueberries the batter would never have had a chance.

I could tell that these weren't going to be easy to get out of the pan. You know, no matter how much I grease and flour an odd shaped pan i.e. friand, bundt, angel food, they get stuck. I had a little battle with the damned friands until I had - as Oprah calls it - an "A-HA!" moment. A spoon would aide in the removal of said friands. Thank goodness for the spoon. What a fantastic invention! I got them out of the pan and onto a plate. Hmmm... these would be perfect for an Irish Pub Road Race breakfast coming up on Cape Cod. In a zip lock and into the freezer they went.

I took them out for the Road Race and they were good. VERY sweet, but good - all that experimenting... The texture was super moist and they were like little pillows of air. I think I will do more research and some conversions and try these suckers again. Thanks to Lizzie for a new, more exotic baked good, a cool new pan, and for just being a bad ass friend.













The Aussie and Mahones out for a night on
the town instead of baking Friands - oops.