Popovers

Popovers are a special treat for me:
Mom made these only on special occasions when I was growing up, such as for a particularly fancy dinner. She still makes them for Christmas dinner every year.

As this was my first attempt at popovers, I didn't realize that they were...almost deceptively easy. Although there are a number of variants on the recipe, the basic formula is very similar to a quickbread - mix together milk, egg and melted butter, and then stir that into flour and leavening, taking care not to overmix:

Although my popovers looked tasty and had the proper interior structure they weren't as good as Mom's recipe - so I'll be trying again soon.

Sour Cherry Buttermilk Cake

Last weekend I got some beautiful sour cherries in the fruit share from my CSA:
I had seen this post, a raspberry buttermilk cake from the June issue of Gourmet, and decided that it would be the perfect recipe to adapt to sour cherries, and I had just enough fruit for the cake.

My first step was the pit my cherries. My favorite local cookware shop was out of cherry pitters, but they gave me some great advice - a piping tip will work just as well! I used my #4 Ateco:

Then, on to the cake. This was a straightforward creaming of butter, sugar, eggs following by alternating additions of flour and buttermilk:

Once the batter was done I poured it into a single cake pan, dotted the top with chopped cherries and sprinkled the cherries with sugar:

And after a quick 25 minutes in the oven, yum!

*any vegans out there can check out a great vegan adaptation of this recipe here.

Welcome to my Kitchen: Cupcake Aftermath

Sometimes the complications in complicated recipes don't really involve the food, but the mess that I make.

Welcome to my kitchen. This is my sink partway through frosting two fresh batches of cupcakes:
The two cupcakes of the two previous posts were made over one 24 hour period!

Chocolate Sour Cream Cupcakes with Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

A simple tray of chocolate cupcakes is almost always appropriate, especially with a thick, rich batter:

This particular batter resembled a traditional cake batter, until the sour cream...

was swirled in and made it richer and lighter:

To complement the rich cake, I made a rich buttercream consisting of confectioners sugar sifted with cocoa:

Which was then blended with butter and vanilla before melted chocolate was added:

As I recently purchased a new pastry tube, I had lots of fun with the decorations!

Lemon Poppyseed Butterfly Cupcakes

I wanted to have some fun with a lemon flavored cupcake, so I found a recipe that was a bit more involved to bring to a recent book club meeting. These basic cupcakes...

start with a fairly standard cake recipe - butter creamed with sugar, to which you add eggs, lemon and a fair number of poppyseeds, and then alternately add the dry and wet ingredients:

Then, the fun begins. Some homemade lemon curd is set aside, and more is mixed into freshly whipped cream:

The top of the cupcake is sliced off, and then the cupcake is frosted with the lemon-whipped cream mixture:

Then, the tops are placed back on with a bit of piped lemon curd - butterflies!

Biscuit Dogs

When I think of hot dogs, I don't always think about the big eating contest that's held every July Fourth, or about the grill. I think about biscuit dogs!
A biscuit dog is a pig in a blanket wrapped in biscuit dough made from my grandmother's recipe. 

The first time I made biscuits, my father helped. Pops and I pulled out the recipe, gathered ingredients and heated the oven. We looked at the faded card and realized, then, that a crucial direction was missing: we weren't sure whether we should grease our cookie sheets. Since the biscuits were a surprise for Mom, we couldn't ask her, so we played it safe and buttered the pans before we baked. When Mom tasted the biscuits she paused for a moment as she tried to figure it out, and then told us that no, ungreased cookie sheets are the way to go when making biscuits.

Here's everything you need to make biscuits: flour mixed with leavening, milk, and shortening:

The key to biscuits, like any quickbread of muffin, is to not overmix the dough. In this case, you don't want to mix the shortening into the flour too well:
Once the shortening is mixed in, all that is left is to add milk and roll out the dough.

I like to wrap my hot dogs slightly messily wrapped in dough so the end result has a few crispy bits. I think my brother likes them this way so that the mustard is less of a mess:

Blueberry Sour Cream Pie

I love a good fruit pie, but sometimes dessert is tastier when the kitchen is a bit cooler. This pie features fruit and a quick cooking graham crust - perfect!

Once the graham cracker crust is baked, the only heat involved in this pie is in cooking the berries. The recipe calls for frozen berries, so it can be made at any time of the year. Here, I'm beginning to cook the berries down with a bit of lemon juice and lemon zest:

Once the blueberry mixture was fully cooked and cooled a bit, I spooned it into the crust and left it in the fridge to set:

The next step in this pie was the sour cream based topping. It is a mixture of sugar, cream cheese, sour cream and a bit more lemon - basically a no-bake cheesecake:

Once the topping was well blended, I smoothed it over the blueberry mixture and put it back in the fridge until time for dessert: