My appreciation for walnuts has come to me relatively late in life. I used to hate them. Biting into a walnut always sent a shiver up and down my spine. But, as I have aged, I have come to appreciate the bitter nature of walnuts. That astringent note in walnuts comes from the tannins found in the paper-thin skin that covers the walnut.
That bitterness is a perfect counterpoint to all the sweet notes in these rugelach. The dough is tender and flaky, thanks to the addition of cream cheese. And, it rolls out so easily, no cracking. You can roll the dough into a circle and cut it into wedges for a crescent shaped rugelach, or you can roll it into a rectangle and roll it up into a log for circular cookies. Your choice. The video below shows both variations. I show you a neat little trick for getting your rugelach all exactly the same size.
The dough is spread with maple butter. Maple butter actually contains no butter. It is just maple syrup boiled until very thick and then whipped to a creamy spreadable consistency. Many supermarkets cary it or you can buy it online. Sometimes it is called maple cream.
The walnuts in the filling are candied first in maple syrup which is easily done in the oven. Complete directions are in the recipe. Brush them with egg white before they hit the oven.
And because we’re fancy around here, I glazed the finished rugelach with a maple-lemon glaze.
Sometimes you need a simple little cookie, like these or these. And then there are times that require something outrageous and over the top, like these Triple Chocolate Chunk and Caramel Cookies.
These cookies call for three kinds of chocolate, bittersweet, milk and blonde (caramelized white chocolate). This is not a sponsored post, but I highly recommend using Valrhona chocolate. I used Dark Bittersweet 70% Guanaja, Milk 40% Jivara and Blonde (White) 32% Dulcey. I order my chocolate online from The Vanilla Food Company. The quality is outstanding and it really does make a difference what kind of chocolate you use in these cookies. Supermarket chocolate chips just won’t give you the same results.
For the caramels, I just used vanilla caramels from Bulk Barn. Werther’s chewy caramels or Kraft caramels would also work well here. In the video I made, you see me mixing the caramels right into the dough. DO NOT DO THAT! The caramel oozes out of the cookies and makes a huge mess. Trust me. I made over 8 dozen of these cookies, figuring out the best way to do it.
To prevent the ooze, set the caramels aside. Scoop your cookie dough, and while the dough is in the scoop, stuff one whole caramel into the centre of the scoop. The surrounding dough insulates it. I also found it best to freeze the scooped dough for at least 2 hours before baking. That also helped to prevent the caramel from escaping.
For picture-perfect cookies, hold back about 3 Tablespoons of each of the three kinds of chocolate, coarsely chop them and top the cookies with these bits of chocolate about halfway through the baking time. This will give you pretty pools of melted chocolate on top of your cookies. You can also cut a few extra caramels into quarters and top the half baked cookies with one or two additional pieces if you like.
These cookies also use three types of sugar, white, brown and turbinado (raw sugar). The addition of the turbinado adds a bit of crunch to the cookies. I learned about this from Ashley, on her blog, Not Without Salt.
These cookies would make an excellent addition to a cookie box for holiday giving, or just stash them away in your freezer for those days that call for extravagance. I won’t judge.
I have long been an admirer of persimmons. Each fall I’d see them at the market and marvel at their vibrant orange hue and smooth shiny skin. Yet, until a few weeks ago, I never actually bought them. I had no clue what to do with them.
Because 2020 hasn’t presented enough challenges already😉, I decided to confront my ignorance and brought a bagful home with me. I’ll share with you what I learned. There are two main varieties of persimmons. The first are known as Fuyu. They are the squat tomato shaped ones you see in the picture above. The second variety, Hachiya, are oblong shaped with a pointed base, like a large acorn.
The Fuyu variety is non-astringent. These can be eaten when firm and crisp, just like you would an apple. The skin is tough, but edible, so I prefer to peel them. They are quite sweet, with an almost vanilla-custard flavour. They are best eaten raw, in salads.
The Hachiya variety is astringent, and a completely different story! If you bite into an unripe persimmon you will be sorry. Loaded with tannins, it will make your mouth pucker and go dry. These need to be ripened completely, until they are soft. Inside they will be creamy, almost pudding like. They are great to use in baking, much like bananas for breads and cake.
For additional texture, I candied some nuts and seeds with maple syrup. My mix included pistachios, pecans and pumpkin seeds. I finished the salad with some crumbled ricotta salata cheese. Salty feta would also be great.
If you’re anything like me, you fall into a salad rut, making the same bowl every night. I think that’s why salad always tastes so good when someone else makes it. It’s different than yours and your tastebuds crave change. This salad was certainly new and exciting in our house! Let me know if you try this and that you think.
Corn chowder isn’t just a summer soup. I love it year round. At this time of year, feel free to use frozen corn. The addition of poblano peppers makes it perfect for a winter soup. The gentle heat of the poblano peppers really warms you up from the inside-out! If you are not familiar with poblano peppers, they look like a green pepper but are skinnier and pointy at the bottom. They are a mildly spicy pepper, measuring about 1000-2000 SHU (Scoville heat units) on the Scoville Scale. For reference, a jalapeño measures around 8000 SHU.
I was inspired by Diana Kennedy’s recipe for Corn and Poblano Soup, from her classic book, The Essential Cuisines of Mexico. Sometimes corn chowder can be a bit bland. Not this version. Poblano peppers and plum tomatoes are roasted in the oven and then peeled. The poblanos add a gentle heat and the tomatoes add a welcome acidity. I also added some diced potatoes to the recipe to give the soup bit more body.
Because I’m all about texture, I cut some soft white corn tortillas into strips and shallow fried them in vegetable oil, until crispy. A bit of sour cream or whipping cream tames the heat and cilantro adds a fresh verdant note.
These Apple Cider Browned Butter Doughnuts are the best thing I have baked all year. Yes, I realize that’s a bold statement, given the number of things I have baked in 2020. (It’s been a heavy baking year… we all deal with stress in our own way, don’t judge!)
Granted, these doughnuts are not as pretty as my black and white ones from a few weeks ago, but OMG, the taste and texture of these is off-the-charts fantastic. I was inspired to bake these after seeing a recipe for Apple Cider Doughnut Cake from food writer Tara O’Brady. I subscribe to her newsletter and every week I get a charming, informative and beautifully crafted email.
Tara baked the batter in a loaf pan. Her description of this loaf is so lyrical. I want to write like this when I grow up.😉 “Out of the oven the texture is almost spongy; jaunty and open. As the cake sits, it settles, relaxing into a sturdiness that is exactly right and as it should be. The crust establishes itself with a gentle crunch as it meets the teeth, while the centre fluff gives way with a velvet weight.“
I made the loaves and fell in love with her recipe. Apples are featured prominently. The batter calls for reduced apple cider and applesauce. I wondered what would happen if I baked the batter in doughnut pans. You could also bake them in muffin tins, but they will take a few minutes longer to bake.
As I was assembling the ingredients, I realized I had run out of applesauce, but I had a jar of apple butter leftover from baking this.
There is no actual butter in apple butter. Apple butter is basically concentrated applesauce, or as I like to describe it, “applesauce on steroids“. Alex Delaney wrote a brilliant article explaining the difference.
The doughnuts come together fairly quickly. You will need to reduce the apple cider and brown the butter in advance.
While the doughnuts are delicious plain, dipping them in browned butter and then rolling them in cinnamon-sugar takes them over the top, so don’t skip this step!
I baked these doughnuts several times, the first time to just test the recipe, the second time to shoot the photos and the third time to shoot the video. Luckily I live in a condo and have several neighbours who happily take the leftovers. I also discovered that they freeze beautifully. Wrap individual doughnuts in plastic wrap and place them all in a freezer bag. They will thaw at room temperature in about 45 minutes.
Baking is my happy place and I love to challenge myself with advanced techniques to create something I have never done before. This vertical stripe cake has been on my list of “must bake” for quite a while now. Cutting into a cake and revealing vertical layers of cake and icing, instead of the usual horizontal, is such an unexpected delight and surprise. There are so few good surprises left in life anymore.
This cake is inspired by the Lemon and Blackcurrant Stripe Cake in Sweet. I could not find black currants, so I used blackberries instead. The berries are used to make a sauce to flavour the buttercream. In the original recipe, they used some of the sauce to create a “drip cake”, but I have never been successful in getting the sauce to drip artistically down the sides. I always make a bloody mess. I decided to just top it with some berries and flowers and use the extra sauce to serve on the side.
The batter for the cake is a light lemon sponge. It’s baked in a jellyroll pan.
Once the cake is baked, let it cool for 5 minutes. Then dust with icing sugar, and cover with a clean towel. Flip the whole thing over, peel off the baking sheet and parchment paper and roll up the warm cake in the towel.
This step “trains” the cake to roll up later without cracking. Once cooled, unroll and cut into three long rectangles.
Spread each rectangle with some of the buttercream. The original recipe called for a French buttercream. This type of buttercream uses egg yolks. I find it a bit too rich for this cake, so I went with a Swiss Meringue Buttercream, which uses just the egg whites.
The three strips of cake are rolled up into one wide barrel. Stand it on its end and you have a vertical stripe cake. You can see in the photo below, where the strips have been joined. Then cover the entire cake in more buttercream.
I created a simple decoration of flowers and blackberries.
I created these black and white donuts as a homework assignment for an online photography course I am taking. The essence of the course is to learn how to style, plan and compose your food shots like the professionals and magazines do.
If you are a food photographer or blogger, I highly recommend this class. The course creator, Rachel Korinek, is a supremely gifted photographer and teacher, not to mention a real sweetheart! I have purchased several online courses and Rachel is one of the few teachers that is constantly adding new material to the course, stays continually engaged with her students and is available for help and feedback. She has created an amazing Facebook community for her students.
This assignment was to create a monochromatic scene where the background, props, and food all fit within your colour palette. I decided to go all black and white. The challenge is to make sure that there is enough interest and texture so that the image does not look flat or boring.
The first choice I had to make was which background to shoot on. I had two options in mind. I shot on both to see which I preferred.
The first was a black, grey and white painted canvas.
The second was a graphic hexagon tile.
I put it out to our Facebook community and there was no clear winner. It was almost a 50/50 split. Some people felt the tile was too busy and took away from the donuts. Others really liked that graphic detail. I am a Libra, so I was undecided😉. The canvas backdrop is softer and more ethereal, while the tile is more punchy and graphic. What do you think?
To add interest and layers, I decorated the donuts in three different ways; some half black and half white, some black with white sprinkles and some black with a white piped design. I had a few of the donuts unglazed and a few donuts had bites taken out of them. I placed the donuts on parchment paper, and lay that on a black cooling rack, for additional layers. Donut crumbs were sprinkled around for more texture.
The most challenging part of the photo shoot, was arranging so many items in the scene, in an aesthetically pleasing arrangement. There are different compositional tools/guides that you can use to help you. The general idea is to place the main or important subjects along intersecting lines, or within the created squares or triangles of the guide, and let the eye be lead. Some of the tools/guides, like the rule of thirds or the golden triangle, are simpler to use.
Rachel challenged us to use a more complex tool called dynamic symmetry. This is my image, with the dynamic symmetry guide superimposed over it, so you can see how I used some of the lines to help me place all the items. This photo shoot took hours!
To be completely honest, the donuts, while quite beautiful, were way too sweet for me, because of all the glaze. If you have a big sweet tooth, here is the recipe.
It’s only mid-October, and already I’m missing those sweet local farmer’s market tomatoes. It’s going to be a long winter!
When I’m craving that sweet summer tomato taste, roasting little grape or cherry tomatoes is the next best thing. Roasting caramelized the tomatoes and brings out their inherent sweetness and can mask any bitterness.
This pasta dish comes together in less than 30 minutes. Start with tossing halved little tomatoes with honey, olive oil, garlic salt and pepper and get them into a hot oven for about 15 minutes. While they’re roasting, remove the meat from the sausage casing and start browning it up in a skillet. To keep things vegetarian, I used Beyond Meat Spicy Italian Sausage. It is plant based, but so closely resembles the real thing, in both taste and texture, it’s amazing.
Put on a big pot of water to boil. Add a bit of tomato paste to the browned sausage and a few cups of jarred tomato sauce. I love Rao’s marinara sauce. They sell it at Loblaws now! Just be sure to pick a sauce with no added sugar. Simmer the sauce while the noodles cook. Save about 1/2 a cup of the starchy pasta water before draining.
Add drained pasta and roasted tomatoes to the sauce. Mix well and stir in some of the reserved pasta water to bring the sauce together. Transfer to a platter and add a few spoonfuls of ricotta. Sprinkle with parmesan and fresh basil. Close your eyes and imagine it’s still summer. You’re welcome.
If we’re being completely honest here, I must confess that salads in the salt and serenity kitchen are usually served tossed, in a stainless steel mixing bowl and eaten while standing over the sink. Perhaps some of you loyal readers can relate.
I created this salad as a homework assignment for a course I am taking on food composition from the immensely talented Rachel Korinek. The objective was to focus on the macro-level of styling salad. Let the salad be the hero and fill the frame.
I went grocery shopping to get inspired. I ignored all the obvious orange fall produce like pumpkins and squash. I dislike pumpkins (well, more like detest pumpkin spice, but that’s a rant for another day) and I always cook with squash, so that didn’t present much of a challenge for me. When I saw these gorgeous Starkrimson red pears, I knew I had found my intended. The shape of pears is so graceful.
Once I had chosen my hero, I could figure out the rest. I added some pomegranates because they add shine and a beautiful jolt of red. If you have ever studied colour theory, you know that the complementary colour choice to red is green (opposites on the colour wheel). I went for a mix of greens, kale for a dark emerald shade and arugula for a a hit of brighter green.
I picked up some shallots. Their violet colour be a beautiful accent against the red and green. Pickling them would add a sour counterpoint to the sweet pears. For crunch, I candied some walnuts in maple syrup.
I decided to plate this on a cutting board (top photo), for a casual feeling. I saw Jamie Oliver do this on his show and you know how I feel about Jamie Oliver! I decided to roast the pears instead of using them raw in the salad. I sliced them two different ways for a variety of shapes.
Sometimes when I post things, I think, “who is actually going to make this?” This Apple Rose Tart is one of those things. It took a few hours to create this beauty. It is my take on Julie Jones’ incredible Apple Rose Tart. I have been obsessed with baking it for a while now. I finally decided to tackle it last week.
I was listening to Sprout podcast last week, on the subject of Creating a Space for Judaism in the Lifestyle World. Rebekah Lowin was being interviewed and something she said resonated strongly with me. “Things don’t have to be fast and easy. They can be a little bit challenging. Sometimes giving yourself a challenge is beautiful and a more interesting way to live your life.”
My girlfriend Sandy and I were chatting last week, about how we want to spend our time, at this point in our lives. We are both empty nesters. She said she is looking to pare down her time in the kitchen. She only wants fast, easy recipes. I had to laugh, because at this point in my life, I only want to create and photograph beautiful food. If it takes a bit longer, I’m ok with that. I have always had a very strong sense of aesthetics. It drives my husband crazy that I insist on labelling jars with my label maker, in a specific font and not just masking tape and a marker.
So, even f you don’t plan to create this tart, I hope that you can enjoy my journey and still appreciate the beauty. If you do plan to make it, I have included a very detailed recipe and a video showing how to create these beautiful apple roses.
I used a rectangular tart pan (11×7 inches) but a 9 inch round pan would work perfectly. The pan should have a removable bottom. The tart is first filled with an almond frangipane (ground almonds, eggs, butter and sugar).
The apples need to be sliced quite thin (1mm or 1/16 inch). A mandolin is best for this job. Core apples and cut in half, vertically. Once sliced, they go into a bowl of cool water with lemon juice to help prevent browning. Then, they are microwaved until pliable and don’t crack when you bend them. This takes about 5-8 minutes, depending on your microwave. Then the fun part begins. It’s not actually difficult, it just takes time. I found the process quite meditative.
