Tag Archives: Rosh Hashanah Desserts

Salted Honey Gingerbread Ice Cream Sandwiches

I consider Honey Cake to be the Jewish equivalent to Fruit Cake. It’s always served at Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) celebrations but no one really likes it.

Honey figures prominently in Rosh Hashanah menus as it symbolizes our desire for a sweet new year. The choice of honey was brilliantly explained on the website torah.org with this insight:
“A bee can inflict pain by its sting, yet it also produces delicious honey. Life has this same duality of potential. We pray that our choices will result in a sweet year.”

But nowhere is it written that honey must be baked into a cake. This year, Salted Honey Gingerbread ice Cream Sandwiches are on the menu. I’m a rebel.

Watch how they come together.

The cookie stamps I used are from Nordic Ware. Rolling the cookie dough in granulated sugar prevents the cookie from sticking to the cookie mold. You could certainly just bake the cookies without the bee themed stamps, but I couldn’t resist.

I tested out this recipe this summer and I wrapped each ice cream sandwich individually in plastic wrap and stored them in the freezer. We quickly discovered that the frozen cookies become rock hard making the sandwiches really difficult to eat. So in the recipe, I suggest you cut out the ice cream circles and store them a baking sheet wrapped in plastic wrap in the freezer. Assemble the sandwiches, with the room temperature, soft and chewy cookies, just before you want to eat them.

The addition of the salt to the honey ice cream keeps it from being cloyingly sweet. The spicy chewy ginger cookies are a perfect match for the sweet honey ice cream. Wishing you all a sweet and healthy new year.

Click here to print recipe for Salted Honey Gingerbread Ice Cream Sandwiches.

Ombre Apple-Honey Galette

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If you were at the Smiths Falls YIG (Your Independent Grocer) last week, and saw a masked woman pawing through every apple bin, looking for perfect specimens in every colour of the rainbow, that was me. I apologize for getting my germs over every apple!

I realize that August is a bit early to start posting about fall apples, but Rosh Hashanah is in two weeks and we’ve got to get our ass in gear. I’m not a fan of traditional honey cake. I find it too cloyingly sweet. I wanted to find a way of incorporating both apples and honey into a dessert.

Apples and honey go together on Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year), like cookies and milk, every other day of the year! We dip apples in honey to symbolizes our wishes for a sweet year for family, friends and all the Jewish people. While this explanation makes sense, I have often wondered why specifically apples and honey? Why not figs dipped into date syrup?

In researching this question, the interpretation I discovered on the website torah.org, resonated quite strongly with me.Their insight regarding the apple part of the equation, is explained this way:
“On most fruit trees the leaves appear before the fruit, thus providing a protective cover for the young fruit. The apple, however, makes a preemptive move by appearing before the leaves. The Jewish people are compared to an apple because we are willing to live out our Jewish lives even if this seems to leave us unprotected. “

The choice of honey was brilliantly explained with this insight:
“A bee can inflict pain by its sting, yet it also produces delicious honey. Life has this same duality of potential. We pray that our choices will result in a sweet year.”

And so apples and honey it is again, this year on my holiday table.

You’ll need 5 different varieties of apples if you want to make the Rainbow/Ombre effect I produced here. You’ll need two of each kind of apple. Look for dark red apples, pink apples, red-orange apples, yellow apples and green apples. A very sharp paring knife and about 20 minutes of concentration and you will be ready to assemble.

I used my favourite galette dough as the base. Impossibly flaky and delicious it is a versatile dough. I mixed some ground almonds, honey, egg and flour to make a honey paste (frangipane) as the base for the apples. The dough is folded up around the apples in a very casual way. Nothing precious here. Sprinkle it all with some cinnamon sugar and then into a hot oven.

The colours do fade a bit when baked, but the taste is so delicious. I brushed it with a honey glaze when it was still warm, for extra shine.

A scoop of vanilla ice cream would be very welcome.

Or just plain with a cup of coffee or tea.

Click here to print recipe for Ombre-Apple-Honey-Galette Download

Apple Caramel Cake

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I’m passionate about apple cake, so when my Instagram friend Dee, boasted that her apple cake was the BEST ever, you can bet that got my attention. Of course, I had to go over to her blog and check it out. I had a sneaky feeling I knew exactly which recipe she used, and I was right. The recipe came from her mother-in-law, who got it from the Second Helpings Please! Cookbook. Every Jewish mother, worth her salt, cooked from this book in the 1970’s. I don’t recall my mom using this book though. We ate mostly frozen foods in the 70’s.

I first learned about this apple cake at one of my very first professional cooking jobs. I was working in an upscale take-out food shop in Toronto’s Yorkville area called Dinah’s Cupboard. I learned so much from Dinah Koo, the shop’s owner. She demanded perfection and precision. She cooked with big flavours and was a master at presentation. I am forever grateful to her for teaching me so much. It was my job to make 4 of these cakes every day. We baked them in 9×13 inch rectangular cake pans and cut the cakes into large squares to sell in the shop.

Dinah’s twist on the Second Helpings classic was to soak the just baked cake in a caramel sauce. How bad could that be? As soon as it comes out of the oven, poke holes all over the cake and pour on caramel sauce so it has an opportunity to soak in. This is a moist, dense, intensely flavourful cake. Because I’m fancy, I baked mine in a Bundt pan with 2 layers of apples sandwiched between 3 layers of batter. Watch how it all comes together.

Click here to print recipe for Apple-Caramel-Cake Download

Apple Maple Pecan Tart

Click here to print recipe for APPLE MAPLE PECAN TART

Apple Beehive

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I’m not sure what Elisabeth Prueitt had in mind when she created the Apple Beehive, but my mind immediately went to Rosh Hashanah. For the Jewish New Year, it is customary to dip apples in honey to symbolize our wishes for a sweet year for family, friends and all the Jewish people. There are quite a few sweet options available for us to choose from. Why specifically apples and honey?

In researching this question, the interpretation I discovered on the website torah.org, resonated quite strongly with me. Their insight regarding the apple part of the equation, is explained this way:
“On most fruit trees the leaves appear before the fruit, thus providing a protective cover for the young fruit. The apple, however, makes a preemptive move by appearing before the leaves. The Jewish people are compared to an apple because we are willing to live out our Jewish lives even if this seems to leave us unprotected. “

This dessert is gorgeous in its purity. Gossamer thin slices of apples are shingled with butter, cinnamon and sugar. That’s it. Nothing else. When baked, the apple slices fuse together into a sweet-tart conglomeration that belie its simplicity. This is one of those cases where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The flavours are surprisingly complex for so few ingredients.

A mandoline makes slicing the apples easy. If you have stellar knife skills, you can just use a sharp knife. Granny Smith apples are the perfect choice for this as they are tart and hold their shape when baked.It really looks like a beehive before it goes into the oven.During baking, the apples shrink and caramelize, losing the lofty height it once had. It doesn’t quite resemble a beehive as much after baking, but this is so delicious, no one will complain. Just remember to take a before picture to show everyone!Once the beehive comes out of the oven, brush it with some melted apricot jam to give it a glossy coat. Delicious warm or at room temperature, it can be served plain.Or gild the lily and add some vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.Or do as I did and drizzle it with salted caramel sauce.Wishing you all a happy, healthy and very sweet new year.

Click here to print recipe for Apple Beehive.

Apple Custard Cake

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I have a recipe for an apple caramel cake that is outstanding. But some occasions (maybe breakfast if you’re my husband) call for a simpler cake. This cake is perfect for those times. This is a dense cake. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! I mean dense in the best possible sense. This is yellow cake at it’s finest. Owing to butter, eggs, whole milk and sour cream it has a compact velvety texture.

My dad would have described this cake as plain. And he would have meant it as a great compliment. He liked subtle flavours, nothing too sweet, ornate or fancy. The inspiration for this cake comes from Sarabeth’s Good Morning Cookbook. Sarabeth knows good breakfast!

The first tweak I made to the original recipe was to toast the sugar. Stella Parks over at Serious Eats convinced me to give it a try. The bottom line is that toasting sugar in the oven tames sugar’s sweetness and the longer you toast it, the more intense the caramel flavour will be. Check out her article if food science is your jam.

I toasted my sugar for about 2 1/2 hours. The toasted sugar is on the right. I tasted both, side by side and did find that the toasted sugar tasted less sweet. You can toast 4 pounds at one time and it will keep forever, just like white sugar. Start with a 9 inch tube pan (also called an angel food cake pan). Butter and flour the pan very well.I made this cake twice last week. The first time I made it, I found it too plain. (Sorry dad!). On the second go-round I added an additional layer of apples and coated the apple slices in cinnamon-sugar.

Half the batter goes into the pan. Smooth it out.I used the first Honeycrisp apples of the fall season! Pink Lady or Granny Smith would also be great choices.Top batter with cinnamon apples.Repeat with a second layer of batter and cinnamon apples. Then drizzle with custard mixture.Resist the urge to turn the cake out of the pan until it has completely cooled. Your patience will be handsomely rewarded. The ribbon of cinnamon coated apples that runs through the center of this cake is quite beautiful.

Salt and Serenity

Tales from my kitchen