Tag Archives: Rosh Hashanah

Traditions and a Brown Butter Apple Tart

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two tarts 2 625 sqTraditions. All families have them. Those little rituals passed down from generation to generation that help shape your family by creating a sense of interconnectedness, you know, that warm fuzzy feeling that makes you appreciate being a part of this clan. Traditions can help create memories that fill your mind with laughter, love and joy. Hopefully your family has multiple positive traditions and not too many of the negative ones, that sadly get passed from generation to generation, like the ancient family recipe for guilt and passive-aggressive bullying!

Almost every summer my siblings, their spouses and kids and my mom descend upon us at the cottage for the Labour Day weekend. About eight years ago my youngest sister and brother and I were swimming in the lake and the next thing we knew, we had swum from our cottage to a little island in the middle of our lake, and back again, about a 2 kilometer swim. No one can really remember how the decision to swim this little marathon came about, but we have repeated the swim every summer since then. Lest you think we are elite athletes or something like that, let me assure you we swim the entire way with head-up breaststroke. None of us likes putting our heads in the water. So we talk and laugh, and cough the entire way there and back. My husband insists I wear a waist belt that has a little swimmers safety flag attached to it so that boats can see me and not run me over. He loves me dearly, I guess!the swimmersOver the years, various other family members have joined us and in 2009, my then 9 year old niece did the swim for her very first time! She is part mermaid. Last year my brother’s new wife joined us for the first time and we almost had to boot her out of the club when she started doing a proper crawl stroke and actually got her head wet. This summer she is 7 months pregnant, so we excused her. My brother made up some baseball hamstring injury excuse so he did not join us either. My 14 year old nephew completed the swim for the first time this summer and we were all very thrilled about that.

I have one brother-in-law that is known for his competitive nature. The first year he joined us for the swim, he was upset that my sister and I were swimming faster than he was. He claimed that it was his swim trunks that were slowing him down. Apparently they were not very aerodynamic as they kept filling up with water. Being the keen competitor he is, he removed the swim trunks, and swam commando. We made him promise to never do that again! Every third year, my cousin Lewis joins us, and he has come to treasure this new tradition, as well as the Double Coconut Granola and yogurt breakfast that awaits him when he is done. In addition to my little safety flag, we always have a canoe alongside us just in case someone gets too tired. This year my brother-in-law Guy got coerced into the role of spotter.

Regular readers of this blog may already know that my drink of choice in the summer is a cold glass of Prosecco. While I have no problem drinking alone, (I find my own company very amusing!), cracking open a bottle and sharing it with my sisters is even more enjoyable and has become a tradition that we have all come to love. However, this past weekend we only drank one bottle of Prosecco. We discovered a new wine that we all fell in love with. My siblings and mom brought me a case of assorted wines as a little thank you gift.bottle and glassWe all became smitten with a California wine by Ironstone called “Obsession.”. Made from the Symphony grape (a hybrid of the muscat and grenache gris grape), this wine was luscious. My brother-in-law chilled it in the freezer an hour before we served it. It has floral and citrus notes, with peach and pear overtones. It is clean and balanced with a crisp and slightly acidic finish, which saves the wine from being too cloyingly sweet. It is the perfect aperitif wine. A new tradition has been born!

I decided to test a new Rosh Hashanah recipe over the weekend since I had my niece Kailey here with me. Although she is only 12, she is an extremely gifted baker. She did all the baking and I shot the pictures. We made a brown butter apple tart, a take on the traditional Rosh Hashanah Apple Cake. Browned butter is one of those magical culinary techniques that makes everything taste  and smell better.

kneadingrolling dough

lining tart panlining pie shellThe custard filling is enhanced with vanilla bean and brown butter. It doesn’t get much better than that.  Topped with thinly sliced apple rings, this tart is sure to become a new Rosh Hashanah or fall tradition at your house.apples 2

placing applesbrown butter fillingNot only did my niece bake the tarts, she also helped wash the dishes!washing dishesicing sugar

Click here to print recipe for Brown Butter Apple Tart.

a slice

 

Beehive Honey Cake

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Tomorrow night marks the start of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Honey is traditionally served at the Rosh Hashanah table to symbolize our hope for a sweet year ahead.  What you may not know, is that honey is rapidly at risk of becoming a scarce commodity.

What I’m about to share with you may sound a bit far-fetched, like a plot from an episode of CSI-The Animal Kingdom Edition, if there were such a version.

Honeybees are disappearing at an alarming rate.  Apparently, thriving colonies disappear overnight without leaving a trace, the bodies of the buzzing little victims are never found. Seemingly healthy communities fly off never to return. The queen bee and mother of the hive is abandoned to starve and die.

Bees don’t just make honey; they are critical in the pollination of our fruits and vegetables When you stop to consider that honeybees pollinate about one out of every three bites of food we eat, this is a serious matter. This missing bee phenomenon is known as “Colony Collapse Disorder” (CCD).   What is causing CCD is up for debate.

Some put forth the theory that whenever bees are stressed, a parasite, called nosema, attacks the bees digestive system. Anytime bees are stressed, their immune system takes a hit.  What could honeybees possibly be stressed about, you may ask?  In what’s called “migratory beekeeping”, beehives are often transported long distances to pollinate farms.  Imagine how you’d feel, doing a great job on one farm and then being packed up in a truck, to travel thousands of miles only to have to set up shop in a new location all over again.  That would stress anyone.

According to Richard Schiffman of  blogs.reuters.com

Three new studies point an accusing finger at a culprit that many have suspected all along, a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids.

In the U.S. alone, these pesticides, produced primarily by the German chemical giant Bayer and known as “neonics” for short, coat a massive 142 million acres of corn, wheat, soy and cotton seeds. They are also a common ingredient in home gardening products.

Research published last month in the prestigious journal Science shows that neonics are absorbed by the plants’ vascular system and contaminate the pollen and nectar that bees encounter on their rounds. They are a nerve poison that disorient their insect victims and appear to damage the homing ability of bees, which may help to account for their mysterious failure to make it back to the hive.

What can we do to help? Here are a few ideas from the “District Domestic” website that you can implement in your garden, to help the plight of the honeybees.

  • Replace some of your lawn with flower beds.
  • Keep your garden as organic as possible! Avoid using pesticides and herbicides.
  • Plant native species, which bees love – for example: mint, daisies, strawberries, raspberries, lavender, salvia, asters, sunflowers and verbena.
  • Choose plants that flower at different stages in the growing season to provide a constant supply of food for the bees.

While honey cake is traditionally served at Rosh Hashanah, I have to admit that I’m not the biggest honey cake fan. My main complaint about honey cakes is that they are very sticky and cloyingly sweet.

To me, honey cake is the Jewish equivalent of fruitcake.  Everyone makes it but no one really wants to eat it.  However, here is a honey cake recipe that I have come upon that has changed my mind.   Honey-Glazed Beehive Cake is light and delicate, as a result of egg whites which are whipped to fluffy peaks and then folded into the batter.

The honey glaze which sandwiches the two halves of the hive together is created by combining brown sugar, honey and butter. The brown sugar and butter work their magic to tame the cloying sweetness of honey. I could not stop myself from licking the bowl.

This recipe comes from the June 2008 issue of Martha Stewart Living. I have adapted it slightly and omitted the marzipan honey bees that Martha decorated her cake with. If you have the patience and fine motor skills to make the little marzipan bees, go for it! The hive cake pan is made by Nordicware and I got mine on Amazon.

Egg whites are beaten to stiff peaks and folded into the cake batter to help create a lighter honey cake.

The cake halves must be trimmed in order to sandwich them together to make the hive. The trimmings make a great afternoon snack with tea!

Martha recommends using the honey glaze when it is warm, to glue the halves together. I found that the two sides kept sliding, so I chilled the glaze for about an hour so the butter had a chance to set up a bit. Once firmer, the two halves stuck easily.

The remaining honey glaze can be rewarmed and poured over the cake if you like a “wet-look” sticky cake.

A final sugar glaze is made by mixing icing sugar and water together and poured over the cake.

Click here to print recipe for Beehive Honey Cake.

L’Shana Tova. Wishing you all a sweet, joyous and healthy New Year.

Caramel Apple Cake

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I learned how to make this cake many years ago, 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 and a certain discipline that is lacking in many kitchens. 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 x 13 inch rectangular cake pans and cut the cakes into large squares to sell in the shop.

After I left Dinah’s Cupboard, I didn’t make that cake again, for a very long time. I guess I was sick of it or had just forgotten about it. But then a few years ago I was working on a column for Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year). It is traditional to have honey cake on Rosh Hashanah, to symbolize a sweet new year, however, I hate honey cake. Luckily, it is also traditional to have apples on Rosh Hashanah, so I decided to feature an apple dessert of some sort. And then, I remembered this apple cake. I decided to bake it in a Bundt pan, to make it look a little fancier. We had several other desserts at our dinner, but this was the first to disappear.

I had forgotten what a great cake it is. It is perfect for entertaining as it can be made a day ahead of time. it is also wonderful for breakfast with a big glass of milk, or at bedtime with a cup of tea. It is a moist, dense, intensely flavourful cake. The outside of the cake gets a bit crispy from the caramel glaze that is poured on top of the cake. The inside is tart from the apples, but also sweet, in that slightly bittersweet way that only dark caramel can be.   This is cake perfection. I am warning you that it is very hard to have just a little bit. Your guests will ask for just a sliver and then they will be back at the cake, hacking away at it for more slivers, until there are only crumbs left. Not that my friends and family are like that, of course!

I decided to make it again this weekend, so I could take pictures and tell you all about it. I went to the basement to find my Bundt pan, and sitting next to it on the shelf were my mini Bundt pans. I decided to make a double recipe and make a big cake as well as some minis. An applepalooza around here! My husband was so happy.

I decided to use a mix of Granny Smith and Honey Crisp apples. You want some tart apples in this dish that will hold their shape when baked.

The apples get peeled and sliced into wedges for a big cake or diced for the mini cakes. Then the apples are then bathed in a sugar cinnamon mixture.

No need to take out your mixer for this cake. Everything gets mixed together in a big bowl. Whisk eggs, vegetable (or coconut) oil, orange zest, orange juice and vanilla extract together. Lately I have been using vanilla bean paste, instead of vanilla extract. You get those pretty vanilla flecks in the cake.

Then the dry ingredients are added to the wet and the whole batter gets mixed. You will think that there is no way all the dry ingredients will get incorporated, as this is such a heavy dense batter. But persist, use some elbow grease and it will all come together. Just think of all the calories you will be burning in advance of eating this cake!

Then the cake gets assembled. It’s a little like making lasagna. Layer 1/3 of the batter into the pan. Arrange one half of the apples on top, then more batter, a second layer of apples and finally the last third of the batter.

The minis are just so adorable!

Once the second layer of apples are covered with batter, into the oven it goes. While it is baking, you can prepare the caramel glaze. Butter, brown sugar and heavy cream are cooked until hot and bubbly.

Once the cake comes out of the oven, it’s time to add the caramel. Now I’ll share with you the secret to what makes this cake so incredible.

Then you must exercise extreme patience and let the cake cool COMPLETELY, before trying to unmold it. Looking at the sad bottom of this cake, all riddled with holes may have you a little concerned. Then you unmold it and it just looks like a boring Plain Jane Bundt cake. But wait, yee of little faith.  Slice into it and taste. You will be a believer!

Click here to print recipe for Caramel Apple cake.

A Very Sweet New Year with Caramel Chocolate Dipped Apples

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I know that in my last post, I promised a daily update on “The Best Thing I Ate Today”, while travelling through Umbria, Italy. Unfortunately, the internet service at our villa was knocked out by a tremendous thunderstorm and so I was unable to blog daily. I promise to post about the trip very soon. But in the meantime, a very sweet post!

Tonight at sundown the Jewish New Year  (Rosh Hashanah) begins. On Rosh Hashanah, we traditionally dip apples in honey in order to symbolize our wishes for a sweet year for family, friends and all the Jewish people. While this explanation makes sense, I wondered why specifically apples and honey?  Why not bananas dipped into maple syrup?  (Hmmm, I see a new recipe developing).

In researching this question, I came upon an interesting explanation on the website torah.org.  The insight they offered, regarding the apple part of the equation, goes like this:  “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.  We have confidence that God and the instructions in the Torah could never mislead us.”

They explained the choice of honey 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.”

While I love apples, honey has never been a favourite of mine. Honey cake can be found on many Rosh Hashanah dessert tables. But not mine. This year I decided to do a twist on the apples dipped in honey. I dipped my apples in caramel sauce and then melted chocolate. Then I covered some of them in mini m&m’s, some in salted chopped peanuts and the rest in skor bits. A sweet new year indeed!

This caramel sauce contains the usual ingredients of butter, brown sugar and corn syrup. However, where it gets interesting is the addition of small amounts of maple syrup and molasses. These 2 ingredients, while small in quantity add a wonderful dimension and depth of flavour to the caramel. A candy thermometer is needed to make these.

Wishing you all a sweet and healthy new year!

To print the recipe for Caramel Apples Dipped in Chocolate, click here.