Strawberry (and blueberry) Shortcake

My lovely sister visited me a couple of weekends ago, and while she was here we decided to make shortcake! She'd made it before, but I'd never even eaten a real shortcake before. I find that most of the time you see it in a restaurant, grocery store or bakery, it's actually angel food cake served with strawberries. Very different!

Shortcake is actually made with a dough. It looks like bread dough. You mush it into a pan and it's lumpy and not very pretty when it comes out. But it still somehow looks delicious and perfect.
You're supposed to cut this (very thin) cake in half and layer it with whipped cream and fruit. We decided it would be difficult to do (plus we were tired and just wanted some cake), so we didn't. It kept a lot better that way.

I didn't take photos of the whole process because we were also busy making dinner when we made it, but here's what it looked like when we were done!









It's really a simple and lovely cake. Very filling, too, so you can get quite a few servings out of one cake!

Recipe

Strawberry Shortcake

×××

2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup sugar
2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1/3 cup cold butter or margarine, cut into pieces
2/3 cup milk
2 pints strawberries (about 7 cups whole)
1 cup whipping cream

×××

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Grease 8-inch round cake pan. In medium bowl, combine flour, 3 tbsp sugar, baking powder, and salt. With pastry blender, cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Stir in milk just until mixture forms soft dough that leaves side of bowl. On lightly floured surface, knead dough 10 times. With floured hands, pat evenly into cake pan and sprinkle with 1 tbsp sugar. Bake until golden, about 20-30 minutes.
Meanwhile, reserve 4 whole strawberries for garnish; hull remaining strawberries and cut in half or in quarters. In medium bowl, toss strawberries with remaining 1/2 cup sugar until sugar has dissolved.
Invert shortcake onto surface. With long serrated knife, cut shortcake horizontally in half. In bowl, with mixer at medium speed, beat cream just until soft peaks form.
Place bottom half of shortcake, cut side up, on cake plate; top with half the strawberry mixture and half the whipped cream. Place remaining shortcake, cut side down, on strawberry mixture. Spoon remaining strawberry mixture over, then top with remaining whipped cream. Garnish with reserved whole strawberries.


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Strawberry and White Chocolate Tart

Okay. So, not only am I back from Germany, but I'm also unemployed because 1) this is a weird time of year to hire anyone, and 2) it's a terrible economy to hire anyone. You're probably thinking that I should be using all this time to bake bake bake and post post post. But bake bake baking requires money money money, which I am sorely lacking because of my current state of unemployment.
Nonetheless, I did bake last week. I actually made something for a friend who was looking for a subject for a photography exercise/contest. I spent a lot of time considering all my options. Something tried and true or something completely new (rhyme not intended)? I chose a dish, then changed my mind, then changed my mind again and finally I did land on something I had made before... only completely different.
If you'll think (or look, if you weren't with me back then) back to June 2008, you'll remember that I made a strawberry chocolate pie for my sister's birthday. Well this time I decided to follow the original recipe more closely and used white chocolate... but I still used strawberries. Mostly because the raspberries were about twice the price.


I started by hulling and washing some beautiful, fresh, Ontario strawberries. I'm only glad I live in Ontario in the summer, and only because of the plethora of beautiful, fresh produce.


I set those aside to drain and cut up some chilled butter.


Then added some flour and sugar.


And blended it all up.


Next I added some egg yolks, whipping cream and lemon juice and blended those in.


The dough looked like this when it was all blended.


I formed it into a ball and wrapped it up in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge.


Meet my new Paderno tart pan. I love it.


When the dough was chilled, I fit it into the lovely lovely pan.



The dough went back into the fridge and I chopped up the white chocolate.


I melted it in a pot with some whipping cream and vanilla (which made the colour kind of gross, but I tried to ignore it).


I poured the melted chocolate mixture into a bowl with an egg and beat it up.


While I was doing all that, the tart shell was baking blind, so once the filling was prepared, I filled the bottom of the tart with a bunch of strawberries.


And drowned them with the white chocolate mixture.


After going in the oven for 45 or 50 minutes, the tart came out looking like this, which is basically what I imagine heaven looks like.


So, I don't have any photos of the tart cut. I took the tart over to my friend's house where he had set up about three flashes and his fancy-pants camera. Many shots of the whole tart were taken before we cut a perfect slice out and took many most photos of the slice and the tart, etc. It was fun and a lot of the photos seemed to turn out pretty nicely. Of course I haven't seen any since that night, but as soon as I get my hands on them, I'll post them up and show you what my food looks like when you light it properly instead of just using the natural light of my huge apartment windows.
We also ate some, and it was pretty tasty! They crust was a little too thick, but the filling had a pleasant white chocolate flavour and the strawberries gave it a nice fresh taste, too! I did alter the recipe based on thoughts by eat me, delicious, who made it quite a while ago and thought that the white chocolate flavour was a little weak. All I did was increase the white chocolate by 2 ounces and decrease the whipping cream by 2 ounces. It worked out just fine!
I'm not sure I would add it to my regular rotation of desserts for gatherings or functions, but it was quite enjoyable.

More posts to come soon, hopefully! My sister is visiting for the weekend and we're planning to make shortcake!

Recipe

Strawberry and White Chocolate Tart
adapted from a Ricardo Larrivée recipe.

×××

Shortcrust
2 ¼ cups flour
1 pinch of salt
½ cup sugar
¾ cup unsalted butter, chilled and cubed
4 egg yolks
1 tablespoon ice water or 35% cream
1 tablespoon lemon juice
Filling
½ cup 35% cream
6 ounces white chocolate, chopped
1 egg, lightly beaten
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 ½ cups fresh strawberries (or enough strawberries to fill the bottom of your tart crust)


×××

Shortbread Crust
Place the butter, flour, salt and sugar in a bowl and blend with a pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Add the egg yolks, water or cream and lemon juice and blend until the mixture is uniform. Shape into a disk, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
Pat the dough into a 9-inch tart pan. Refrigerate for another 30 minutes. With the rack in the lowest position, preheat the oven to 375°F. Line the chilled crust with aluminum foil, scattering a few dry beans or pie weights on top to hold the foil in place. Bake for 10 minutes. Remove the weights and foil and bake for 5 minutes more. Let cool.
Filling
Preheat the oven to 325°F. In a saucepan over low heat, gently melt the chocolate in the cream and vanilla. Lightly beat the egg using an electric mixer on lowest speed. While beating, slowly add the chocolate mixture, taking care not to incorporate air into the mixture. Beat for 15 seconds more. Arrange strawberries on the pie crust with their pointed ends facing up. Gently pour the filling over the berries without covering them completely. Bake until the centre is only slightly jiggly, 45 to 50 minutes*.
Let stand at room temperature for 3 to 4 hours. Best if served the same day.

* Make sure you check often after about 35 minutes, because all ovens are different!

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Blueberry Cheesecake Squares

So here's my excuse for this stretch of time without updates: it was the end of the semester, and then Christmas, and THEN when I got back to Kingston my computer's power adapter died so I was without my computer for a few days. Now, instead of doing laundry or getting ahead on reading, I've decided to update my blog. With a baked good I made over a month ago... It was for a potluck Christmas dinner I went to at my best friend's apartment, the night before I went home for Christmas.

It started with a sort of shortbread base.




I pressed that into a greased baking dish, and baked it for a bit.




While it was baking I put together the cheesecake filling, something I'd never made before.


Now, when you say "whip together the cheese and sugar" it sounds just so wrong. But if cheesecake is wrong, I don't want to be right...


Added some eggs...


And whipped until smooooooth.


Next, I opened the can of blueberry pie filling I had bought on sale before Thanksgiving... thank goodness for canned goods.


And I poured the cheesecake filling onto the shortbread base...


And then spooned the blueberry filling into lines in the filling.


Next I took a knife and swirled the blueberry pie filling through the cheesecake filling.


It baked for a bit and then came out looking much the same as it did before I baked it, just a little more brown!

Riveting!!!!

All cut up and lovely.


Of course, I had extra pie filling, and I made this the day after I made my chicken pot pies, so I had extra pie dough, SO I made mini blueberry pies.

Cute!

The cheesecake was enjoyed by all at the potluck! I had fun making it, too, since I had never made cheesecake before. It's hard for me to say if this is a good recipe, since I hadn't made cheesecake before this, but it was very tasty and I did actually follow the recipe, so it couldn't be too bad!

Recipe

Blueberry Cheesecake Squares

×××

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons flour, divided
½ cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
1/3 cup unsalted butter
24 ounces cream cheese, softened
¾ cup sugar
3 eggs
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla
½ - ¾ cup blueberry preserves or pie filling

×××

Preheat oven to 350°F. Lightly grease a 13 x 9 x 2 inch baking pan. In a medium sized bowl, combine 1 cup of flour with brown sugar. With pastry blender cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Press evenly into prepared pan. Bake for 20 minutes and remove from oven to cool on a wire rack.
In large bowl with an electric mixer at medium speed beat together cream cheese and sugar just until combined. Beat in remaining 2 tablespoons flour, eggs, lemon juice and vanilla until combined. Pour over partially baked crust. Drop spoonfuls of blueberry preserves over top. With the broad side of a butter knife lightly swirl in preserves. Bake 20 minutes longer. Turn off oven; prop oven door open with handle of wooden spoon. Let cheesecake cool in oven 10 minutes; then cool completely on wire rack away from drafts. Refrigerate for at least 3 hours and then cut into squares with a wet knife.
Store in refrigerator.

Guten Appetit! And stay tuned for my Christmas baking, including a five layer cake I made for my mother's birthday on December 26th! Continue reading...

Filled Butter Braids

I'm here, I'm here! I promised I would be back, and here I am! I'm hoping that from now on I can find time every weekend to bake something. Anything. This school-but-no-baking thing really bites.
Anyway, last weekend, Anders was away at training camp for cross country, so I had the apartment and the kitchen all to myself. It was glorious. Except that I missed him. But then he came back and ate the food I made, so all was well.
And what did I make? I made Raspberry Butter Braids from this recipe. Except that I didn't make a raspberry one at all. Instead I used triple berry jam and Nutella. Mmm.

To begin with, meet my new kitchen:

Why yes, we do house a greenhouse in our kitchen. That's a ficus, a lemon tree, a clementine tree (both grown from seeds!) and a jade bonsai.
The house our apartment is in is over 100 years old. It originally belonged to the general manager of the train line in Kingston, when the trains used to run along the lake (the window faces the lake). So, being that the house is old and was owned by a fancy person, the windows are gigantic. The two of us have to work together to get them up and down because they're wider than our armspans. They're also heavy.

Is this a cooking blog or is a home blog?!?!

But one more thing! This is my oven/stove:

It was more or less perfectly clean and brand new when we moved in. It was like heaven.

As for the bread, I started out by scalding some milk, and then adding some butter, sugar and salt.


While that was cooling a bit, I put some yeast into a bowl of warm water and let that sit for about 10 minutes:


And while that was sitting, I beat an egg.

At which point, all the above mentioned ingredients that did their things and then sat for x number of minutes were added together.

To that, I added the four, 1/2 cup at a time.

I think I ended up using all 4 cups of flour suggested - it was a very humid day.

Then, I realised I had used my biggest bowl and needed to wash it out so that I could put oil into it and use it to let the dough rise. I'm not always the smartest in the kitchen.

This is the dough sitting in its oiled bowl.

This whole time, I had my oven sitting at the lowest temperature it would heat to (170°F). When I was finished mixing up the dough, I turned the oven off.

I covered the bowl with a clean tea towel and put it into the turned-off but still-warm oven to proof.

Success!

About 90 minutes later, it had double in size and was nice and soft.

I kneaded it a bit, then split it into two even portions.


I split each half again into three equal portions and rolled them out into long (18") ropes.


Next, I took my lovely, heavy marble rolling pin to the ropes and flattened them out a bit.

And I spread some jam (triple berry, in case you were wondering) along each one.

Closing these suckers up was the hardest part about this recipe. Especially the jam ones.

You can see that some jam escaped. And then after I took this photo the seams all came apart and the jam went everywherrrre.

But I managed to move the ropes to the greased pan and braid them, nonetheless.

It took some patience though.

The Nutella ropes were much easier to deal with.


And the braid came out much better.


Once I had them both braided and ready to go, I let them proof again in the turned-off oven for about an hour.

As you can see, when I took them out, the braid had disappeared a bit. I put an eggwash on them anyway, and put them in the oven for about 25 minutes.

And when they came out of the even at the end, the braid have almost completely disappeared!



I'm not completely sure why this happened. I think it could have been that I didn't put enough flour into the dough initially and it was unable to hold itself up? Who knows.

Now, we ate the Nutella one like it was going out of style and I only got a photo of the jam one.

Both were good, but the jam one is still sitting out of the cutting board on our kitchen table, all sad and alone.

I really like this recipe. I really didn't need a lot of ingredients that I didn't already have, and the amounts of the ingredients seem very low compared to how much product ou get out! Two loaves of bread! It's great that these are filled, too. It takes one step out of breakfast (which these work very well for), and that is always nice when you're running out the door to stupid 8.30AM classes.
I have two small problems with this recipe... and it's not even the recipe, really, both things are my fault and things that I can fix. The first problem is that the filling to bread ratio was too low. Both Anders and I (but especially Anders) thought these would be better with more filling. The other problem was, of course, that the braid really sucked in the end. And again, that was my fault. It's funny, because when I worked at the bakery I used to do egg braids almost every day. I loved doing them, actually. They were always so pretty and I got pretty good at it. You'd think that I might remember the difference between that experience and this one... but I don't. It's all a learning process though, and I look forward to making these again so that I can figure out where I went wrong!

Recipe

Filled Butter Braids

1 cup milk
½ cup butter, cut into pieces
½ cup sugar
½ teaspoon salt
1 envelope dry yeast
¼ cup warm water
1 large egg, beaten to blend, room temperature
4 cups (approximately) unbleached all-purpose flour
¾ cup desired filling (I used triple berry jam and Nutella)
1 large egg, beaten with 2 tablespoons water

×××

Scald milk in heavy, medium saucepan. Add butter, sugar, and salt. Let stand until butter melts. Pour mixture into large bowl. Cool to 105 to 115 degrees. Sprinkle yeast over ¼ cup warm water in small bowl; stir to dissolve. Let stand 10 minutes at room temperature. Add yeast mixture and egg to milk mixture. Stir in enough flour, ½ cup at a time, to form soft, slightly sticky dough. Lightly grease large bowl. Add dough, turning to coat. Cover bowl with kitchen towel and let dough rise in warm draft-free area (like a turned-off, but still-warm oven) until doubled in volume, about 2 hours. Grease two heavy large cookie sheets. Turn dough out onto lightly floured work surface and knead until smooth, 2 minutes. Divide dough in half. Divide each half into thirds. Roll each piece out between hands and floured surface to 18 inch long rope. Using a rolling pin, roll each rope into a flat strip, about 3 inches wide. Spoon about 2 tablespoons of filling down the length of each strip. Fold dough over filling to seal. You can brush the edges of the dough with a bit of water to help seal the dough. Arrange 3 ropes side by side on 1 prepared sheet. Braid ropes. Pinch ends together and tuck under loaf. Repeat process with remaining 3 ropes on second cookie sheet for second loaf. Cover each loaf with kitchen towel and let rise in warm draft-free area until almost doubled in volume, about 1 hour.
Preheat oven to 350°F. Brush egg wash over loaves. Bake until loaves are golden brown and sound hollow when tapped on bottom, about 20 - 25 minutes. Transfer to racks and cool.

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