I'm back with a...whimper (Tuesdays With Dorie: Sweet Cream Biscuits)

Hello? Is anyone still out there? It's me, Kait, sheepishly returning to my blog after a much-needed but much-guilt-inducing month off. And what a month it's been. A new apartment, the end of school (well, in two days, anyway), job application after job application. I love our apartment, although there are still many boxes to unpack. I can't wait for school to be done (hopefully forever). And the job situation? Well, it's a work in progress.

I was hoping to come back with a bang, but my attempt at today's Tuesdays With Dorie recipe, Sweet Cream Biscuits chosen by Melissa of Love At First Bite, was decidedly lackluster.


I'm positive it wasn't the recipe itself (flour, cream, baking powder, salt - no butter!), as I snuck a few bites of the raw dough scraps and they were heavenly - creamy, slightly salty.


I know for a fact that I handled the dough too much, a big no-no when it comes to biscuit making. I got a bit too overzealous when I rolled out the dough, despite Dorie's express warning against this very mistake. The dough ended up about 1/4 of an inch thick, half of the thickness I was aiming for. So I decided to fold the dough upon itself and roll it together. That didn't work (the two halves separated). So I smushed the whole thing back into a ball and started from scratch.

I knew I was doomed when the dough kept springing back after being rolled. It was way too elastic. The result: biscuit hockey pucks. Such a shame.

Still, I'm intrigued by the concept of this recipe, and think it would be a great recipe to try again the next time I need to use up a ton of heavy cream quickly. But next time, I'll use a lighter hand. For the recipe, visit Melissa's blog.

Sweet Melissa Sundays: Orange Scented Scones

Dessert for breakfast - is there anything better (or more indulgent)? I have a soft spot for any baking recipe that I can justify eating for breakfast. It ensures that I use up a recipe before it starts to go bad, and more importantly, it means I get to eat sugar for a breakfast. A total win-win.


As a result, I was really looking forward to this week's Sweet Melissa Sundays recipe, Orange-Scented Scones (chosen by Robin of Lady Craddock's Bakery). As a bonus, I had never made scones before.


These scones - with their buttery orange flavour and flaky texture - were a great introduction to the genre. They were very fast and easy to pull together, and for very little effort, yielded a ton of flavour. I loved these for breakfast with homemade strawberry-raspberry jam.


I recently found myself a part-time job for the school year, and I think these will come in handy now that I'll be working mornings four days a week. They're a perfect grab-and-go breakfast. A big thank you goes to Robin for giving me the incentive to make a baked good I've never tried before. I think this is a recipe I'll be experimenting with in the future. Please visit Robin's blog for the recipe.

Barefoot Contessa's Scrambled Eggs with Truffles

Ever since my boyfriend brought me back truffles from his trip to Italy, I've been looking for new ways to use them. Luckily, one of my Christmas gifts yielded a new and wonderful recipe that calls for truffles.

I was lucky enough to receive two Barefoot Contessa cookbooks for Christmas - Barefoot in Paris and Back to Basics, her latest. I've been thoroughly enjoying them, making a ton of recipes from both books. (Sidenote: Ina Garten is just so great. She and Dorie Greenspan are tied for my all-time favourite kitchen goddesses - they can do anything in the kitchen and almost everything they make looks so good!)

Barefoot in Paris includes a recipe for Scrambled Eggs with Truffles, which I found to be a perfect application for truffles. More than that, it showed me a new way to make scrambled eggs. The eggs are combined with half and half cream and slow-cooked over a water bath. Typically, when making scrambled eggs, I combine eggs with a bit of milk and butter. Ina Garten's got a passion for butter, cream, and big portions, though, so I wasn't surprised that this recipe called for 16 eggs and 1 cup of cream - and that's to serve only 4 people.

These eggs are very smooth and creamy, and would work very well without the truffles - the truffles give just a hint of flavour as-is. I also think these would be fantastic with a bit of fresh herbs - thyme or chives sound particularly tempting. Give them a shot, with or without truffles. Read on for the recipe.

Scrambled Eggs with Truffles
Serves 4 to 5

1 black truffle
16 extra large eggs
1 cup half-and-half
2 teaspoons kosher salt
½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
4-5 slices toast

Beat eggs, half and half, salt, and pepper together in a heat-proof glass bowl until combined but not frothy. Shave the truffle into the egg mixture with a truffle shaver or mandoline. If you have time, cover with plastic wrap and sit in fridge for few hours.

When ready to serve, set the bowl over a saucepan of simmering water. Cook over the water, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon, until the eggs are thick and custardy. The spoon will stand up in the middle of the eggs when they are properly cooked. This will take about 20-25 minutes. Remove from the heat immediately.

Place one slice of toast on each place and serve with the cooked eggs.

Apple Bread Pudding

I love apple-based desserts. So often their cinnamon-flecked flavour is reminiscent of apple pie, but they often double as breakfast fare -- and they're a lot less difficult to make than pie. Any recipe that captures that apple pie flavour but doesn't require the same effort is worth a try, in my books. And if I can justify eating a sweet for breakfast? All the better.


Enter Anna Olson's Green Apple Bread Pudding. Or rather, my version of it, plain-old Apple Bread Pudding. You can use any type of baking apple (McIntosh, Empire, etc.) in this dish, or even the original Granny Smith Anna suggests.


Using lighter cream than the recipe's original heavy cream, you can justify serving it for breakfast. Be sure to serve it with a generous splash of maple syrup on top.


Keep reading for the recipe.


Green Apple Bread Pudding
Yield: 6
5 tbsp butter, melted
1/2 large baguette, cubed
1 cup apple, peeled and diced
2 egg yolks
2 whole eggs
1/3 cup sugar
1 1/4 cups table or half-and-half cream
1 cup milk
2 tsp. vanilla extract
sugar
maple syrup

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Brush the bottom and sides of a 9-inch square baking dish with half the melted butter. Toss bread cubes and apples remaining melted butter and spoon into baking dish.
2. Whisk together egg yolks, whole eggs, and sugar. Whisk in cream, milk, and vanilla. Pour over bread cubes and press down gently on bread to help soak in. Let stand for about 15 minutes.
3. Place baking dish in a water bath (boiling hot water in a pan large enough to contain the bread pudding's pan--I used a 9"x13" pan) and sprinkle top of pudding with sugar. Bake for 50 to 60 minutes, until the center of the pudding springs back when pressed.
4. Remove baking dish from water bath. Serve warm, with maple syrup available to pour on top.

Breakfast on the Barbecue: Baked Apple Pancake

Despite my profound love of cooking and baking, there is one essential culinary task that I absolutely detest: peeling. I'm painfully slow at it -- we're talking 3-5 minutes for one potato. The good news is, I bought myself a peeler which rests in the palm of my hand and shaves at least a minute off of each potato, apple, carrot, whatever. The bad news? My boyfriend and his roommates only own a dollar store quality peeler--and we were planning on making a baked apple pancake for breakfast two weekends ago.


There's something else: I'm not the most patient person in the world. So when it took me 20 minutes to peel three apples, I was on the verge of tears. We slept in, so my hunger wasn't helping, either. Irrationally frustrated, I was relieved when I finished the apples and walked over to the oven. I was about to preheat the oven when I remembered -- my boyfriend's oven is broken.


Oi. Luckily, I thought to use a cast iron dutch oven and try to barbecue breakfast instead. I am happy to say that my barbecued breakfast turned out beautifully.

The brown sugar forms a bit of caramel on the bottom, while the batter is like clafoutis -- firm, but custard-like. Served with a drizzle of maple syrup, it's a very decadent breakfast that's also perfect for brunch.

I've included oven instructions for the recipe, because for most of you it's probably easier to pop it into the oven than to stick it on the grill. But the barbecue modifications are very simple, and you can find those at the very bottom of the post.

INGREDIENTS

Apples
1/2 stick (1/4 cup) butter (or margarine, if you're at your non-baking boyfriend's house)
3 medium baking apples (I used McIntosh), peeled, cored, and cut into 1/4-inch-thick slices
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 tbsp. maple syrup

Batter
3 large eggs
1/2 cup milk
1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt

1. Preheat oven to 425F. Melt butter over medium-high heat in an ovenproof frying pan or dutch oven. Add apples, brown sugar, and cinnamon and cook, stirring occasionally, until the apples begin to brown and most of the juices have evaporated, 5 to 7 minutes. Remove pan from heat.

2. Whisk together eggs, milk, flour, and salt until smooth.

3. Spread apples evenly across the bottom of the pan or dutch oven. Pour the batter over the apples. Place the pan in the oven and bake until the pancake is golden and puffed, 18 to 20 minutes.You can also put a knife into the centre of the pancake; if the knife comes out clean, it's done.

4. Remove the pan from the oven and cut into wedges. Serve immediately with a drizzle...or a big splash...of maple syrup.

Serves 4... or 2 really hungry people.

Note: if you do want to barbecue the pancake--say, if you're camping, or your oven's on the fritz--heat the barbecue to 425F as well, and just watch it closely after 15 minutes. Just as with the oven method, when a knife or toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean, you'll know it's done.

Baked eggs with cream and herbs

Sometimes it's hard to find the energy to cook. Even when you're passionate about cooking (and eating!), there will always be that night that makes it seem impossible to make something nutritional and homemade. For me, that night occurs every other Sunday, when I return from a weekend visit with the boyfriend at around 9pm, just in between bedtime and dinner time. I'm too tired to really cook, but too hungry to settle for a little snack.

One fast dinner option I never get tired of is the ultimate comfort food: eggs. Especially when they're drizzled with heavy cream and speared with slivers of buttered toast. Nigella Lawson and Laura Calder introduced me to the concept, and the beauty of it is that it's so customizable. When I got home last night, I wanted my eggs really rich: I wanted them with cheese and chives, too.



The method is simple. Heat your oven to 375F. Then boil a kettle of water. Meanwhile, for each egg you're planning on making, butter one ramekin. Sprinkle the ingredients you're craving in the bottom of the ramekins --no more than a couple of tablespoons per ramekin. Pick any cheese, herbs, meat, or veggies you'd like. Crack one egg in each ramekin, on top of the ingredients. Then spoon about 1 tbsp of heavy cream (a.k.a. whipping cream, 35% m.f.) on each egg. Season with salt and pepper.

Place the ramekins in a casserole dish and pour the boiling water into the casserole until it comes halfway up the sides of the ramekins. Bake for 15 minutes (for soft-baked eggs). Serve with toast.

Seasonal Ontario Food's Fruit Clafoutis

Ed. Note: I sort of goofed this post up. I originally wrote it Thursday but wanted to post my Mmm...Canada entry first. But I forgot to change some of the words in the post to reflect the change! I've changed the wording now, but wanted to be ethical and let you know.

Happy Canada Day!


I picked up a pint of blueberries from the grocery store last week, and since then they've just been sitting in the fridge, completely useless. I needed them when I saw them -- had to have them -- but didn't know what to do with them. So Thursday night, with the long weekend fast approaching, and knowing the fruit was likely to spoil over the weekend, I found the perfect recipe: Ferdzy of Season Ontario Food's Fruit Clafoutis.




What I loved about this recipe was its flexibility; you can use a variety of fruits. In my case, I had one lonely pear sitting in the fridge, so I made a blueberry-pear clafoutis. I also didn't have the lemon zest the recipe calls for, so I added a bit of vanilla extract instead to make up for the loss of flavour. The result was wonderful -- sort of like a baked apple pancake (one of my mom's best dishes; you can find a similar recipe here). I've never made clafoutis before and based on the name thought it would be complicated, but I was wrong.

You can check out Ferdzy's lovely recipe here.

Mmm...Canada: Strawberry-Rhubarb French Toast

This post is part of the Mmm...Canada event, hosted by Jennifer of The Domestic Goddess and Jasmine of Confessions of a Cardamom Addict.

When I thought of what food screams "Canada!" to me, I aimed for something recent vs. my all-time favourite. The reason? There are just too many Canadian foods that I love to mention.

In Canada, we are so lucky to be able to produce so many delicious things. On my recent trip to the Niagara Wine Country, I got to sample the many delicious wines being produced just a short drive away from me.

When I still lived in London, I loved to go to the St. Jacob's farmer's market to buy maple syrup produced by local mennonites.

And when I visit my hometown now, I'm even more appreciative of the roadside stands where I love to buy my fruits and vegetables...like rhubarb. So that's why, for this event, I decided to make something with Essex County rhubarb.

Essex County is the best place I know to buy fresh, local produce. And it's inextricably tied to "Canada," for me, since I spent the first 18 years of my life there. Growing up in a Canadian small town, to me, meant growing up in Essex County, with its roadside fruit stands and huge farming community. I took rhubarb from Essex County and some strawberries I picked in London and made Strawberry-Rhubarb French Toast.








The recipe itself is pretty basic. I used about 1 cup of chopped rhubarb and only 1/4 cup of chopped strawberries (I really wanted the rhubarb to be the dominant flavour, but you could increase the amount of strawberries, too). I stewed the fruit in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat with a couple tablespoons of water, a few tablespoons of granulated sugar, and a splash of vanilla. I let it cook until the rhubarb released its juices and the fruit was nice and tender. You could add more sugar, but since I was planning on dousing my french toast in maple syrup, too, I cut back on the sugar in the sauce. This made enough for about 2 servings (with about a 1/2 cup of sauce per person). You can adjust it accordingly, if you'd like.

I made standard french toast -- bread dipped in a milk, egg and cinnamon mixture, then fried like grilled cheese (I'm sure you know the drill) -- cut it into halves, and dusted it with icing sugar before spooning the strawberry rhubarb sauce over top. A heap of maple syrup completed the dish.

So, there you have it. A basic recipe with lots of room to make adjustments. With its abundance of local produce, I can't think of any other recent dish I've made that epitomizes Canadian food for me.