Category: Dessert

Kavi helped me make star bread for the first time today — I did a bake-a-long with Pooja Makhijani teaching us. Super-happy with the results — it’s so damn pretty. I can’t stand it. And making the twists was VERY satisfying.

My first one was chai-spiced: sugar, cinnamon, cardamom, clove, nutmeg, ginger, black pepper. Mmm…. I have a second going in the oven, a savory one — will post details soon.

I don’t have a recipe for you, because I’m not sure where Pooja got the one we used, and I don’t want to share it without permission, but if you follow the King Arthur Flour recipe for star bread, just add 1/2 teaspoon of the other spices listed above to the cinnamon and sugar, and you should end up with something very close to mine.

I brought it warm to the kids to eat for a last treat before bed, after our nightly Doctor Who. They were VERY happy. It’s half-gone already.

Lime, Rosewater, and Ginger Shortbread, dipped in White Chocolate

When you find yourself going back into the kitchen to see if there are any crumbs left on the plate, you know you have a winning recipe; I think this is now my absolute favorite shortbread. Adding in some citric acid gives a seriously tangy punch to these buttery-rich bites, but they would still be tasty without. The white chocolate’s sweetness balances the tang beautifully, but they’re delicious straight up too, especially warm from the oven.

Note: I find that a pair of kitchen shears is much easier to work with than a knife for cutting up sticky crystallized ginger.

Ingredients:

3/4 pound unsalted butter at room temperature
1 c. sugar
2 scraped vanilla beans or 2 t. pure vanilla extract
3/4 t. salt
1 lime, zest and juice
1 t. citric acid (optional)
1 T rosewater
3 1/2 cups flour
1/2 c. crystallized ginger, chopped fine
1 c. white chocolate chips (optional)
luster dust and a bit of vodka for decorating (optional)

1. Preheat the oven to 350F.

2. Cream together the butter and sugar; add the vanilla and salt, citric acid, lime juice, lime zest, and rosewater. Then add flour and mix on low until dough forms. Stir in ginger.

3. Turn out dough onto floured board. (If it’s not coming together into a dough, the heat of your hands will help.) Firmly pat flat (to desired cookie height, usually about 1/2 inch). If using cookie cutters, cut out shapes, place on parchment-covered baking sheet, and chill for 15 minutes (to help hold shape).

NOTE: Can be kept chilled at this point for several days, covered in plastic wrap, and then rolled, cut, and baked fresh.

Alternately, press into baking pan or shortbread mold, prick with fork. (For this batch, I simply pressed into an 8 x 8 baking pan.) You can also cut shapes out after baking — shortbread is very forgiving that way — but then the individual cookie edges won’t be browned.

3. Remove from fridge and bake for 15 to 20 minutes, until the edges begin to brown, then remove to wire rack to cool.

4. Optional decorating — once shortbread has cooled, melt white chocolate in microwave at half power for a few minutes, or in a double boiler. Dip shortbread pieces in chocolate, then set on rack to dry. Once dry, brush with luster dust mixed with a bit of vodka.

Okay, I am never going to be able to produce desserts uniform enough for a French patisserie! Yet another reason why I won’t be applying to the GBBO or its offshoots.

(I was listening to the Milk Street podcast yesterday while gardening, and they interviewed someone who’d worked at The French Laundry, I think it was, and it sounded just brutal. When they say things like ‘you have to be in your mid-20s to start as a chef, or your body just physically won’t be able to handle it…oof.’)

But still, these white chocolate-dipped lime, rosewater, and ginger shortbreads are pretty darn cute. The sparkly green and gold accents make them look a little more Easter-y than I anticipated, but that’s just fine. 

Marshmallows for the Mother’s Day treat packages — passionfruit, vanilla, and rose.  I think I’ll have five of these in each package, in one of those long clear sleeves.

I tried substituting in 1 cup of coconut milk for 1 cup of the heavy cream in tonight’s ice cream experiment. Mostly because I only had 1 cup of heavy cream, and I had an opened can of coconut milk in the fridge with 1 cup left. Waste not, want not…

As expected, the result tasted lighter than usual — coconut milk is 552 calories / cup, as opposed to heavy cream’s 821 calories / cup. I don’t know that I’d want that for chocolate, but I was making passionfruit ice cream and the lighter mouthfeel paired well with the tropical flavor. And of course, the coconut milk brought its own tasty deliciousness as well. I reduced the sugar by 1/4 c., since coconut milk is sweet.

Verdict for coconut milk & passionfruit ice cream? Recommended — would make again, especially on a hot summer day. I had it with the last bit of yesterday’s waffles, and if I’d had fresh mango on hand, I would’ve added that too.

I got sort of obsessed by the idea of making a springtime cake with mango curd and passionfruit buttercream frosting, decorated with fresh mango and edible forsythias, the sort of thing one might serve for Easter. Forsythias don’t actually taste like much, like most edible flowers, but v. pretty!

I usually do a lemon daffodil bundt cake for Easter brunch, and in fact, Lori Rader-Day would probably get cranky with me if I didn’t, because she loves it so, but that always made me a little nervous because daffodils aren’t actually edible, so I had to carefully make sure that however I decorated the cake with them, there was no risk of anyone eating a bit of daffodil. Usually I stuck them in a vase in the center of the bundt, but that’s kind of goofy. Anyway.

Once I get a recipe idea in my head, I have a really hard time letting it go, even if it’s not very practical. I even got a little cranky with the kids because they kept needing things from me when all I wanted to do was futz with my curd and frosting and cake (in the end, Kevin took care of both lunch and dinner so I could work on the cake).

I’m not going to give you all a recipe, because it’s not perfect — the mango curd was too sweet, it needed some tang from lime, and all of us agreed that we wanted, oh, twice as much fresh mango — a whole layer of it, along with the curd. And on top of all that, the cake itself, which I thought I could shortcut with a Trader Joe’s vanilla cake, was fine, but if I’m going to this much effort to make a cake, I want it better than fine, so clearly I’m going to have to work to get a yellow cake recipe I’m happy with.

The forsythias are only here for another week or so, and we really don’t need to eat another cake right now (especially since I just bought five different flavors of ice cream), so I suspect it may be another year before I come back to perfect this cake. I actually ended up giving half of it away to neighbors, leaving tupperwares on their doorsteps with a little note that we’ve been social distancing for more than two weeks, so hopefully they trusted the food enough to eat it. (Don’t tell me if you didn’t, neighbors, it’s fine!)

But the cake is a good idea, I think. I’ll get there eventually. And it’s certainly pretty, and Kavi said she liked it enough that she’d want it for a birthday cake, so I guess that’s not so bad then. The passionfruit buttercream really was pretty darn good — take a regular buttercream recipe, stir in 1/2 cup of passionfruit puree. Yum. SO GOOD. I had to fight the urge to just keep eating it straight out of the bowl.

Passionfruit & Vanilla Ice Cream, with Rubies.

Do you remember those ruby chocolates with passionfruit cream centers that completely failed to set, a few months back? I threw them in the freezer, because I’m frugal that way, figuring I’d come up with something to do with them eventually. Last night, I pulled half of them out, chopped them up, and then stirred them into a fresh batch of vanilla ice cream, along with about 1/4 c. of passionfruit puree. Reader, it was good.

I’m going to make a second batch, the next time I can get cream from the grocery store (they were only able to deliver half of what we’d ordered), and then will freeze for a party some sunny day from now. We’ll gather together again…

Passionfruit and Ginger Shortbread
(45 minutes + optional 15 minutes chilling time)

I have to note that if you’re making these, you’d better cut the passionfruit really small (ideally a little smaller than I did in these photos), because dried passionfruit is quite chewy — the consistency is similar to a new stick of gum at first. Is it worth the extra effort? Well, I’m a passionfruit fiend, so I say yes; I thought these were delectable. .

Note: I find that a pair of kitchen shears is much easier to work with than a knife for cutting up sticky dried fruit.

Ingredients:

3/4 pound unsalted butter at room temperature
1 c. sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
3/4 t. salt
3 1/2 cups flour
1/2 c. dried passionfruit, chopped fine
1/2 c. crystallized ginger, chopped fine

1. Preheat the oven to 350F.

2. Cream together the butter and sugar; add the vanilla and salt. Then add flour and mix on low until dough forms. Stir in mango and ginger.

3. Turn out dough onto floured board. (If it’s not coming together into a dough, the heat of your hands will help.) Firmly pat flat (to desired cookie height, usually about 1/2 inch). If using cookie cutters, cut out shapes, place on parchment-covered baking sheet, and chill for 15 minutes (to help hold shape).

NOTE: Can be kept chilled at this point for several days, covered in plastic wrap, and then rolled, cut, and baked fresh.

Alternately, press into baking pan or shortbread mold, prick with fork. (For this batch, I did half cut-outs and half in a pan, using an 8 x 8 baking pan.) You can also cut shapes out after baking — shortbread is very forgiving that way — but then the individual cookie edges won’t be browned.

3. Remove from fridge and bake for 15 to 20 minutes, until the edges begin to brown, then remove to wire rack to cool. Delicious with chai! If you wanted to dress it up, you could drizzle with dark chocolate, but honestly, I love them just as they are.

Confectionery experiments….ruby chocolate and dehydrated strawberries. The crunch of the strawberries is very fun. 🙂 Karina, was thinking of eating strawberries in Sri Lanka with you.

*****

Quick reminder for US-folks that if you’re signing up for my Patreon to subscribe to the edible treats level, please do sign up by end of February, if you’d like to receive a treat box in March! I’m not positive what will be in there yet, but almost certainly the Dragonfruit Nebulae chocolates (I’ve ALMOST finalized the recipe), and probably the ruby-strawberry ones too. I’m thinking another batch of “I Plight Thee My Troth” (passionfruit, vanilla and rose) marshmallows too.

If you sign up after March 1, you’ll get your first box at the end of June. (So signing up in Feb is an excellent deal; signing up in March is much less so, signing up in April will go back to normal. Slightly unfortunate function of trying to do a quarterly product through a monthly service.)

#serendibkitchen

I was experimenting with powdered dragon fruit (pitaya) this weekend — fun, and so easy. Just melt white chocolate chips in the microwave (1/2 power for 2-3 minutes, stir), and then stir in some of the powdered dragon fruit (intensely purple!) to make a truly beautiful natural chocolate. If you’re going for an all-natural Easter table, this would be a great addition.

I’m really happy with the decorating here. I used two different molds — one that makes little crystal shapes, and one that gives a geometric breakaway surface to a bar, both good. I don’t love having the dried fruit in first, though, as it makes a lot of holes in the cool geometric surface; for the next one, I’m pouring in the chocolate, and then adding the dried fruit to what will become the base of the bar.