February 28th, 2011

Orange Olive Oil Cake

Orange Olive Oil Cake

This recipe is actually from Smitten Kitten, and was originally made with blood oranges. I feel the blood oranges are far too precious to bake with, so I substituted naval oranges. In the end, I believe this was the correct choice. The bread itself is incredibly sweet, so a sweet citrus like blood orange would only make it nauseatingly sweet in my opinion. The naval orange had a delicious tart flavor that complimented the cake. And it was chalk-full of orange chunks.

Big hit at the coffee machine at work. Gone within an hour. If you notice, I only bake for my coworkers. It's too dangerous to keep this kind of stuff in my house.

February 27th, 2011

Naval oranges

These were a part of my Orange Olive Cake preparation. Three oranges go into this cake, which is more like a sweet bread. Perfect for breakfast, delicious with tea.

The process of actually cutting up these oranges, however, is elaborate. First you chop off the tops and bottoms like shown in this photo. then you use a knife to remove the rest of the peel and pith from the sides. Then comes the annoying part: You cut each section out individually so as to end up with only the juicy flesh and not the skin separating the sections.

I do have detailed step-by-step photos of this process, but I'm limited to one per day on here. I like to abide by my own arbitrarily made rules. The end product is tomorrow's photo.

February 16th, 2011

Coconut Cream Cupcakes

Coconut cupcakes Part 2 starts here. I frosted the tops of the cupcakes with the same coconut frosting, then rolled them in toasted sweetened coconut flakes.

As you can tell, this was like semi-homemade since I used the box cake and bought sweetened coconut flakes. My previous coconut cake from two weeks ago was far more advanced with every last thing from scratch - coconut cracking fresh.

But these were a lot more moist than all of my from-scratch cakes, so I fell back on the box after several disappointing cake textures. Everyone loved these and they disappeared almost immediately. Sweet decadence. I can still smell the sugar coconut in the air.

This was a request by the way, from a coconut loving birthday coworker.

February 15th, 2011

Filling the coconut cupcakes

These are my half-complete coconut cupcakes. It's a basic yellow vanilla cake mix. Instead of water, I used coconut water. I added pudding mix for moisture. I added coconut extract for amazing flavor.

I then made a coconut frosting from scratch - which was a little runnier than I wanted, but still fluffy, sweet and most important coconutty. It was infused with coconut extract also, along with coconut milk.

I filled up a pastry bag with the frosting, buried the end into each cupcake and squeezed until the tops bulged and threatened to split.

That was Part 1.

January 24th, 2011

Sewing kit
January 23rd, 2011

I made banana cream pie for the Pie Party at work. It was amazingly delicious in my opinion. Light and mild. Made from Dorie Greenspan's recipe - with her sweet tart dough crust and freshly whipped cream.

January 2nd, 2011

January 2nd, 2011

It took me 5 days to complete this Spanikopita, not intentionally. It began with the vegetable prep and some phyllo dough thawing. Various components were cooked and left to set. Eventually the ingredients were combined and folded into a beautiful little triangular packets. Then frozen. And lastly, wrapped in plastic for easy individual servings.

The recipe is somewhat nontraditional, and yet phenomenal. Of course, this would be the case, since the great David Lebovitz was the inspiration. Taking his suggestion on additional seasonings I added paprika, chopped sun-dried tomatoes and fresh garlic. Due to a shortage of feta cheese, I substituted a half cup of ricotta - which worked well to bind the spinach into a creamy, rich filling.

The most sinful part of this recipe was the sheer quantity of butter used between each lay of phyllo and before every fold of the packet. Best if enjoyed with a light salad and some olives.