Still Life, With Cats

This content shows Simple View

Baking

Slow cooking

Since I know I missed a day this week, today you get two citrus recipes. First, in the morning I set up the dough for Lemon Buns. These are a yeasted dinner roll sort of affair, but with lemon zest in the dough, and also brushed with a mix of zest and butter both before and after the bake. I thought the recipe sounded intriguing, and these are the sort of thing that freeze well, so I made the full batch.

They’re baked in round pans, 10 per pan (and the assembly fits perfectly into a freezer bag, which is where the second pan went immediately after it was cooled).

They look pretty, all golden brown and brushed with bits of lemon zest, but aside from being a perfectly soft and lovely dinner roll, you would never guess (if you weren’t told) that there was lemon in them. So on the plus side, at least they’ll go with anything a normal dinner roll would, but on the downside, I admit I was hoping for at least a hint of that lemon.

We had them alongside Salmon with Dill Sauce and Lemon Risotto for dinner. Richard mixed up the dill sauce while I worked on the risotto, ladling hot broth into the pan and stirring and stirring and stirring until it was all fully cooked. I think I have made risotto before (?), but it is the sort of thing that, to me, always seems unnecessarily tedious.

The salmon is simply seasoned with a little salt and pepper and then cooked. We’d originally planned to have this with a side of broccoli, as a nod to health, but upon taking the bag of broccoli from the fridge to prepare it, I discovered that it was squishy, and not in a good way, so….another plate of all the tones of beige it is!

Verdict – the fish was cooked perfectly (phew!), and everything was absolutely delicious, although I felt like overall it was a bit on the heavy side (and I found myself really wishing that we’d had the broccoli to help lighten it up).

Citrus used: 2 lemon

Total citrus used so far: 1 mandarin orange, 10 tangelos, 8 lemons

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.



Bet you never made your oatmeal like this

What better way to start the week then with a healthy breakfast? How about something where you cook some oats in orange juice and then bake it into a cake?

I saw the recipe for Orange Oat Breakfast Cake and was intrigued. You first cook the oats in the orange juice (which is…not the most delightful smell), then you stir together all the other ingredients and fold in the cooked oats. The recipe called for a 5 inch pan, which I don’t have, so instead I divided it between two of my four-inch springform pans, and that worked perfectly.

A small breakfast cake, dusted with powdered sugar and sitting on a plate.

Sometimes things like this can come across as very earnestly ‘healthy’, but this was actually pretty good. We split one of the little cakes for breakfast this morning and the second one will be breakfast tomorrow.

Along with the breakfast cake this morning, I also made Lemon Orzo Soup for dinner. This was originally planned for last night but time got away from us.

A bowl of creamy orzo lemon soup with carrot coins

I first made this soup back in 2019 (for Thingadailies), and it’s been in our winter rotation ever since. It’s fairly quick to make (I usually just beat the egg whites by hand to avoid dirtying yet another bowl), and we always add a couple carrots, peeled and sliced, to sneak in some extra veggies. And bonus, it makes enough for lunches for the next few days.

Citrus used: 2 tangelos and 1 lemon

Total citrus used so far: 12 tangelos, 5 lemons

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.



Allll the orange

Hooray, it’s the weekend! That must mean it’s time for cake. Orange Pound Cake, to be exact.

Here is where I have to admit that pound cake is one of my favorite types of cake – there’s something about the dense crumb and the buttery mouth feel that makes me really happy (case in point – the Norwegian Sour Cream Cake recipe from King Arthur Baking Company is in regular rotation in my kitchen). So finding a recipe that combines delicious pound cake with the flavor of fresh orange (or in this case tangelo) sounded perfect.

Pound cakes get their name from the fact that they use roughly a pound each of all the main ingredients. I admit I winced a little when I saw it called for 5 eggs (egg prices being what they are right now) but oh, it was worth it, and not just because it used up half a dozen tangelos. The cake batter gets orange juice and zest. Then once it’s baked, you brush it with an orange glaze, and finally, once it’s completely cooled, you top it with an orange and powdered sugar icing. It sounds as if it might veer into too-sweet territory, but the tartness of the citrus tones everything down.

A bundt cake drizzled with orange frosting

As with any other pound cake, this thing weighs a ton, but it’s absolutely delicious. The orange flavor comes through just enough to brighten the palatte, without being overwhelming, probably because it gets the bulk of its flavor from fresh juice and zest instead of relying solely on extracts.

Citrus used: 6 tangelos

Total citrus used so far: 10 tangelos, 4 lemons

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.



A little sweet, a little tart

Today is February 2nd, also known as Candlemas across the pond, which means it was time for crepes. Do not ask me to explain why one eats crepes for this day, as I actually have no idea why, but crepes are easy to make so who am I to question.

I made these Crepes with Lemon & Sugar, as the recipe fulfills both the citrus challenge as well as the need for crepes, but any crepe recipe would work here. I do have a crepe pan, but crepes will work just fine in a regular frying pan, as long as you make sure it’s well greased so the crepes don’t stick. Letting the batter rest for a bit before actually cooking them is also key – this lets the flour fully hydrate.

Two folded crepes on a plate, topped with whipped cream and yellow sprinkles

For this recipe, you make the crepes, then top with equal parts sugar and lemon juice. I was a bit nervous that they’d still be too tart, but in fact they were almost a little too sweet (probably because Meyer lemons are not quite a tart as regular lemons like the recipe calls for). If I was to do this again, I’d reduce the amount of sugar added with the juice at the end. Regardless, these were pretty tasty.

Total citrus used so far: 4 tangelos, 2 lemons

Making a thing a day for Thingadailes.



Nutty

Oh look, it’s February, which means it must be time for Thingadailies, or in this house, time for my annual month of ‘holy crap, how do we use up three full trees of citrus before they all go bad?’

So to kick off the month, I made Citrus Pecan Bread, which is a basic oil-based quick bread recipe, but with orange juice and nuts. For tonight, I used tangelos for the juice and chopped walnuts (because that’s what was in the freezer), but the general concept is the same.

This is not a new-to-me recipe – in face, I think we got this a couple years ago when we were doing a recipe subscription service, but we both liked it so much that it gets put into rotation at least a couple times each year when the citrus is ripe.

A loaf of quick bread

Can you tell where I accidentally jabbed my oven mitt-covered thumb into the loaf when pulling it out to check on it? Sigh.

Anyway, it’s super tasty and it used the juice and zest of 4 tangelos, which was the whole point.

Citrus Pecan Quick Bread

  • Ingredients
  • 1 3/4 cup all purpose flour
  • 3/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1/2 tsp nutmeg
  • 1/3 cup vegetable oil
  • 1/2 cup orange juice (plus the zest from the fruit)
  • 1/2 cup water
  • 1/2 cup chopped pecans

Preheat oven to 350 Farenheit. Grease a 9-inch loaf pan.

Combine all dry ingredients except pecans. Stir in orange juice, water, and oil until mixed (but do not overmix), then stir in the pecans.

Pour into greased loaf pan. Bake 35-40 minutes, or until knife inserted in center comes out clean.  Let rest in pan about 10 minutes before removing; cool completely before cutting.

 

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.



Worth every penny spent

This morning we got up bright and early in order to make the house presentable for company, and this meant finally breaking out the nifty new gadget we bought ourselves during the after-Thanksgiving sales – a new vacuum cleaner.

You know you are a proper adult when you get super excited about a vacuum cleaner. But to be fair it is a combination vacuum cleaner that ALSO MOPS, and if you live in a house with all hard floors and an ever changing number of very busy cats and kittens, this is a massive game changer.

So while I tidied and unearthed the kitchen from a mountain of dishes, and baked the cookies for this evening’s exchange, and steamed and scrubbed the bathroom (after first relocating the *extremely* messy quintet of kittens who had been residing there to a new enclosure), Richard cleaned all the rest of the floors in the house with our fancy new device, and we both marveled over how fast it was, and how well it worked, and yes, I know this means we are officially old, but I’m okay with that.

Anyway. Once the house (or at least the upstairs – we shall not speak of the condition of the downstairs) was reasonably tidy, a bunch of friends came over and we all learned a new-to-us game (Mosaic), and gnoshed on all manner of snacks, and played with kittens. And then once that was done I packed up the cookies and headed off to another’s friend’s house, where several of us gnoshed on (yet more!) cookies and had a lovely time.

And now I am going to go keel over because as much fun as it’s been, it’s been a very, very long weekend, and as previously determined, I am officially old.

Tis the season for Holidailies.



Baking Sisters: Alaska

When my sister and I discussed what to do for Alaska, we tossed around a couple ideas. Technically the official recipe is a salmon pie made with a puff pastry crust, but my sister is not a fan of fish. So instead we decided to make sourdough the over-arching theme, since that’s a common thing up there.

Obviously we had to make sourdough bread, but if you’re doing true sourdough, you do not use commercial yeast, but instead use a starter that you’ve either nurtured for years by carefully feeding it (cough cough, kept in the fridge and fed once every month or three when I remember it’s there), or something you throw together quickly because your old starter died (my sister).

I got my sourdough sponge started Saturday afternoon. Before I went to bed, I mixed up the dough, then put that into the fridge. After that, it seemed like a good idea before the fact to plan to get up at 5am and pull it out of the fridge…except that I forgot that it was Daylight Saving Time day, and that meant it was actually 4am (no matter what the clock said) and since I’m going through another round of super fun insomnia, that meant I was riding on roughly 3 hours of sleep. Fun times!

But anyway. Dough comes out of the fridge, then gets shaped, then gets set aside for another couple hours, so that by the time we were ready to meet via video call, all we had left to do was pop it into the oven.

This is where things got interesting for me. For years my oven has taken just a couple extra minutes to bake things. But during an attempt at making cookies last week, things were taking more than twice the normal time to bake, and after we bought a hanging thermometer, we discovered why. The oven is now heating roughly 100 degrees lower than the dial says.

So I turned the oven up as high as it would go (500), put my boules on the bottom rack, and crossed my fingers.

Thankfully, they baked, although they aren’t as browned as I might have liked.

But one cannot live on bread alone (ha!), so we also made cake and cookies, both of which used sourdough starter, and also soup, which did not use sourdough starter, but was instead to join the bread for lunch.

First up was the soup. I decided to make this Cheesy Broccoli Soup based solely on the fact that we had a lot of broccoli in the fridge that needed using up. So while I was waiting for the oven to come to temperature, I threw all the soup ingredients together and got that simmering. I also stirred in some leftover chicken sausage, because soup is an excellent way to clean out the fridge.

Next up was a Sourdough Chocolate Cake. This cake involves a sponge that’s stirred together a couple hours before you’re ready to bake it, with sourdough starter, flour, and water. Once it’s baked, then it’s topped with an espresso buttermilk glaze. It’s also supposed to be drizzled with some melted chocolate, but I decided that that was a bit overkill, so left that out.

And finally, the cookies – Sourdough Soft Ginger Cookies from Ruth Allman’s book Alaska Sourdough. These are spiced with molasses, ginger, cloves, cardamom, and lemon zest. They were supposed to be cut-out cookies, but by the time we got to them I was starting to wear out, so I just pulled out a cookie scoop and made ginger lumps instead.

So how did everything turn out?

The soup was super tasty – the addition of the sausage worked really well, plus since I doubled all the veggies it was quite filling and substantial.

The cookies will not win any prizes at a beauty contest, but they’re actually really tasty. I would definitely make these again – super quick to stir together and they hold their shape really well so would work for either scoops or cut-outs.

Aside from being slightly burnt on the sides (see above for my oven temperature woes), the cake was delicious. The addition of the buttermilk and the espresso powder kept the icing from being too sweet (which is usually a problem with glazes).

Oh, and because all of that wasn’t nearly enough, I also made Sourdough Cinnamon Crumb Cake for breakfast before the official baking extravaganza started, primarily because I’d doubled my starter in preparation and had a lot to use up to get it back to a manageable amount before it goes back to lurk quietly in the fridge for another couple weeks.

This was…a lot of crumb topping (and I didn’t even make the full amount the recipe called for), but it’s delicious and so I can forgive the mess involved in eating it.

Overall, this was an extremely successful baking day, even if I did have to do a bazillion adjustments with oven temperature in order to get things to cook.



A head of the pizza game

Today was National Pizza Day, so I suppose we could have just made pizza, which we have done oodles of times in the past. But a random Twitter thread a week or so ago had me pondering, because someone mentioned that they had made calzones in their mini skull cake pan. And I thought, hey, *I* have a mini skull cake pan. I should make calzones! Or perhaps I should call them skullzones instead.

I started with our usual pizza dough recipe, then we eyed the contents of the fridge and decided to fill them with some broccoli and some mushrooms. We debated type of sauce – whether to go with a red or a white sauce, so I instead just tossed a little butter and flour into the veggies and made a roux, then stirred in some cheese, and used that as the filling. I divided the dough into six pieces, then rolled each one out and carefully lined the skull pan molds. I filed them, did my best to crimp the tops, then tossed the pan into the oven and hoped for the best.

Ta da! Skullzones!

They aren’t perfect – I think next time (because oh yes, there *will* be a next time) I need to use less dough per skull, and perhaps parbake the cough in the molds before adding in the filling, but they were super tasty, and highly amusing, and that’s what counts.

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.



A loaf of comfort

Today was World Nutella Day (yes really, it’s a thing), so in order to have a vehicle on which to consume our Nutella, I made some soda bread.

There are a bazillion recipes out there for soda bread, many of which include things that are Wrong and Disgusting, like raisins and caraway seeds, but the recipe I used is pretty simple: oats, flour, baking soda, buttermilk, and salt. Yes, there’s the added step to grind up the oats first, but I find I actually prefer them that way, when used in a quick bread setting, but otherwise you just stir everything together into a shaggy dough, then dump it into a greased bread pan, and plop it into the oven to bake. And when you’re done, you have a lovely, hearty loaf of bread that is perfect for slathering with Nutella, or just some really good butter.

This recipe is just a little heavy on the salt (next time I’ll halve the amount) but otherwise is extremely delicious.

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.



Return of the lemon

Just to show that it is not all yarn all the time around here, today I decided to mix things up and bake something.

Okay, so the truth is I was feeling uninspired to knit, and was very much aware of the plethora of fruit that still remains on the Meyer lemon shrub in the backyard, but hey, baking a thing counts, so let’s go with it.

Anyway. I made Lemon Brownies, because it was a quick recipe that would use up a lemon.

They’re…okay. The majority of the lemon flavor comes from the glaze, while the bar itself is fairly bland. It’s possible the flavor will develop once they’ve had a chance to sit, but overall, we were both underwhelmed. Ah well.

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.




top