Penney’s Palate

Rainy days at home make me want to cook a pot roast or some soup. They also make me want to bake. I’m relaxing today though, so I decided to write about food instead of making some.

I started making these one weekend morning before I set out for a morning run. It seemed like a good thing to do with a run on the morning schedule for several reasons:

1. I could run during the first dough-rising period, and shower during the second dough-rising period. This also eliminates the inpatient anticipation that I always have when making cinnamon rolls (or twists) in the morning. I like the yeast-raised dough the best, but yeast takes its time, which requires hungry, salivating patience.

2. While running, I could think about eating cinnamon rolls. This makes me run faster and better, because I’m not continuously thinking about how much I want to quit running.

3. I could scarf them down with no regrets, because I had already run off all of the calories. In fact, I’m pretty sure I needed to REPLACE some calories that I burned off during running.

I like this enriched dough because it is easy to make (some enriched doughs have a lot of butter or other fats that make them hard to work with). I also like my cinnamon roll dough to be rich in flavor, but not really sweet. I like to pour on some sweet sweet icing after they are baked, and if the dough is too sweet, then I get overwhelmed with sweetness and don’t enjoy them as much.

I forgot to take pictures of how to cut the roll and braid it to make the twists, but hopefully I will be able to describe it well enough anyway. If it is too confusing, then just cut them into rolls instead of the twist.

I apologize for the strange weight measurements. I converted this from a classroom-sized recipe that made 16 pounds of dough. This recipe makes 2 twists, or about 20 cinnamon rolls.

Cinnamon Roll Dough

Ingredients
1.56 ounces fresh yeast
7.31 ounces milk
18 ¼ ounces bread flour
2.19 ounces sugar
4 ½ ounces butter
1 egg
⅛ ounce salt

butter, at room temperature (1 stick should be good, depending on how much butter you like to smear on the dough)

cinnamon sugar, about 1/2 cup

Preparation
1. Combine all ingredients together in the bowl of a mixer fitted with a dough hook and mix for 6 minutes.

2. Cover and let rise for 20 minutes.

3. Punch down and let rise for another 20-40 minutes, until doubled in size.

4. Take half of dough and roll out to a rectangle, about 12 inches wide by 9 inches long. Do the same thing with other half once you have finished with the first half.

5. Brush all but the top 1/2 inch with softened butter. Sprinkle with cinnamon sugar. Brush the top edge with water to help seal. Roll up tight, keeping the edges square. Seal the edge.

6a. For a braid: Hold one end of the roll and place your knift about 1/3 of the width of the roll. Cut a strip down the length of the dough. Then move over 1/3 width of dough and cut another strip. You should have 3 strips of dough that are all connected at the top. Braid the dough and tuck in the ends once you get to the end of the braiding. Place braid onto a parchment-lined cookie sheet.

6b. For cinnamon rolls, cut into 1-inch slices and place 1/2 inch apart onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.

7. Proof for 30 minutes (20 minutes if cutting into rolls).

8. Bake at 380 F until golden brown, about 10-12 minutes.

9. Cool for 1 minute, then brush with softened butter.

10. Cool for 5 minutes and then glaze with topping of choice.

Sloppy Joes are something that I never think of to make, but I absolutely love to eat. It is probably best that I only eat these once every few months, because I might tire of eating them and then I wouldn’t be excited to make or eat them, and that would just be sad. I have made them enough times to be able to tweak recipes until they have satisfied both mine and Tommy’s food-snobbery. I took this recipe and ended up with just a few changes to make what I would consider the tastiest sloppy joe.

I like using ground turkey because, for some reason, it makes me feel like I’m making the recipe healthier than by using ground beef. Also, whenever Tommy sees ground beef cooking in a pan, he gets grossed out. I think that ground turkey cooking in a pan looks the same, but somehow the turkey doesn’t gross him out. At some point (I think it was an accident), Tommy and I realized that we really like the addition of beans in our sloppy joes (kidney and pinto work best). And I also use the same amount of vegetables in the recipe, but only use about half of the amount of ground turkey (because you can only buy them in ~1.25-lb packages at the store). I like having more vegetables than meat. So here’s the Vernieri Family sloppy Joe recipe. We eat them on hamburger buns, with a thick slice of cheddar.

Sloppy Joes, Vernieri-style

Ingredients
3 Tbsp olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
1 carrot, diced
1 red bell pepper, chopped
4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 1/2 lb ground turkey
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1 (14-oz) can diced tomatoes
1/2 cup ketchup
2 Tbsp molasses
2 Tbsp cider vinegar
1 1/2 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce

Preparation
1. Heat oil in a large pan over medium heat until hot, then sauté onion, carrot, bell pepper, and garlic, stirring occasionally, until golden, 10 to 12 minutes.

2. Add turkey and sauté, stirring occasionally and breaking up large lumps with a wooden spoon, until meat is no longer pink, about 5 minutes. Stir in salt and pepper.

3. Purée tomatoes with juice, ketchup, molasses, vinegar, and Worcestershire sauce in a blender until smooth.

4. Add the tomato mixture and beans to the turkey and simmer, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until sauce is thickened, 25 to 30 minutes.

5. Serve with hamburger buns and a thick slice of cheddar.

I decided to write about the Mextoberfest cake that I made, and realized that I had a few unpublished drafts hanging out on my dashboard. The dashboard says that the last time I edited this post was September 2009. Whoops! And this isn’t the only draft in my dashboard either.

Panna Cotta is one of my favorite desserts to make and eat. It is soft, creamy, a little sweet, and perfectly rich. It is like a pudding, but more decadent. We ate it at a restaurant once and it was garnished with a strawberry with some Vincotto drizzled on top. It was heavenly, so we bought some Vincotto while we were in New York (couldn’t find any here in Charleston) and then I recreated the dish.

I’ve also made panna cotta with honey poured into the ramekins before the panna cotta is poured in, so that the honey is on top once the panna cotta is inverted onto a plate. The dark speckles are the vanilla beans that sunk to the bottom of the ramekin. I like it just as much as the lemon panna cotta, except that it looks pretty ugly.

Lemon Panna Cotta

Ingredients
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
1/4 cup sugar
zest of 2 lemons
juice of 2 lemons
1 1/4 gelatin leaves

Preparation
Mix together zest and sugar with fingers until zest has been mixed in well with the sugar.  Add the sugar and zest to a small saucepan with the heavy cream.  Add the juice and bring to a simmer.

Meanwhile, soak the gelatin leaves in cold water for about 4 minutes.  Strain the heavy cream mixture into another bowl.  Squeeze out the excess water on the gelatin leaves, mix gelatin in with the cream mixture.  Pour into ramekins and chill for the day.

To serve, use a sharp knife to cut around the edges of the ramekin. Then invert the ramekin onto a plate and wiggle a little bit until the panna cotta falls out onto the plate. Garnish with a strawberry, or whatever you think looks pretty.

One of my friends has been talking about a Mexican-themed party that he threw in college, and they called it Mextoberfest. The only requirement for entry was that you had to be wearing a sombrero. Other than that, it was just a party with some Mexican eats and beer pong. He has been talking about hosting a Mextoberfest for all of his coworkers, who didn’t know him in college and therefore, didn’t get to experience Mextoberfest. After about a year of talking about hosting it, I finally demanded that he have Mextoberfest right away, and so he did.

I decided to play around with Mexican chocolate and make some sort of cake with it. I ended up combining a cake, buttercream and ganache from 2 different recipes to create my own version of a Mexican Hot Chocolate cake. It ended up being very tall (4 cake layers with buttercream separating each of them), and very flavorful. Tommy declared it my best cake yet. It is called Mexican hot chocolate because the “Mexican chocolate” that can be bought is used as a hot chocolate mix. It comes in hexagon-shaped chocolate disks that have other spices added in (cinnamon and cayenne of some sort as far as I can tell).

I also thought the cake was excellent, but if (and when) I make it again, I would change a few things:

• The Mexican chocolate was not good to use in the ganache. The ganache never set like it was supposed to. And because it didn’t set up, I had to use it as a pourable glaze for the cake instead of spreading it in between the cake layers. The original cake was supposed to be iced in the buttercream, with the cake layers being separated by the ganache. I think I liked using the buttercream for the layering and the ganache as the outside coating though, I just wished the ganache would have set up correctly. Next time I would just use plain chocolate. As you can see from the picture, the ganache was runny after slicing into the cake too. No amount of refrigeration was going to harden this ganache.

• The buttercream icing was supposed to be a Swiss buttercream frosting. But I didn’t want to deal with the egg whites, so I just turned it into a regular buttercream (powdered sugar and butter). I’d probably try the Swiss buttercream in the future though, because I like how soft and fluffy Swiss and Italian buttercreams are.

• I also ran out of powdered sugar for the buttercream. With time running out before the party started, I had no choice but to attempt to make my own powdered sugar by putting granulated sugar into the blender. It worked a little bit, but not all the way, so my buttercream definitely had a slight sugary crunch to it. Tommy said that he liked the added crunch while eating his slice of cake, but I think he just had pity on me that I ran out of powdered sugar.

I really liked the flavor of the cake, I don’t think I’ve ever had cinnamon in a cake before, other than breakfast-related cake like coffee cake. The cake seemed very moist, which is how I like it. I didn’t have any of the leftover cake that was brought into Tommy’s work after the party, so I’m not sure if it retained the moisture days after it was made or not.

The Cake (Cinnamon Vanilla):

Ingredients
2 sticks butter
2 cups sugar
4 large eggs
3 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup whole milk
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Preparation
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In a medium bowl sift together flour, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt.

Cream the butter in a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Add sugar and continue to mix until fully incorporated and it is light and fluffy, about 4 minutes.

Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.

Combine milk and vanilla. Add portions of the flour mixture and milk mixture to the electric mixer, alternating, starting and ending with flour. Pour evenly into 2 buttered and floured 9-inch cake pans.

Bake for 40 minutes or until golden. The cake should pull away from the side and spring back to the touch.

Mexican Hot Chocolate Buttercream

Ingredients
2 sticks butter, softened
2 cups powdered sugar
4 ounces white chocolate, melted and cooled
3.1 ounce disk Mexican choclate, melted and cooled

Preparation
Cream the butter and sugar. Add the chocolates. Add more sugar if sweeter frosting is desired.

The Ganache Topping

Ingredients
1 cup heavy whipping cream
2 (3.1-ounce) disks Mexican chocolate, finely chopped (I would just use bittersweet chocolate next time)
2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, finely chopped
2 tablespoons butter, cut into small pieces
1 tablespoon light corn syrup

Preparation
Heat the cream in a small saucepan just until simmering.

Place the chopped Mexican chocolate and unsweetened chocolate in a bowl. Pour the hot cream over the chocolate. Let stand for a few minutes, then gently whisk until the chocolate has melted. Stir in the butter until melted, then add the corn syrup. Refrigerate for 20 to 30 minutes until stiff enough to spread. With a spatula, beat the ganache to make it smooth and spreadable.

After my baking class ended this semester, I wanted to make sure that I kept on baking. I really liked knowing that every Wednesday, I would be baking for 5.5 hours. I always looked forward to Wednesdays. I decided that I wanted to become as good as Brian at pie-making, so I named this summer “The Summer of Pies (and cakes)”. The cakes are thrown in there because I need to start developing some awesome cake flavors for Tommy’s sister’s wedding cake.

Every week I’d like to make a pie (or cake). I think that sometimes I will make the same pie over again, when it doesn’t turn out quite right the first time. So far I’ve made 3 pies and 1.5 cakes:

• Black and White Chocolate Cake, from the Baking From My Home to Yours cookbook by Dorie Greenspan. I learned how to cut a cake into even layers in class this semester. I turned my spice dolly into a temporary turntable so that I could properly cut the cakes into 4 thin layers. The cake was very even, but I clearly need to work on my piping skills.

• A sponge cake that fell A LOT. So much that I couldn’t possibly use it to make a layer cake, so I chopped it up and turned it into a Strawberry Lemon Curd Trifle. Because of the failure, I’m only counting this as 1/2 of a cake. This was my first trifle and it was a major sucess! I learned that when making a sponge cake (if you have more than one cake pan full of batter to bake as I did), try to position the 2 pans so that they do not need to be rotated in the oven. Rotating them made mine fall, and they never recovered.

• A strawberry-rhubarb pie. It turned out runny but delicious.

• A peach-raspberry pie. It turned out runny but delicious. I’m not sure why my pies are runny. The internet says that I don’t bake it long enough, or I don’t wait long enough for it to cool down. But both the strawberry and peach pies were still runny after spending the night in the refrigerator, so I’m going to try the peach pie again soon and bake it longer. And maybe try to sweat the peaches so that they aren’t so liquidy? I don’t know if I can do that. The peaches for this pie sat in a colander for about 30 minutes before I combined them with the sugar/cornstarch mixture, so I’m not sure what else I can do.

• An apple-cranberry pie with a struessel topping. I precooked the crust and the filling, so I am very optimistic that this one will not be runny. I’m not allowed to eat it until later tonight, so I don’t know how this one will end up. With cranberries in the pie though, it seems like vanilla ice cream should be eaten with a slice of this pie. The partially baked crust didn’t seem to bake up so well. And when I (slowly and carefully) lifted up the weighted foil after baking, some of the bottom came up with the foil, so I had to do some patching on the bottom. I’m not sure why the sides didn’t stay up. Even though it looks ugly, I’m sure it will taste just fine.

So far I’ve been working with an all-shortening crust. I like that it comes out super-flaky, and I feel that I have a pretty good grasp on the crust-rolling-out-preparation. I’d like to experiment and use some combination of butter/shortening (butter gives it more flavor but less flakiness) or a lard crust (which gives it flavor AND flakiness). I’m not sure that I can ever remember eating a crust made from lard. I’m not even sure where to buy lard. I think I can feel my arteries hardening just talking about lard.

I have already posted once about éclairs. But those didn’t turn out so well. They were thin, most of them fell after taking them out of the oven, and they tasted very eggy, a taste that neither Tommy or I like. I tried them one more time after that and got the same result.

When I saw that pate a choux (the dough that is used to make eclairs) were on the syllabus for the baking class that I took this past semester, I got very excited. I was hoping that I would be taught the right way to make the batter, and hopefully learn what I was doing wrong the few times before trying to make eclairs. The biggest problem seemed to be that they always deflated after taking them out of the oven, no matter how long I baked them.

After learning how to make pate a choux in class, I think the three things that I was doing wrong were:

1. Adding the eggs too quickly, and probably too many. I was unsure how to tell when I had enough eggs but not too much, as this was always stressed in the recipes/instructions that I read as being a critical element.
2. Using the wrong recipe. I’m sure if I went back and tried the recipe I was using, I’d have success (especially now that I know how to tell when I’ve added enough egg). But this combination and quantity of ingredients worked for me, so that’s what I’ll stick with.
3. Piping wrong. Probably not wrong, but I like the short/fat eclairs more than the long skinny ones, and I didn’t know how to pipe them fat.

I also learned that I don’t need to mix in the eggs with a mixer, as most of the recipes on the internet instruct you to do. Stirring in the eggs doesn’t require THAT much effort without a mixer… at least I don’t think so. Plus it makes it a one-pot recipe instead of a 2-pot + 1 paddle recipe.

So here is the recipe that seems to work for me. My teacher told me that you can use water or milk, but I used milk and that’s what I will stick with. Milk causes the pate a choux to brown faster and darker than using water, and the milk will also keep the pate a choux on the soft side after it has baked and cooled. If you want crisper eclairs, then use the water. Also, you can use butter or vegetable oil for the fat, but our class used vegetable oil because it is cheaper. So again, the oil worked so that’s what I’ll use forever.

Pate a choux

Ingredients
8 oz milk
4 oz vegetable or canola oil
1/2 tsp salt

5 1/2 oz bread flour

8 oz eggs (4 large eggs) – beaten

Preparation
Add the milk, oil and salt in a sauce pan and bring to a simmer. As soon as it starts to simmer, add the flour all at once. While still on the heat, stir in the flour with a wooden spoon. The dough will form a ball and will look a little like play-do. Continue to stir on the heat until a light film on the bottom of the pan forms. This will only take 2-3 minutes from the time you add the flour. Remove from the heat and cool the mixture for about a minute (so that the eggs do not cook when you begin to add them).

Still using the wooden spoon, add the eggs one by one. After each egg addition, the dough will become runny at first, but continuous stirring with the wooden spoon will eventually cause the batter to come back together. Once this happens, you can add the next egg. When you get close to the end, add eggs by the 1/2 egg portion so that you don’t add too much egg. The dough is ready when you put a small glob between your pointer finger and thumb and pull your fingers apart. The dough should stay together until your fingers are about an inch apart. If the dough does not stick together, add more eggs. I’m not sure what it looks like if you add too many eggs, I think that it is just really runny.

Put the dough into a piping bag and pipe into the shape of your choice. To pipe them fat, you have to begin squeezing out the dough while not moving the bag. The dough will begin to spread out width-wise, at which point you can very slowly start to move the piping bag along the length.  The first few times I did this, my hand was shaky and I ended up with little ridges along the length of my dough, but the ridges went away during the baking process. When you finish piping an eclair, you will be left with a not-so-smooth part at the end. If you bake it like this, it will turn into a very sharp point. After piping out all of the eclairs, dip your finger in water and pat down the rough ends to smooth them out before baking.

And if you mess up, you can scrap the dough up and put it back into the bowl, and then back into the piping bag for a second chance.

I’ve only had one other savory bread pudding that I can remember, and I loved every bite of it. That was a few years ago, and Tommy made it. I’m not sure why I don’t make them more often, but it isn’t something that I think of when looking for dinner options. Tonight I needed to use up some aging Swiss Chard from the Farmer’s Market. I was looking for a simple but flavorful and quick sauteing of some sort, because we already have plenty of leftovers in the house for lunch and dinner over the next few days.

I came across this recipe and realized that I had everything already except for 3 eggs instead of 4, and cheddar cheese instead of Swiss cheese. I also realized that this wasn’t the quick side dish that I was looking for, but the night was young and Tommy was working late and it was raining outside and I was bored. My loaf of bread that was going stale was a rosemary-something-loaf that we used for paninis this weekend, so I felt this was a perfect match. And I’m happy to have had some dried porcini mushrooms in the pantry. Since the bread already had plenty of rosemary flavor, I did not add the rosemary that the recipe called for. It came together in about 30 minutes, then took 50 minutes to bake.

I also drank (and enjoyed) some left over Verdicchio both while making and eating the bread pudding. And now we have leftovers to last through Friday.