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So, this cake. I made this cake for my boss and his family. His wife is currently going through chemo treatment (they expect her to make a full recovery) and a bunch of us in the office decided to put together a care package of food for them after her latest round. Not only was I happy to do this for my wonderful boss, but it allowed me to do my favorite type of baking - bake and release, as Dorie Greenspan calls it.

The only instruction I was given was to make something apple. I did not really have any idea what I wanted to make, except that I knew I didn’t want to mess around with pie or anything that required rolling out dough. After a food blog search I found a recipe on Serious Eats that was a modified version of Dorie Greenspan’s Swedish Visiting Cake with apples. Perfect. I printed this recipe at work and left it on the printer. It did me a lot of good there.

Since I am sometimes super lazy about the dumbest things, I decided to just use Dorie’s recipe in Baking: From My Home to Yours and add sliced apples, instead of searching and reprinting the recipe at home. Whatever. Don’t judge me.

Here is what Dorie has to say about this cake, because, who am I kidding here, I cannot say it better myself…

“This cake is thin and light with a golden sugar crust and an interior that is soft, chewy, moist and reminiscent of cakes made with almond paste. Although it is amply satisfying in its plainness, I upped the flavor just a little by adding vanilla and almond extract.”

Seriously, this cake could not have been easier to make. The batter comes together literally in minutes, in one bowl, no mixer needed, no waiting for things to come to room temperature. The makings of a recipe I like. Dorie calls for this to be baked in a 9 inch cast iron skillet. Problem: I do not own said 9 inch cast iron skillet. Solution: I own cake pans or I own 10 inch cast iron skillet.

I went with solution “I own cake pans", for no particular reason. Next time, I will try solution “I own 10 inch cast iron skillet". BECAUSE - this mother f’ing cake took FORever to bake. Okay, not forever, but like double the time the recipe called for. That becomes a problem when I am trying to fit this cake in after making dinner and before getting to the gym. I suspect part of the problem was that the cake pan I used was too small and maybe the addition of the sliced apples threw this cake for a loop. It just couldn’t handle being baked with apples, it didn’t know what to do with itself.

Truth be told, I made this cake twice. The first cake was a real hot mess. It was in the oven at 350F in an approx. 8.5 inch cake pan for an hour and was still totally raw in the middle. I had to abandon this cake and leave it in the good(?) hands of Nick while I went to the gym. My instructions were “take the cake out when it is not wet in the middle and don’t ruin it". Yeah. I came home to an undercooked cake which was sitting inside a turned off oven. Huh? Okay, let’s not even go there.

Let’s make a long story short and say that after some stomping, pouting, and removal of cake from pan and into garbage, a second cake was made.

This time I wised up and used a larger 9.5 inch cake pan. This worked out much better in that after an hour of baking, I had a cake that I could actually give to someone. A cake that was actually the consistency of cake and not cold lumpy gravy. Still, this second cake baked for double the 25-30 minutes Dorie calls for AND about 20 minute in when I saw it was not even close to done I turned the heat up to 375F. I am perplexed.

The silver lining in this Swedish cake saga is that at least I got to taste cake #1 a.k.a hot mess. There were some edge pieces that were acceptable to eat, and they were freaking delicious.

Cake #2 came out looking fabulous, way better than it’s deformed hot mess of a sister. It was totally cooked through and nicely golden brown (I loosely covered it with foil near the end). The top became a puffy sugary crust that sparkled with sugar but the inside was still all moist and cake like and the apples got nice and soft.

I will for sure be making this again for my own consumption. Maybe with apples or maybe not. I would like to try it without apples to see if they were the culprit of my baking time issues. The more I think about it, the more likely that seems.

The recipe that is posted after the jump is Dorie’s original recipe from the book. The cake that I baked was modified. This pretty much entailed not adding almonds, and adding sliced apples of the Pink Lady variety instead. I know, I’m a visionary, you don’t have to tell me.

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Well hello blog world. I am back. Is anybody still out there? No. It’s okay, I am used to talking to myself.

So, I love biscuits with a capital L. I am not really going out on a culinary limb here, because really who doesn’t love biscuits? If you don’t love biscuits, I don’t trust you as a person. Period.

These biscuits are from “America’s Test Kitchen The TV Companion Cookbook 2009″. I could not find this on Amazon so I think this is the book that comes with one of the DVD sets. I borrowed/stole it from Nick’s dad, so I don’t know where he got it. I am slightly obsessed with this book at the moment, pretty much everything in it sounds and looks super tasty.

These drop biscuits were the first thing I made from this book. They are fuss free and so quick to make. There is no cubing and cutting in cold butter, no kneading and rolling, and no worrying about over handling the dough. To make these biscuits, all you need to do is combine your dry ingredients, combine your wet ingredients and then combine them together. I had these bad boys in the oven in 10 minutes. In fact, your oven will probably take longer to preheat to a stifling 475F than it will take you to prepare the biscuits.

These came out of the oven smelling of buttery deliciousness. And they tasted like it too. They had a rich butter flavor (thanks Strauss butter), and I loved the texture contrast between the golden brown crispy outside and the soft fluffy inside. They were perfect. Taste wise, I think they can rival any rolled biscuit, and texturally they are just different so it’s hard to compare.

However, I was impressed with the tenderness of these biscuits. Normally, in a rolled biscuit the ice cold butter that you cut into the flour creates steam as it melts in the hot oven and that is how you achieve the light flaky layers. There was a definite lightness to these drop biscuits, and ATK explains that they figured out the way to do this by mistake. The wet ingredients in this recipe are melted butter and buttermilk. In one trial, due to some impatience, they combined slightly cooled melted butter and cold buttermilk straight from the fridge, getting a clumpy butter-buttermilk mixture. They tried to whisk the crap out of it to get it to emulsify into a smooth liquid, but the butter was too stubborn. They decided to bake them anyway with the chunky butter. These butter clumps created steam in the biscuits and helped them rise higher and bake up fluffier than all their other trials with a smooth buttermilk mixture, mimicking what happens in a standard rolled out biscuit.

Nick’s opinion was that these were really good, but he still likes the more standard rolled out flaky biscuits that I make. He informed me that his benchmark for biscuits is Popeye’s biscuits, and he thought that Popeye’s were still better than these. I pointed out to him that it had been far too long since he had a Popeye’s biscuit to make such a statement, so I do not accept his opinion. I think that these are just as good as a Popeye’s biscuits and when you take into account the low fuss factor, they are making a play for my favorite biscuit to bake.

I served these fluffy pillows alongside a roast chicken, also courtesy of ATK, which I will post about soon.

If you are an astute reader you will notice that there are 6 biscuits in this picture:

And only 5 in this picture:

I am sure you would just assume that is because we ate one of them before taking a picture. Unfortunately, this is not true. The 6th biscuit lost it’s short life almost immediately after coming out of the oven when it gingerly slid right off the baking rack into a sink of dirty dish water. It was a sad moment. I let out a gasp that actually prompted Nick to get up from the computer to make sure I was okay. It takes a lot to get Nick to look away from the computer when he is in the zone.

Make these very soon, they do not disappoint.

Recipe after the jump.

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If you are coming here expecting to find Carrot, Green Apple & Mint Salad, well, it’s not here. Even though this week’s Craving Ellie recipe was chosen by one of my favorite bloggers (A Singleton in the Kitchen), who also happens to live in the same city as me, this salad just wasn’t our thing. My apologies to Jessica - please don’t look me up and beat me, but please look me up and bring me some of your delicious looking baked goods, ribbons and all!

I have been doing A LOT of cooking lately, and not so much baking, so I decided to do a rewind this week and make Ellie’s Chocolate Cherry Almond Biscotti. If you are unfamiliar, biscotti are Italian cookies and their name means “baked twice". You bake the dough the first time in a log, then you cool it, slice it and bake the slices a second time to dry them out. The longer they bake the second time, the harder the cookies will be. They are the perfect mate to a nice hot cup of coffee.

These were easy to make. The dough is a very stiff and sticky cookie dough. The only sort of issue I had was that after the first baking of 25 minutes they were still very raw in the middle. I did not realize this until I sliced them, so I just had to do a longer bake the second time. I am really not sure if it was supposed to be that way or not, but it worked out in the end.

Overall these biscotti were pretty good, I enjoyed them even more after they had sat for a day. I like that they weren’t rock hard and the combo of chocolate, cherries, and almonds is always delicious. If I make them again I would add more cherries, decrease the chocolate, and put in some almond extract to get more of an almond flavor.

I am not really sure what the fat and calories are in a normal biscotti, but these babies have 10 grams of fat and 230 calories per cookie. So they are not exactly guilt free (at least in my mind), but they are certainly not a diet buster either. And they are made with half whole wheat pastry flour so the calories are not totally empty.

You can find the recipe for these cookies here.

Here is my log. I measured this to be 10 x 3, so I don’t think my under doneness had to do with the size. You can see how chock full of delicious goodness it is:

Here it is out of the oven:

Semi raw biscotti. I think I had to bake them for another 25 minutes, and I tested them this time with a cake tester!

(BTW - how do you like my cheap Ocean City hotel room cups. Nothing but the finest for imafoodblog!)

This is the second granola recipe I have ever made for myself, and I am now officially in love with making my own granola. It is so much tastier than what I buy in the store and I can personalize it with ingredients that I like. It is also easy to ensure that what you are making is a healthy and sensible snack because you have control over the quantity and quality of what is being used.

My first experience with granola was Ellie Krieger’s nutty granola. Then a few weeks ago I saw this Strawberry Banana granola over at our good friend lisa is cooking. The original recipe is by none other than Michael Ruhlman, so it already had winning status in my book before I even made it.

I was so pleased with this way this granola came out. Basically, you create a fruit puree that you mix with your granola ingredients and then bake it low and slow until all the liquid has been absorbed into the oats. This creates a really lovely subtle fruity flavor to complement the richness of the nuts, which is all balanced out by some flavorful dried cherries.

I altered the recipe a bit to scale it down (the original recipe makes an enormous amount) and I also lightened it up and eliminated the refined sugar. One important thing to note for this recipe is not to use more liquid than called for. If there is too much liquid the granola will start to burn before it is all absorbed and then you will have burnt and soggy granola. Let’s just say I really made this granola twice, with the first burnt and soggy batch going straight into the garbage.

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Do you know that the Irish would carve turnips into jack-o-lanterns instead of pumpkins on Halloween? I just heard that on the History channel.

Pumpkin is not one of my favorite ingredients, I don’t hate it, I just don’t love it. Though I have been more open to using and trying things with pumpkin lately. So I was excited to make these muffins. Although I am always be happy to try a new muffin recipe, especially an Ellie Krieger one. This recipe is a pretty standard low fat muffin recipe. The fats are canola oil, eggs, and low fat buttermilk. And the actual flavor of the muffin is very much like a spice cake with a hint of pumpkin.

I did make a few changes to the original recipe, which can be found here.

• I used 100% all-purpose flour
• I added 50% more of all the spices since some were saying these were bland
• I only used 2 tbsp of molasses since that is all I had left
• I left out the pumpkin seeds because I did not want to buy them just for this
• I added in a handful of ground flax seed to the batter

Overall I really enjoyed these muffins. Ellie’s muffin recipes have not disappointed me yet. There was a nice flavor to the muffin with the cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and nutmeg, though I think there is room to improve by changing the amounts. It was also pretty moist and did not have the gross gummy dense texture that some low fat muffins can have.

I think that some golden raisins in the muffin might be good, I will try that next time. I also loved 24carrots idea on the Tell All to substitute maple syrup for the molasses. I may also try replacing one of the eggs with another cup of pumpkin and see how that goes. This would make it healthier as well as allow me to use up a whole small can of pumpkin instead of only half a can.

Bottom line: These muffins were very good, I will definitely make them again and try different variations.

Great pick by Amanda of Oddball Oven Mitt for this week’s Craving Ellie in My Belly.

This week it was my turn again to pick something for Craving Ellie in My Belly, and I chose a New York Breakfast.

Like Ellie, I grew up in New York (I may have mentioned that a bazillion times on this blog already), and thus I grew up eating lots of bagels with cream cheese and various types of smoked fish. My favorite being nova lox. I know this is something that people either love or hate, so I apologize to my Craving Ellie girls who fall in the latter category.

However, I was in New York a few weeks ago and every time I go I always ingest tons of lox while I am there and then bring some back with me and freeze it. So I was inspired by my trip up there to pick this recipe since I knew I would be flush with smoked fish.

Before we get to the recipe, let’s talk fish. Lox, nova, nova lox - it’s all the same thing. And what it is is cured and cold smoked salmon. Yum! It is the stuff of dreams (well, my dreams). The name is derived from the German word “lachs” and the Yiddish word “laks", both meaning salmon. Nova can sometimes be confused with smoked salmon, which are indeed two completely different things. Smoked salmon is hot smoked, so it is cooked, which provides a very different final texture and flavor compared to a cold smoked salmon. Cold smoked salmon is technically raw because it never reaches over 90F. You may have also heard of Gravlax, which is a Nordic preparation of salmon. In Gravlax, the salmon is cured with a spice rub usually containing salt, sugar, paprika and dill. It is then weighed down to push out all the moisture and cures for about 3 days. Gravlax is not smoked at all, so it is also a raw application of salmon. I love salmon - raw and cooked - and all of these different preparation are delicious. However, nova remains my favorite.

This sandwich is really simple to make and it does not have many ingredients. So that is why it is important that all the ingredients are top quality, because you will taste everything. I hope everyone who made this was able to find good lox. I prefer to get mine from a deli where they slice it off the fish themselves on site. I try to stay away from the vacuum sealed stuff, but it will do in a pinch. I also tried some lox from Whole Foods once and found it to be horrendous. This is why I usually don’t buy it unless I am in New York, but I am bit of a snob, so just ignore me.

I made my New York Breakfast a bit different than Ellie’s directions.

Here are my changes:

1. I used thinly sliced rye bread instead of pumpernickel.
2. I used full fat chive cream cheese instead of neufchatel cheese. I did this because Nick and I have decided that besides the fact that NY bagels are superior to every other bagel, another reason why our NY bagel sandwiches are always so good is because of the delicious homemade cream cheese you get at some of the bagel shops and delis. So I picked up some quality cream cheese from a NY style bagel store near my office in Maryland. Since I got chive flavored cream cheese (my favorite) I did not add extra chives.
3. I left out the cucumber and tomato.

So my sandwich consisted of well toasted rye bread, cream cheese, thinly sliced red onion, lox, and some more red onion. I hope everyone who made this enjoyed it. I sure did. And this is not the only way I like to eat lox, check out my post about lox, eggs, and onions. Also yum!

Lox:

And yummy cream cheese:

You may recall some weeks ago that I posted about strawberry bread that I made that was loaded with butter and marscapone cheese. Yum! It was delicious.

Now I bring you strawberry muffins. These are not nearly as rich and delicious as the strawberry bread. However, the good news is that I can actually eat more than just a sliver without gaining 10 pounds.

I bought a huge container of strawberries and I had to use them up before they turned on me. I had seen this recipe from Jen at Savor the Thyme a while back and it popped in my head as the perfect way to put these berries to good use.

These were pretty tasty, and I also think they are the healthiest muffins I have made in a while. They were a tad dense and not as tender as I would have preferred, but they were a good low fat breakfast muffin.

Since I used Jen’s recipe almost as written, I am going to send you over to her site for it. The only change I made was that I did not boil the strawberries down before adding them to the batter, I just added fresh cut berries. You can find the recipe here for Strawberry Muffins.

Applesauce Spice Bars. I can’t say that this is something I would have chosen to make on my own. However, as is the case with most Dorie Greenspan recipes, they were quite good. This cake was spiced with the usual suspects of cinnamon and all spice, and rounded out with a nice splash of brandy. The cake could really not have been more moist, and the glaze, oh boy. The glaze was by far the best part. Just combine yourself the right amount of sugar and fat and you have liquid happiness. I let my bars cool 100% completely before I made the glaze so I would have a nice thick icing. Some of it still did seep into the cake, but most of it set quickly and stayed on the top where it belonged.

This cake really reminded me of a muffin, in the process of making it and in the texture and taste. I am sure some people did bake them into muffins and they probably came out wonderful. I might try to lighten this recipe up in the future and make some healthier muffins with it. I really loved the chunks of apples and nuts, and I even enjoyed the raisins in this which can be hit or miss for me. Nick suggested that I make these again during the holidays and make a boozed up version of the glaze to top it with. Sounds good to me.

Nick seemed to enjoy these a lot, and I hope the rest of his coworkers do as well, as I am dumping a huge pan of them in his office this morning. They must get out of the house. I am so untrustworthy around anything sweet that I bake myself. Even if I don’t really like something, I will still eat it because it’s there and it’s home baked by me.

This was a super Tuesdays with Dorie pick by Karen of Something Sweet. You can find the recipe at Karen’s blog or on page 117-118 of Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan.

So a few weeks ago I posted about some yummy lemon blueberry muffins. This week I thought I would shake things up a bit and post about some orange blueberry muffins. I know, I’m crraaaazy. I like to live life in the fast lane.

These Orange Berry Muffins are the very first recipe in Dorie Greenspan’s Baking: From My Home to Yours. I don’t really know why that is relevant, but, something has got to be first and this is it.

They top the list of favorite muffins that I have made in recent times. I absolutely loved the orange blueberry combo and the orange flavor was a nice change up from the standard lemon zest that I usually add to a berry muffin.

These muffins were really tender and moist, with a great crumb. Not surprising since this is a Dorie recipe. They were on the lower end of sweet, which to my surprise I enjoyed. There is only 1/3 cup of sugar in the batter. The rest of the sweetness comes from some honey and fresh orange juice.

For this recipe I used the zest of 2 oranges but the juice of only 1 orange (about 1/4 cup). This created a lovely orange flavor that was not overpowering.

I used 6 oz of blueberries which is a standard small container. I think these could stand to have a bit more berries, a full 8 ounces would probably be perfect.

If you are looking for a way to use up your bounty of blueberries, this is a great recipe to try. I just scored blueberries for 99 cents per pint, so you can bet your ass I will be making these again really soon.

Full recipe after the jump.

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Well, they don’t look like much, but this is yet another winner from my girl Ellie Kreiger. I made these muffins for this week’s Craving Ellie in my Belly, which was chosen by Leanne of Enjoying My Favorite Things.

So, are these muffins or cupcakes? I am not really sure what the difference is, but I didn’t frost them, so I am going with muffins. Though I think if you did make the lemony cream cheese frosting that is a part of this recipe they could easily pass as cupcakes.

And for a cupcake or a muffin, these are quite healthy and low fat. The only fat in the batter is 1/4 cup of canola oil and 2 eggs. In addition, there is only 3/4 cup of sugar. Not bad at all. Even with the cream cheese frosting, there is only 10 grams of fat and 236 calories per serving.

I was pleasantly surprised at how moist these are. Like really moist. I don’t think they taste low fat at all, and they don’t have that denseness and chewiness that is often associated with low fat baking. I don’t know how they compare to full fat carrot cake because I very rarely eat it. The actual carrot flavor is very subtle here and the main flavors are the cinnamon and nutmeg.

Besides the semi annoying task of finely grating the carrots, this is a super easy and pretty standard muffin recipe. You can whip this up in 10 minutes, and they bake up in about 20 minutes.

I will definitely be making these again, and I give a big thank you to Leannne for picking something that I love that I would never have chosen to make on my own.

You can find the recipe here, or on page 284-85 of The Food You Crave: Luscious Recipes for a Healthy Life by Ellie Krieger.