Hazelnut and Peach Jam Financier and a Review

Greetings from Slackerville!
I've never understood the point of a stay-cation. Isn't a major change of scenery and the ability to forget you even own a cell phone a major aspect of a proper getaway? A proper vacation is not in the cards for me this year though, so I'm replacing it by random road trips and spontaneous bursts of doing nothing. Or at least nothing useful, I've still not mastered the fine art of couch potato zen. And so it is these very pursuits that have kept me from contributing anything of value (and therefore anything period) to this blog. I have however been baking, and quite a bit (though not all of it picture worthy, let alone blog worthy), so pull up a chair and take a look.

A few weeks ago the lovely folks over at Oh!Nuts have contacted me about trying out their products, which was sort of awesome since I've ordered from them before and absolutely loved everything about this little company. They have a pretty good selection of nuts and dried fruit, but what's even better, they have a pretty good selection of nut flours at a very reasonable price. I've tried grinding my own, but despite completely ruining one coffee grinder and almost melting my Magic Bullet, I have never been able to get it as fine as I'd like. Since I got to pick what to try, I asked for a bag of hazelnut flour and pistachios (because I'll never ever ever ever pass on pistachios that I don't have to shell). I had visions of Nutellaesque marcarons, but when the bag was sitting on my counter I suddenly got a craving for something simple. Something humble looking, but with complex flavors. Something that doesn't need frosting. Something that would help me put a dent, even a small one, in my still rather plentiful stash of jam. Which is where the lovely Cannelle et Vanille came in.

I've been bookmarking recipes on her blog for, oh gosh, probably 3 years now? Somehow her gorgeous photography has made me afraid of trying the recipes. There's no way anything I made would look that perfect. But this weekend I decided that I don't care. If they turned out ugly, they'd still get eaten, so I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. I tweaked the recipe a bit, burned one batch of browned butter (I'm serious when I say don't walk away from it!), browned a perfect batch of butter (that lovely smell stays in the kitchen for days), added my vanilla bourbon and peach jam, tossed the batter in the fridge and went to sleep. The next day, after less then 5 minutes of work, I had these lovelies:



Uh....yum.

Hazelnut and Peach Jam Financier
Recipe adapted from Cannelle et Vanille

120 grams egg whites (this ended up being about 3 medium egg whites for me)
125 grams sugar
55 grams flour
55 grams hazelnut meal
150 grams unsalted butter, browned and strained, cooled

Cook the butter in a small saucepan until it starts to foam and dark particles start to form on the bottom of the pan. Don't leave it for a second, and stir it the whole time to make sure it cooks evenly*. It will smell nutty and turn a light caramel color. Take it off the heat right away to prevent burning, strain the butter and let it cool.

Whisk the first four ingredients together in a bowl. Slowly add the brown butter and whisk until it is incorporated. Stuff the batter into a pastry bag or a ziplock bag, and let it rest in the refrigerator overnight.



The next day, preheat the oven to 375F.
Pipe batter into silicon mold or a mini muffin tin. Using a small round tip, pipe a small amount of jam into the middle of each batter mound.



Bake for about 10-20 minutes or until golden. Time will vary depending on the size of the mold. I think mine were on the bigger side and took a full 20 minutes to cook, but you should keep an eye on yours.

* If you do burn the butter, as long as it's not completely black, I'm told that you can strain it, whisk some lemon juice into it while it's still hot, and still use it as a lovely sauce on fish. Mine is in the fridge, so I'll let you know how that comes out.



They're great warm, but if you wait until they're cool, the top will caramelize into a very light crumbly crispy sugary crust that will make you swoon.


Disclosure: I was sent the hazelnut flour used in this recipe at no charge by Oh!Nuts, however I truly loved the product and gave as unbiased review as I could while wiping the financier crumbs off my keyboard.

Contest Winner, Melktert, and a Friend

Thank you all for stopping by and entering my little giveaway and thank you so much to you who shared your GF&DF recipes, I really appreciate that. It was awesome to hear your stories and what you'd do with the GC, but unfortunately I only have one to give out. After tallying up the entries and feeding them to random.org, the winner is Melinda!

Melinda, I left a message for you over at your blog. Please shoot me an email and I'll get you the redemption information right away. As for the rest of you, don't worry. I'm planning on a lot more giveaways in the weeks to come, so stick around, you never know what you'll get.

And while you're here, how can I possibly let you go without a recipe? A few weeks ago, or was it months? Wow, the time really has whipped through the last few months...anyways, a few whatevers ago I was invited to a little celebration at a friends house and she requested that I make a milk tart. A what what? A South African dish called a melktert, also known as a milk tart. I had no clue what the heck it was but I promised to have one in hand when I showed up. I dug around online and almost all the recipes sounded basically the same until I found Cook Sister! I liked that she lightened her tart and messed with the flavors a bit by adding cardamom, and while in the end I learned that I'd probably prefer the more traditional shortbread crust to the puff pastry, despite it's humble looks, the filling was really really REALLY good.



Melktert
Recipe adapted from Cook Sister!
I didn't have custard powder handy and I wanted a tiny bit stronger cardamom flavor so I tossed in an extra pod, other then that I left the recipe untouched.

about 200g of ready rolled puff pastry
1.5 cups milk
1 tsp butter
a pinch of salt
1 cinnamon stick
2 green cardamom pods
1.5 tsp cornstarch
1.5 tsp cake flour
1 Tbsp cold milk
1/4 cup sugar
2 eggs, separated
1/4 tsp almond extract (optional)
sugar mixed with a little ground cinnamon

- Pre-heat the oven to 400F and line a 9 inch fluted pie dish with the puff pastry, leaving the edges raggedy and hanging over the edge of the dish. Bake the shell for 10 minutes to get it cooking. I skipped this step and the bottom of my shell wasn't quite cooked through when the custard was ready...there was some rather creative pie frying that had to happen after that to finish off the bottom, so please, listen to me and don't skip this step.
- Bring the milk to a slow boil in a medium saucepan, then add the butter, salt, cinnamon stick and cardamom pod.
- Combine the cornflour and cake flour and add the cold milk to make a paste. Stir a little of the hot milk into the paste to thin it, then stir the custard paste into the hot milk in the saucepan. Make sure there are no lumps in the paste - and don't panic too much if there are some lumps in the saucepan once you've added the custard - just make sure you stir vigorously and continuously to get them to dissolve.
- Add 2 Tbsp of the sugar and stir/whisk continuously. When the custard thickens, remove it from the heat and discard the cinnamon and cardamom.
- Beat the egg whites until stiff, then beat in the remaining sugar gradually and set aside. Beat the yolks slightly and then add about 2 Tbsp of the warm custard mix to the yolks and mix well.
- Stir the yolk mix into the custard saucepan and add the almond essence (if using). Gently fold in the egg whites.
- Pour into the pie dish, sprinkle with cinnamon sugar and bake at 400F for 10 minutes. Then turn the heat down to 350F and bake for a further 10-15 mins, until puffed up and golden.
- Allow to cool on a wire rack, or in your car on the way to the party, slice and enjoy!



And just to see if you're all paying attention (or even reading this far down in the post), I'd like to share with you my friend the croc:



I've been looking for a smooth lead-in to share him with you for a while, mostly because I really like how this picture came out, and I've basically given up. So here he is. He didn't get any of the tart, but I'm pretty sure he'd have liked it. Go on, bake some yourself. Make him jealous.

S'More Cookies and a Giveaway

I am such a slacker. I mentioned that I'd be having a giveaway in my last post and then got completely sidetracked by other stuff, well wait no more! I'm officially opening up the giveaway for entry and the prize is a $50 GC to anything your little heart desires from CSN Stores. For example, it could go a long way towards getting a few (and I mean very few, these things are pricey!) of these adorable little guys or maybe a dozen of these cuties. And all you have to do to throw your hat into the ring is:

1. Leave a comment telling me what you'd get with your $50 CSN Stores GC. It doesn't have to be food related, but hey, that's what my blog is about, so let's face it, it probably will be ;)
2. Make sure you leave contact information in your post! Be it your email or a link to your blog/site/profile where I can find your email. If I don't have a way to contact you in 2 days after the contest closes, I'll be forced to pick a different winner...and quite frankly that involves more work for me. Have I mentioned the laziness?
3. Bonus Entry: A friend has recently asked me for gluten and dairy free recipes and while I have one, I'm seriously lacking in that department. So, if any of you have good recipes you're willing to share or great sites you know of (my favorite so far is the infamous Mrs. Tartlette), let me know and I will give you an extra chance to win!

You have until midnight CST on March 7th to get in your entries. Good luck!

Contest is now closed and the winner will be announced shortly. Thank you all for participating!

Whew! And now onto the reason you guys come here, the recipe! There isn't much of a story that goes with these, I felt like making S'More cookies, so I did. I had a box of graham crackers lying around and I whipped up a batch of strawberry marshmallows to fill. Dunked into a vat of melted chocolate and allowed to dry these were pretty good. I might pipe on a lot more marshmallow onto these next time and maybe slip in an extra disk of chocolate, but they were quite tasty as is.



S'More Cookies
Marshmallow recipe from Martha herself

Graham Crackers, carefully broken into squares
2 envelopes unflavored gelatin
1/4 cups granulated sugar
1/3 cup seedless strawberry jam or jelly
1/3 cup light corn syrup
Dash of salt
Chocolate for dipping

1. Arrange the graham cracker squares on a flat surface. You want them to be ready once the marshmallow fluff is done or it will start to set before you get a chance to pipe.
2. Pour 1/3 cup cold water into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Sprinkle with gelatin; let stand until softened, 5 minutes.
3. Stir together granulated sugar, jam, corn syrup, salt, and 1/4 cup water in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil, stirring often. Continue to boil until syrup registers 238 degrees on a candy thermometer (soft-ball stage).
4. Add syrup to gelatin. Beat on low speed until slightly cooled. Gradually raise speed to high, beating until mixture is cool and peaks form, 20 to 30 minutes. You can mix in red food coloring if you like, one drop at a time, to achieve desired shade of pink, but I skipped it and still got a very soft pink hue.
5. Working quickly, spoon the fluff into a pastry bag fitted with a large plain round tip and pipe a square of fluff just inside the edges of each graham cracker.
6. Let the marshmallow set for an hour or so to dry. Melt the chocolate in the microwave in 30 second intervals, or in a bain marie, and start dunking. I only wanted the chocolate on top but you can do whatever you like here. Dunk the top or the whole thing, it's up to you. I also sprinkled a few graham cracker crumbs on top to make it pretty(and cover up my bumpy marshmallow piping job).
7. Allow the chocolate to set either on the counter at room temp, or slide the tray into the fridge/freezer for a few minutes to speed things up.

That's it! You now have perfectly portable S'More Cookies. Enjoy :D

On Creme Brulee and Breakfast Whimsy

Before I start, could I insert a touch of randomness here? The good folks over at CSN have reached out to me about hosting another giveaway! They have basically everything you could possibly imagine, everything from pretty blue dutch ovens to outdoor playsets, so this should be exciting. But you know what they don't have? Sadly they don't carry these adorable egg molds. I got two of them forever ago and due to the chaos that is my kitchen I only found them this weekend. The occasion called for soft boiled eggs for breakfast:



Yep, that's an egg shaped like a fish. Isn't that the cutest thing ever? Totally useless though, not like that certain something special the winner would be able to get with their gift card....but onto the topic at hand!

There are so many things I haven't tried to make because I was afraid of failure, but no more! I have been afraid of Creme Brulee for far too long, so for Valentine's day I invited some friends and put it on the menu. After a brief, and completely irrational, moment of panic about trying something completely new with a whole dinner on the line, I set about finding that perfect recipe with the most fool-proof instructions and with the 115% swoon guarantee. And you know what I learned? Aside from infusing the cream to change the flavors to almost anything from basil to raspberry to matcha, the base recipe stayed basically the same. There were a few ratio differences, of course, but the the core elements were the same, and there were so few of them! Simplicity itself, right? So I used them all. I took notes, I wrote down inspirations, and I came up with this recipe...which I've now made 4 times. I've never gone through this much heavy cream before. And since they say that color means flavor, I just had to incorporate a bit of it in here as well.

Please excuse the crappy picture, I literally took this on my way out the door before work, and if you know me at all, you'll know that I was running late.


Creme Brulee with Color
I pulled ideas from so many places that I can't really give credit to any one, so I'm going to say this one is mine, with the world wide web as inspiration.

1/2 cup vanilla sugar*
6 egg yolks
2 Tbsp molasses (regular, not dark)
1 vanilla bean, or 1 Tbsp of Nielsen-Massey Pure Vanilla Bean Paste, which is awesome
pinch of salt
2 cups heavy cream
extra vanilla sugar for topping

* You can totally use plain sugar here, but I keep a jar of sugar into which I toss in my used up vanilla bean pods and I finally found a use for it!

- Preheat the oven to 350F and place 6 ramekins into a deep baking pan.
- Bring a teapot full of water to boil and keep on the side.
- Whisk first 5 ingredients (not the cream) in a bowl and set aside. If you're using a vanilla bean, scrape out the insides into the mix, let the outside dry out and then start a jar of vanilla sugar for next time :D
- Bring the cream to simmer in a slow pot and whisking the entire time slowly temper it into the sugar/yolk mixture by adding it a little at a time.
- Once all the cream has been tempered in, pour the mixture into the ramekins. Then pour the boiling water into the pan reaching halfway up the ramekin sides, being careful to keep the water out of the cream.
- Carefully slide the pan into the oven and set the timer to 30 min. You want a the custard to set a bit, but still be jiggly.
- Carefully slide the pan out of the oven and allow everything to cool before you remove the ramekins. Let them come to room temp, then cover with saran wrap and chill in the fridge for at least an hour.
- When ready to eat, sprinkle sugar in a thin and even layer on top and go to town with your torch, or slide them under the broiler for a few seconds.
- Don't forget to share!

Caramelized Pecans and a Simple Salad

Ignoring my craft closet, which is quietly busting at the seams, I've decided to pick up two more hobbies. I can't help myself, textiles and design and all things pretty call to me and I want to try making them all. So now I can tack on quilting and letterpress to my "I know a bit about how to do that" list. I bribed a sewing genius of a friend with food to help me with my color circle quilt and it's really starting to take shape, which is making me super excited. Once it looks a bit more like an actual quilt, I'll share pictures with you guys, I promise. And as a belated holiday gift to myself I signed up for letterpress classes at a local studio. It's still too early to tell if I'm any good at that, but you can be sure that next year's holiday caramels will come in pretty hand stamped packages.

As you can imagine, all of this leaves me with very little time for cooking and one thing I've been making a lot of around here is salad. I like making salad, layering the ingredients, balancing the toppings to make it look pretty, but I don't actually like eating it. I don't know, it just seems like so much chewing for not so much flavor or satisfaction. It's good for you though, so in an effort to be healthier I've been trying to come up with ways to make salads more exciting.

The first thing I did was to buy a small bottle of the very best, the uber yummy, thick and syrupy balsamic vinegar. There were days when I used to smother everything in ranch, but ever since I moved past the cheap grocery store balsamic, I haven't looked back. My current obsession is with the aged blackberry and ginger balsamic I bought at the French market a month ago. It's so good, I don't even temper it with olive oil. And on standby I have 18 year aged balsamic from Old Town Oil, which is also fantastic.



I top a bowl of mixed greens with crumbled goat cheese, sometimes little chunks of marinated beets, sometimes dried cranberries, but always with candied pecans. I don't know why, but even a few of these babies never fail to make me actually want to eat the big pile of greens underneath. And there's no reason to spend $10 for a tiny bag of candied pecans either when all it really takes is some sugar and some raw or lightly toasted pecans to make them yourself.

Just set aside a silpat or lightly greased cookie sheet, dump a half a cup of sugar into a pan and set aside a cup of pecans. You can toast your pecans or leave them raw, I've done it both ways and it really comes down to how lazy I'm being at the moment, it's delicious either way.

Try to keep the sugar in the pan in a nice thin and even layer, then crank up the heat and don't go anywhere! I keep the heat on high, but you may want to turn it down a little bit your first few times. It will take the sugar a little while to get going, but once it starts things go pretty fast and burned sugar smells horrible.



It will take a while, but eventually the sugar will start looking like wet sand and then slowly will start to melt around the edges. DO NOT STIR IT! Don't swirl the pan, don't even touch the spoon and for goodness sakes don't go anywhere.



As the sugar starts to melt more you're going to see a bit of color development around the edges and there will still be some un-melted sugar in the middle, but at this point you're still okay, so just stick around and watch.



Once you get here, if you're really starting to get nervous, you can carefully nudge the hot sugar towards the un-melted pile, but don't stir or you'll end up with clumps. If you do get clumps, turn the heat down a bit and keep stirring until everything is even. Just be sure that you don't let the color get too dark. As soon as you reach a nice deep amber color like I have here, take the pan off the heat.

This, by the way, is also the first step to making caramel. If you were doing this in a deeper pot, you could CAREFULLY add cream a little at a time, stirring like mad, and you'll end up with yummy caramel topping. You could also add boiling water, also carefully and also a little at a time and also stirring like crazy, to make a caramel flavored simple syrup...which I'd imagine would make for some fantastic cocktails. Or you could keep going and stick with the salad plan. Up to you.



Working very quickly, stir in your pecans and spread everything out on your Silpat or greased sheet. The cooked sugar will set quickly so the faster you get this done, the easier and less messy things will go. Do not touch the sugar! It's basically boiling lava and it will hurt like nothing else, so don't touch anything until it's completely cooled.



Once the sugar has cooled completely you can break apart the pieces and top your salad...or just eat them straight, but that would defeat the salad point.



P.S. My friend asked me to tell everyone that if something should go wrong during the caramelizing process and you burn the sugar, do not pour the hot bubbly mess down the drain. The sugar will seize and clog the drain. Then you will panic and break your favorite fork trying to chip away the clog, and then fill the sink with boiling water and hope that everything melts before your boyfriend shows up and laughs at you. The best thing to do is to just let the mess cool a bit in the pan and then soak the pan in hot water. It will come right out and then you can try again.