Carrot Muffins

In celebration of my new cookbook Baking From My Home to Yours, by Dorie Greenspan I chose to make muffins. Deciding where to start was a little hard since there are about 250 recipes in the book - so I took a logical approach and started in the first section of the book, Breakfast. I had a really hard time deciding between the Carrot Muffin and Almond Scone (which are next by the way) but decided that a carrot muffin sounded better at the time. We also had a lot of fresh carrots from our CSA box so I didn't have to buy new ingredients. The muffin was (as my friend Nicole would describe) divine. The muffin had just the right amount of sweet to resemble my favorite cake but did not make me feel like I was eating dessert for breakfast. They rose up beautiful and tall and had an extremely moist and flaky center. They don't need jam or butter (though my mother - a very big fan of butter - would probably slather butter all over it) since they have a decent amount of fat in them. I also enjoyed the addition of currants rather than raisins which my husband (a raisin hater) liked as well. The combination seemed perfect. I have also found that they grow more flavorful with age, like a good pumpkin bread, as long as you keep them well sealed. I will be making this muffin recipe often. Thanks Dorie for an amazing start to your cookbook!

Bundt Cake

Bunt Cake, strange name for a cake really. Surprisingly the bundt pan is the most sold pan in the US (according to Wikipedia) and I didn't have one until a few months ago. Michael's Aunt had 7 and while remodeling her kitchen decided it would be ok to let one go - Thanks Joy - so now I am part of the american trend of bundt cake pan owners. Bundt cakes are fussy. It is really easy to overcook them resulting in a dense dry cake and I surmise my first bundt cake will probably be my worst. I wanted to try a recipe from a cookbook I love Birthday Cakes for a meyer lemon pound cake. It turns out I didn't have any lemon herbal tea for the glaze at the end of baking so I switched to a different recipe I had all the ingredients on hand for (strongly suggested by my friend Emily who was hanging out that night). The cake was a buttermilk poppy lemon pound cake and the batter was much more dense than I had ever worked with. I sprayed the pan like crazy since it has more grooves than a traditional bundt pan and stuck it in the oven to bake. I think I eliminated about 5 min of baking because the pan has a dark teflon coating. The cake looked pretty but in my opinion it was too dark. I added a lemon glaze after cooling and then came the taste test.... So so in my opinion. I have made better cakes - but I think the pan is somewhat at fault. I think I'll try it again sometime and really monitor everything. Some people really liked it and though I have a tendency to be really hard on myself but I don't think I was terribly hard on myself this time. The cake had good texture and was not overly sweet or overly lemony - it was just a tad bit dry for my liking. Nothing spectacular. I am going to try that other recipe sometime soon though. I love lemon flavored desserts and am up for the challenge of this new bundt pan.

The Microplane

I will begin by saying I love this tool. It makes perfect zest and grates cheese well - the only thing I don't appreciate about the tool is that it is very dangerous. I was grating some Parmesan cheese over pasta the other night. It was a very skinny piece of cheese and it seemed much more efficient to grate it parallel to the mircoplane. Dumb mistake - because it took of a small chunk of skin from my knuckle. It didn't seem too disastrous at the time but about 30 seconds later I had a small pond of blood on my finger. Lessons learned.... always grate tiny cheeses perpendicular to the microplane AND develop some sort of hand shield (my friend Kerry suggested a small force field to encapsulate your hand). I'll let you know how it goes. Until then I will practice cautious grating/zesting.

Dream Jobs - Flour Bakery

So, I love to bake and would love to bake for a living but until I find a willing investor will settle as an architect. Leslie Henslee owner of Frankenart Mart in San Francisco asked me earlier this year to participate in one of her shows entitled "Dream Jobs". The Mart is an eclectic participatory art project/gallery with themed shows every three months or so - and I agreed. All I had to do was make an appointment and the Mart was mine for the time to transform into whatever I wanted. Of course I wanted it to be a bakery - so following is my account of my own personal bake sale. 

Aside from it probably being illegal to sell baked go

ods from an art studio for profit (and ignoring minor health codes requiring food to be sold in places without pets...) we had a lovely time. I took over the Mart for a weekend in November. In preparation for this event I had to name my bakery which I now call Flour, decide on a menu, and find lots and lots of cake stands. I think I ended up with 14 different items on the menu and a beautiful display of baked goods using some of a local artist's ceramic stands (check them out Whitney Smith Pottery). 

I think I spent about 25-30 hours the week before the show baking and preparing packaging, and by the end of the week was totally exhausted from working a 16 hr day. Thanks to my husband Michael for keeping me sane (or at least somewhat sane).

I may have taken the "transformation" option for the gallery a little too seriously though it turned out beautiful. The only problems we encountered was a cream-cheese-crazed-cat named Reuben and plaster walls that did not like shelves much. 

The weekend was a success and we had a lot of people stop in - mostly confused - who ended up buying some treats. Personal sized items are my favorite. I think people are more into a two bite cookie than a cookie the size of your face - which allows you to either gorge yourself with as many different types as possible or just one little nibble to cut the sugar craving. Thanks to all of you who helped me make my bakery dream come true - by eating, assisting, and ordering afterwards. Hopefully this dream will someday become a reality.