Literary Baking (Middle Eastern Baked Goods for Craig Thompson Event)

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Kiesha

You may remember a few days ago I wrote about a couple of events for which I would be baking. The first of these events happened last Saturday.

I baked Middle Eastern cookies for the event celebrating the release of Craig Thompson’s newest book Habibi.

The first cookie I baked was called hab el hal, which are sugar cookies flavored with cardamom.

These were super tasty. The cardamom provided a really interesting flavor and they were incredibly addictive. I just wanted to keep. Eating. Them.

The second cookies was called baraziq, which were butter cookies coated on one side with sesame seeds and on the other with pistachios.

I’m not a big pistachio fan, so I only had one of these, but it tasted pretty good. Other people seemed to really enjoy them.

The event was great and Craig was nice enough to stay and autograph everyone’s book with both his signature and a drawing.

I even took a little plate of cookies to the table where Craig was sitting to do his autographs. I hope he enjoyed them!

My 30th Birthday Party

Posted on September 18, 2011 by Kiesha

Yes, it’s true. I’m finally finally 30! I’ve been waiting since I was about 12 to turn 30 and I’m pumped that I’ve finally made it.

To celebrate, I threw myself a county fair themed birthday party. It was basically an excuse to do a ton of baking and make a dessert table. I also organized a few games of skill and a 1981 trivia contest.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I will bore you with lots of photos* from the day. Here we go!

The dessert table

Whiskey Apple Pie

Strawberry Rhubarb Pie (this was the hit – not even crumbs left!)

Vegan Blueberry Pie

Vegan Cotton Candy Cupcakes

Vegan Ice Cream Conecakes

“Caramel Apple” Cakepops

* Some of these photos were taken by my sister-in-law Megan Duffy, but I can’t remember which are which. Obviously, any with me IN them were taken by her.

Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Kiesha

This weekend was definitely a Jerseylicious weekend. We spent Saturday with friends and Sunday with family. As the food front was covered in spades with our family, I decided to bring dessert to the friends’ gathering.

Lately I have been trying to bake things that I’ve never made before. It’s my goal for the rest of the year to make a lot of stuff that is off my beaten path. So I decided to bake a pie that was neither apple nor pumpkin. I’d bake a Strawberry Rhubarb Pie.

I’m not the biggest fan of strawberries. I love the flavor, but the texture always bothers me. I tend to find those little seeds in my teeth for days. And rhubarb? I can’t say that before Saturday I ever ate it in my life. It certainly doesn’t look like something that would be good in a pie.

Nevertheless, I busted out Martha Stewart’s Pate Brise recipe from her Baking Handbook and found a fairly simple filling recipe over at Epicurious.

I also cut out hearts out of pie crust dough for the top of my pie, although the next time I do this, I’m going to buy a smaller heart cookie cutter. These hearts looked like I’d spooned biscuit dough on top of my pie and they sorta resembled hearts…

Epicurious recommends baking the pie for 20 minutes at 400 degrees and then lowering the temperature to 350 and baking for another hour and 20 minutes. I pulled my pie out 20 minutes early, because it had reached that point between smelling good and emitting smoke. I think I made the right decision, as the crust was a beautiful golden brown and the filling solidified within two hours.

And talk about solidifying! This was quite possibly the easiest chunky fruit pie I’ve ever sliced up. No oozing, no falling apart, just clean, smooth slices. Beautiful!

Everyone loved this pie. Even I liked this pie! The texture was good, chunky, but still solid and the flavor was great. Not too sweet, not too sour, but somewhere right in the middle. And I think it was my best pie crust to date.

I’ve also got to say I’m pretty pumped with my photos from this pie. I was working with less than ideal sunlight, but after a little Photoshopping, they came out looking pretty snazzy.

Vegan Cookies and Cream Cupcakes

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Kiesha

This past weekend Rob and I had a backyard barbecue for Father’s Day. We invited Rob’s dad as well as his sister and her fiance over on Sunday for some beer and grilled meats.

Well, grilled meats and a grilled black bean patty for my vegan sister-in-law.

I knew I’d be baking something vegan for dessert, so I pulled out my trusty copy of “Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World”. There was a very tempting lemon and blueberry number that I almost went for, until reading that it needed to be served immediately after assembling. I planned to bake the night before the barbecue, so I needed something that would hold up for 12 hours or more.

I flipped to the beginning of the book and looked at the chocolate cupcake and noticed the Cookies and Cream variation. It’s basically a chocolate cupcake with vanilla ‘butter’cream frosting with half a package of chocolate sandwich cookies crushed up and thrown in. Sounded like something i could definitely do.

I forgot to make a turn down the organic section at our grocery store and quickly discovered that that is probably where they keep the Newman-O’s, so I picked up Oreos instead. Yes, folks, Oreos are vegan! Which means that there isn’t anything even resembling milk in those bad boys. Hooray for chemicals! Tasty, tasty chemicals.

Anyhoo, everything went according to plan, save for the fact that I used a large round tip to frost them when I should have went with a star tip. It worked out okay, I think. Everyone was very happy with these cupcakes and four of us polished off two each in short order. Rob’s dad was the only one with any restraint.

Photos!

So stunning in black and white!

Doukhobor Baked Goods at Largehearted Lit

Posted on June 19, 2011 by Kiesha

As you might remember, a couple of weeks ago I posted about my friend Alina Simone releasing both a book and an album at the same time. Another friend, David over at Largehearted Boy, hosts a monthly event at Word bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. For June’s event, he welcomed Alina Simone as well as Wesley Stace and a special performance by Amanda Palmer.

You may also remember that Alina asked me to provide refreshments for the event, in the form of Doukhobor baked goods. I selected two items from her Doukhobor cookbook and crossed my fingers. Rob and I went over to Alina’s apartment (she has a bigger kitchen than I do) and about five hours later I had created Apple, Raspberry and Apple/Raspberry Fruit Tart Pastries as well as Orange Cookies. They got good reviews from Alina and Rob and on the night of the event, there were only four Apple tarts left out of the three dozen tarts and three dozen cookies. I would say they were a hit!

It was actually pretty cool hearing Wesley Stace (AKA John Wesley Harding) tell me that my Raspberry Tarts were delicious. Yay!

Some photos of the baked goods and the event:

Doukhobor Baked Goods

Orange Cookies

Fruit Tart Pastries

David from Largehearted Boy

Alina Simone

Wesley Stace

Amanda Palmer

As a side note, because we drove Alina to the event in our car, we ended up driving Alina, Amanda Palmer and Eugene Mirman home, as we all live in South Slope. It was one of the more surreal nights I’ve had in New York.

As a second side note, this post definitely wins for most links embedded in a post.

French Toast and Bacon Cupcakes

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Kiesha

This past Sunday I took a DIY Food Photography class at Brooklyn Brainery, a ‘trade school’ that offers cheap, informative classes on pretty much anything you can imagine. In addition to DIY Food Photography, this month they also offered classes on Knot Tying, WordPress and Intro to Urban Forestry, among others.

We were instructed to bring a piece of fruit or a vegetable to photograph, or, if we were feeling more adventurous, something a little more complex. I figured that since I’ve a baking blog, I should probably take a baked good. And what would be a good, complex thing to photograph that wouldn’t take hours to create?

The answer came in the form of The Busty Baker’s French Toast and Bacon Cupcakes, cupcakes which blew me away the first time I saw them back at CupcakeCampColumbus 1.0. They were delicious and a sight to behold, with a little crowning piece of bacon on top.

So I whipped up a batch. The most difficult part of this cupcake (besides realizing I was out of piping bags and wasting half a batch of frosting trying to use a piping tip in a Ziploc bag) was cooking the bacon. I’m a skillet girl myself, but I wanted my pieces of bacon to be as flat as possible, so I went the microwave route. The first round of microwaved bacon got burnt black and left my entire apartment smelling like a pig in an incinerator. I finally got a handle on the cooking times and turned out some lovely pieces of bacon.

They certainly were a talking point at the class. Everyone else brought fruit or vegetables, which are very pretty, but come on. How often do you just NEED to photograph an onion? I am of the opinion that most of the people in that class will find themselves documenting full dishes than just the ingredients.

The class was great and I learned some very important things about my camera’s setting and how to use Photoshop to manipulate photos. I also learned that if I really want to get serious in photographing my food, I need to buy another lens. Isn’t that always the way?

Update: You can read another blog post about this event at Julia C. Smith‘s blog. Check out her pretty radish photos!

More photos!

Vegan Orange Cupcakes with Orange Pudding Filling and Orange ‘Butter’cream

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Kiesha

On Memorial Day weekend, my husband and I threw our first barbecue of 2011. We fired up our grill and made some delicious Pat LaFrieda burgers and invited over our friends Brian and Alison and their three kids.

The two eldest kids have some dairy sensitivities, so I decided to make vegan treats for them. A chance view at a baking blog revealed Orange Cupcakes, which I realized came from “Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World”. They looked delicious, so I decided to tackle to them.

These are fairly simple to make, if a little time-consuming. And they’re soooo tasty. We all really enjoyed them and they’ve made the list to be repeated.

Literary Treats in Brooklyn: Doukhobor Baked Goods for Alina Simone/John Wesley Harding

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Kiesha

My friend Alina Simone is releasing both a new album AND a book in June and asked me if I would be interested in providing baked goods as refreshments for her release event at Word bookstore on Wednesday, June 8. There was just one catch; she wanted Doukhobor baked goods.

You can read all about the Doukhobors here. They’re basically a group of people of Russian descent who now mostly live in Canada, whose ancestors left the Russian empire way back in the late 1800′s due to religious differences. That’s the super-duper Reader’s Digest condensed version of the story.

Anyway, a chapter of Alina’s new book “You Must Go and Win” concerns the Doukhobors and during the research process, she bought a Doukhobor cookbook in Canada. Alina thought it would be a lot of fun to feature some of those items at her book release event and sent several scanned pages to me.

As I plan to bake the night before the event, I needed to select some items that would hold up overnight. I ended up going with the mini tart pastries (which will most likely be filled with apple and/or sour cherry) and orange cookies.

This free event is sponsored by Largehearted Boy and will feature both Alina and musician/author John Wesley Harding reading and performing music. Come on down, get some culture and try some of the baked goods! You can RSVP here on Facebook and I look forward to meeting you!

Lemon Meringue Cupcakes

Posted on May 22, 2011 by Kiesha

A couple of weeks ago I finally decided it was time to bust out one of my favorite recipes; Lemon Meringue Cupcakes. I don’t make them often because they are fairly labor intensive, but the craving had reached astounding proportions and I knew it was time to whip up some lemon curd and get to business.

I took these to work, where they were devoured in seconds flat. The best response came from one of the women in my office who ate hers and then left a note for me on my desk:

The recipe comes from Culinary in the Desert and hasn’t failed me yet. I highly recommend giving this one a try. But you’ll have to do your very best to not just stand in front of your refrigerator, eating the lemon curd as it cools. It’s incredibly addicting.

Ginger Oatmeal Cookies

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Kiesha

It’s been a whole month since I’ve baked something. And you know what? It’s been kind of awesome. But the baking itch hit hard this weekend and I knew it was time to do something about it. Brownies sounded really good, but they required an hour of baking and then two hours of cooling before they could be eaten, and I wanted to something that I could bake and then take out of the oven and put directly into my mouth.

I flipped through a few cookbooks and found the winner inThe Dessert Bible. Oatmeal cookies. Chewy, homey and didn’t even require a mixer. Perfect.

I am not a raisin fan, so I was really glad to see the Ginger variation, which omitted the raisins and added 3/4 teaspoon ginger to the mix.

The cookbook recommends taking these cookies out of the oven after only 15 minutes of baking, at which point they will look pale and underdone. Taking them out at this point ensures that the cookies will turn out crispy on the edges and chewy in the middle. It totally worked. You couldn’t remove the cookies from the cookie sheet with a spatula when they came out of the oven, but it was worth the work of transferring the whole cookie-laden parchment paper to a cooling rack. These cookies are delicious.