New England Spider Cake

Christmas brought a few unexpected delights this year, including discovering this decorated tree during a stroll through Hendrick's Park. Another treat was this New England Spider Cake that we had for a late Christmas breakfast (after fortifying ourselves earlier with stollen). I adapted this recipe, using corn flour, polenta, and soft white flour from our newest CSA installment from Lonesome Whistle Farm, and we ate it topped with poached quince. This cake is just the thing to slip in the oven, along with a tray of bacon, to bake while opening presents. The final dish is a kind of cornmeal spoon bread, and apparently gets is name from the spidery cracks emanating from the center of cream, which is itself an unexpected custardy treat.

New England Spider Cake

adapted from Jonathan Reynolds from NYT Cooking

1/2 cup corn flour (I used Lonesome Whistle Farm's corn flour)
1/2 cup coarse corn meal (I used Lonesome Whistle Farm's polenta)
3/4 cup all-purpose flour (I used Lonesome Whistle Farm's soft white wheat)
1/2 cup sugar
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
2 cups buttermilk
2 eggs
2 tablespoons butter
1 cup heavy cream

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and place a 12-inch cast iron skillet in the oven to warm.  Combine corn flour, cornmeal, flour, sugar, baking soda and salt. Whisk eggs into the buttermilk. Stir into dry ingredients and set batter aside.

2. Remove the skillet from the oven and melt the butter in the hot skillet. Pour in the batter. Pour the cream into the center, slide the skillet into the oven and bake until golden brown on top, about 45 minutes. Slice into wedges and serve warm.

Holiday Scents and Poached Quince

Our house smells like Christmas. It's making me giddy with anticipation for the holidays, and thoroughly distracted from all the end of term grading I should be doing. Last weekend my daughter and I visited Sweetwater Farm (home of the rusty dragon above), and learned how to make wreaths from a bounty of evergreen boughs twisted onto frames of poplar branches. When we brought home our masterpieces, the fresh pine smells of these wreaths enveloped the house and suddenly all I wanted to do was bake stollen and Christmas cookies.

The major baking projects will have to wait until I get my grading done, but today I poached a couple of lovely quince from our Good Food Easy CSA.

The fragrance that filled the house was heavenly, and I can't wait to savor these rosy gems on top of waffles tomorrow morning.

Poached quince

2 quince
1 1/2 cup water
2 Tbsp honey (or more to taste)
1/2 tsp vanilla

1. Combine the water, honey, and vanilla in a sauce pan and bring up to a simmer.

2. Meanwhile peel, core and slice the quince into eighths. They are much harder than apples, so be careful. I found it easiest to use a vegetable peeled on cored quarters. Slide them into the simmering poaching liquid as you slice them.

3. Cover the pan, turn to low, and cook at a very gentle simmer for an hour, until the quince are very soft and rosy. The quince can be stored in their poaching liquid in the refrigerator for a week or so. They make delicious toppings for waffles, pancakes, yogurt, or rice pudding. 

Elin's Farmor's Limpa

Our baking traditions this season include German Christmas stollen and cookies for Santa such as Swedish rye cookies, hazelnut cloud cookies, award-winning buckwheat cocoa nib cookies, and rugelach (because why shouldn't Santa enjoy a Jewish treat). This year, as an addition to our Swedish Smörgasbord, I made limpa, a Swedish rye bread from Elin England's new book Further Adventures in Eating Close to Home: Beans, Grains, Nuts and Seed. 

This is a dense bread full of fragrant spices and orange rind, with just a hint of sweetness. I used our new crop of rye and wheat flours from our Lonesome Whistle Farm CSA. Today the aromas of freshly baked yeast bread, anise, fennel, and cardamom mingled throughout the house with the excitement of anticipation for Christmas.

Elin's Farmor's Limpa

from Further Adventures in Eating Close to Home: Beans, Grains, Nuts and Seed

2 packages (4 1/2 tsp) yeast
1 1/2 cups warm water (about 100 degrees F)
1/4 cup molasses
1/4 cup sugar
1 Tbsp salt
1 tsp each: fennel seed, anise seed, and cardamom seed, pulverized together in a spice grinder or with a mortar and pestle
Grated rind of 2 oranges
2 Tbsp soft butter
2 1/2 cups rye flour
2 1/2 cups whole wheat flour

In a large mixing bowl, sprinkle the yeast and a pinch of sugar over the warm water, and stir until it is dissolved. Set in a warm place for 5 to 10 minutes to proof the yeast.

When the surface is nice and bubbly, add the molasses, sugar, salt, spices, orange rind, and butter. Stir in the rye flour, then when thoroughly blended, mix in the whole wheat flour, a cup at a time.

When the dough is too stiff to work in the bowl, turn it out onto a counter or breadboard dusted with flour and knead until the dough is satiny, about 10 minutes.

Place the dough in an oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap or a tea towel, set in a warm place, and let rise until doubled, about 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

Punch down and let rise again, until doubled, about 1 hour.

Punch down yet again and divide the dough in two. Shape each half into a round loaf, then place both loaves on an oiled baking sheet. Cover with a tea towel and let rise until doubled, about an hour.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Bake for 35 minutes. When the loaves come out of the oven, brush the tops with melted butter and let cool on a wire rack.

Enjoy warm out of the oven or toasted and slathered with butter.

Holiday Gift Ideas and Homemade Kettle Corn

If you are looking for inspiration for holiday gifts, you don't need to look far from home. This weekend, head over to the Lane County Farmers Market next to the Eugene Holiday Market for some great finds. For beginning and experienced cooks alike, I recommend Elin England's new book Beans, Grains, Nuts and Seeds: Further Adventures in Eating Close to Home, which is a treasure trove of recipes including such gems as her famous Elkdream bars. You can pick up copies at the Lonesome Whistle Farm booth (or find it at local sellers, such as Tsunami Books).

While at the Lonesome Whistle Farm stall, check out Kasey White's line of Cultivation jewelry, which celebrates the natural kaleidoscope of colors in their heirloom beans and corn.

And pick up a bag of Lonesome Whistle Farm's Dakota black popcorn. It make delicious kettle corn, which I recently discovered is easy to cook at home (recipe below). Keep browsing and you'll find the perfect item for everyone on your list: homemade jams, pickles, fudge, or a rosy apple for the bottom of a stocking. Let's support our farmers this holiday season.

Kettle Corn

recipe from food52

Serves 4 to 6

1/4 cup neutral oil (like vegetable)
1/2 cup popcorn kernels
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon coarse salt, or to taste

Heat oil in a large pot over medium heat until hot. Add 3 popcorn kernels and cover. When these pop, dump in the rest of the kernels and the sugar, and stir to coat. Cover the pot, and shake it frequently until the popping becomes much less frequent. The minute you hear that, take it off the heat so as not to burn. Turn the kettle corn out onto a parchment-lined tray for the sugar to dry -- and before it does, sprinkle generously with salt.

Hazelnut Cloud Cookies

With all the anticipation and preparations for the holidays, it's hard not to feel a little bit disappointed with the actual event, as my daughter did when the promised Christmas snowfall in Boston yielded only enough for this miniature snowman peeking quizzically around the porch pillar of my childhood home. We all have our hopes for the holidays and each celebration will only be an approximation of those expectations. My son had covered his bases with his list for Santa Claus: "a magic wand and some money", but got neither, while I suspect that my daughter's fervent wish was simply to be able to believe in Santa Claus for one more year, a tall order when Santa had to navigate between Eugene and Boston and between antithetical German and American Christmas traditions.  

Ensconced here in the artifacts of my childhood, I couldn't help pine for the incomparable flavors of the homemade German Christmas cookies we used to receive each year from my grandmother's home in Franconia, half of them crushed into an etherial mixture of sweet, nutty, buttery crumbs that I used to scoop and gobble by the handful. In a post-holiday attempt to perk up my daughter and recreate some of those flavors, I tried this recipe for powdery nut cookies, similar to her favorite pecan cloud cookies from the Eugene City Bakery.

The cookies are made from a simple butter dough sweetened with powdered sugar and packed with ground nuts (back in Eugene, I would use our supply of hazelnuts from Thistledown Farm). This batch served as an accompaniment to a tea party with toy china my son unearthed from my old bedroom. As we nibbled our dainty nut clouds, real snow clouds gathered in the afternoon sky and by bedtime enough snow had accumulated to ensure that real-sized snowmen will be built tomorrow. 

Hazelnut Cloud Cookies

adapted from Epicurious via Smitten Kitchen

makes about 4 dozen cookies

1 cup (2 sticks) butter at room temperature, cut into cubes

1/2 cup powdered sugar for the dough and about 1 1/2 cups for coating

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 cup hazelnuts (or use pecans or walnuts or a combination of nuts)

2 cups all purpose flour

1/8 tsp cinnamon (optional)

1. In a dry skillet or a toaster oven, lightly toast the nuts until fragrant. If using hazelnuts, roll them in a dishtowel to remove most of their skin. Combine the nuts and the flour in a food processor and blend into a fine powder (including the flour will prevent the nuts from turning into nut butter). Remove the nut flour to a bowl.

2. Put the butter in the food processor and process until well-creamed. Add the 1/2 cup powdered sugar and vanilla extract and process to incorporate. Now add the nut flour and process into a stiff dough. Transfer the dough back into the nut flour bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and chill for at least 30 minutes.

3. Prior to baking the cookies, preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Cover two baking pans with parchment paper or silicone mats. Scoop out large teaspoons of dough, roll them into 1 inch balls in your palms, and place them on the baking sheets in about three rows and four columns. Place in the oven. Chill the remaining half of the dough while the first batch of cookies bake. After 10 minutes, rotate the baking sheets 180 degrees and from top to bottom oven rack. Remove the cookies after about 18 minutes, when their bottoms are golden brown and their tops are pale golden.

4. Let the cookies cool on the rack for about five minutes. Fill a shallow bowl with 3/4 cup powdered sugar, and mix in cinnamon, if using. Roll each cookie in the powdered sugar and transfer to a serving plate. If you like, sift the remaining powdered sugar over the cookies to give them a final dusting. Bake the second batch of cookies as above (or you can store the dough to bake later). These cookies store well at room temperature in an airtight container for several days.

Swedish Rye Cookies

My son, born four years ago on Winter Solstice, is the antithesis of winter. From the moment he arrived, he has been a fiery ball of energy with the sunniest of personalities. Defying the laws of Mendel, he seems to have inherited only his father's Swedish genes, and has a head of white blond hair the color of a field of grain in the height of summer. With a new supply of rye flour from Lonesome Whistle Farm, I recruited my little Swede to help me test out this recipe for Swedish rye cookies from 101 Cookbooks.

The recipe calls for a combination of butter and cream cheese, which gives the final cookies a pleasantly tart flavor. The dough was quite easy to work with, and in no time we had a herd of reindeers.

The poor things never knew what hit them when they encountered my son's blizzard of colored sugars. Luckily, the cookies themselves are not too sweet and could stand the heavy drifts of decoration. We all liked the subtle rye flavor and we think Santa will too. These will definitely become part of our regular holiday baking repertoire.

Swedish Rye Cookies

from 101 Cookbooks

1 cup (106 g) rye flour (from Lonesome Whistle Farm)

1 cup (120 g) pastry flour (such as soft white winter wheat flour from Camas Country Mill)

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup (113 g) cream cheese, at room temperature

1/2 cup (113 g) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1/2 cup (100 g) fine sugar

1. Sift together the flours and salt.

2. In a mixer or food processor, cream together the cream cheese, butter, and sugar until very smooth. Then combine in the flour mixture, but avoid over-mixing. Gather the dough into a ball, flatten into a disc, cover with plastic wrap, and chill in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes.

3. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Roll out the dough to about 1/4 inch thickness and cut into shapes. Place on parchment paper-covered cookie sheets and dust with colored sugar. Bake for about 10 minutes until just golden around the edges. At this point you can dust them with powdered sugar, if they haven't already been thoroughly sugared.


Other recipes for locally grown grains
Barley Risotto with Grilled Vegetables
Buckwheat Blini
Buckwheat Crepes
Gluten-Free Waffles
Quinoa Salad with Roasted Beets and Kale
Teff Grain and Ricotta Pancakes with Apple Topping
Wheatberry Tabbouleh with Green Beans and Feta
Wheatberries with Snap Peas

Christmas Baking

What I look forward to most about Christmas is all the excitement and preparations leading up to the actual holiday, and best of all the smells of holiday baking. I especially love the yeasty fragrance of Christmas stollen baking in the oven. This holiday bread is laden with dried fruits, almonds, and butter, so that the yeast has a Herculean task in making the dough rise. My mother always gets trans-Atlantic tips and encouragement from her family in Germany since her stollen dough is several time zones behind. One year my parents did the stollen baking with friends, and while my father diligently kneaded his half of the dough, their friend gave his half a few perfunctory pats in between sips of Gluhwein. I distinctly remember when the two loaves came out of the oven: one nicely plump and the other sadly flat. I was outraged when my parents felt compelled to claim the flat one as theirs and my mother pretended to chastise my father for his poor kneading effort. With a food processor, the kneading is a lot easier, but we had to adapt our standby recipe from the Joy of Cooking (the 1975 edition) to fit into the machine: using 2/3 of the original recipe and preparing this in two batches.

The first thing to do to coax the yeast along is to mix it with warm milk until it's dissolved and frothy.

The buttery dough has just enough flour to come together in a ball,

which you leave in a warm place to rise until it's doubled in bulk.

Then you have to knead in the goodies: toasted almond slivers, and fruit. Over the years, our family has dropped the candied fruit and settled on plain raisins, plumped up in a little warm water, as the nicest accompaniment to the yeasty crumb, but one can add any variety of candied or dried fruit. It's always a challenge to get these incorporated into the dough, which seems to shed raisins like an overexcited labrador sheds fur.

Now this heavily laden dough, shaped into loaves, needs to rise again, and this time the best strategy is to proof it: cover the loaves with a clean dish towel and nestle them in the oven with a pan of steaming hot water underneath. (Just don't forget about them and start preheating the oven for cookies). Finally, after a day of pampering, the dough is baked until golden brown, and covered with a snowfall of confectioner's sugar. This is the perfect treat for Christmas morning to tide everyone over while the presents are unwrapped.

Of course, one wouldn't expect Santa to deliver any presents if he weren't rewarded for his troubles with a plate of home baked cookies. In our household, we've developed the tradition of leaving Santa a Jewish delicacy: rugelach. They are fun for kids to make, and Santa seems to like them because they always get eaten. The recipe comes from Mollie Katzen's Enchanted Broccoli Forest cookbook, which uses cottage cheese for a surprisingly malleable and ultimately flaky dough. She gives a number of filling suggestions, but our favorite is hazelnuts and chocolate with cinnamon sugar.

The trick is to freeze the chocolate chips so that they don't melt while being pulverized into a coarse crumb.

Then you roll out the dough, sprinkle on the filling, and slice it like a pizza.

Roll the cookies from the center to the outside, and sprinkle any shed filling over the assembled cookies.

Then bake until golden brown. Make sure to reserve some for Santa before serving them for Christmas Eve dessert.

Christmas Stollen

adapted from the Joy of Cooking

1 cup (2 sticks) butter

5 cups flour, plus more for handling the dough

1 cup milk, just below scalding

2 Tbsp + 3/4 tsp (3 packages) yeast

1/2 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 cup toasted slivered almonds

1 1/2 cup dried or candied fruit, including or exclusively raisins plumped in warm water and drained.

1. Dissolve the yeast in the warm milk. Prepare the dough in 2 batches in a food processor, combining the butter, sugar, and egg, then mixing in the flour and pouring in the yeast mixture while the processor is running. If the dough is too sticky to handle, add a little more flour. Combine the two batches, cover, and allow to rise in a warm place for several hours, until doubled in bulk.

2. Knead in the nuts and fruit, using a little more flour if the dough is too sticky. Shape into two loaves and place on greased cookie sheets. Cover with clean dish towels and place in the oven beneath a pan of steaming hot water. Allow to rise several hours until doubled in size.

3. Remove the dough, preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and bake the loaves for about 45 minutes until they are golden brown and sound hollow when tapped with a finger nail. Cool on a rack. Dust with confectioner sugar. Serve slices as is or toasted.

Rugelach

adapted from Mollie Katzen

for the dough

1/2 cup (1 stick butter)

1 cup cottage cheese

1 1/3 cup flour, and more for handling

1/4 tsp salt

for the filling

1/4 cup hazelnuts

1/4 cup chocolate chips, frozen

scan 1/4 cup sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

1. Chop the filling ingredients in a food processor until they have the consistency of a coarse crumb. Reserve.

2. Wipe out the food processor and prepare the dough, processing the ingredients until they come together into a ball. If the dough is very sticky, add a little more flour. Remove the dough and shape into two balls. Wrap in plastic wrap or a silicone baking mat and chill  for a few minutes. 

3. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Remove one dough ball from the refrigerator, roll into about a 12 inch diameter circle, sprinkle with half of the filling, and slice into 12 slices. Roll each slice from the center to the perimeter and place on an ungreased cookie sheet. Sprinkle any filling that fell out over the rolled cookies. Prepare the second ball like the first. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes until golden brown.

Merry Christmas!