Crisp Coconut Cookies

I dream of convection ovens the way some people dream of Bugatti Veyrons or Mazarati cars. The perfection realized in the way a Veyron hugs the road at high speeds is similarly attained in the perfection of baked goods that come from a convection oven. How does this occur, you might ask. If you've ever lived somewhere like Winnipeg, you understand wind chill. The genius of the convection oven lies in its use of the same physical phenomenon. It seems fitting that I should love something that harnesses the powers of a force that made me suffer for the powers of good.

My regular oven!

You may have gathered by now that I do not have a convection oven. There's a good chance you probably don't have one either. Never fear, it is still possible to bake lovely cookies in the regular sort of oven too! The secret to lovely, crumbly cookies with even edges is butter. How you handle the butter is critical to luscious cookie success.

First, make sure your butter is fresh. Like bread, butter can go stale, especially if it's exposed in your refrigerator. Butter should be about 65 degrees before you cream it with sugar. That means it's cool to the touch (and will take an imprint of your finger), but easy to spread. If it gets any warmer, you start messing with its delicate emulsion and then it's game over. The whole point of keeping butter cool is so that it can maintain structure for you.

If your butter melts, don't try re-freezing the butter and starting again. You can use this destroyed butter for frying potatoes. Lastly, keep your dough cool. Don't work it too much with your warm hands (people with permanently cold hands like mine, rejoice, for you have found a calling in forming cookies). If it seems to be warming up, put it in the freezer to cool it down. 

Crisp Coconut Cookies

125 g butter (one stick)
1 cup sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 egg
pinch salt
2 cups rice flour
1 cup dessicated coconut
extra sugar

1.  Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

2. Cream the butter in a bowl for approximately three minutes. The object of this game is to beat air bubbles into the butter. The baking powder will only work to expand these existing bubbles. If you're using an electric mixer, don't go past medium speed because otherwise, your butter will heat up.

3. Add in the sugar and beat until just combined. Combine the dry ingredients in a separate bowl and mix.

4. Take two or three tablespoons of sugar and spread it around in a small saucer. Take a teaspoon of the dough and roll it into a ball between the palms of your hands.

5. Flatten the dough to about 1/4 inch thickness. Dip one side of the cookie into the sugar. Place cookie, sugar side up, on a greased baking tray. You can avoid the grease by using Silpat.

6. Bake for 10 - 15 minutes on the middle rack. Gently loosen the baked cookies on the tray while still warm.

This is my favourite cookies to nibble while it's still warm, accompanied with a cup of tea. Do you have a favourite cookie? Let me know what it is :)

 

(yield 40)

Pickled beets and quilts

I had just finished photographing the newly completed sun-bathed back of my quilt when Tooley mentioned his recent batch of pickled beets.

I was moonlighting as a quilter at Tooley's family home in the posh 10 Mile Point area of Victoria. It's one of the times I get to vicariously enjoy the perks of being a propertied dog owner who lives out by the seaside. But back to the beets.

Beets. How I adore their shades of red and pink, their delectable candied texture when roasted, and their iron-y twang on my tongue after eating the second beet. I promise, absolutely promise to share my roasted beet salad with chevre and candied pecans with you. And a killer Tamil recipe for shredded beet called poriyal.

Tooley's pickled beets are a marvel of unconventionally canned perfection. Sweet and sour with a perfectly toothsome bite, they were too pretty to pass up for a photo op.

After nibbling on pickled beets, I finished photographing the top bit of my quilt. The quilt is a two year labour of love; it's made up of bits of fabric I picked up on my travels. I refuse to accept that quilting is an acceptable activity for middle aged ladies and grandmas. Quilting is a meditative exercise in discerning the algorithm of colours between pieces of cotton; mustering the precision and focus required for sewing the perfect 1/4 inch seam and cutting fabric.

Easy Peasy Pickled Beets

2 bunches small beets – scrub and trim ends
4 small onions – slice and separate rings
1/2 cup liquid set aside from boiled beets
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1/2 cup honey
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon cloves

Add just enough water to cover the beets and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down to a moderate setting boil for about 40 minutes. Add the onion slices and boil for another 5 minutes.

Drain out the beets and onions, and save a 1/2 cup of the liquid that you boiled them in.

Set the beets and onions aside, add the liquid, vinegar, salt, cinnamon, cloves and honey to a sauce pan and bring it to a boil.

Peel your beets and slice according to preference. Place the beets in a sanitized jar and pour the liquid over top. Leave them in the fridge for at least two days. The beets will keep for several months.

Special credit to Megan for sharing this recipe.

Orange Peel Liqueur

One of the legacies of my time spent as a sous chef is the pleasure I derive from a perfectly peeled apple or potato. There's something smugly satisfactory about a long unbroken line of curling peel. Maybe this is the closest I'll ever get to the sort of superior triumph one experiences after buying a Prius.

I experienced this sense of accomplishment a month ago when I peeled five oranges for my orange peel liqueur experiment. As I coiled the long peels into the jar in preparation for their meeting with 750 ml of vodka, I realized this marriage should be cemented with cloves.

The humble clove no longer gets the respect it once did. They are indigenous to what was once called the Spice Islands (now called the Malukus - a post about my trip there earlier this year is forthcoming). For well over a millenia, cloves were highly prized in Africa, Asia and Europe for their medicinal and aesthetic properties. Entire sultanates crumbled on account of these little flower buds. I considered the clove-studded orange pomander. Ten cloves were dropped into the jar.

I posed my orange liqueur next to the Hungarian pear liqueur I'm trying out this weekend. The pear liqueur is ambrosial and rounded without being cloying. However, the ingredient list does not inspire confidence.

Feeling somewhat concerned about the time I might have to invest in filtering the orange peel liqueur (it took me 12 hours to filter the cherry liqueur), I started the process off by straining the liqueur using cheesecloth. My friend finished this step off by testing his death grip on the peel-filled cheesecloth.

On the subject of orange peels, when you peel your oranges, use a vegetable peeler. The object is to avoid including the white pith as much as possible because the pith will impart bitterness to the liqueur.

I briefly considered filtering with paper towel but that felt like cheating. I can't even change hairdressers; it feels so much like cheating to me. I resigned myself to the rigors of the coffee filter.

Miraculously, it only took two hours to filter the entire jar, make one cup of simple syrup and mix the syrup in with the final product (I heated 1 cup of white sugar and 1/2 cup of water until it just barely boiled. Cool it down before adding).

Now, the wait recommences. Generally, a month is required to introduce citrus to liquor, and after filtering, the liqueur should age at least two months. The longer you wait, the better it gets.

Recipes in Translation

On this rainy October day, gentle readers, I remain in bed even though it is well into the early afternoon hours. I decided to bring you a recipe that has a dual purpose. Though this recipe is a demonstration of the gastronomic translation that occurs in my kitchen, it is also meant to transport the reader to a Sunday morning that involves a kitchen flooded with sunlight and the scent of warm, baked goods.

Long before gluten-free products became fashionable and everyone was drinking soy, almond or rice milk, the family doctor diagnosed me as being allergic to a list of things longer than there is blog space. A proper allergic sort of person that no amount of Lactaid or whatnot would fix. In time, I grew out of most of the allergies save for the allergies to wheat and its closest family members, as well as most forms of dairy that come from a cow - the biggest offenders being milk and cheese.

My mother, being an enterprising lady, used the rice-based Tamil and Malaysian fusion cuisine to compensate for this as I grew up. She also experimented with corn and rice flour to bake delightful cookies for me. Aside from the disgusting childhood engagement I was compelled to have with powdered soy milk that left me completely unable to drink soy milk straight, this left me with a key philosophy. The world is a wide place with many culinary traditions that provide countless alternatives. One should not despair on account of allergies.

I have found that friends and acquaintances who were diagnosed with allergies much later in life are often frustrated by what seems to be the loss of options and the limitations of substitutions that are often quite expensive. I suspect they feel cheated. While I still hold to the notion that seeking gastronomic alternatives is often the better choice, coming up with substitutions isn't such a bad thing either. Here's a recipe I adapted from Martha Rose Shulman. We ate these warm from the oven, slathered in peach marmalade made during the last days of summer.

Quinoa Walnut Muffins

Grind your own quinoa flour in a spice mill, or in my favourite, the stone mortar. I used red quinoa for these moist, not too sweet muffins.

1/2 cup ground flaxseed meal
1/2 cup rice flour
1/2 cup quinoa flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 large or extra large eggs
1/4 cup maple syrup or agave nectar
3/4 cup Balkan style yoghurt (Works so well! Or use 3/4 cup soy milk.You won't taste soy milk in this.)
1/4 cup canola oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup cooked quinoa
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees with a rack in the middle. Plop cupcake papers into 12 muffin cups. Otherwise, grease the tin. Mix together flours, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

2. In a medium bowl, beat together the eggs, maple syrup or agave nectar, yoghurt/soy milk, canola oil and vanilla. Quickly whisk in the flour mixture, then fold in the cooked quinoa and walnuts. Combine well.

3. Spoon into muffin cups, filling each two-thirds full. Bake 20 to 25 minutes until lightly browned. Cool in the tins for 10 minutes, then remove from the mold and cool on a rack.

Yield: Twelve muffins. They keep well for two days. If you want to keep them longer, pop them in the fridge or freeze them. If you end up cooking too much quinoa, don't fret because it freezes really well. I like to freeze it in one cup measurements.

Special credit to my sister, Amanda, for bequeathing her unopened packet of ground flaxseed meal to me when she moved several time zones away.

Botticelli's Second Toe

I strained and filtered a jar of bing cherry liqueur the other day. After several months of macerating and occasional shaken jar syndrome, I retrieved the hermetic jar from its hiding spot in the dark, recessed top of my tallest bookcase.

Cherry liqueur, left, and blueberry liqueur, right.

I shook the jar experimentally. The broody blood red colour was intriguing, but the liqueur no longer had the virginal clarity it had several months ago when the bathtub booze madness began.

At the height of this year's genteel Victorian summer (never hot, never quite cold), I was seized with the inclination to try my hand at making liqueur. I daydreamed of speakeasys; running my very own blind tiger where hot jazz plays until the wee hours. Being a woman of action, I tired of daydreaming and got down to the business of research.

I pored over śliwowica and schnapps recipes, read about the resurgence of vintage cocktails, and stumbled on Gunther Anderson's site. I collected my cherries, blueberries, sugar, little Italian hermetic jars and the cheapest vodka and gin I could find.

I felt confident with my fifteen years of canning experience. Give me fruit, give me sugar and I will give you something delectable. Then I realized I had started out the hard way. Working with liquor would have been the best way to ease into the world of all things canned as high proof alcohol creates a preservation-friendly environment the jelly maker has to work hard to create.



Rhubarb schnapps

But fruit, sugar and liquor? Ye gods. There is something about that trifecta that is undeniably akin to the perfection of Botticelli's second toe. 



Botticelli's second toe. The great Italian Renaissance master painted beautiful women with second toes that were longer than the first. Have a good look at The Birth of Venus. She's riding that half shell with second toes that are longer than her first toes. Historically equated with beauty, wisdom, and royalty, the longer second toe is also known as piede greco or Greek's foot.



My first liquor experiment with my parents' rhubarb started it all. My decision to elevate rhubarb from its humble status as playmate to apples in a crumble allowed it to assume new heights of noblesse in vodka. There was something mesmerizing about watching the fine legs of vodka run down the inside of the schnapps jar while the scarlet hue of the rhubarb slowly eased into a faint pink, its colour blushing into the sweet liquor sea around it.

C. Aiken for Luscious Domestic. Plum schnapps.

Not content with rhubarb alone, I boozed up unsuspecting blueberries, cherries, orange peel, and, at Aiken's suggestion, golden plums that were too ripe to eat in polite society.

Then the jars sat. I'd like to glibly say I forgot about them as most people seem to write in their own musings about making liqueur, but I was too curious. I'd check to see how the colour changed. I'd shake the jars.

Now after filtering the cherry liqueur, the jar has gone back to the top shelf to age for another few months. Using coffee filters proved to be very time consuming. However, as the end product boasted a colour and clarity even more sublime than its first incarnation, I felt its beauty was reason enough to tolerate the wait.

Bing Cherry Liqueur

3 lbs fresh or frozen cherries (must be good quality)
Cherry pits of half the cherries (1.5 lb)
10 whole black peppercorns
3 cups sugar
1.5 litres vodka (I like Wyborowa or Bols for this sort of thing)

Method

• Pit the cherries and save the cherry pits. You may use frozen cherries, but thaw them out first. 
• Divide the cherries and sugar equally between two 2 quart jars. I like the hermetic ones, or ones made by Weck.
• Use a stone mortar or something equally durable to crack the cherry pits. Divide the pits and the peppercorns between the two jars. Shake the jars.
• Macerate in a dark place at room temperature for eight to ten weeks. Shake once in a while for first two weeks.
• After eight to ten weeks, strain liqueur using a cheesecloth to remove the larger solids. Do not squeeze fruit as this will ruin the clarity of your liqueur. You can squeeze your fruit to get every bit of liqueur out, but you'll be fussing with filters quite a bit more.
• Use a coffee filter or paper towel to filter your liqueur. Test for sweetness (if it isn't sweet enough, use this recipe for simple syrup). 
• Age the liqueur for another three to four months.