Shabbat Dessert Roundup Part 2: Chocolate Bundt

I’ve taken to making a backup dessert when I am nervous that my Plan A will fail. Considering how the plum galette almost turned out, I’m glad I did. Uncertain about how, fruit (Gasp) would be received, I opted to make a Chocolate Bundt Cake just in case. Simple and easy to put together, this Chocolate cake is really the old Hellman’s Chocolate Cake , a cake that contains, that’s right, mayonnaise—which is just eggs and oil, if you think about it- for added moistness. The cake did turn out light and chocolatey and supremely moist, just like I like it. Baked in my personal favorite, the design on the fly pan , the bundt, dessert was ready as soon as the cake was turned out. You can definitely glaze the cake, or just simply dust with powdered sugar and it makes a lovely accompaniment to tea or coffee. I’m glad that I tested it and it certainly does turn out an excellent cake, but I most likely will make this only if I have mayonnaise that I need to get rid of, as the case was this past weekend. Otherwise I’ll stick with my mom’s tried and true recipe. But that’s for a later post.

Chocolate Bundt Cake
from Hellman's

2 cups all-purpose flour
2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1-1/4 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. baking powder
3 eggs
1-2/3 cups sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 cup mayonnaise
1-1/3 cups water

Preheat the oven to 350. Thoroughly grease a bundt pan or two nine inch pans. Set aside.
Place the flour, cocoa, and leavener in a bowl. Whisk until well combined.Make a well in the mixture, and add the eggs,mayonnaise,and sugar,whisking to combine. Take care not to overmix.Pour the hot water over the batter,and mix thoroughly to combine. The batter will be loose. Pour the batter into the greased pan and place in the oven. Bake for around 40 minutes for the bundt, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Remove to a wire rack to cool completely. When the cake is completely cool, turn it out of its pan onto a wire rack. Move to a serving plate. Dust with powdered sugar or cocoa or glaze if desired.

Shabbat Dessert Roundup Part 1: Vanilla Scented Plum Galette

A couple of weekends ago, I was invited by my friend’s sister E to dinner at her apartment. I asked her what I could bring and she asked me to bring dessert. Of course, I willingly obliged. Having newly acquired the excellent book, Rustic Fruit Desserts, I was anxious to put it to use. After thumbing through it, I realized that living in Israel poses a problem. Fruit seasons aren’t the same as they are in America, making a number of the fruit combinations, and therefore the recipes, impossible to reproduce here. For example, the season for strawberries isn’t at the same time as the other berries, which aren’t even grown here. That being the other issue- a lot of fruits aren’t really available here, such as rhubarb, a big focal point of the book, and various berries. I did manage to find a simple recipe utilizing plums, which are at their peak season right now in Israel. The recipe is Vanilla Scented Plum Galette, an open faced tart sweetened with vanilla scented sugar and thickened with cornstarch. Of course, no matter how I try to succeed with my desserts for Shabbat, I always have at least one disaster- and this was it, although thankfully, this dessert was salvaged. I had successfully made dough and assembled a beautiful galette. Before baking, I placed it in the freezer to firm up. Apparently, not freezing it long enough coupled with not piling the fruit in the center enough equaled the galette edges opening up and leaking juice everywhere. The juice leaked all over the parchment and pan (but cleaned up easily because it was nonstick!!!). The galette was a bit….. rustic looking, I’ll say, but by the taste of the juice and a bit of plum that I nabbed, was quite delicious. After much deliberation, I decided I would serve it after all in all its rustic glory. Truth be told, I thought it was delicious, albeit, not quite as vanilla-ey as I would have liked after sacrificing a precious vanilla bean. The filling turned soft and jammy, perfectly highlighting the plums. Although this galette turned out far better than the last one I made about a year ago, I’m still dead set on achieving a picture perfect one.

Rustic Plum Galette
from Rustic Fruit Desserts

1 disc pie or galette dough
3/4 cup sugar
seeds scraped from half of a vanilla bean, or substitue vanilla bean paste
1 tbsp cornstarch
1/2 tsp fine sea salt
1 1/2 pounds plums, pitted and sliced into eighths

Before you begin, have your pie or galette dough ready made. Allow it to rest at room temperature to make it easier to roll out.Rub together the sugar and vanilla seeds.Add the cornstarch and salt and rub in to combine.

The lovely plums.

Sprinkle all but two tablespoons of the sugar mixture over the plums,and stir to combine. Allow to sit so the fruit can release their juices.Place the dough on a sheet of parchment. Roll the dough out to a 13-14 inch circle. Sprinkle the dough with the remaining two tablespoons sugar.

Pile the fruit into the center of the dough, taking care to make sure that there is a good inch and a half of dough surrounding it. Placing it in the center as much as possible will ensure that it doesnt leak out, as it did for me.

Fold up the dough around the fruit. Overlapping makes it nice and rustic. See the spot on the left where I didnt leave enough dough? I was just asking for a leak.. Place the parchment with the galette onto a baking sheet and put in the freezer for no less than twenty minutes. This is very important as it solidifies the fat in the dough making sure it doesnt melt right away and weaken the structure and make a mess in the oven. Dont skip this step, especially if your kitchen is as warm as mine. While the galette is in the freezer, preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Bake for 30 minutes. Reduce the temperature to 350 and bake another 20-25 minutes. Cool on a wire rack completely. Or serve warm and with ice cream for a nice contrast.

See? I told you it was rustic.

Sourdough Pancakes

With newly acquired sourdough starter comes the newly acquired dilemma of what to do with all of the discard that results from the culture’s maintenance feedings. I’ve previously tried Sourdough Chocolate Cake, which is due to be taken for another whirl, and Banana Bread with Sourdough but I hadn’t tried pancakes or waffles, quite surprisingly. So after finding this recipe in the Baker’s Companion for Pancake Waffles I decided to make them, making them as pancakes instead, as the recipe allows. The recipe requires you to make a sponge well ahead of time, or if you’re a bit impulsive, at least a couple of hours before, to allow the sourdough to develop. To that batter, eggs and oil and some baking soda are added. They’re pretty much basic pancakes, just with the extra step of preparing the sponge. The result was a nice, sturdy pancake that served as the focal point of a dinner with friends. Truthfully, there was only a slight, barely noticeable tang and that could have very well been attributed to the buttermilk. Nonetheless, these were good pancakes, as pancakes always are and I used up discard! I served and enjoyed these with honey, which is just as good if not better than maple syrup. Sacrilegious, I know. This batter yielded a tremendous amount of pancakes, leaving a nice portion of the next day’s breakfast.

Sourdough Pancakes
from KAF Baker's Companion

Sponge:
2 cups flour
2 tablespoons sugar
2 cups buttermilk
1 cup sourdough starter, not fed

Batter:
Sponge
2 large eggs
1/4 cup vegetable oil
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda

Begin making the sponge the night before or at least a few hours before. In a bowl, place the dry sponge ingredients in a bowl,and whisk to combine.Add the buttermilkand blend.Add the sourdough starter,and blend until smooth. Set aside to develop overnight or a few hours, as much as you can afford. When you're ready to assemble the rest of the batter, place all of the liquid batter ingredients into a container,
and whisk to combine.Pour this over the sponge mixture,and stir. Right before you cook add the baking soda. Preheat a pan or a griddle.Cook the cakes until they bubble and then flip them over. Cool until brown.
Pile them on and enjoy any time of day!

Muffin Mondays: Chocolate Chip Muffins

It's been a long time since I've posted, but not for lack of things to post. Trust me, I have a backlog of things waiting to be posted. It's also not because I've lost interest-- on the contrary, I log on every day to check out the blog. So why have I been a stranger? Well, for the past two weeks, I have been in the south of Israel working for my "adopted" family while they are working on a program. The internet in the house is practically nonexistent, save for a couple of bars that go in and out. Pretty unreliable. Needless to say, it's almost impossible to upload photos. To my shock and surpise, I managed to get these few photos up and so I'm posting. These are the Mini Chocolate Chip Muffins that I made when I went to Jerusalem on a day off to hang out with A. It was quite fun. We went to a bead store and made each other keychains, watched Friends and a movie. I baked pizza for dinner (my first opportunity to bake in two weeks!!) and decided to make a late night snack, these muffins, with what she had around in her apartment cupboards. This recipe is adapted from the excellent Israeli book on chocolate called, More Chocolate. They are made with cream, and are therefore extremely decadent, but you can feel free to substitute milk. I made these muffins mini in her silicone muffin pan. I must say though that I can't stand silicone and I wouldnt recommend it to anyone. It's hard to get the muffins out and they dont brown as well because they obviously lack the properties of metal. In any case, these were still delicious muffins, with a silky texture and a creamy flavor. They are so yummy, rich and delicate that you could easily bake the batter in a greased cake pan and call it a cake. Although the batter is assembled as a quick bread, it is fairly loose, which results in the lovely crumb. Cake-like, indeed.

Mini Chocolate Chip Muffins
adapted from More Chocolate

280 grams flour
180 grams sugar
15 grams baking powder
chocolate chips
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
250 ml cream
1/4 cup milk
50 ml oil

Preheat the oven to 350. Grease well two mini muffin pans or one regular pan. Dont use silicone!

In a bowl, combine all the dry ingredients,and whisk well to combine.Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients, and add the eggs, cream, milk and oil.

Blend well without overmixing. The resulting batter will be quite loose. That's ok. Scoop the batter as neatly as you can into the cups.

For mini muffins bake ten to fifteen minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Remove from the oven and cool five minutes. Remove the muffins from the cups and place on a wire rack to cool completely. Enjoy with friends or for a decadent breakfast!

Shabbat Dessert Roundup Part 3: Chocolate Chocolate Roulade

It's late, but I'm still awake. But this time it's my fault, really. Today was the day Jews around the world commemorated the destruction of the temple and we all fasted. Truth be told, there's not really much to be done, and due to the weakness and hunger and thirst and tiredness, I slept a lot. Therefore, I am not sleeping right now. And I knew what I was getting myself into! So to kill some time before I attempt sleep, or a rest, I'm posting the last dessert from last weekend, before the new roundup has to go up. This is the Chocolate Chocolate Roulade that I had planned to make for my Black and White Shabbat. Only, I never brought it to the meal because I felt that, to say the least, it wasn't aesthetically pleasing. When my dinner host, who's a boy heard this, he flipped out. It seems they truly don't care about what the food they eat looks like. But I do. So it didnt get served and instead I brought the Gingerbread Bundt. And saved the Chocolate Roulade for snack time with my friends. Which is truly a shame. Because it was awesome. I'm so stubborn sometimes when it comes to these things. But even I must admit. It was good. Really good. My friends and I had slices of it as the urge hit, straight from the freezer nice and cold. The reason why I couldnt serve it? Well, the heat made the cake moist and sticky as it cooled and melted the cream before I could roll the whole thing up. It was one mess best eaten with eyes closed. But once in the freezer no one was really the wiser. The cake recipe comes from King Arthur Flour's site and the cream was the cream used to fill the Chocolate Chocolate Tart.

Chocolate Cake
adapted from the KAF site

4 large eggs, room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon chocolate extract
2/3 cup flour
1/3 cup dutch-process cocoa
1 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 cup vegetable oil
6 tablespoons milk or cream

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a jelly roll pan with parchment. Set aside.

In a bowl, place the four eggs.
Beat until foamy.Add the sugar and extracts and beat until light and thickened.Add the dry ingredients and gently mix to combine.Add the oil and milk,and gently fold in to make a uniform batter.Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake for 10-12 minutes.Remove from the oven. Cool for two minutes. Dust the cake with powdered sugar. Roll up the cake using the parchment and set aside to cool completely. When ready to fill, unroll the cake. Mine shrunk a bit. Dollop the cream onto the cake,and spread evenly all over. Roll up the cake. Mine was beginning to crack and leak out so I had to cut it in half. I thought it would be helpful to cover it with remaining cream, but you can imagine what that looked like. But it's all gone now and none of it was wasted in the end. Sorry boys!