Image courtesy of www.joanne-eatswellwithothers.com

The internet is a great source for all things foodie, and we’re constantly bookmarking, starring, and emailing intriguing recipes, food porn, and inspiration. Here’s a selection of clippings we think are worth checking out.

Happy American Thanksgiving!  Means even MORE pumpkin… biscuits, savoury scones, a chiffon pie, and what looks to be a clear winner: baked pumpkin puddings.

Citrus isn’t my favourite, but something about this lemon vanilla cake makes me want it. Right now.

Raisins aren’t my favourite either, but I can only imagine how great these toasted raisin biscuits smell when they’re in the pan.

These little fig-anise swirls are listed as fall cookies, but I think they should grace every Christmas cookie plate.

Dan Dan noodles can be found at an array of restaurants here in Vancouver, from your traditional Chinese place to hip Japanese izakayas. Enjoying them as I do, I was happy to see my friend Sara shared her recipe.

Seeing as how I’ve been strongly suggesting pumpkin recipes in my Clippings posts of late, I thought I should finally get around to doing something with pumpkin. Hopefully this won’t be the last foray because I believe you can safely get away with cooking with pumpkin between September and December. Unsafely, I see no problem in pushing it all the way until Spring. I mean, pumpkin usually connotes warm and spicy. Why do those feelings have to end with Thanksgiving? In Canada, we need those feelings to keep us going through months and months of winter.

When I came across this easy easy easy chocolate chip pumpkin loaf, I knew I had the perfect Sunday afternoon task to make my coworkers love me on Monday morning. As I learned last year, pumpkin and chocolate are well-suited for each other. Chocolate gives your cold-weather pumpkin treat a little more engine power. It appears that magic happens when you add something sweet and rich like chocolate to baked goods of the vegetable variety. Think about cream cheese icing and carrot cake or zucchini bread and chocolate. They’re tricks to get us to eat our vegetables, sure, but are you complaining?

Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Loaf
Adapted from Big Girls Small Kitchen

1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 baking soda
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 can pureed pumpkin (~14-15 oz)
1 cup chocolate chips or chunks or chopped chocolate

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a loaf pan.
In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, baking powder, and soda. In another bowl, beat the eggs with the sugar, vanilla, and vegetable oil until thick. Fold the dry ingredients into the beaten mixture until well blended. Stir in the pumpkin, then add the chocolate. Pour into the prepared loaf pan and bake 1 hour, until it tests done with a toothpick or cake tester. Remove from the pan and cool completely on a rack.

Sandra making burek. Image courtesy of superfora.wordpress.com.

The internet is a great source for all things foodie, and we’re constantly bookmarking, starring, and emailing intriguing recipes, food porn, and inspiration. Here’s a selection of clippings we think are worth checking out.

A savoury Turkish pastry I often enjoyed at breakfast during my trip to Turkey was called börek. Happiness was me when I saw that my lovely friend Sandra over at Superfora provided the recipe for the Croatian cousin, burek.

Here in Vancouver, there’s a great Lebanese-inspired restaurant, Nuba, that has a popular fried cauliflower dish called Najib’s Special. This dish from Melissa Clark’s new cookbook, Cook This Now, reminds me of that dish and how amazing cauliflower can become with the right direction.

This hot raisin quickbread sounds too easy and too much like a poor man’s scone too ignore. (Because I’m not rich, and I love cinnamon-y scones!)

Autumn comfort food doesn’t always have to mean death to your waistline. Soothe your carb cravings with a polenta and swiss chard bake.

It’s still pumpkin season: What happens when you take the classic Chilean street snack, a sopapilla, and cross it with pumpkin cheesecake? Gourd greatness.

Image courtesy of www.zoomyummy.com

The internet is a great source for all things foodie, and we’re constantly bookmarking, starring, and emailing intriguing recipes, food porn, and inspiration. Here’s a selection of clippings we think are worth checking out.

Don’t balk at these “oven-fried” onion rings. They’re made with potato chips!

Tired of grilled cheese? How about some new-fangled cheese on toast?

I have no interest in trying to be like Heston Blumenthal at home. But, the idea of serving pumpkin soup in a bowl glistening with brown butter might get me thinking about trying.

Why wait for Halloween? You should totally make these homemade peanut butter cups this weekend.

And hooray! It’s time to eat all things pumpkin. Start with soft’n'spicy pumpkin snickerdoodles.

I had a vague notion of what a whoopie pie was when I started seeing more recipes pop up.  Like candy bars and soda, whoopie pies seem distinctly American to me.  I didn’t grow up hearing about or seeing any whoopie pies.  They weren’t at specialty bakeries or brought out at birthday parties.  From what I could tell, they were essentially a homemade sandwich cookie. I’ll always choose Chips Ahoy over Oreo, so the attraction was minimal.  But when I saw the enticing variations that cropped up via Lucy Waverman’s recipe in The Globe and Mail and Jeremy’s over at The Kitchen Front, I felt these were waters beyond chocolate and vanilla that I wanted to wade into.  After deciding to make a sweet treat for a Halloween gathering, I set my sights on Martha Stewart’s chocolate-pumpkin version as I had some leftover canned pumpkin at the ready.

All was going fine until I was ready to ice my pies.  I thought nothing of the puff my cookies held when coming out of the oven.  They would deflate upon cooling and I would have perfect little pies.  Not so.  No deflation.  No cooperative pies that would lay flat and look pretty. Oh, the science of baking.  There was some slight mismeasurement in my chemistry (baking) project, and my cookies rose too much.  A friend at the party was very excited to try one of my “pods.”  Alien-like or not, they were still pretty tasty.  And… when I saw that these tasty looking whoopie pies also came out as pods, I didn’t feel so bad.

Two bites in...

One bite in and you know you’re not dealing with just a sandwich cookie.  The texture of the cookies is very cake-like, and Martha’s batter did not disappoint with its rich, chocolate flavour.  The tang of the cream cheese in the icing was an appropriate complement to the rich cookies, and the pumpkin made you wonder why the chocolate-pumpkin combination has not been exploited further.  Black bottom pumpkin pie anyone?  My overarching thought on the pie, however, was that it was not a homemade sandwich cookie.  It is a reconfigured cupcake — a homemade cupcake sandwich.  A traditional cookie batter would likely just crumble with each bite.  Cake, not so much.  Does this mean we’ll soon see a whoopie pie shop on every corner?!

And yes, we are very happy to be celebrating our second birthday as Cream & Sugar.  Thank you very much for reading.

Chocolate-Pumpkin Whoopie Pies
adapted from Martha Stewart

1 3/4 cups all purpose flour
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon coarse salt
1/4 cup + 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar
1 large egg
1 cup whole milk
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

4 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
1/2 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup icing sugar
1/4 cup canned pumpkin
1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon
Pinch of nutmeg

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Sift together flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt into a medium bowl; set aside.
Beat butter and sugars with a handheld mixer in a large bowl. Mix on high speed until smooth, about 3 minutes. Add egg; mix until pale and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Mix in half the flour mixture, then the milk and vanilla. Mix in remaining flour mixture.
Drop about 1 tablespoon amounts of dough onto baking sheets lined with parchment paper, spacing 2 inches apart. Bake until cookies spring back when lightly touched, 12 to 14 minutes. Transfer baking sheets to wire racks and let cool 10 minutes. Remove cookies from baking sheets and transfer to wire racks using a spatula; let cool completely.
Whip together cream cheese, butter and icing sugar on medium speed until smooth, about 3 minutes. Add pumpkin, cinnamon, and nutmeg; whip until smooth, scraping down the bowl as necessary. Spoon about 2 teaspoons filling on the flat sides of half the cookies. Sandwich with remaining cookies.  Makes about 15-18.

Still life with pie

It’s almost shameful that I haven’t done a full post on pumpkin pie until now.  And now being almost six weeks post-Thanksgiving.
The almost stays as is because I could eat pumpkin pie all year long.  So there’s never a wrong time to post about my love for that most un-pretty pie. Yes, pumpkin pie.  That once-a-year treat made from a vegetable that rarely breeds excitement.  Except in me.
I can tell you exactly why:  it’s a pie, it’s basically a custard, it’s spicy, it’s not served hot, and it’s best served with whipped cream.  Oh, and there’s no chocolate.  I’m not sure why it took almost thirty years for me to realize that we were a match made in heaven.

With Disney’s version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow always being a favourite, I must have subconsciously been cultivating my obsession for pumpkin since the early 80s.  For soups, pastas, bars and muffins, I’ve been known to pop open a can or two or point my finger in that direction on a menu.  I always come back to the pie though.  And fall is the best season not (only) because of the return to coats and boots, but because from early October until late November, I’m pretty much guaranteed that pumpkin pie will be on every dessert menu. Yes. Please.

I’m always more than happy to eat someone else’s, especially if they’ve gone to the trouble of actually carving up a sugar pumpkin, but I’m also more than happy to make my own.  Over the past five years or so, the following recipe for the filling has been my standard.  It always comes out perfect and has a great texture, almost like a cheesecake.  As my pastry skills were non-existent back in the day, I’ve always done a crumb crust.  Sometimes with graham crumbs, other times with crushed ginger snaps.  Both are excellent and add an extra layer of flavour.

I had been pondering what an oatmeal cookie crust might be like when I came across a posting on Bobby Flay’s Throwdown pumpkin pie.  You know the show?  Slick Bobby (read: his two chefs) tries to outdo regular folk on their beloved classic recipes and never seems to win. *Cue producers’ credit.*  What intrigued me about his recipe was not that HE TOO does a crumb crust, but that he tops his pie with what amounts to a crushed oatmeal cookie.  I patted myself on the back for my good pondering.  Following a lovely dinner of Melissa Clark’s white bean and sausage stew, I would be serving up my pumpkin pie with some cinnamon crunch to a old friends.  Still November, still allowable without looking obsessed.

The crunch was exactly that and became a fourth texture to play off of the rich crumb, pumpkin middle and crown of cream.  The cream! I can’t forget to tell you about my Throwdown whipped cream.  Secret:  brown sugar.  A friend told me about the magic of brown sugar cream a few years ago, and I’ve never looked back.  Sometimes, I’d be alright just eating a bowl of the cream and saving the pie for another day.  But as that’s less socially acceptable than adoring pumpkin pie and I have jeans to fit in, it hasn’t happened yet.

In conclusion, I think as you are safe to make pumpkin pie for at least two more weeks without feeling weird about it, you should try my pie, with my cream and Bobby’s crunch.  I won’t hold it against you if you eat it at room temperature, but I think it’s best slightly cold and with as much cream as you can handle.

Breakfast of champions

Crumb crust

2 cups of graham crumbs, or crushed cookie of your choice (finely crushed)
1/2 cup  of melted butter
1/3 cup of sugar

Mix crumbs, butter and sugar together and pat onto bottom and sides of pie plate.  Bake for 10 minutes at 400 degrees or until lightly golden.  Cool completely.

Cinnamon crunch
adapted from Bobby Flay

1/4 cup of oats
1/4 cup of flour
1/4 cup of brown sugar
3 1/2 tablespoons of butter, chilled and cut into small cubes
1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon

Cut butter into flour, sugar, oats and cinnamon until coarse crumbs form (processor or fingers).  Pat mixture into a square about 1/4-inch thick on a parchment-lined baking sheet.  Bake for 15 minutes at 350 degrees.  Cool “cookie” completely.  Break into small pieces with your hand.  Store for later.

Pumpkin pie
adapted from Bon Appetit

1 15-ounce can pure pumpkin
1 14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk
1/4 cup sour cream or plain full-fat yogurt
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
3/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 large eggs

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Whisk pumpkin, condensed milk, sour cream, cinnamon, ginger, vanilla, and nutmeg in large bowl to blend. Whisk in eggs. Pour into crust (some filling may be left over).

Bake pie until filling is puffed around sides and set in center, about 55 minutes. Cool pie on rack. (Can be made ahead. Let stand at room temperature 2 hours, or cover and chill overnight.)

Brown sugar cream

3 tablespoons brown sugar
1 cup of whipping cream
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

A few hours before you will whip cream, mix the sugar with the cream (I always put the sugar into the cream carton).  It needs time to melt into the cream.
Whip the cream and sugar until soft peaks begin to form.  Add the vanilla and whip to desired thickness.

Pie. Cream. Crunch.  Done.

The Hardware Grill is one of Edmonton’s finest fine-dining establishments. But as Ms Sugar and I talked about on our recent visit, their plate sizes are a little on the hefty side.  If I’m going to have a night of luxe dining complemented by smooth wine and even smoother service, I want the experience to last.  Thus, a 3-course night is generally what’s planned for.  Unfortunately, at Hardware Grill 3 courses equals more than just loosening your belt.  The starters are easily the size of mains at other places, which is both a blessing and a curse.  The value is outstanding, but the even larger main that follows tests the size of your stomach.  The solution?  Two appetizers = enough room for dessert.

And that is what this post is really about.  Why choose to talk about dessert over the richness of duck confit or the velvety texture of pea ravioli?
Because the dessert in question was a pumpkin—you had me at pumpkin—tart.

Polenta crust?  Inventive and tasty but it could have been more tender.
Cinnamon ice cream?  Delish, but a tart is not the best for sopping up melted ice cream.  The traditional whipped cream would have been more successful.
Poached raw pear?  Trying to take a lady-like morsel of a raw pear with only a fork is not something I want to try again.
Fruit Saskatoon compote?  I am a big fan of Saskatoon pie.  Part of what makes the pie work is the crust and cream that soften the blow of the berry’s tartness and firm texture.  A mass of this compote just didn’t work with the pumpkin… or the raw pear… or the ice cream.
Pumpkin filling? Perfection.

Verdict:  An awkward mix of flavours and textures.
Worth $11?  Not even close.

Note to pastry chef:  Bake me a larger tart after you’ve perfected the crust and be sure to go heavy on the cream.

“There’s no such thing as too much cream,” says Cream.