use real butter

Recipe: cranberry yogurt coffeecake

Our local sunset is now some time around 4:15 pm, because we have that giant wall of the Continental Divide as our western horizon. It sneaks up on you rather quickly and sometimes the best you can do is to admire it from the road or while you’re working or maybe even miss it altogether. But when it’s good it is awesome and I love watching the progression from yellow to orange to pink.

lighting up a wave cloud

turning orange

and pink

I’ve been spending time with my folks this week. They like to feed us when they are in Boulder. I think that’s a parent thing. I feel a little like a parent with my parents these days… bringing them groceries, making sure they have what they need, having them up to stay with us, planning outings that will be of interest, setting up play dates, and telling Dad when to use his inside voice.

dinner at mom and dad’s place

a visit to the denver art museum

seeing the fantastic “becoming van gogh” exhibit

[You really ought to see the Van Gogh exhibit at the Denver Art Museum if you are anywhere near the state of Colorado from now until January 20, 2013.]

It happens every year after Thanksgiving, that people post about eating their leftovers. I skip over much of it because I have a fairly cool relationship with turkey. But then there are the cranberries. I hoard cranberries. Organic whole cranberries only come around once a year and I buy several bags to store in my freezer. I love these tart little jewels and the brilliant color is simply mesmerizing. I make cranberry sauce for the sole purpose of having “leftover” cranberry sauce.

cranberries and sugar

just 15 minutes until you have…

cranberry sauce

A recipe for cranberry coffeecake caught my eye on the King Arthur Flour site over the weekend and I knew it was meant to be. Coffeecake says “casual” to me. Nothing fancy, but always good. I like the single pan dealio and love how versatile it is as a dessert, as a breakfast, for a snack, to go with tea and of course… coffee.

streusel ingredients: vanilla, butter, flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, salt

mix it together

crumbly goodness

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: chocolate cassata cake

It’s cake season. This means that it is cool enough for me to want to turn my oven on. It means that it is cool enough that I am willing to work with chocolate. Even so, making a cake can fill me with dread and be downright frustrating at times – mostly because of elevation issues. I’m always keen to try new recipes, but hate the idea of wasting time, energy, money, and good wholesome ingredients on cakes that fail. A recipe tester, I am not. But this cake has been bouncing in my head since October.

let’s make some candied orange and lemon peels (lemons, orange, sugar)

slice the peel off

combine sugar and water to make a syrup

simmered peels (2 hours)

I have never had an authentic Italian cassata before. The only reason I knew anything about cassata was that I had made an adaptation from Marcel Desaulnier’s Death by Chocolate which involves yellow spongecake soaked in rum and layered with a shaved chocolate pastry cream rather than the traditional ricotta cheese filling. I read that Italian cassatas are commonly served around Easter. But when I had lunch at Pizzeria Locale last month, I saw cassata on the dessert menu and impulsively ordered it.

chocolate chiffon cake: oil, eggs, confectioners sugar, milk, flour, cocoa, sugar, almond extract

mix wet ingredients into dry ingredients (except egg whites and granulated sugar)

folding whipped egg whites into the chocolate batter

pour the batter in buttered pans lined with parchment paper

What arrived was a slice of chocolate cassata: chocolate spongecake with a creamy, almost buttery ricotta filling studded with pistachios, and all topped with a nice dark chocolate glaze. Brilliant. I had to attempt this at home – it was so lovely! I did a little research and decided to make a layer cake… because I am partial to layers. There would be four components: chocolate spongecake, ricotta cheese filling with candied orange peel, chopped pistachios, and shaved chocolate, a boozy simple syrup to soak the cake layers, and a dark chocolate glaze.

ricotta cheese, vanilla extract, grated chocolate, chopped candied citrus peel, pistachios, cinnamon, powdered sugar

adding vanilla

stirring in the pistachios, candied peels, and chocolate

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: seven layer cookies

Our neighbors are absent in summer because they run a camp in the wilds of Canada. It’s really too bad because we quite like these neighbors and their giant walking carpet of a dog (she’s such a lover). The kids return in late August when school starts, and then the mother comes back in September and finally, the father wraps everything up and returns in October. We see glimpses of one another in the driveways as summer transitions into autumn. It’s a busy time for us too with travel and work such that I make a point of going over to welcome them home. I can’t really walk over empty-handed, because… I can’t.

graham cracker crumbs, melted butter, coconut, butterscotch chips, chocolate chips, sweetened condensed milk, macadamia nuts

buttering the pan and lining with parchment paper (and buttering again)

So I’m flipping through my old notebook with my earliest recipes, looking for a certain cookie when these seven layer cookies caught my eye. This was a recipe from my days growing up in Virginia, something the ladies would bring to potlucks. It is sweet beyond all get out and is filed with the rest of my favorite “white trash” recipes. I hadn’t made these in over 20 years. I know this because Jeremy had neither heard of them nor tasted them before. Time to whip up a batch, no?

mix the melted butter and graham cracker crumbs

press into the bottom of the pan

These are the kind of treats that rot your insides, but are surprisingly snacky. That’s why I 1) haven’t made them in 20 years and 2) gave most all of these away. It’s foolproof too. I really don’t think anyone can mess this recipe up. If you do manage to mess it up, don’t tell me.

pour the sweetened condensed milk over the crust

layer the butterscotch and chocolate chips

**Jump for more butter**