Archive for Desserts

08 Sep 2008
Cookery • Desserts • Fruit recipe • locavore log • Recipes

Rusty’s Italian Plum Cake

A slice of Rusty\'s Italian Plum Cake

Vanille teased me for being in an “upside-down” baking mood (and she should know – being “down under” in New Zealand) because I blogged back-to-back about Tomato Tatin and then about Upside Down Plum Spiced Cake. I felt like I had to make a post that was not upside down. Well, not really… but I am still working through my 4 gallons of Italian plums, and nobody ever – ever – complains in the house when I make dessert. So, here! ANOTHER Italian Plum Cake.

The recipe comes through courtesy of my mother-in-law. She wrote that it’s from a newspaper clipping dated 9/13/89 that’s in her recipe box. Although the clipped recipe calls for plums, Rusty informed me that she never made it with plums, but has tried it with other fruit – mainly apples (in which case she adds nutmeg because she likes nutmeg) and pears. She says it’s good even cold, great for a snack or for breakfast (her son agrees). I added a little liqueur to the cake, changed the spices used, increased the amount of fruit, and – since I don’t think it’s a torte (which it what the clipping called it), I am renaming it: Rusty’s Italian Plum Cake. I also use white whole wheat flour, which works perfectly fine with this rather rustic (but delicious) dessert. Read more

sylvie | 2 comments | Tags: , ,
05 Sep 2008
Cookery • Desserts • Fruit recipe • locavore log • Recipes

Upside Down Plum Spiced Cake

End of summer: say good-bye to fresh juicy sweet fat peaches until next year. Welcome Italian plums, those tasty versatile little morsels. Because they are cling-free, they lend themselves easily to all kinds of preparations: jam & preserves, liqueurs, chutney, sautéing and grilling, compote and of course baking. Having just acquired 4 gallons of Italian plums at a local orchard, I have enough materials to try a few things. I might even see about drying some.

Freshly picked Italain plums

However, they were picked less ripe than I really care about (something about picking them before the skies open and dump several inches of water on us as storm/hurricane Hannah moves North). So I will let them ripen for a few days before processing a lot of them.

But I had to make something right away. I normally don’t bake too much sweets at home, but once in a while, I will bake a dessert with fruit. My husband was actually astonished when he realized that the cake was for us. He thought I was donating it to the Taste of Rappahannock, a fund raiser from the Headwaters Foundation, or some other worthwhile cause, as seem to have been the case several times recently as he gently reminded me. But, no, the lovely scented Upside Down Plum Spiced Cake was for us, and less than 24 hours after it was made, more than half is gone (hint: try it for breakfast, too, not just dessert.) I better go and make something else – maybe a tart? Read more

sylvie | 4 comments | Tags: , , ,
25 Jul 2008
Cookery • Desserts • fruit • Fruit recipe • locavore log

Not Yet Peached Out

A bowl of peachesI promised more peach recipes. If “recipe” is the word to use. You got to do a lot of things – fast – when you got a bushel (close to 60 pounds!) of peaches.

Perfectly ripe fruit call for a very simple treatment. Why mess up with pure goodness? Some nice dough, a sprinkling of sugar, a dash of spices. Voila!

This “recipe”for rustic summer fruit tart works with peaches, nectarines, apricots and plums. Picture #1 shows 3 unbaked Rustic Tart, 2 plums & 1 peach; picture # 2 shows baked Rustic Peach Tarts.

Three assemled tart waiting to be baked

Ingredients

  • frozen puff pastry (Or fresh, if you make it. I have not quite been successful at puff pastry and will admit to buy it – unbaked and frozen). Frozen puff is what I’ve got on the freezer right now, so that’s what I use.
  • ripe peaches, pitted and sliced (I don’t bother to peel – although I do wash – but go ahead and peel if you must)
  • sugar
  • vanilla powder

Thaw puff pastry. Roll out thinly on a floured surface.

Cut each sheet in rectangle – any size, does not matter. In the picture, I cut up a 3-fold pastry sheet rectangle in 3, giving me 3 small-ish rectangular tarts.

Put dough on parchment paper on cookie sheet. The parchment paper – while optional – prevents sticking and makes it easier to remove the baked tart without tearing the bottom.

Arrange sliced fruit on top, leaving enough edge to fold the pastry on the fruit. See first picture. Crimp, pinch etc as necessary to ensure the pastry wraps well up the fruit to hold the filling in place during cooking. You can see on the 2nd picture, in the middle tart the dough was not wrapping the fruit well enough so some juice escaped during baking

Sprinkle one or two tablespoons of sugar and a dash of vanilla powder on fruit.

Bake in a preheated 400 F oven. 20 minutes or until done (i.e until the pastry is puffed up and golden, with slightly browned edges)

That’s it! Pretty, tasty, easy. Fast enough to make just about any week night…

Rustic Peach tart

sylvie | No comments | Tags: , , , , , , ,
07 Jul 2008
Cookery • Desserts • Fruit recipe • herb • herb recipe • Kitchen Garden • locavore log • Recipes

Lemon Verbena for Summer Fragrance

Lemon Verbena

Lemon Verbena Growing in a Container at Morninside Nursery

A small shrub from South America, lemon verbena (Aloysia triphylla) is a delightful plant in the garden. Because it is a tender perennial, I grow two mother plants in pots that come in the house or the greenhouse in winter, and make cuttings every spring that I plant in the garden once they have rooted. It’s amazing how fast they grow once they are planted out: they’ll give me plenty of leaves for all sorts of uses. I have trained my potted plants as topiaries, but in its natural habitat lemon-verbena grows as a multi-branched, airy shrub up to 10 foot tall. In a sheltered dry-in-winter place, I suspect lemon verbena would perennialize in Zone 7: the plant would die down but new shoots would come from the roots in spring. The plant itself looks better in the ground, healthier, darker green and lusher – one does not have too keep watering it as in pots. Last year, I left one of my containers out when the temperature dropped to below 20 degree F several night in the row. The top growth died, but new shoots came from the roots, and the plant is now perfectly healthy – still in it pot. The picture above is a healthy specimen growing in a container at Morningside Farm & Nursery in Griffinsburg, VA.

Close up of lemon verbena leaves

The white flowers are rather small and the sweet lemon fragrance come from the crushed or brushed leaves. Plant it where you can brush against it as you go by – it’s a wonderful, slightly haunting smell. Great for delicately scenting cloth, for pot pourri or for wreaths (the flexible fresh branches are easy to fashion into a wreath that will just dry over a few weeks), it also makes a pleasant tea and is wonderful to make into fragrant syrup to poach fruit. It can also be infused for sorbet, ice-cream, flan, custard etc. I understand that lemon-verbena marries very nicely with fish – something I have not yet tried.

What I have tried – with most delicious results – is to use lemon verbena for sorbet and to poach fruits. It’s particularly wonderful with peaches , and will come handy if you ever face some peaches that are slightly under ripe, that you don’t have time to ripen, and that you must serve now. A quick poaching in lemon verbena syrup will elevate them to another dimension. Using fully ripe peaches will yield commensurably tastier results. Guests are always intrigued by the taste. The two recipes provided below (Lemon-Verbena Poached Peaches and Lemon-Verbena Syrup) are more guidelines than recipes per se. The hardest part will be to locate a lemon verbena plant. I have noted that it’s becoming increasingly easier to find, many good herb plant shops carry it.

Read more

sylvie | No comments | Tags: , , ,
01 Jul 2008
beverage • Cookery • Desserts • Fruit recipe • herb recipe • locavore log

When you Have Green Apples, Make Sorbet

Green Apple Sorbet

I love to the capture the essence of fruit in fruit based-desserts, but I don’t care to bake in summer – well, not too much. I also detest wasting food. So here we are, late June, and the apples need to be thinned, or they’ll thin themselves (and what a waste that will be!) or the fall harvest won’t be quite as good. In late June, those thinnings are of honorable size, perfectly good for apple sauce actually – but just not fully ripe. So what’s a girl to do (beside apple sauce?): Minty Green Apple Sorbet, a simple-to-make concoction, delicate and refreshing – definitively a summer dessert!

I normally make that sorbet in the fall with green apples (green as in color, not maturity) such as Granny Smith. They give the sorbet a faint green color that’s just lovely and the tartness that comes through is just wonderful. But this is June (well July, but I made the sorbet in June) and there is no local Granny Smith apples to get until the Fall. So big thinnings it will be. To be sure it worked, I made the sorbet three times. Since the household comments were positive, here is the recipe. (If you try it, let me know how you like it) Read more

sylvie | One comment | Tags: , , , ,
26 Jun 2008
Cookery • Desserts • fruit • Fruit recipe • herb • Kitchen Garden

Of Strawberries and Sorbet

Perfectly ripe Strawberries

Most people who grow strawberries - or who pick-them at pick-your-own operations or even frequent Farmers’ market – are familiar with the so-called June strawberries. They bear over a few weeks from mid/late May to mid/late June here in the Northern Piedmont depending on the cultivar. For the kitchen gardener, that’s good only if you have time to process lots of strawberries then. I don’t know about you, but in May and June, I am always so behind with planting and new garden projects that should have been done 3 months earlier (and really can’t wait any longer) that I really don’t want to deal with 40 quarts of strawberries.

So last year, I got ‘Tristar’, a day-neutral strawberry developed at the University of Maryland. While the June strawberry flowering (and therefore fruiting) is trigged by a certain amount of day light, day neutral strawberries don’t give a fig and flowers as long as there is no frost. I get fruit from early June until frost. Last year, I threw agricultural fabric over the bed, and I actually got a few strawberries for Thanksgiving. I can’t say they were very tasty but it was a victory of sorts… Best of all, you can harvest the year you plant. You have to pinch the flowers through June after which you let the plant flower. Unlike the June bearer, the crop is spread over many months. From 25 plants, last year I got over quart a week. This year, I got a quart or two every other day for about 3 weeks. Then there was a lull for a couple of weeks, and I can see I’ll be able to start picking again in few days.

I love freshly picked really ripe strawberries, eaten plain, tossed with a little sugar and lemon, frozen for smoothie, but one of my favorite recipe – not the least reason for it is that there is very little heat used (something to think about in the hot muggy summers of Virginia) – is Strawberry Sorbet. Here is the recipe I use: Read more

sylvie | 7 comments | Tags: , , ,
  Recent Entries »