Recovering from twelve delicious varieties…

I love Irish Soda Bread. Of course, it tends to get a lot of press at St. Patrick’s Day, but why not make it or eat it any time? Need an excuse? June 20 marks the eve of summer solstice, or longest day of the year for the northern hemisphere, where lots of festivals, fairs and concerts occur in Ireland (leftover from Pagan days) and Europe, for that matter. The dates change yearly, but is usually around June 20-22.

The recipe I make at home turns out all rustic looking, which is very different from a lot of Asian baked goods I’ve had. At the bakery the Chinese baked buns (bao or pao) and Filipino buns are typically these beautiful golden brown, rounded hills lined up on a tray.

from centurycafe.com

But, I love me a rustic bread anytime… the displays at Corner Bakery and Panera Bread are enough to make me want to carbo-load.

Irish Soda Bread recipe

• 2-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3 tbsp sugar
• 1/2 c melted butter
• 3/4 c milk with 3 tbsp of apple cider vinegar (let this mixture sit for a few minutes) OR 3/4 c buttermilk
• 1/2 c raisins or currants

Preheat oven to 425. Combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and sugar in a large bowl. Make a well in the middle and add the wet ingredients. Mix until ingredients are just combined; don’t overmix. It’s okay to look lumpy. Fold in the raisins or currants. Transfer dough to baking sheet. Dough should hold its shape, but you can form your bread loaf how you want. Bake at 425 for 15 minutes, turn down to 375 for 20-25 minutes (or until toothpick inserted at center comes out clean). Remove and cool completely.

My daughter told me it tasted store-bought. I guess that meant she liked it! Maybe next year, I can make a corresponding craft? Anyone out there make or bake anything to celebrate summer?

Happy Father’s Day to all tomorrow! I’ll be back next week with crafty tales!

Since we don’t typically eat or cook ricotta cheese in our home, and we had some ricotta cheese left in the refrigerator after our dinner party last weekend, I looked up a friend’s recipe for ricotta cheese cookies.

I just don’t like wasting food, you know? Here’s my twist on it… taken from the lemon-ricotta cheese blinis we made for our dinner party, I added lemon to the cookie recipe. And, it was lemon-y delicious!

• 1 cup butter, softened
• 2 cups granulated sugar
• 15 oz. ricotta cheese
• zest of three lemons
• 6 tsp. fresh lemon juice (juice taken from the lemons – save the extra juice)
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 4 cups all-purpose flour

Glaze: 1 cup powdered sugar, extra lemon juice

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Cream butter, sugar and cheese. Add zest and 6 teaspoons of lemon juice to butter and sugar mixture, blend well. In separate bowl, mix salt, baking soda and flour. Incorporate the flour mixture into the butter-sugar mixture. Dough will be very sticky. Using a small teaspoon scoop (or just two teaspoons), drop dough onto ungreased cookie sheets. Bake for 13-15 minutes or until bottoms turn golden brown. After removing from oven, cool for 1 minute, then transfer to cooling racks.

Make glaze by slowly adding juice to the powdered sugar. Thin consistency will probably only need a couple of tablespoons of juice. Spread over cooled cookies.

Yields about 84

Having never made brownies from scratch (unthinkable to some), I was really on the lookout for a good recipe. I think I always made “box” brownies because I thought melting chocolate was always part of the deal. I was just unsure of, you know… double boiler, making sure not to overheat the chocolate, yada, yada, yada. I never thought to look for easy recipes. So, when my husband and I saw a few recipes using cocoa powder, it was like the clouds opened up and rays of sunshine shone onto the mixing bowls. Alright, it wasn’t that dramatic, but we thought, “HEY! We can DO THIS!”

Actually, we were going to bake together since my husband is more like the “McGyver” in the kitchen and doesn’t follow recipes. He ended up doing most, if not all, of it alone because I ran out of the house at the wrong time to run an errand. What we ended up with was a nice small batch of the most fudgy brownies I’ve had in a long time. The pan was quartered into sections: plain brownie, brownie with caramel, salted brownie, brownie with salt and caramel.

He even made the caramel from scratch (took two tries)!

Not so good caramel attempt

Leftover "good" caramel

For an 8 x 8 pan, you might be surprised how long it lasted. We cut the brownies into 1-inch squares. That’s all you need for a taste – it’s so rich!

The recipe we used is from Smitten Kitchen, and can be found here. I’ll be trying this recipe out again with some Scharffen Berger cocoa…mmm.

Other cocoa brownie recipes:

• Alton Brown’s cocoa brownies
• Hershey’s best brownies

Since we’ve been talking about food, what is it about fresh-baked bread that makes the house smell so good? There’s a grocery store two blocks away, and it’s just as easy for me to pick up their fresh-baked goods (they’re still warm, too). I think I’m pretty good at baking (quick breads, especially) but I’ve had no luck in the past with making anything that starts with yeast. Let me recap my epic failures.

About 8 years ago, I attempted to make a coffee cake. The “Rosy Red Coffee Cake” was a recipe from my “Great American Home Baking” binder cookbook. You know, the sort of cookbook that grows because you’re paying a few bucks a month and in return you receive myriads of recipe cards to fill your binder. I had such high expectations before I got married that I would try all the recipes. No such luck. But this recipe seemed so easy… yeast bread, cranberries, sugar, orange juice in a beautiful wreath. My wreath was all deflated, looked melted, and the bread itself… hard. Clearly, I must have killed the yeast.

About 4 years later, I tried to make cinnamon rolls from my aunt’s recipe. This recipe didn’t seem hard. I had a few years of quick bread recipes under my belt, so I thought, maybe my technique would be better this time. Pucks, hockey pucks, 12 of them.

Fast forward, April 2010. This time, this time I think I may have found a recipe I can count on. A recipe that has restored my faith in cooking with yeast… a No-Knead bread. (Aaaaah… the angels are singing for me.) You knead, I mean, NEED time – time for the dough to rise on its own. Don’t do this if you want your bread the same day. And where did I get this recipe? Actually, I saw Jim Lahey on Martha Stewart and heard him say “no knead bread”. I watched, and then thought, “Hmph, cool,” end of story. (Not like when I watched Good Eats with Alton Brown and he cut up a whole chicken, and did a southern fried chicken recipe. I ran to the store the next day, cut up my own chicken and made… fried chicken. Another story for another time.)

Actually, it was in the April 2010 Living magazine that they showed the no-knead bread (Pane Integrale) recipe and some step-by-step pictures. My one mistake: I used all-purpose flour instead of bread flour. In the magazine, they call for bread flour. In the television recipe, they call for either; I didn’t remember this. Everything else in the recipe was the same. I only realized I used AP flour after I had mixed everything and the dough was sitting to rise. Seriously, I thought, NOT AGAIN. I messed it up AGAIN! Well, let’s see how it turns out. Not to worry, though, because as you see from my pictures, I think everything turned out okay. Not a lot of fuss. I couldn’t have been happier about baking bread. It was really rustic, crusty on the outside and chewy on the inside. Lovely. I’ll try it again with bread flour next time.

Click here for some more of Jim Lahey’s recipes from the Martha show.