Key Lime Pie

I've made key lime pie before, but at the time I neglected to take any pictures. Our friend Jon is an amateur downhill bike racer, and sometimes he comes to stay with James and me in Vermont for a race. On Labor Day weekend he came up and said key lime pie was his favorite dessert...and he loved it! He came up again this weekend and requested the same pie, and this time I remembered to bring out my camera!

As you can see, this is another super-easy pie recipe. I'm becoming more and more convinced that simple yet bold ingredients can make something that is tastier than a pie with a lot of different things thrown in. How could you distinguish all those flavors?

A great thing about this pie is the crust: crushed graham crackers, butter and some sugar. Mmmm.

A great thing to note about the core of this pie is that there is barely any sugar added. Condensed milk and the limes have a nice balance of sweet and tart, which makes this a *fairly* healthy pie compared to some. The egg yolks also make the inside lovely and custardy. What do I do with those unused egg whites? you may ask. What I do is pour them into a freezer bag, write in Sharpie how many whites are in it, and then pop it in the freezer! Then, if you're making some sort of meringue which requires lots of whites, you simply have to defrost them and nothing is wasted! Another cool way I saw to do this was to have an ice try handy, and pour each white into an individual cube dish. Then when you freeze them, you have individual whites all pre-set for you to pop out! Just don't forget that they're egg whites and not real ice cubes, or you might get a nasty surprise when you put one in your drink.

Although the condensed milk makes the inside very thick when the pie is uncooked, the filling with definitely "set" after you bake it. Just jiggle the dish, and if there's a bit of movement that's good; anything that still appears thin or liquidy is not.

Above is the baked pie: toasted crust, custard center! In this recipe, the filling does not fill the pie to the top of the crust completely; rather, it leaves room for a layer of whipped topping.

I did do this by hand until it was thick and stiff, although it took about 5 minutes and my arm was burning a bit by the end! I did finally find a near-mint condition electric hand mixer, but the arms have yet to be washed. I tell you, I am really excited the next time I have to do any sort of whipped cream or meringue!

A very tasty pie, although the filling is VERY loose. It isn't oozy like a berry pie, but it does not hold its shape like a cheesecake. I think that in the future I will add a little cornstarch to firm it up, although the texture was nice and creamy and I wouldn't want to ruin that. Enjoy this easy and delicious pie: very refreshing in the hot weather!

Strawberry Rhubarb Pie Recipe

CRUST
1 1/4 c all-purpose flour, plus more for rolling
8 T (1 stick) butter, cold and cubed
1/2 t salt
1/2 t sugar
2-4 T ice water

FILLING
3 1/2 c rhubarb, cut into 1/2" thick wedges
3 1/2 c strawberries, cut in half
1/2 c brown sugar
1/2 c sugar
1/4 c cornstarch
1 t cinnamon
1/4 t salt
squirt of lemon juice


Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Grease a pie pan. For crust, combine flour, salt and sugar, add butter and crumble until mixture resembles coarse meal, with pea-sized pieces of butter. Add water 1 tablespoon at a time until mixture just begins to stick together. Place chunks of dough in pan and press until flat. Chill crust. Mix strawberries and rhubarb together in a bowel. Add remaining ingredients and coat fruit well. Pour filling into crust and cook for 20 minutes. Reduce heat to 350 degrees and cook for a remaining 1 hour and 25 minutes.


Notes:

• Grease the dish way more than you think. This is good because 1) there's no way anything will stick, especially in the corners, and 2) you'll get that lovely buttery crust!
• When making tart pastry, if butter is starting to melt put it in the freezer until you need more. You want it to stay as cold as possible.
• When placing tart pastry into pie pan, grab chunks and press until flat. Don't spend too much time on one part, or the heat from your fingers will start to melt the butter! You want to still see chunks of butter, as this will make the crust lovely and flaky.

Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

Hey folks! I know it's been a long time....I haven't posted since January! But I swear I've been really busy. I was taking a massive amount of credits at school, which prevented me from doing anything but do work and eat, so that's my excuse. Now school is wrapping up and I find myself with a lot more time, which means I can finally bake again! One of my boyfriend's favorite pies is strawberry rhubarb, and his way of telling me he wanted me to make one was to put strawberries and rhubarb in the shopping cart and wait until we checked out. He offered a sheepish grin and said meekly, "Can you make me a pie?" I couldn't resist.

So as far as pies go, this is fairly simple. It doesn't seem to me to be a pie that begs for more ingredients than what is necessary, which is why what you see before you is not particularly interesting. Plus, about half of it is for the crust, which I'll talk about next.

My whole baking life I have stood staunchly by one specific recipe for most tart and pie crusts: a simple but effective tart pastry dough. It's easy, flaky, buttery and delicious. However, although I've never cared before I realize that this recipe is not ideal for pie-making. This is because it is meant to be for a tart, which only has crust on the bottom and not the sides. When I try to use it as pie dough it does indeed cover the bottom of my pan, but it takes some stretching to get it partway up the sides...and unfortunately this means that my fruit/liquid-based pies bubble out over the sides of the dish and make a bit of a mess. Taste-wise it doesn't change anything, but I think I will have to revise this recipe to make enough dough to be usable as true pie dough.

Like I said this is a fairly simple pie: strawberries, rhubarb, sugar(s), cinnamon and lemon. I have thought about it and think that a bit of cardamom might be delicious, but I have to try that first before I claim it as a good idea! I say sugars because it called for both brown and white, which made for a sticky delicious fruit filling.

I love pie recipes where I can write down the ingredients, a temperature and a time, and that's it. This pie only requires that you make the filling and put it in the pie. What was also helpful was that this used one package of strawberries and one package of rhubarb, so nothing was wasted and I didn't have to buy a ton of fruit. As a side note, always put some sort of thickening agent into your fruity or liquid-y pies, like banana cream pie. I use cornstarch because a little bit (1/4 cup) can go a long way, unlike flour, which seems to require a lot more. If you put no thickener in your pies the filling will just ooze out, whether it is cold or not. So friends, if you are making a gooey pie and the recipe does not call for a thickening agent put 1/4 cup of cornstarch in!

You can see I did make a top to my pie out of tart, which I normally don't bother doing, but again I didn't have enough to connect the dough so the juice oozed out a little. However, this didn't detract from the fact that the pie was absolutely delicious, and who could ask for an easier recipe? This is a must try!

Chocolate Guinness Cake

January 18th was my guy's birthday, and he had told me a long time ago that he wanted a chocolate Guinness cake. I'd never heard of it, but it's not inconceivable; people cook and bake with alcohol all the time, and I could see how a dark beer could add a lot of flavor to a cake. So, we bought some Guinness draught and I set to work building this magnificent creation.

I gotta say, I really love looking at an ingredient list and seeing beer on it. In any case, the cake itself is pretty simple, as you can see from above. It's not a super chocolatel-y cake, but is very light and has great texture. The beer adds depth to the flavor, but is not dominating. First things first: butter the cake dish. I added a ton of Crisco to this, and the cake still came out sticking to the sides! However, it helped:

Next was something I'd never seen before: superfine sugar. "Is that confectioner's sugar?" I thought? No, it's not. Superfine sugar is simply a more finely grained version of regular cane sugar, and is preferred in cakes for giving a smoother texture. Well, it was James' birthday, so I had to do it right! Since I didn't have any superfine sugar what I did do was crush regular sugar with a mortar and pestle until it was finer.

Next you boil beer and butter in a saucepan and start adding your ingredients, like sour cream:

Finally, when you're all done you should have a thick, rich batter of chocolate-y, beer-y goodness.

While this was cooking, I prepared some frosting that touted itself to be the best. The recipe proclaimed that if you could stand not to eat it all while making it, it would totally add to cakes (esp. chocolate) and muffins. "You'll never go back to another kind of frosting," it stated. Well, ultimately it was a buttercream frosting rather than a cream cheese one, and since we'd just had cream cheese frosting on my red velvet cake I decided to try a new one. It was indeed delicious! First you cream butter and sugar until super soft and light, and then you add the other ingredients and whip until smooth and thick. Then you put this on your cake! Note to add this AFTER the cake has cooled, or the butter in the frosting will melt and it will run everywhere.

Enjoy this deliciously moist cake!

Cinnamon Buns (w/ Bacon) Recipe

BREAD

1 package dry yeast
1 c warm milk (105 degrees F)
1/2 c sugar
1/3 c butter, melted
1 t salt
2 eggs
4 c flour


RUB

1 c brown sugar
2 1/2 T cinnamon
1/3 c butter, soft
12 strips bacon (optional)


GLAZE

1/2 c butter, soft
1 1/2 c powdered sugar, sifted
3 oz cream cheese, soft
1/2 t vanilla
1/8 t salt



First add yeast to warm milk with a pinch of sugar and wait until foamy. In large bowl combine all dry ingredients for bread. Then add the eggs, butter and yeast mixture. Cover with damp cloth and put somewhere warm until about doubled in size. Once ready spread the dough out on a floured surface to approximately a 16 x 20 x 1/4" rectangle. Wipe the melted butter from the rub on the dough and pat on mixed cinnamon and sugar. Roll up the rectangle length-ways and cut into 12 pieces. If adding bacon, unroll each piece carefully and wrap bacon within. In a 400 degree oven, cook the rolls for 20 minutes. While cooking, preapre the glaze by creaming the butter, cream cheese and sugar. Once smooth add the vanilla and salt and whip until light and fluffy. If making regular cinnamon rolls, remove from oven and spoon glaze on top while still hot. If making bacon cinnamon rolls, remove from oven and check the bacon. If done, pour on glaze; if not fully cooked carefully remove each piece, pan fry, and replace within the rolls. Add glaze.

Notes:

• If you keep your butter in the fridge and don't want to wait a hundred years for it to come to room temperature, simply but what you need on a dish in the microwave and set for 20-25 seconds (go with less time first). This will make the butter soft but not melt it.

Cinnamon Buns...with Bacon?

That's right, folks, you read it correctly: cinnamon buns with bacon wrapped inside! I was browsing around on Reddit looking at recipes and saw one recommending this one. The author said that rolling a slice of bacon up in a cinnamon bun gave a nice saltiness to balance the sweet, and smokiness to balance the confectionary nature. I thought, "Well, I love bacon too much to ignore this sign. I'll try it!" However, because I always worry about the outcome of my cooking I decided to only do half my buns with bacon and leave the other half as is.

By themselves, cinnamon buns are not only easy but also delicious....and if you are on a low-fat or low-sugar diet you can simply make minor changes to the recipe and they will STILL be delicious. You can't get a recipe much better than that! Plus, for me at least, cinnamon buns have a sort of homey warm quality (even though my mom never made them). Essentially the buns are comprised of three things: a rolled sweetbread, a layer of cinnamon/sugar/butter, and a glaze. The picture above is for the bread. First you have to take into account the yeast. You want to have it as close to room temperature as possible; otherwise it will take longer to foam. If you've never messed with yeast before, you put it with a little sugar in some warm water and it will start to foam. This foam is simply the byproduct of the yeast eating the sugar you gave it. It is supposed to look puffy and smell kinda sour. This is what you're looking for:

As you give the yeast more time it will continue to rise, which is why you have to add it to your bread dough and then set it aside for awhile to rise (or double in size). Although the picture below kinda looks like mangled animal brains, I assure you it is indeed bread dough (pre-risen):

I did realize once I put the yeast in the water that the recipe called for yeast in warm milk, but I figured I'd just add a bit more butter to make up for it. In any case, once your dough is ready, you knead it out with lots of flour onto a rolling surface. The recipe I used called for a rectangle of 20 x 16 x 1/4", but just approximate. The dough will expand a LOT during cooking. Also note the nice non-stick measuring mat my great boyfriend got me! <3

Then add some melted butter and a cinnamon/brown sugar concoction. I also added some chunks of butter because the amount I used was a little short:

To roll this, divide it into three section and roll a bit for each section at a time. So, start at the right side and roll a bit, move to the middle, then to the left side. This ensures that it rolls easy and evenly and you don't tear the dough. Then cut your log into however many rolls you want (I made 12):

Next came the bacon! I simply unrolled 6 rolls and added half slices of bacon into them. Candied bacon, mmmm!

Next is the glaze, which you can make while these are cooking. It's pretty simple: a whipped cream cheese, sugar and vanilla frosting that will seem thicker than it should be but melts once put on hot rolls. If you don't have a hand mixer, you'll have to whip for awhile to cream the butter, cream cheese and sugar together. But you'll get it:

Here comes a bit of advice from a stupid person. Since the bacon I used was thick-cut, when I took out the rolls the first time I checked the bacon and it wasn't completely cooked. I quite wrongly decided to put the rolls back in for 5-10 more minutes....and when they came out again the bacon STILL wasn't done! I then made the wise decision to remove the pieces, pan fry them to crispy goodness, and replace them back into the rolls. I should have done this first, because I ended up with burnt bottoms to my rolls and a little tougher bread consistency than I wanted. Ah well, life is all about learning, isn't it? What I'll do next time, and what you should do the first time, is to cook the rolls for the allotted time, remove the bacon and pan fry it, and replace the bacon. In any case, these next two pictures still look amazing, and I hope you'll try making these soon! Your man will love you forever.