Raisin-filled Cookies

December 23, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / 3 Comments

Okay, one more cookie recipe, then I’ll be done for the year…maybe.

These are one of my all-time favourite cookies–big soft cookies that taste like raisin pie. Mom made them every Christmas when I was growing up (at least that’s how I remember it…), and she wrote down the recipe for me when I left home. The index card is stained and bent, but carefully guarded in a little wooden recipe box.

Like many handed-down recipes, this one is incomplete—little more than a list of ingredients. You have to know what to do to turn them into cookie dough. I’ve added more instructions below.

2 cups brown sugar

1 cup shortening (I use softened butter)

2 eggs

½ cup milk

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp vanilla

4 cups flour (I usually need about 1 cup more)

pinch salt

Mix baking soda into milk and set aside to thicken. Cream brown sugar and shortening together until fluffy. Beat in eggs, then milk and vanilla. Gradually add flour, mixing until you have a stiff dough.

Refrigerate dough at least 2 hours.

While the dough is chilling, make filling. Place in a medium saucepan and boil until thick:

2 cups chopped raisins

2 cups granulated sugar

1 cup water

1 Tbsp flour

Allow to cool to room temperature.

Roll the dough thin and cut out 2-inch circles. To form the cookies, place a circle on a greased baking sheet, put a scant tablespoon of filling in the centre of the circle, and top with another circle. Press the edges firmly together (a fork does a nice job and leaves a pretty edge). Bake at 190°C (375°F) for about 10 minutes.

Ricotta Cheesecake

December 20, 2015December 15, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

While all you denizens of the northern hemisphere are baking Christmas cookies, we’re down here trying to figure out how to eat an overabundance of early summer fruits.

This week, we had a delicious confluence—too many cherries and too much ricotta cheese. There’s only one thing to do with that situation—make ricotta cheesecake and smother it in cherry pie filling!

The ricotta cheesecake—essentially a sweet soufflé—puffed twice the height of the pan in the oven, then fell most unattractively when it cooled. But it left a perfect rim for holding cherries.

Bake Us Some Figgy Cookies

December 19, 2015December 13, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

I’ve had a hankering for figs lately—must be the holidays—so I made fig cookies. They taste like a cross between fig newtons and walnut crescents.

This recipe is adapted from a recipe in The Gourmet Cookie Book (Have I mentioned before that this book is the most beautiful book ever made? It is a lesson in effective graphic design, and has lots of good recipes, too. If you haven’t finished your Christmas shopping, you must buy this for someone. If you have finished your Christmas shopping, you need to buy it for yourself. Aw, never mind—just buy it for yourself, regardless.)

Anyway, these cookies take most of their sweetness from the figs. If you wanted a slightly sweeter cookie, I think they’d be fabulous dredged in powdered sugar!

1 cup butter

¼ cup sugar

1 cup walnuts, ground*

1 cup dried figs, ground*

1 tsp vanilla

2 cups all-purpose flour

Cream butter. Add sugar and beat until fluffy. Stir in ground walnuts and figs, and vanilla. Stir in flour, mixing until all incorporated.

Use a scant tablespoon of dough for each cookie. Form into small finger shapes about 1 inch (2.5 cm) apart on a greased baking sheet. Bake at 300°F (150°C) for 25-30 minutes. Do not let them brown. Cool completely before eating—they crisp nicely as they cool.

*I grind the figs and walnuts together in a food processor—the walnuts keep the figs from sticking together in a big clump.

Culture clash

December 12, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Some days it’s unavoidable, and we have a culture clash in the kitchen. No, I don’t mean that I want stir fry for dinner, but my husband insists on a curry. This is a more literal clash of cultures—sourdough vs. cheese culture. Either one can infect the other, with unsavoury results, and both take up large amounts of space in the kitchen, so we try to avoid making both on the same day.

Today, however, there was no getting around it. The neighbour gave me 50 litres of milk—I had to make cheese. And my husband already had the sourdough bulking up Friday—he had to make bread.

Timers were going off all morning, and it was a trick to know what each one was for—was that the bread, the parmesan or the cheddar? And what needed to be done to it? Then of course, I was standing over the hot oven, stirring cheese curds for hours. And all dishes had to be washed, dried and put away immediately, or they were in the way. And trying to keep the cheese-making stuff sterile? Forget it!

Glad that doesn’t happen often!

Currants

December 11, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

New Zealand produces about 8,000 tonnes of blackcurrants each year—5% of world production. We have at least one large blackcurrant farm nearby, and more popping up, as a craze for blackcurrant products grows. Marketing for blackcurrant products focuses on their health benefits (antioxidants, vitamin C).

We grow both red and black currants, but not for their health benefits. We grow them for their flavour, colour, and prolific production.

Let’s forget healthy entirely–currants’ bright colours and tart flavour make for beautiful and decadent pies, jams and ice cream. They liven up fruit salad, and their juice makes a lovely drink on a hot day, mixed with tonic water and a splash of gin.

And you can toast your health with that!

The Cherry Mystery

December 8, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

When you move onto an old property, it takes a while to become familiar with all the plants previous owners planted. Our property was blessed with a variety of fruit trees. There are a few apples—three varieties, from what we’ve seen, though we can only identify one of them. There’s a late-season peach. And there is a cherry tree. The cherry tree is old and had been damaged repeatedly over the years.

In the spring, the first years on the property, we would watch as the tree put out a few flowers, but we never saw a ripe fruit. The birds seemed to eat them all before they ripened.

Then one year the tree flowered profusely. It was loaded with cherries. But still, they didn’t seem to ripen before they were eaten by the birds.

That’s when it finally dawned on us—it was a yellow cherry! The fruits were ripening. The birds knew that—they can see the change in reflected UV light when a berry is ripe—but we didn’t.

Once we knew what the cherries were, we were able to get a harvest most years, in spite of the birds. It’s still difficult for me to tell when one is ripe by look, but I pick by feel—a ripe cherry is subtly softer than a nearly ripe one.

We still don’t know the variety. The fruits are relatively small. They’re sweet, but very heavy in cyanide flavour, and we can’t decide if they’re better for eating fresh or baking.

This year is a bumper year for cherries, so we’ll be able to have them both ways. This morning’s harvest was more than enough for a pie, so you can guess what we’re having for dessert tonight!

Chocolate Hearts

December 7, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / 4 Comments

Another must-make Christmas cookie is chocolate shortbread hearts. This is another recipe from my mother-in-law. Another recipe whose origin is lost in the mists of time. This one is quite possibly my favourite cookie ever. It’s a good thing the recipe isn’t a large one…

2 cups flour

½ cup Dutch-process cocoa

¼ tsp baking soda

1 cup unsalted butter

1 cup confectioners sugar (sifted)

1 ¼ tsp vanilla

Cream butter. Add sugar and beat 2 minutes. Beat in vanilla and add sifted dry ingredients. Roll to 1/3 inch (mine are more like ¼ inch) between sheets of wax paper. Chill 2 hours. Cut out and bake at 325°F (160°C) for 16 to 18 minutes.

Hide them if you want to actually have a chance to eat any yourself.

Gingerbread

December 6, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / 3 Comments

‘Tis the season, and though I’d rather be eating strawberries, I feel culturally obliged to bake cookies.

And I’m obliged by my husband to bake gingerbread…

his mother’s recipe…

because that’s THE gingerbread recipe, according to him.

As gingerbread goes, it is a very nice recipe—full of lemon and orange in addition to the ginger and cinnamon. And the dough rolls and cuts well.

And it makes a TON of cookies!

Thankfully, this year the kids did all the decorating!

(Not so) Plain Vanilla

November 28, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

I knew I would be picking strawberries later in the day, so this morning when I was baking I made a simple vanilla cake, because it would go well with the berries.

But why do we consider vanilla simple, plain?

Vanilla is an exotic spice, made from the bean of a tropical orchid. Like most orchids, it has evolved a close relationship with it’s pollinator, and is only pollinated by one genus of bees. Outside its native Mexican range, vanilla must be hand pollinated. Though vanilla was introduced to Europe in the 1500s, it was more than 300 years before a viable hand-pollination technique was developed, allowing vanilla to be grown throughout the tropics.

To make vanilla even trickier to cultivate, it cannot germinate without the presence of specific mycorrhizal fungi.

Add to that the fact that it grows in regions prone to hurricanes and cyclones (which regularly wipe out regional production), and it’s not surprising that vanilla is the second most expensive spice after saffron.

So, why do we think of vanilla as ordinary and plain?

Perhaps it comes from the fact that vanillin, the artificial vanilla flavour that is used in 95% of “vanilla” flavoured products is made from lignin, a by-product of the papermaking industry. That makes artificial vanilla much cheaper than real vanilla—cheap enough to use in everything. Unfortunately, vanillin is only one of 171 different aromatic compounds found in the real vanilla bean, which is why artificial vanilla tastes so…well…plain.

This lovely, exotic spice has been rendered plain by its cheap imitation.

I use only real vanilla.

It’s not plain.

But it goes great with strawberries!

Girls’ Night In

November 24, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

My son is at school camp and my husband is at a workshop, so it was just me and my daughter for dinner tonight.

We indulged in biscuits—eaten first with egg, cheese, lettuce, and all manner of toppings as dinner, then later filled with strawberries and whipped cream for dessert.

MMMMMMM…

A game of washers in the late evening sun, and it was a perfect Girls’ Night In!