recipe

Cheese and Quince Tart

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Our quince tree gave its first harvest ever this year, which is exciting. I picked them today, and my husband went looking for some new (to us) recipes that use quince.

He came across Tarta de Queso y Membrillo con Almíbar de Cardamomo—Cheese and Quince Tart with Cardamom Syrup. How could I resist? 

It’s been a while since I followed a recipe in Spanish, so there was an added level of adventure for me making this recipe. I don’t think I ever bought or used azúcar flor (icing sugar) when we lived in Panama, so I had to look that one up.

Even in your native language, this is not a tart you whip out quickly—nothing using quince is, and this has lots of different things to prepare—but it is delicious! It’s essentially cheesecake with caramelised quince in a pie crust. What’s not to like?

I modified the recipe slightly—here’s my version, in English.

Cheese layer:
1 package cream cheese
1/2 cup unsweetened yogurt
2 Tbs honey
1 egg
1 Tbs fresh lemon juice

Quince layer:
3 large or 6 small quince
1/4 cup brown sugar
25 g butter
1 Tbs cinnamon

Enough pie dough for 1 crust (see my pie dough recipe here)

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Cardamom syrup:
3/4 cup icing sugar
3 Tbs fresh lemon juice
3 cardamom pods

Make your pie crust and refrigerate until needed.

Mix the ingredients for the cheese layer with a handheld mixer until well combined. Set aside.

Peel, core, and thinly slice the quince (you should have 7-8 cups of fruit). Place the quince, butter and brown sugar in a large skillet and cook on low heat for about 10 minutes, until the quince has softened. Stir in the cinnamon.

Roll out the pie dough and line a pie or tart pan with it. Pour the cheese mixture evenly over the bottom of the crust. Layer the caramelised quince on top, and sprinkle with chopped walnuts.

Bake at 190℃ for 40-45 minutes.

While the pie is baking, make the sugar syrup. Place the icing sugar, lemon juice and cardamom pods in a small saucepan and boil gently for 8 minutes. Remove from the heat and let cool. Drizzle over the pie when serving.

The recipe I used said to serve the tart warm, which is how we ate it this evening. But I’m looking forward to a second piece tomorrow, because I think it’ll be even better cold. 

Next time I make this (because there will no doubt be a next time), I’ll crush the cardamom pods so that the syrup is more strongly flavoured. I also think it would be even more spectacular with a cup of ugni berries (Chilean guava) tossed into the quince mixture.

If you don’t have quince, this tart would be lovely made with apple or pear, too.

Zucchini and Tomato Tart

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We’re in the bountiful days of summer right now. And while I’d like to be sitting in a chaise lounge enjoying that bounty all day, someone’s got to pick it and process it. At the moment, the processing mostly involves making pickles and chutneys, but there’s a lot more to come. Then there’s the necessary watering, weeding, tying up of tomatoes, planting of winter crops (because as John Snow says, winter’s coming)…

zucchini tomato tart

But at the end of each day, we do get to enjoy the fruits of the season. Last night I made one of my favourite mid-summer meals—zucchini and tomato tart.

The beauty of this tart belies its simplicity—just tomato and zucchini, embellished with a little parmesan cheese, garlic and basil. 

Back when I had dairy goats, I’d spread a layer of chevre on the bottom, too, which was divine. It also had the bonus of preventing the crust from getting too soggy. These days, without an unlimited supply of goat cheese, I put up with a soggy crust—the tart is still amazing.

This tart relies on having the best tomato and zucchini possible—it’s not a dish to make with out-of-season vegetables—so if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, hang in there and enjoy this gem in July and August instead.

Download the recipe here.

Black Currant Icing

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bowl of black currant icing

I made chocolate cupcakes yesterday and wanted to make use of some of the last of the fresh back currants in them. Instead of tossing a handful of black currants into the batter (which would have been lovely), I used the fruit to make a black currant icing—tart, sweet, and shockingly pink! 

You could do this with frozen currants, too, and it’s not difficult. The result is worth the bit of extra work.

100 g softened butter
3/4 cup fresh black currants
1 cup icing sugar

Place the black currants in a sauce pan and cook until soft—3-5 minutes. Press them through a sieve to remove seeds and skins. Set the puree aside to cool to room temperature.

Beat the butter until fluffy. Add 3 tablespoons of the black currant puree and beat until uniformly mixed. Sift the sugar over the butter mixture and beat until smooth. Adjust by adding more sugar or puree until the icing is spreading consistency.

Biscuit Stars (a.k.a. Starry Scones)

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

It’s been a long time since I blogged about biscuit stars (or Starry Scones, as I call them here in NZ, since ‘biscuits’ are cookies here). It’s been a while since I made them, too.

unbaked biscuit star
baked biscuit star

I was feeling whimsical on Sunday morning, though, and whipped one up for breakfast. As usual, it turned out beautifully and took minimal effort. It struck me as the perfect ‘fancy’ breakfast for the coming busy holiday season.

Try making one of these yourself—everyone will ooh and aah over your amazing culinary skills, and you never have to let on that it’s dead easy (I won’t tell …). 

Here’s the recipe. Enjoy!

Accidentally Perfect

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I didn’t set out to make a spectacular cake.

lemon cake with blackcurrant puree

I actually set out to whip out something simple and quick—a Covid cake—because I had little energy for baking last week as I recovered from the virus.

So I chose a tried and true recipe. My favourite lemon cake is a recipe I came up with years ago when my daughter asked for a lemon birthday cake. It draws on components of a good lemon scone recipe, an orange cake recipe, and a coconut cake recipe. 

It’s a recipe I’ve honed over the years, and one I could probably make in my sleep.

And this iteration of it was one of the best cakes I’ve ever made.

The butter was at the perfect temperature to whip up light and fluffy. And maybe I gave it a little extra time with the mixer, because I was bored of Covid isolation. And because I wasn’t up for much work, I added a little extra liquid to the batter to make the egg whites easier to fold in.

The recipe always makes a cake with good texture, but this one was a step up from the usual. Whether it was perfectly whipped butter or a wetter batter, something worked in my favour, and the finished cake’s texture was positively sublime—soft and fluffy, but with body like a good butter cake should have.

When it came time for a topping, I took the lazy way out. I topped and filled the cake with black currant puree I happened to have in the fridge. No measuring, and no additions to it—I simply spread it between the layers and poured it over the top. The puree spread out thickly, dripping down the sides and drying to a shiny, soft, fruity layer. Not only did it look great (and appropriately bloody-looking for Halloween), but the tart, unsugared black currant was the perfect foil for the sweet cake underneath.

It was a cake I could have served to anyone.

Unfortunately, because we were in isolation, only my husband and I got to enjoy this perfect cake, but I’ll definitely be trying to replicate it in the future.

Strawberry Cupcakes

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Every now and again, you come across something that is as delicious as it is easy. The other day I wanted to make a cake involving strawberries, because it’s that time of year. I looked at lots of recipes online that involved making a strawberry reduction first, but it seemed like an awful lot of work. I was really looking for simple. 

So, ignoring everything I’d seen online, I modified a basic vanilla cake recipe from the Mennonite Community Cookbook, adding sliced fresh strawberries, and whipped up a quick strawberry icing. I baked the cake as cupcakes, as I often do to keep our portion sizes down (because you know I can’t resist cutting a huge slice of cake …).

The result is exactly what I wanted—an easy cake that highlights fresh strawberry flavour. I’ll definitely be making this one again.

Strawberry Cupcakes

3/4 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups sugar
3 eggs, separated
3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
3 tsp baking powder
1 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups fresh strawberries, sliced

Cream the butter. Add sugar gradually and beat until fluffy. Add egg yolks and beat until well incorporated. Sift flour, salt and baking powder together in a separate bowl. Add flour mixture alternately with milk and vanilla, beating well after each addition. Fold in stiffly beaten egg whites, then fold in the strawberries.

Fill cupcake papers, and bake at 175ºC (350ºF) for 25 minutes. Allow to cool completely on a rack before frosting.* Makes 24.

Strawberry Frosting **

60 g (1/4 cup) butter, softened
1 cup icing (confectioners) sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
3 Tbsp pureed fresh strawberries
Puree strawberries in a blender (I had to puree about a cup and a half of berries in order to have enough volume for the blender to work with—just save the extra puree. There are hundreds of delicious uses for it). Cream the butter. Sift the sugar over the butter and continue to beat. Add vanilla and strawberry puree and beat until well blended. Adjust the icing by adding more sugar or strawberries until it is a spreading consistency. 

* It was a warm day, and I was a little worried my strawberry icing would weep if it sat at room temperature with the cupcakes. Instead of frosting them all, I frosted only what we were going to eat right away, storing the remainder in the fridge, to spread on the cupcakes as we eat them. Alternately, you could store your iced cupcakes in the refrigerator. Mine is currently stuffed full of zucchini and green beans—no room for cake.

** Double this frosting recipe if you want to ice all 24 cupcakes. I put half the cupcakes in the freezer unfrosted, since I haven’t got kids at home to devour them at the moment, so I only made a small batch of frosting.

Black Currant Pie

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

I have blogged about black currant pie before, but it’s worth doing again. This year’s black currant harvest was overwhelming, not just because it came in the two weeks on either side of Christmas, but also because it was huge. It didn’t help that the red currants also gave a hefty crop at precisely the same time. For two weeks, I felt like all I did was pick and process currants.

Well, and eat them, too.

We use currants in ice cream, crisps, cobblers, fruit salads, and smoothies, but my favourite way to eat them is in pie.

Black currant pie is not for the sour-averse—it is a full-bodied, knock-your-socks-off type flavour. To me it is the flavour of summer. And because it works equally well with frozen berries, I always try to save enough so I can make black currant pie on the winter solstice and dream of long summer days in the chill and dark of winter. 

So revel in the intense flavours of summer and enjoy a slice of black currant pie. You can download a pdf of this recipe here.

Crust:
¾ cup all purpose flour
¾ cup wholemeal flour
¼  tsp salt
60 g butter
60 g Olivani
3-4 Tbsp ice water

Filling:
4-6 cups black currants
½ cup sugar
2 Tbsp flour

Topping:
2/3 cup flour
2/3 cup finely chopped walnuts (or rolled oats)
2/3 cup brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
75 g butter, melted

Crust:
Whisk together the flours and salt in a medium bowl. Cut in the butter and Olivani with a pastry knife until the largest chunks of butter are the size of small peas. Sprinkle the ice water over the flour mixture and combine with a fork until evenly moistened. Knead lightly, just until it forms a coherent dough (it will be crumbly). refrigerate while you prepare the filling and  topping.

Filling:
Combine sugar and flour in a small bowl. Mix with stemmed, washed black currants and set aside.

Topping:
Combine the flour, walnuts, sugar and cinnamon in a medium bowl. Stir in the butter with a fork until evenly moistened and crumbly.

Roll out the crust and place in a 23 cm pie pan. Pour the filling into the pan and sprinkle evenly with the topping. Bake at 200°C for 30 minutes, then reduce the heat to 170°C and bake another 30 minutes.

Serve with a generous dollop of whipped cream.

OOOOOh my! Chocolate cookies

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I dipped into Ottolenghi’s book, Sweet, again the other day. This time I made Chocolate O Cookies. 

All I can say is  OOOOOOh my!

These could possibly be the best chocolate cookies ever. They’re a lot of work, and the recipe only makes 20 cookies, but those 20 cookies are truly divine.

The cookies themselves are a rich chocolate shortbread—alone, they’re worth making. But the piece de resistance is the water ganache filling.

I’d never made a ganache like this before, and I have to say I was dubious at first—mixing chocolate and water is a no-no, right? To make matters worse, the ganache starts with a sugar syrup, which has always been a bit of an Achilles heel for me.

But somehow it worked, and the infusion of cinnamon, chilli and orange gives the ganache a complex richness that lifts it above any other ganache I’ve made.

I’ll definitely be making these again … and again … and again.

Incidentally, I had extra ganache, which I popped into the fridge and slathered on lemon cupcakes later in the week—an excellent bonus!

Here’s the ganache recipe:

1/2 cinnamon stick
shaved peel of 1/2 orange
1/2 tsp chilli flakes
90 ml boiling water
125 g dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids), roughly chopped
scraped seeds of 1/2 vanilla pod (I used 1/2 tsp vanilla)
1/4 tsp salt
50 g caster sugar
50 g liquid glucose (I used honey)
50 g butter, cut into 2 cm cubes

Place cinnamon, orange peel and chilli flakes in a small bowl and cover with the boiling water. Set aside for 30 minutes. After the water has been infusing for about 20 minutes, prepare the sugar syrup.

Place the chocolate, vanilla seeds and salt in a medium bowl and set aside. Place the sugar and glucose in a small saucepan and warm over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the sugar has melted. Increase the heat and boil until the caramel turns a light amber colour (this doesn’t work if you use honey—it will already be amber. I boiled to about the soft ball stage), about 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and add the infused water and aromatics. Return the liquid to a boil and then strain over the chocolate and vanilla. Discard the aromatics. Leave for 2-3 minutes until the chocolate has melted. Stir until smooth.

Add the butter, one piece at a time, stirring constantly until it is incorporated and smooth. Refrigerate 30 minutes to firm up.

Butterless Pumpkin Lockdown Cake

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iced pumpkin cake

Lockdown grocery shopping is always a bit frustrating. Our local grocery store is calm and safe-feeling. There’s never a line out the door, and social distancing is relatively easy. The problem is the store is small (little choice in brands—you take what you can get), and the prices are high. Under normal circumstances I do my shopping at cheaper, larger stores in the city.

So during lockdown, I buy as few groceries as possible and limit expensive foods like cheese and butter.

Which is why last week’s baking challenge was an iced cake with no butter. 

I based the cake on a whole-grain pumpkin cake recipe from the King Arthur Flour Wholegrain Baking book. The recipe calls for 1/2 cup each of oil and butter, so I simply used a cup of oil instead. I’ve done this before with other cakes when I needed to make a cake for lactose intolerant friends, so I was confident it would work well. It did, and the cake turned out light and moist.

The icing was more of an issue. I wanted a nice thick icing, not a simple glaze. What I really wanted was a cream cheese frosting, but I had no cream cheese. To get the cream cheese frosting flavour, I used yogurt instead. I drained about a third of a cup of yogurt for a couple of hours to thicken it. Then I blended it a spoonful at a time, along with a teaspoon of vanilla, into 2 1/2 cups of icing sugar until I hit the consistency I wanted.

It wasn’t a butter icing—it still had the feel of a glaze more than a frosting—but it spread on thickly, oozing slightly over the edges of the cake and drying to a beautiful glossy sheen. Best of all, it had the lovely cultured tartness of a cream cheese frosting. All in all, a darned good icing on a fabulous cake.

And it didn’t cost me $7.95 for a block of butter. An excellent lockdown experiment!

Cheese sablés

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Cheese sables

Move over Cheez-its! Cheese sablés have entered my baking lexicon.

Well over a year ago, I copied a recipe for Cheese and Sun-Dried Tomato Sables from a cookbook I got from the library. Sadly, I don’t know what the cookbook was, or I’d recommend it to you.

I finally got around to making them yesterday. In addition to learning that ‘sables’ are actually ‘sablés’, which is French for sandy (the texture of the mixture before the cheese is added), I discovered that these little savoury biscuits are amazing.

There are so many flavours—all of them distinct and strong—in these glorious things, I can hardly describe them. They’re more work to make than your average cracker, but they are so far beyond the average cracker in flavour, it’s hardly surprising. I made them without the tomatoes, because I had none in the house. Even without tomatoes they were heavenly. Here’s the recipe, sans tomatoes, and with a few modifications based on my experience.

100 g plain flour
75 g wholemeal flour
1/2 tsp salt
good pinch cayenne pepper
good pinch mustard powder
1 tsp caraway seeds
freshly ground black pepper
125 g cold butter, diced
50 g sharp cheddar, finely grated
75 g Parmesan, finely grated
4 tsp sesame seeds
2 tsp nigella (black onion) seeds
1-2 tsp milk

Mix the flours, salt, cayenne, mustard, caraway and a good grind of black pepper in a large bowl. Add the butter and cut with a pastry knife until there are no visible flecks of butter remaining. (The original recipe suggests doing this in a food processor, which would be quicker and easier). Add the grated cheeses and mix until the dough just starts to come together in clumps. Now knead it with your hands until you can bring it together in a smooth ball. This takes some time, as the only ‘liquid’ in the dough is the fat from the butter and cheese. Be patient. It will happen. Shape the dough into a log roughly 5 cm in diameter. Wrap in cling film and refrigerate about 2 hours until firm. 

Preheat the oven to 180ºC (160ºC if using fan bake). Butter two baking sheets.

Mix the sesame seeds and nigella seeds on a tray. Brush the sablé log with the milk and roll in the seeds, pressing them into the dough so they stick. Slice the log into slices 4 mm thick and place 3 cm apart on the baking sheets.

Bake for 12-15 minutes, until golden. Cool on a rack. Fight off the rest of the family who hover around waiting for them to be ready to eat.