A taste of Toronto (late summer and autumn)

Q: Queen Olive Cheese Balls

Wooaaaaaaaaah, time sure does fly! In exciting news, Alphabake recently celebrated its one year anniversary (and we still have not gotten through the entire alphabet--oops). The other thing that reflects time's quick passing is that I actually made this recipe and took the photos for this post last Christmas Eve (I think my style has changed a bit since). I realize that making a quiche or something with quinoa would have been a better match for the letter 'Q' but these Queen Olive cheese balls were  made in honour of my sister's dog, Olive. I felt that I needed to make letter 'Q' before I left for Scotland in order to get the puppy photo op.

The recipe comes from Hors D'Oeuvres by Eric Treuille and Vitctoria Blashford-Snell.  The main reason I decided to try this recipe was because it was one of the very few I had that started with 'Q'.  I did not expect them to be particularly tasty but I was pleasantly surprised and everyone at the dinner really liked them. HRH Queen Olive Cheese Ball herself tried to get her paws on a few!

A taste of Montreal

P: Portuguese Custard Pies

"Oh Blog, once again you have been neglected for far too long. I truly do apologize. Things have been so busy with school and work and moving. I have finally found a moment to myself, as I leisurely sit in front of the TV watching the Food Network ('Cupcake Wars', to be specific...aka TV gold)"...

Anyway, this week on Alphabake we are featuring two recipes that start with the letter 'P'. "Two recipes?!?," you ask? Yes, dear reader, and just to let you know, currently in my books the letter 'P' stands for "pain", "problematic", "pest", etc. Maybe I am being  a tad dramatic, but you get the idea.

So, the first attempt to complete a recipe for letter 'P' was in the form of Peanut Butter and Sweet Banana Cookies from Anna Olson's Sugar: Simple Sweets and Decadent Desserts. It is a sandwich cookie recipe and unfortunately something went horribly wrong with the filling.  It must have been something I did because I can't imagine anyone writing a recipe so that it would purposefully taste so horrid. Basically I had to caramalize some bananas and the sugar must have burned. I didn't have it cooking for very long at all but it turned dark so quickly. I used oil instead of butter because I didn't have any left and I think that might have lead to the rapid burning...but I'm not sure. Even though the filling was horrible, the actual peanut butter cookies were amazing on their own so I've posted the recipe at the end of this entry  in case you want to just try making them (or even battle with getting the filling right).

About a week later I decided to try and tackle a new recipe. For quite a long time I had been eyeing one for Portuguese custard pies in Jamie Oliver's The Naked Chef Takes Off.  They reminded me of my trip to Lisbon. I also recently saw them featured on Jamie's 30-Minute Meals so they couldn't be too time consuming, right? WRONG!!!  Ok, they weren't too difficult but they definitely took way longer than thirty minutes to make--at least they were super tasty.

My main problem was with the pie shells. The recipe calls for store-bought puff pastry which was easy enough but it took me a while to figure out how to bake it. In the book he uses glass tumblers, turns them upside down, greases and flours their bases, and then stretches and places the dough on top. On his TV show he baked them in a muffin tin. Since I didn't have any tumbler glasses I started with the muffin tin method. It was hard to roll out the dough because it tends to shrink back, and after it baked it formed a very shallow pie shell that wouldn't hold a lot of custard. I happened to have another roll of puff pastry so I started over and this time I took the muffin tin and flipped it upside down and stretched the dough over the cup bases and that seemed to work pretty well.  A couple of other small alterations I made to the recipe were that instead of using vanilla pods and fresh nutmeg, I used vanilla extract and ground nutmeg since that is what I had.

Once I figured out a good technique for making the tart shells, things were pretty simple (although making the custard filling took a little while) and the results were great. The pastry turned out really crispy and delicious and the slight citrus notes in the custard was really pleasant.  They were slightly different than the traditional custard pies I tried in Portugal, but definitely caputured their essence. Enjoy!

A taste of Peru

A taste of Bolivia

A taste of Argentina

O: Orange and Poppy Seed Cake

Before I begin talking about food I'll just share the low-down of what I've been up to this past week. I ended my European adventure and got back to Canada on June 15th. The weather was beautiful, it was so nice to catch up with everyone, and I found I had developed a greater appreciation for Toronto. I was there for a few days before leaving again on the 21st to fly to Buenos Aires in Argentina. I have some family here and I also met up with my friend Brigid who has recently been doing a bit of travelling of her own. For just over a month Brigid and I will be visiting a few different places in South America--where we will be going still needs to be determined...

I have always wanted to travel to South America so it is great being in Argentina now although it is their winter and the weather is a bit sad. Brigid and I are taking a couple of days to get over our jet lag (I have no excuse because it is just an hour ahead here but she just came from Australia) and to finally create a rough plan of where we want to visit. I thought I would take advantage of this time of rest to complete the blog post I started just before I left for the airport on Tuesday.

When I was in high school my mother used to always buy issues of the BBC Good Food magazine. They were one of my favourite magazines to flip through (food geek) and my mum now has a couple of folders with clippings of some of our favourite recipes. This orange and poppyseed cake is one of the really good ones we have in there.

The Saturday I was back in town, my sister invited us over to her place for a barbeque (scrolll down to see pictures of her lovley table decor and her cute pup, Olive) and I thought I would make this cake to bring for dessert. I find that oranges are usually featured in more wintry dishes (their season tends to end in April), but with the custard and citrusy notes, I think this recipe works quite well for a summer barbeque. 

Here are some of my notes:

1) Try to cut the oranges as thinly as possible. The orange slices that I featured on top of the cake were quite thick.  Because of their thickness they were less likely to fall apart while being poached and therefore were more attractive. However, the thicker density was manageable but also on the boarder of being 'too much' when it came to eating them.

2) The recipe calls for a 20 cm pan which is approximately 8 inches. I used a 9 inch spring-form pan because that's what we had. It was fine but using the smaller size would have been a bit better because the cake would have been taller and therefore easier to slice into three (and I think it would have been prettier). The recipe doesn't make a whole lot of the custard filling so if you have a smaller area to cover you can also put it on more liberally.  

3) There are quite a few steps to making this cake (baking the cake, making the custard, poaching the oranges, waiting for everything to cool, etc) so it's good to give yourself at least a few hours to make it. You could easily subsitute making your own custard with one that is ready-made and just combine it with the citrus juices and zest. Also the cake would probably benefit from being made the day before and being chilled overnight because that would allow for all the flavours to blend into one another. All in all it is such a delicious and really flavourful cake!

Since I am on the road again until the end of July, this is probably the last post I will be able to put up for a while.  I promise to take lots of pictures of my travels in South America and will put them on here once I return to Canada. Until then, hope you enjoy the photos and even the cake if you get a chance to make it!

A taste of Oxford and London

N: Nut Cake

As much as I love posting all of my travel photos (there are still a few more to come), it is about time I get back to the original theme of this blog.  I made this nut cake on May 15th which was my last day in Edinburgh before leaving to Portugal. I made it in between all the sorting, packing, and saying my goodbyes so it was vital that the recipe for letter 'N' was quick and painless. This is one of my mother's recipes and with only three ingredients (nuts, eggs, and sweetened condensed milk) it is so easy to execute but still extremely tasty.

The cake has an almost custardy texture and it pairs really well with ice cream (generally vanilla). Most kinds of nuts can be used in this recipe but my mother's recommendations are either almonds or pecans because of their flavour. I decided to go with pecans this time because I didn't have a food processor and I thought they would be easier to chop up.  One probably could use a bag of already ground almonds but then again they might be too fine... Anyways, if you're having a moment where you are feeling a little too preoccupied to do any baking, it doesn't matter, start making this cake!!! :-)