Tipsy trifle

 

First, you need an excellent, preferably home-made sponge cake, though you could use a store-bought Sara Lee pound cake easily enough.  Slice the cake into 1/4-inch slices. 

Make a quickie berry jam:  

            2 lbs frozen strawberries

            1 lb frozen raspberries

            1/4 cup water

            1 cup sugar

            Pinch salt

            2 tsp unflavored gelatin, hydrated in 2 Tbp water. 

Bring to a simmer, and cook gently until thickened a bit.  Mash the berries to make more homogeneous if necessary.  Add gelatin.  Let cool.  

This will not set up like a “Jello” dessert, but the gelatin will give it a bit more body.  It will not be as sweet as a commercial jarred jam. 

Feel free to use any jarred jam you like, though I am particular to strawberry, raspberry, or apricot for trifles.  I would NOT use Concord grape jam. 

Make a recipe of pastry cream.  (There’s really no good substitute for this.  Cooked pudding comes close, but lacks the richness, as there are no eggs.)

            1 qt milk

8 egg yolks

1 1/4 cup sugar

4 Tbp flour

4 Tbp corn starch

2 tsp vanilla extract

Pinch salt

2 Tbp softened butter

Scald milk gently over moderate heat.  (You can also do this in the microwave.)  Set aside. 

Beat egg yolks with sugar until smooth.  Add flour and corn starch.  Beat until smooth.  Add about a 1/2 cup of the warm milk by dribbles into egg/sugar/flour mixture and beat well until the egg mixture has been warmed up a bit (this is called “tempering”), then pour the egg/milk mixture back into the remaining hot milk. 

Cook over moderate heat, stirring constantly, until thickened like pudding.   Remove from heat.  Add vanilla extract.  Beat in butter. 

Cover surface with plastic wrap so that a skin does not form.  Let cool completely before using. 

Assemble your trifle in a straight-sided trifle bowl.

Layer sliced cake in the bottom.  Generously dribble rum (or other alcohol like brandy).  Spread cake with jam.  Spread some of the pastry cream.  Repeat several times, finishing with pastry cream.  

Trifle being assembled.  

Decorate with whipped cream on top, if desired. 

Summer jewel tones

Ruby

Quick raspberry refrigerator jam.

Topaz

Sweet white corn from the cob, slowly simmered in butter.

Emerald

A weekend's harvest of basil for pesto. 

Amethyst

 Blueberry pandowdy, fresh out of the oven, for the 4th of July BBQ.

Gold

Ripe freestone peaches, peeled, pitted, sliced, for jam.

Sausage gravy on biscuits

It's a gray, cold, snowy day, and I needed a reminder that Sunday brunch on the patio in the backyard isn't too far away.

Sausage gravy with homemade biscuits. I've done this recipe before, but add this variation:  if you're so inclined, or if you don't have sausage on hand, this works equally well with any kind of ground meat -- beef, turkey, pork.  I would be sure to saute half an onion or a shallot, and maybe add a crushed garlic clove before browning the meat, to add extra flavor to unseasoned ground meat (unlike sausage, which is fully seasoned, and often flavored, ground pork). I also really like adding Worcestershire and Tabasco to jazz up the flavor. 

And after you've finished the sausage gravy, you can always slather a biscuit with sweet butter and homemade peach jam.  Yes, you can.

The recipe I've been using for biscuits is from the New York Times (Melissa Clark).  It's a very good all-purpose recipe, though written in an annoying style, as the NYTimes seems convinced of late, that all its readers are cooking with metric measurements.  Odd.

And though the recipe calls for part cake flour (to approximate the soft flours used in 'classic' Southern biscuit recipes), I typically use just all-purpose flour, and it works just fine.  

I don't use a biscuit cutter.  After rolling out the dough, I cut with a knife into triangles.  No fuss, no bother.  

Flaky Buttermilk Biscuits (source: The New York Times)
Yield 10 to 12 biscuits

Time 30 minutes
    230 grams (about 2 cups) all-purpose flour
    50 grams (about 1/2 cup) cake flour
    15 grams (about 1 tablespoon) baking powder
    8 grams (about 2 teaspoons) sugar
    6 grams (about 1 1/4 teaspoon) fine sea salt
    9 tablespoons unsalted butter, chilled and cubed
    1 cup buttermilk, chilled.

Method
    1. Heat the oven to 450 degrees. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment.
    2. In a bowl, whisk together flours, baking powder, sugar and salt. Using a pastry cutter or fork, quickly cut in 8 tablespoons butter until it forms pea-size crumbs and is uniformly mixed it (for flaky biscuits you want the butter to remain cold). Make a well in the center of the flour mixture and pour in buttermilk. Stir together until it just forms a moist, slightly tacky dough.
    3. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Knead 2 or 3 times, then pat out into a 3/4-inch-thick round. Using a 2-inch round cutter, cut the biscuits. Twisting the cutter prevents proper rising; to prevent sticking, dip the cutter lightly in flour between biscuits. Do not re-roll the scraps, but pat them together and cut into rounds. Transfer biscuits to the baking sheet.
    4. Melt remaining 1 tablespoon butter. Brush butter lightly over the tops of hot biscuits. Bake until puffed and golden, about 15 minutes. Cool 5 minutes before serving.

Blueberry tiramisù

I'm honestly reluctant to call this dessert a "tiramisù," as it contains neither coffee, nor chocolate, nor mascarpone, nor eggs.  But it resembles a tiramisù in its structure (ladyfingers, or savoiardi), a flavoring, and a creamy layer, repeated.

In the same way that we now call pretty much anything in a stemmed cocktail glass a "martini," we'll call this a "tiramisù."

I opted to not use eggs as this will be traveling in 80-degree weather to a pool party, and thought the raw eggs typical in a tiramisù might not be the best idea.  I opted not to use mascarpone because it's unreasonably expensive, and for a pool party, Philadelphia cream cheese -- with a bit of whole-milk Greek yogurt to add some sharpness -- will do just fine. 

There are a few components to this dessert.  We'll do each separately. 

Lemon simple syrup
1 c sugar
1/2 cup water
Juice of half a lemon
Squeezed lemon rinds

Zest one lemon.  Set zest aside for later use.  Squeeze lemon halves into small bowl.  Set aside.
Combine sugar, water, and squeezed lemon halves in a small saucepan.  Bring to a boil.  Stir.  Lower heat to medium, and let simmer about 5 minutes until clear.  Set aside to completely cool.  Add half the lemon juice.

Blueberry compote
3 pints blueberries
1/2 cup sugar
Scant 1/2 cup water
Pinch of salt
Juice of half a lemon
Pinch of cinnamon

Bring berries, sugar, water, and salt to a simmer.  Stir.  Let cook just a few minutes until there is a thin sauce.  Set aside to cool completely.  Stir in the other half of the lemon juice and the cinnamon.

Crème filling
2  8-oz packages cream cheese, at room temperature
1 cup sugar
Pinch salt
2 tsp vanilla extract
Zest of a whole lemon
1/4 cup whole-milk Greek yogurt
1 pint whipping cream

Whip cream to soft peaks in a bowl.  Set aside. 

Beat softened cream cheese with sugar, vanilla, salt, lemon zest, and yogurt, until the mixture is creamy and the sugar is dissolved (there will be no grittiness remaining). 

Fold the whipped cream into the cream cheese mixture until combined.  Refrigerate until read to use.



Assembling the tiramisù
Simple syrup
Berry compote
Crème filling
1/2 pint fresh blueberries

Put a layer of soft ladyfinger cakes in a deep 9" x 13" baking dish or foil pan.  Lightly drizzle lemon-flavored simple syrup on the cakes.  Cover the cakes with half the berry compote.  Spread half the crème filling over the berries.  Repeat with another layer of cakes, syrup, berries, crème.  Top with the fresh blueberries. 

Cover, and refrigerate until ready to serve.

Syrup-soaked ladyfingers, with berry compote spread over.

Berries covered with creme filling.

Second layer.  Ladyfingers soaked with lemon-flavored syrup.

 Final layers of berry compote and creme filling, then topped with uncooked berries. 

Special bonus treat.  Leftover ladyfinger, spread with a bit of homemade raspberry jam, and a bit of creme filling, topped with another ladyfinger.   Dang.  Heaven on spongecake. 

Marmalade: winter sunshine

It's winter. Lots of citrus. Time for marmalade.

I used this recipe, from the National Center for Home Food Preservation at the University of Georgia, but substituting all oranges for the recipe's mixture of orange, grapefruit, and lemon.  I used seven tennis ball-sized sweet navel oranges.

Traditionally marmalade was made with sour, bitter Seville oranges, but they're nowhere to be found, and I don't miss the aggressive sharpness of such fruit in my marmalade.  I've done pink grapefruit marmalade, which is excellent, but today, grapefruit are very, very sweet, too. 

Fruit is boiled for about an hour to soften the fruit and remove bitterness from the peel, seeded, chopped, mixed with sugar and water, and boiled for about 20 minutes, until the mixture reaches 220°F. It's then put up in sterile jars, though I did this batch as a refrigerator jam, so no boiling water process after jarring.  Once cooled, the jars will go right into the fridge.  Got a bit over a quart of sweet orange marmalade.

Fruit is boiled for an hour to soften the peels, and remove a good deal of the bitterness.

Fruit is cut up, seeded (if necessary), and chopped fine.

 Finely chopped oranges.