Blueberry Picking

We picked blueberries last weekend! 

We love picking fruit - we've picked strawberries and raspberries in the past, as well as apples and citrus fruit, but this was our first time at a blueberry farm.

The cousins came, too.

Also grandma Karen

and Grandpa Arne.

I hadn't seen a blueberry plant in person till that morning. 

The berries were exquisite. So flavorful.

After, we stopped at our regular strawberry farm to buy some ready-picked strawberries. We were sad to have missed the strawberry U-pick season but glad there were still farm berries to take home and turn into jam!

Lefse!

Made lefse this week.

First time ever. And it took ALL day.

The children helped, and we had a blast. 
There was flour everywhere.

The Saturday before, I attended a lefse-making class. That was a blast, too. But I was the only non I-Grew-Up-Inhaling-Lefse-Like-Oxygen-Because-My-Norwegian-Grandmother-Made-It-All-The-Time participant. When we were introducing ourselves and explaining how much we couldn't live without lefse, I said that I was there for the husband, who, unlike me, is Norwegian, and whose grandmother did indeed make it.

Then came home and whipped up (in a manner of speaking) a batch while the instruction was still fresh in my mind. Needs some tweaking, I think - our lefse is more like flatbread than the popiah skin  I'm used to seeing on the dinner table when the in-laws get together for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Emily says our crispy version is reminiscent of roti tisu. 

I suppose there's a lefse for every culture. And starch.

My favorite is the sweet potato kind, with brown sugar and butter. Which we also made. Yum.

Hummus

My first taste of hummus was several decades ago in England, of all places. I was a traveling companion to an aunt (hellooooo Auntie Moe!) and she introduced me to hummus. Also taramasalata, which I thought was funny because it was pink, but that doesn't come into this story much. Both were delicious, but both were forgotten after that vacation and I'd returned to Singapore, where it's hard to find either (since neither are particularly local favorites).

Years later, I rediscovered the store-bought kind here in the US, and ate it with everything and in everything (except desserts). 

But I'd also wanted to make it myself, especially since everyone says it's so ridiculously easy. So I did. 

The only reason I'd waited this long (apart from my general propensity for procrastination) is the ease with which one can pick up an inexpensive store-bought tub in a multitude of flavors and brands. Why make when you can buy? is my life motto, because it saves time which, unlike money, one can never earn back.

Then one day I found tahini in my regular supermarket, lurking inconspicuously next to the peanut butters - without even having to go hunting in a gourmet grocery store, mind you! - and decided that the stars had aligned. 

It was as easy as I'd heard, and more delicious than.

Here is the recipe.

I didn't make any changes to it, but I did add leftover black beans to half a batch and pureed them in.

I'm not discriminating against store-bought, though - all hummus is good.

I Found An Icing

Some weeks ago, I spent a solo weekend in New York to visit Edwin and Jono. There was a lot of eating involved, about half of which was dessert/treats. And one of those treats was a caramel cake at Magnolia Bakery.

It was devastating.

Not only did I eat ALL the icing, when I never eat frosting in general (I scrape it off and just eat the cake), I also came home craving it and harboring covetous desires to replicate it.

The problem: I'd have to bake a cake to put the icing on.

I like cakes, but a whole cake seemed a bit much when all I needed was a slice or two. I momentarily considered buying a box mix and tossing away about 80% of the cake, but I couldn't bring myself to put good icing on a Betty Crocker yellow cake. Wrong in so many ways. 

Then I remembered that last winter, I'd made a sugee cake and, in an attempt to exercise restraint, disallowed myself from eating the last quarter of it and instead put it in the back of the freezer for a rainy day.

Hurrah!

On my birthday, I dug out that bit of cake, along with some good Irish butter I'd also been hoarding and made the caramel pecan buttercream icing that had so haunted me.

Amazing. Almondy-pecany-buttery perfection.

Who would've thought - sugee cake and caramel icing? Even Mum didn't believe it when I told her - sugee cake, apparently, is more familiarly served au naturel or with fondant and royal icing, particularly at weddings.

What do I care about following food rules?

Anyway, here is the recipe - see notes below:

• 2 cups (4 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
• 5 cups sifted confectioners’ sugar 
• 11/2 cups firmly packed light brown sugar
• 1/2 cup milk
• 2 tablespoons dark corn syrup
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Notes:

1. I quartered this recipe.
2. I used much less confectioner's sugar
3. I totally forgot to add the milk
4. I added crushed pecans as a sprinkle

No More Bricks

I am thrilled to announce that I have procured a proofing box.

See, I have a long history in brick-baking.

It goes like this: 

• I love bread.
• The rest of the family also love bread.
• I like baking.
• I have successfully baked all my life.
• I tried baking bread.
• I followed all the instructions.
• Half the time, I got bread. The other half I got bricks.
• I was sad.

After enough years of trying, a disturbing pattern emerged:

I usually got bread in the summer and bricks in the other seasons of the year. 

Deduction: When the recipe says to let the dough rise in "a warm place", the authors never lived in Minnesota in the winter. Or Spring. Or Fall. Or in the Summer when it was cloudy.

Hypothesis: The "warm place" must be artificially created in order to avoid brick outcomes.

Several tests were conducted, including:

Test 1: 

A hot lamp was used to illuminate the dough.

Test 2: 

The dough was set in a room in which all the space heaters we owned were switched on and blasting.

Test 3: 

The oven, preheated to the lowest temperature setting and then switched off and housing a large bowl of just-boiled water was used as an incubating chamber for the dough.

Test 4: 

The microwave oven was used in place of the oven in Test 3, except that the bowl of water was boiled in the microwave to introduce steam and induce a humid environment.

Test 5: 

The dough was incarcerated in the minivan out on the driveway in the hottest days of summer, a la greenhouse.

Test 6: 

Again in the summer, the dough was placed in the direct sunshine on the deck, and moved every 15 minutes as the sun shifted and hid behind clouds. This Test was repeated in the winter, with even more abysmal results, by playing musical chairs (or - in this case- windows) with the slivers of sunlight slanting into the house.

Only Test 5 ever worked. And only on days when it was so blistering outdoors that people hid in their homes en masse to avoid skin cancer.

Mum, when whined to, said, "Maybe your yeast is lousy. Should I send you some from Singapore? I never have a problem getting dough to rise in Singapore."

Well, no surprise there. Singapore, after all, is like the inside of an active volcano most months of the year. Anything could rise there, even dead yeast.

At some point in my sad quest, it occurred to me that baking bread should not be harder than scientists trying to discover elementary particles by randomly splitting obscure heavy elements.

So, weary of throwing bricks into the trash after an entire day of chasing sunshine, I gave up. It is a losing battle to fight against the mighty winters of the midwest. And it is a wise -if cowardly -person to think otherwise. The residents of Minnesota, I decided, must either know magic, or buy all their bread ready-made from stores, or else all own bread machines. Nothing wrong with bread machines (and I came close to buying one in desperation), but I reasoned that as I have a perfectly good stand mixer and a perfectly good pair of hands, and enough time to carry out daft from-scratch experiments, there must be one critical variable in the baking equation that was missing.   

Earlier this month, I discovered proofing boxes.

Why have I never known about proofing boxes?

Who has been keeping them a secret?

Today, I baked my first non-brick in years.

And postulated a new hypothesis: In a suitable incubating environment, the outcome of a bread baking experiment has a non-zero probability of success.

Before                                       After

Observation: 

the glorious sight of dough that has actually risen.

Outcome: We had potato bread for dinner tonight.

Not bricks.

Christmas Baking

Last week was Baking Week here at home. In lieu of Christmas crafts, that the kids have outgrown, we amused ourselves by making edible treats to eat and give away. We baked and frosted from Monday to Friday and then spent the weekend packaging the goodies to deliver to neighbors, friends, school teachers and Sunday School teachers.

Thought I'd photodocument the list, so I can refer to it next year. This is a definitely a keeper combination.

Sugee Cake Take Two

While muddling about in the kitchen this Advent season, it suddenly occurred to me that we needed to start our Christmas baking. 

Immediately panicked and designated this week Baking Week. The kids and I baked for five solid days non-stop. That is to say that I baked during every waking minute that wasn't spent on errands, chauffeuring kids somewhere, cooking meals or laundry, and the kids chipped in to help when they were home from school. Baking Week this year was quite the mega-activity, carried out in lieu of the usual random Christmas crafts that the kids have now completely outgrown. We decided that making obscene amounts of treats and packing them into pretty boxes to deliver to friends, neighbors and teachers was much more fun. And tasty.

To kick off Baking Week, I attempted -yet again - the very temperamental semolina (sugee) cake. I've baked it before here in Minnesota, as has mum when she visited us some summers ago. But in spite of following our original recipe, we both failed (and Mum never fails) at reproducing the texture and taste that characterize this delicacy in Singapore. We decided that some translation had to happen between ingredients in making a North American version of a Singaporean/commonwealth recipe.

Which meant experimenting. And producing some very odd-tasting interim products before even approaching what I was looking for. There were so many variables, all of which varied independently of every other variable, and randomly!

For instance, the butter. Which I've analyzed to death in the past, so let's just move on. Then there's the sugar - differently sweet and different-sized crystals. We use slightly coarser granulated sugar from sugar beets here in the US; we use the much finer cane sugar called caster sugar back in Singapore. Next, we don't seem to have this elusive deep yellow paste-like baking aid known as emulsifier in the US (or maybe I just haven't looked hard enough) that stabilizes cakes. And the eggs! How can one even begin the guess at the differences in multi-continental poultry?

The sugee cake page in my recipe book is plastered with mini post-it notes full of notes written to myself: "Increase butter from 10 oz to 13 oz", "Add 2 oz sugar and 1/2 tsp salt", "Too eggy - decrease number of egg yolks to 6 but keep same egg whites" and even "Use lowest rack and increase oven temp by 5 degree and bake half an hour less". Invaluable, those notes, because months go by before each subsequent experiment and I forget what went wrong or right the last time. 

Well. On Monday, I made a sugee cake that tasted as close to home as it will ever be. Finally. It's practically a brand new recipe by the time all the conversions and adjustments had been made. It still sank a little in the middle, which means the next time around, I will have to try a differently-shaped pan or else work the batter less. But there was no separation of layers this time, which sometimes happens when one is working with flour as dense as semolina, mixed with the heavy ground almond bits. Hurrah. 

And the flavor! Buttery. Almondy. Grindy and moist and sweet and salty. I have eaten almost the entire cake by myself. I had to forcibly freeze the last quarter of it, just to feel like I'd attempted some self-control. 

Today, on the last day of Baking Week, I made banana bread. Lots of little loaf pans of it. It is ridiculous how easy it is to bake these no-fail cakes/sweet breads by comparison. A person could do it with ice-cold eggs and frozen butter and scooping random amounts of flour with one's hands and feet and it would all still work. No skill required. I love baking stuff like this!

And now, I must put trays of white chocolate macadamia nut cranberry (what a mouthful) cookies in the oven and make frosting for sugar cookies which the girls can work on after school. And with that declare Baking Week, bookended by two very different kinds of cake, over. The tally: 9 different cookies and 2 cakes (one of which is almost all gone - burp).

This weekend, we assemble treat boxes!

Truly Scrumptious Pumpkin Pie With Streusel

In the spirit of fall, I made a pumpkin pie last week. I don't usually care for pumpkin pie but this one is amazing, not the least because it's not very pumpkiny under all that wonderful nut streusel. 

I found the filling and topping recipe here.

And this is the recipe I used for the crust:

Ingredients:

• 1.5 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/8 cup Crisco
• 3/8 cup butter (or 1/2 cup butter and no Crisco)
• iced water.

Method:

1. Rub fat into flour+salt.
2. Freeze for about 1/2 hour.
3. Fill with pumpkin filling and bake according to the recipe.

Gong Hee Fatt Choy!

Happy 3rd Day of the New Year!

We try to celebrate CNY here in Minnesota. I always snort when I consider that in China, CNY is called the Spring Festival. It would never work here, because we still have at least 2 more months of winter (if we're lucky) before there's any sign of any possibility of Spring turning up. And CNY here is a quiet affair - the stores are stocked with Valentine's stuff because nobody knows what CNY is. Which is fine by me, because the last thing I want is loud Chinese music, complete with cymbals and gongs, blaring over the PA system at the supermarket.

Still, I'm Chinese, and the kids are half-Chinese, so I feel obliged to do things during this season to show my roots, as they say. 

Food is always a safe option. Everyone likes food. 

We made pineapple tarts, using Mum's original recipe. 

Here's the jam. That container came from two oversize pineapples, chopped and cooked down to that miniscule amount. 

Here's the butter. I actually went out and bought European (okay, Irish) butter because it was more like the sort we use in Singapore. Here it is with a bit of American butter (the larger block of Irish butter is yellower and melts more quickly). Nothing wrong with American butter - and it's probably healthier than the sort we use back home, because it's less oily and fatty. But American butter only works with American recipes and European (or Australian) butter only works with the recipes we use in Singapore. Anyway, I used Irish butter, and it really made a difference.

The girls all helped.

And then they ran off and left me to finish up. 

But not before we'd filled quite a few trays together, of tart shells and balls of pineapple jam.

And then we baked them. Here are the ones I like (they have more pastry than jam)

and here are a few we made specially for the family members that prefer a higher jam-to-pastry ratio.

Yum.

And then we packed them away in the same kind of containers we use in Singapore. No reason other than they look more authentic this way.

We filled three containers. Er . . . they were full. They're not so full now.

Here's a tray showing evidence of the children having been part of the baking process. Do you see it?

Here - I'll isolate it:

Yes, it's stuffed-animal-sized tarts for favourite friends.

Unfortunately, family oaths prevent me from sharing the recipe here (or anywhere). All I will say is that we had some leftover egg whites, which we turned into macarons. 

Food apart, we did two other Chinese things.

One was to sew this blouse,

and make these buttons.

Very important aspects of culture - food and clothes. Far more important than language and customs and whatnot (especially since I am atrocious at both).

The last thing we did was to share our culture in school. Every year, I go into the girls' classrooms and do a short presentation. The girls are always very excited about Mum Coming To Talk About Chinese New Year, so I told them I'd do it until they or their teachers lost interest. We bring in our entire paper lantern collection, talk about customs (ha ha ha - I usually have to surf the net to get info), do a short quiz and hand out little clementines and red packets with chocolate coins. Some years I even dress up and wear my (ancient) traditional Chinese blouses. This year -hurrah - I actually had a blouse that fit. 

On to the new year, then! May yours be, like Christmas, merry and bright.