Persimmon pancakes

It's persimmon time again! I made a double batch of persimmon bread last week and that recipe is still amazing. This morning I tried this pancake recipe, which is tasty but not as thick and fluffy as I prefer. Next time I might try this one.

3 T melted butter
pulp from 1 Hachiya persimmon
1/4 c yogurt
1 c milk
2 eggs
1 t vanilla
1/2 c oat bran (or oats ground in the food processor)
1/2 c cornmeal
1/2 c flour
2 t baking powder
1 t baking soda
2 t brown sugar
1/4 t salt

Separately whisk together wet ingredients (butter through vanilla) and dry ingredients (oats through salt) then whisk wet ingredients into dry ingredients. Let sit for a few minutes while the pan heats up and the batter thickens (it will still be runny). Cook pancakes with 1/4 c worth of batter each.

Tomato jam

Welcome back from England, me! My usual travel post will be up soon, but there were more urgent garden matters that demanded my attention first. Just look at all those tomatoes I picked! (And that's only about half of the cherry tomatoes.)

Six pounds of ripe garden tomatoes in the cupboard, with more on the way, and with Lester stuck in England and unable to enjoy the fruits of his labor... It's preserving time. At first taste, this jam is a bit too sweet, but the aftertaste is balanced and nicely spicy. I'd add a bit less sugar next time.

1.5 lb cherry tomatoes, halved
1 lb regular tomatoes, diced
1 1/4 c sugar
juice + zest of 2 Meyer lemons
1 T red wine vinegar
1 shallot, finely minced
1 pasilla pepper, finely minced
1" ginger chunk, grated
1/2 t salt

Put everything in a pot and simmer uncovered for a bit more than an hour, stirring occasionally and squishing up any intact tomato bits, until the water has cooked off and the mixture is thick and spreadable (it won't set up much more in the jars). Transfer to 3 cups worth of sterilized jars.

Blackberry almond muffins

It's blackberry season again, and I still have frozen blackberries from last summer! Gotta step up my game. I haven't really been slacking though—in the last few weeks I've been busy making other summery things (like okra+shishitos and shakshuka), and other sweet things (like chocolate chip cookies), and other awesome things (like apps and more apps). And tomorrow, Lester and I are heading to England for a couple weeks, so you can look forward to some good British travel posts in the near future.

But this morning: just some quick and easy muffins. Tau approves.

1.5 c frozen blackberries
1/2 stick butter
1/3 c sugar
1 egg
3/4 c milk
juice of 1 large Meyer lemon
1.5 c flour
1/2 c oats
1/2 c slivered almonds
1/2 t baking soda
1 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
turbinado sugar

Preheat oven to 350F and put the berries in a colander to defrost and drain a bit. Melt the butter in a 2-c pyrex, then stir in the rest of the wet ingredients (sugar through lemon). Combine the dry ingredients (flour through salt) in a medium bowl, then stir in the wet ingredients and berries until just combined. Scoop into 12 greased muffin-tin cups and sprinkle a healthy pinch of turbinado on each one. Bake for 25 min until a toothpick comes out clean and the tops are starting to brown. (If your berries aren't frozen, the baking time will be up to 10 min shorter.) Transfer to a cooling rack, let cool until the berries won't burn your mouth, and enjoy.

Yarn side project: hippos!

Happy welcome-to-life, David and Cat's baby, and happy moving-on-with-life, Aaron! Somehow I decided that these very different celebrations should each be commemorated with a little squishable crocheted hippo.

For both hippos, I exactly followed this pattern using this yarn. The only difference was the crochet hook: the bigger yellow one was on a H hook (recommended for the yarn), and the smaller red one was on a F hook (tighter stitches -> hopefully more babyproof).

Rhubarb-blackberry coffee cake

Happy 4th of July, all! I don't know how to modify this blogger site in protest, so I made something tasty instead. This is half rhubarb from Lester's garden (the first two ripe stalks!), half foraged blackberries that we froze since last summer, and just a few cape gooseberries from the garden for good measure. It's vaguely red-white-and-blue, but it more reminds me of Alan and Lester talking about British summertime baking—my kind of celebration. And the crumble top is friggin amazing.

filling:
1/2 lb tart fruit (eg rhubarb, blackberries, cape gooseberries)
1/3 c sugar
2 t cornstarch
1/2 t ginger

Prepare the fruit (chop the rhubarb, defrost the blackberries, etc). Toss everything together and set aside.

crumble:
1 stick salted butter, melted
1/3 c turbinado sugar
1/3 c sugar
1 t cinnamon
1/2 t ginger
1 3/4 c flour

Stir the sugars and spices into the melted butter until the white sugar is dissolved, then stir in the flour until it's firm and crumbly but thoroughly moistened. Set aside.

cake:
1 c flour
1/2 c sugar
1/2 t baking soda
1/2 t baking powder
3/4 stick softened butter, cut into pieces
1/3 c yogurt
1 egg
2 t vanilla extract

Stir together the dry ingredients (flour through baking powder) in a medium bowl. Stir in the butter, kind of like biscuit dough. Mix the wet ingredients (yogurt through vanilla) in a small bowl then stir into the dry ingredients in two batches.

assembly:
Preheat the oven to 325F and butter a 8" square pan. Spread the batter evenly in the bottom of the pan and top with the fruit. (Smitten Kitchen said to leave a bit of batter aside and dollop it on top of the fruit, which I did, but I don't think it makes much of a difference.) Sprinkle the crumble over the fruit, breaking up large chunks and squishing together sandy bits to make roughly 1/2" crumble bits. Bake for 50 min until a toothpick comes out clean.

Cinnamon-crusted banana bread

You may have noticed that I really like quick breads. But the closest thing I've posted to a banana bread, a classic of the genre, is something that's trying pretty hard to be a danish instead. This isn't because I don't like banana bread, because I do—it's because I can't stand the smell of overripe bananas, and smelling that smell is hard to avoid while making banana bread.



But once in a while I suck it up and make banana bread anyway. (Today's excuse was a bunch of bruised bananas left over from camping this weekend.) Orangette had a surprisingly large number of recipes to choose from, and I went with this breakfast-ready option: not too rich, no fancy add-ins (besides chocolate of course), and with a nice crackly spicy crust on top. If you know that it doesn't have any added fat, you can tell that it's ever so slightly gummy, but you probably wouldn't notice the texture if you weren't looking for it. Since all the structure is from sugar and eggs, though, you can't cut back on either of them, so choose a different recipe if you're tempted to reduce the sugar.

3 ripe bananas
2 eggs
1 c sugar
1 t vanilla
1.5 c flour
1 t baking soda
2 t cinnamon
1 c chocolate chips (3/4 c + 1/4 c)
2 T cinnamon sugar (almost 2 T sugar + 1/2 t cinnamon)

Preheat oven to 375F and butter a 8" square pan. Mash the bananas in a large bowl with the potato masher, then stir in the eggs, sugar, and vanilla. Combine the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, cinnamon) in a small bowl, then stir into the wet ingredients until just combined. Stir in 3/4 c chocolate chips. Pour the batter into the prepared pan, and top with the cinnamon sugar and the remaining 1/4 c chocolate chips. Bake for 35-40 min until a tester comes out clean.

S'mores-able vegetarian marshmallows

You heard me right—these are marshmallows with no gelatin that vegetarians can take camping. At least, I'm pretty sure they'll work based on preliminary toaster-oven-based investigations, which yielded toasty-on-the-outside, gooey-on-the-inside balls of sugary goodness. Looking forward to trying them for real next weekend!



I spent a very long time choosing a recipe for this project. Not because there aren't a lot of vegetarian marshmallow recipes on the internet, but because most of them say they're not s'mores-friendly. Which is the only point of making marshmallows, right? I ended up going with this one partly because it seemed prudent to choose one with egg whites (no need to be vegan today) and partly because I found xanthan gum in cheap little packets at the end of the health supplement aisle at Berkeley Bowl. Plus, it's a nice easy recipe, especially if you're familiar with meringue buttercream frostings (although it's more like the Italian variety, which I haven't made, than the Swiss kind, which I have).

I followed the recipe at this blog. That, in turn, follows this cool collection of guidelines and recipes for many intriguing (and many more just plain odd) molecular gastronomy gelled edibles: dondurma! Iberian ham cream! whiskey gel! restructured onions! Definitely worth a look.



This makes 25 jumbo-sized (~1.5"x1.5"x1") marshmallows, big enough that you only need 1 per s'more. I used cornstarch for all the dusting, which gave the marshmallows a bit of a cornstarchy taste. I suspect that powdered sugar would work just as well and taste much better, so I'd advise trying that instead, but I can't totally vouch for it. Also, even with all that cornstarch, the marshmallows are sticking to each other a bit after one night in the fridge; I plan to re-dust them right before heading out for camping.

1 t xanthan gum
1 T + 1.25 c sugar (250 g)
4/5 c corn syrup (250 g)
1/4 c water (60 mL = 60 g)
1 t vanilla
3 egg whites
lots of cornstarch (or wherever I say cornstarch, sub powdered sugar)

Butter the bottom and sides of a 8x8" square pan and dust thoroughly with cornstarch. Grind the xanthan gum with 1 T sugar and set aside (since the xanthan gum is already a powder, I can only assume that the point of this step is to make the sugar finer). Weigh out the remaining sugar and the corn syrup in a 2-quart saucepan, then add the water and vanilla.

Heat the contents of the saucepan to 240-250F (firm ball), stirring at least after it foams up (220F). Meanwhile, or immediately before or after, whip the egg whites in a stand mixer until soft. Turn the mixer down to low and slowly drizzle in the hot syrup and sprinkle on the xanthan sugar. Turn it up to medium-high and whip for a couple minutes until it's fluffy and pulls away from the sides in strings or ribbons (a bit like well-beaten ciabatta dough). Scoop the fluff into the prepared pan and attempt to spread into an evenly flat layer about an inch high. Dust the top with cornstarch, cover with plastic wrap, and put in the fridge to set.

After a few hours, prepare a tupperware by lining it with wax paper and dusting that with cornstarch. Put more cornstarch on a bowl or plate, and dredge a metal spatula and a pizza cutter in it. Use the pizza cutter to cut the marshmallows into 25 squares, then use the spatula to reinforce the cuts and lift the marshmallows out of the pan. Dredge the marshmallows in cornstarch and transfer them to the tupperware. Add more wax paper between the layers, and re-starch everything as necessary when things start sticking to other things.