Pancakezeit!

"Pancakezeit!" I rolled over in bed and tried to shut out the call by covering my head with a pillow.  "Pancakezeit!" This time it was closer, nearly at the door. "Pan-cake-zeiiiiiit!!" Matt sang as he waltzed cheerfully into our bedroom, throwing open the curtains to the morning light, and ignoring my feeble protests of "Saturday morning" and "more sleep."  

Most weekend mornings in our house start like that.  Matt is a consummate morning person, getting up only a few minutes later than he would during the week, humming happy songs and starting optimistic conversations as soon as I stumble blearily into the living room. You've probably already figured out that I'm the exact opposite.  If I had my way, nobody except the cat would talk to me for at least an hour after I wake up. 



He has a good reason for getting me out of bed, though.  Pancaketime!  I've flipped my way through quite a few recipes in the last two years, some of them good, some of them not so good.  I still get teased about the cornmeal version I tried one Saturday ("pancakes should not be crunchy!") and a recipe with cinnamon and nutmeg that I thought was delicious met with a distinct lack of enthusiasm from the opposite side of the table.

The New Bakery on the Block

I flipped through the stack of mail that accumulated while we were on holiday: bill, bill, ad, bill, Christmas card, bill... pastries??  There, on a postcard-sized flyer in front of me, appeared a vision of a juicy raspberry sitting atop a square of ganache-covered chocolate mousse.  I turned over the card, expecting perhaps an ad for a catering company, but no: a new bakery less than a 5-minute walk from my house, the latest tenants in a row of stores that has seen quite a lot of turnover in the last few years. And not just a new bakery - a new Japanese bakery!  I tried hard to think of any particularly Japanese treats I knew of other than mochi.  Unable to come up with much,  I hot-tailed it over there to have a look (and a taste!).



Hiro Takahashi was the longtime chef de pâtisserie at the posh Savoy Hotel in Zurich and has now fulfilled his dream of opening his own shop, just 100 meters from the Sood-Oberleimbach train station.  It's klein aber fein, as you would say in German - small but good, with the gleam of brand-new equipment everywhere and the colors of the beautiful confections in the glass display case serving as the centerpiece of the store.

Holiday Highlights, Part 3: Buffalo, New Year's, and a Big Surprise!

Seeing as today is already February first and we are well into the New Year, it's definitely time to wrap up my, well, holiday wrap up!

I left off Part 2 just after Tori and Pierre's wedding in New Hampshire.  The last part of our holiday was all about family, family, family.  After a brief overnight with my brother- and sister-in-law Michael and Katie, we arrived at Matt's parents' house in Buffalo to find.... my mom!  Who lives in New Zealand! At Dave and Kathy's house in upstate NY!  Needless to say it was quite the collision of worlds and I was completely shocked and flabbergasted.  Apparently it was all Dave's idea and they had been plotting this together for months - do I have wonderful parents-in-law or what? Matt and I originally planned to go to New Zealand for Christmas 2009, but then both weddings came up so we changed our plans.  So, since we didn't go and see her... she came to us!  How funny it was to watch her and Kathy chatting together in the kitchen, and how lovely it was to celebrate a late Christmas together.

Daring Bakers in January: Passionfruit Nanaimo Bars

The January 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Lauren of Celiac Teen. Lauren chose Gluten-Free Graham Wafers and Nanaimo Bars as the challenge for the month. The sources she based her recipe on are 101 Cookbooks and http://www.nanaimo.ca/.



This month's challenge was two-fold: make graham crackers, and in honor of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, turn them into that all-Canadian and all-sweet treat, Nanaimo Bars.  Though part of the original challenge was to make them gluten-free, a half hour of calls to every Indian and organic food store in Zurich yielded no sorghum flour to use as one of the gluten-free flours in the graham cracker recipe.   Since the few gluten-free friends I have all live far away, I saved myself any further time and hassle (and long, quizzical pauses from stumped shop assistants) by just using whole wheat flour instead.



Despite my neat edge-trimming and decorative fork-prick patterns that made the raw crackers look pretty on the baking sheet, they turned into homogeneous, crisp, vaguely-rectangular blobs by the time they came out. Good thing I had to crumble them up to make the bars anyway!  Their unattractive shape belies their flavor - the biscuits have a deep, dark brown-sugar taste, far better than store-bought, and I'm looking forward to using the crumbs for a cheesecake crust tomorrow night.

Nanaimo bars are decadently, tooth-achingly sweet, very very addictive.  A chewy brownie-like base, stuffed with coconut, chopped almonds, graham cracker crumbs, cocoa, and oodles of butter is slathered with a generous layer of buttercream icing (yep, more butter) and then topped with dark chocolate (mixed with melted butter).  These are basically a heart attack cut into very small squares.



In order to provide a little more interest than just butter, I added some passionfruit pulp (leftover from the recent tart) to the buttercream icing, which resulted in a tangier flavor and a good combination with the chocolate and coconut.  I would definitely recommend being inventive with the flavoring in that layer - I'm sure almost any tropical fruit would work well, or else you could go in a completely different direction and try espresso or mocha or mint. OR, you could take every imaginable direction, utterly reinvent the compass, and come up with pomegranate, cherry, rose, poppy seed, roasted pine nuts, cumin, fennel, chives and parsley Nanaimo Bars like Audax Artifex, the incredibly creative and undisputed King of the Daring Bakers!  Check his other amazing flavor combinations out too, they are truly mind boggling!

Passionfruit Cream Tart with Poached Oranges

I have a case of the Januaries.  We've been back for two weeks now, and memories of the beach and the sun are fading into the darkness that is omnipresent when we wake up in the morning and when we come home from work.  Though we've already decided to go to Istanbul for Spring Break in April, it's too far away to get excited about yet.

One of the consolations I can come up with for this time of year is making luscious, sunshine-colored, tropical-flavored desserts - like this Passionfruit Cream Tart. I've been loving Julia at Melanger's tropical fruit month (especially the papaya sorbet) and the idea for this tart came to me as I was contemplating a huge display of blood oranges at my local grocery store.

Holiday Highlights, Part 2: NYC, Massachusetts, and Wedding #2

If the first part of our holidays was mostly about rum sun, beach, and Mark & Rebekah's wedding, the second part of our holidays was about staying warm, visiting with friends, and Tori & Pierre's wedding. Christmas morning found us at the Fairfield Inn just outside of JFK, where we had crashed after flying in late from Barbados the night before.   Lest you think that waking up in a stale and anonymous hotel room did not bode well for our Christmas day, I can assure you it got a lot better from there.

After a slight hiccup with the rental car, we headed into Manhattan to meet Matt's old college friend Taufan who had invited us to a wonderful and fancy Christmas brunch at the David Burke Townhouse. The main courses were delicious, but the real highlight of the meal was the restaurant's specialty: a cheesecake lollipop tree!  It was the most fanciful dessert I've ever had, and so fun to eat!  Behind it you can see Matt's malted caramel chocolate cake with Guinness ice cream, and also Taufan's caramel apple tart.

English Muffins

English muffins fall into the same category as bagels - if they were available at the store I'd never bother making them, but since they're not... I got english muffin rings for Christmas and I'm not afraid to use them!  I once wrote that I could eat a bagel every morning for breakfast, but I'd like to amend that statement to 'every other morning.' On the off days I'd eat these: lightly toasted, salted-butter-and-strawberry-jam-covered english muffins.  I love their slightly tangy taste from the milk powder in the dough, the little crunch from the cornmeal on the baking trays, and the crispy brown areas on the crust that resist your teeth.