Savory Herb and Goat Cheese Turnovers

Although this blog has so far featured delicious desserts, baking can be so much more. Even beyond lasagna or other main course, single dish bakes, as far as I'm concerned the oven has earned a rightful spot in the preparation of some of the most stunning and mouth watering appetizers. This past weekend I went to my favorite Spanish tapas restaurant and ordered a small plate of goat cheese empanadas with a drizzle of a tomato based sauce. It is now Thursday and I've been salivating over those empanadas since then! And, in the spirit of expanding my baking repertoire, below you will find a simple and classy savory appetizer, with the total prep time taking about 15 minutes and another 15-20 baking.

Savory Herb and Goat Cheese Tunovers
1 package of Peppridge Farm pastry sheets (2 sheets), room temperature. (Cover with a damp paper towel once unwrapped)
2 4oz packages of fresh goat cheese (President is a good brand)
1 tsp garlic, minced
3/4 tsp basil
1/4 tsp freshly ground pepper
dash salt
dash red pepper flakes
flour, for rolling dough
1 tblsp milk
3 tblsp butter, melted

Preheat oven to 350. Line a baking sheet with either foil or parchment paper. In a medium sized bowl, crumble goat cheese and add garlic, mixing with a fork or your hands. Add basil, pepper, red pepper flakes, and salt to taste (above is a guideline for what I used), and mix well. From one sheet of pastry, cut into thirds along the pre-cut perforations. Taking one of the strips, lay horizontally on a surface lightly dusted with flour. Roll dough very thinly (1/8 inch thick), cut into squares or rectangles with a sharp knife and place the goat cheese mixture in the center of the dough - I used approximately 2 slightly heaping tsp/square. Moisten the edges of the pastry dough with milk, and then fold dough in half to cover the filling and seal edges by pressing together with a finger. If triangle turnovers are made, fold the dough over along the diagonal. Melt butter, and using a pastry brush, brush butter over the tops of the turnovers. Place on the foil or parchment paper covered baking sheet and bake at 350 for 15-20 minutes, or until the edges are golden brown.

Enjoy!

Marzipan Cherry Scones

I’m actually writing this recipe before I’ve even tasted it – they are still in the oven. I just have this feeling… they will be THAT good! (*UPDATE* they ARE that good!) Today at work, a friend of mine was describing these marzipan scones she enjoys at a local coffee shop that she frequents. I had already been thinking about baking something for our weekly Friday meeting. At this point all I heard was “… marzipan… scones… delicious… my favorite,” and I was sold. I’ve never made scones before, so it was a perfect challenge! Design a delicious scone recipe that incorporates only my most favorite and beloved flavor in baking… marzipan.

The perfect scone recipe for me would have more than just the sweet scent of almond with flecks of flavorful marzipan, but the tang of cherries. To give the recipe an extra zing, I soaked the dried cherries in amaretto first, allowing the cherries to soak up the delicious, sweet almond flavor of the amaretto.

Marzipan Cherry Scones
1/2 cup dried cherries, soaked in amaretto (I used a mixture of bing and montmerency cherries)
2 cups all purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/3 cup sugar
¼ tsp salt
6 tblsp butter, cubed and cold
1/3 cup heavy cream (or half and half)
1 large egg
½ tsp almond extract
1/3 cup marzipan, sweetened to desired sweetness by kneading in confectioner’s sugar
turbinado sugar, for decoration

Mix dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Using a pastry cutter, cut in the cubed butter and about half of the marzipan until they resembles small peas. Add the cherries and the remaining marzipan in small chunks. In a small bowl, combine almond extract, heavy cream, and egg and lightly beat together. Pour wet ingredients, reserving about 1 tablespoon, over the dry ingredients and mix together until the mixture holds together (do not over-mix). Turn dough out onto a floured surface and form a circular disc. Cut into 8 pieces from the center, as one would cut a pie. Place on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet and brush with remaining cream and egg mixture. Top with turbinado sugar for decoration. Bake in a preheated oven at 375 for 15-20 minutes, or until light golden brown around the edges.

Almond Spritz Butter Cookies

You know how sometimes baking leaves you with random misfit ingredients that just don’t make the cut? Making that delicious custard ice cream leaves you with 7 egg whites that you just don’t know what to do with, or how making the cakes described above, including the cherry and/or spice cake leaves you with a fridge full of egg yolks? This post uses up some extra egg yolks, resulting in a most delicious and simple dinner party approved cookie – the spritz cookie. When I finished making all of the spice and cherry cakes for the baby shower, I had a whopping total of 16 egg yolks left over, so I had some serious make-up baking to do! Spritz cookies immediately (well ok, after the many thoughts of ice cream) came to mind. As a child my mom would make spritz butter cookies in the shape of trees every Christmas, complete with green sprinkles. And, these almond flavored butter cookies made with her old cookie press never even lasted long enough to make it to the plate destined for Santa and his reindeer. But, given the current excess egg yolk situation, I decided to break from the mold and make these cookies in, yes, April, and choose another cookie press shape.

Almond Spritz Butter Cookies
1 cup of butter (do not substitute more than ½ cup with margarine as it changes the texture of the cookie and the aesthetic of the pressed shape)
2/3 cup sugar
3 egg yolks
1 tsp almond extract
2 ½ cup flour

Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Using an electric mixer, mix butter, almond extract and sugar until thoroughly light and fluffy. Mix in the flour in several stages – in the end you want a thick dough that hold together well – not excessively sticky. If you have to use a little more flour than the recipe recommends, do so one tablespoon at a time.

Take pieces of the dough and roll it into tube and fit it into the cookie press. Press out the cookies onto a foil lined cookie sheet and bake for 7-10 minutes until light golden brown on the edges.

*If you do not have a cookie press, roll out the cookie dough between two pieces of parchment paper (NOT FLOUR) and cut out using cookie cutters. Alternatively, bed bath and beyond sells cookie presses for $20. Enjoy!

Spice Cake

The sister cake to the previous post’s cherry cake is the spice cake. A velvety, mildly spicy spice cake iced with a vanilla buttercream including the same spices in the cake made for a harmonious blend of flavor and another cake well-worth making. I'll post the vanilla-spice buttercream in another post.

Spice Cake
1 stick butter, softened
1½ cups sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
4 egg whites
1¼ cup milk (I use half ½ and ½, half 1% milk)
2¼ cups cake flour
1 tblsp baking powder
1½ tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp cloves
½ tsp ginger
pinch salt

Cream butter and sugar with a mixer until light and fluffy and then some – approximately 3 minutes. Add the vanilla extract, beating thoroughly. In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg whites and the milk/½ and ½. In another separate bowl, combine all dry ingredients and mix well. Add 1/3 of the dry ingredients to the butter/sugar/juice mixture, and mix until incorporated. Add half of the wet ingredients and mix until incorporated, scraping the sides of the bowl as needed. Add half of the remaining dry ingredients and again mix until incorporated. Add the last half of the wet ingredients, mixing until incorporated. Lastly, add the remaining dry ingredients and mix until incorporated, and then mix for an extra few minutes at the end. Pour batter into cake pans prepared by spraying with nonstick cooking spray (or rubbed in butter) and coated with a light layer of cake flour. Bake in a preheated oven set to 350 degrees F until a toothpick in the center comes out clean, approximately 30-35 minutes for a 10 inch round.

As the pictures show, I made this cake a two-layer cake where each layer was made from two cake rounds. This cake recipe makes two 10 inch rounds. I doubled this recipe to make the cake as pictured. After the rounds cooled, I filled and iced them with a vanilla spice buttercream frosting before covering in fondant.

Cherry Cake

For most of March I had my baking cut out for me – it was the month of perfecting several recipes for a job I was recruited for. A friend of mine was organizing a baby shower for a close friend, and asked me to bake a cake to serve 40 people and that could withstand a 3 and a half hour car ride, in either of her friend’s favorite cake flavors: cherry or spice cake. This already sounded like a challenge! I decided for ease in transport, I would make two, two layer cakes, one spice and one cherry, so we could all have our cake and eat it too… literally. ☺ I didn’t have to subject myself to the nightmares of a 3 layer cake toppling over with abrupt braking on the highway during the 3+ hour car ride, and the mother-to-be could enjoy both of her favorites on her special day. I had never made a cherry cake, and knew that this would be a perfect challenge for me – reinvent a cherry cake bursting with authentic cherry flavor and pieces of the tart fruit to match. Spice cake, on the other hand, seemed like it would be less of a challenge, so I knew where I would start. I decided to bake a few practice cakes to get the cherry cake down, which ended up being a harder job than I had anticipated, but full of humor nonetheless. Of course I have to share those with you, but, feel free to skip down to the widely enjoyed and approved final cake recipe below. ☺ I know you will enjoy it too.

The first two efforts found me back at the local grocery store, purchasing marachino cherries and at Trader Joe’s buying several bags of the Montmorency dried tart cherries, which I’ve been known to eat by the fistful… they are just that good. I made one cake in which I made a white cake batter, and added some of the marachino cherry juice as well as diced up marachino cherries. This cake was much too subtle and had an artificial cherry flavor… maybe great for a small child’s cake, but as this cake was to suit 40 grown adults, I kept looking. I made a white cake in which I rehydrated the dried cherries and added them to the batter. This ended up being more like a coffee cake with cherries that sunk to the bottom because they were too heavy. Tasted good, especially the bites at the bottom of the cake, ☺ but just not very cherry. It tasted like what it was – a white cake with some moist cherries in it.

Then, I decided to get creative. Where can I buy cherry juice? Cherry extract? Hmmm… I spent some time online, and settled on two products. From King Arthur Flour (www.kingarthurflour.com) I purchased their “natural” cherry flavored extract. Looking back on the experience I already cringe at the thought of baking with this stuff EVER again. I also did some research and found that concentrated cherry juice is sold by heath food stores (and the online the web from http://www.brownwoodacres.com) and is intended as a supplement for joint pain, but the list of ingredients is still only one thing: Montmorency Tart cherry juice. I happily purchased both cherry items and eagerly awaited their arrival on my doorstep to test in baking. Finally they arrived, and I quickly got to work making a white cake containing the concentrated cherry juice and rehydrated cherry pieces that I cut into smaller pieces in hopes they would not sink to the bottom. I whipped this up, and tasted the batter… and DAMN it was good! But of course, I couldn’t let it be! I went and added 1/8 tsp of the cherry extract…1/8 tsp! Hardly ANYTHING! I tasted the batter… eh… too early to tell. Certainly tasted like cherries, but was it a good cherry flavor?

Finally it was done and I rushed to try it. It tasted like a fake cherry factory exploded in the cake. Andreas tasted it, and even he, my reliable cake testing guinea pig told me he felt like he was going to be sick. So I guess adding the natural cherry extract produced a flavor of anything but? And, all with 1/8th a tsp!! In the end, I didn’t have the heart to bring the sample cake to work, for my co-workers/taste testers to only belittle my cake-making self esteem even more, or worse, make them too feel nauseous. The cake instead found a home in the garbage, and I chalked it up to a ‘learning experience.’

But, despite this cake going extremely wrong, it seemed easy to fix. Don’t add any of the cherry extract. In addition, the cherry juice is made from tart cherries, so I thought my next (and what I was pretty convinced would be my last!) test cake should have an increased amount of sugar to balance the tartness of the juice. Additionally, to keep the pieces of rehydrated dried cherries far away from the bottom of my cake pan, I decided I would dredge the chopped up cherries in cake flour before lightly mixing them into the finished batter. I excitedly made this cake, promised Andreas it would be good, and we both tried it. I am proud to say it was the best cherry cake I’ve ever eaten, and being a person who prefers fruit to chocolate, this is one of my most favorite cakes I have ever eaten. Even Andreas, who eternally will prefer chocolate cake to anything else, agreed it was delicious and should be tried by all. My co-workers/taste testers all agreed, and it is with that I share probably my most prized recipe yet with you… and I daresay it was well earned after all those sample cakes!

Cherry Cake
1 stick butter, softened
2 cups sugar
2 tsp almond extract
½ cup Montmorency cherry juice (http://www.brownwoodacres.com)
4 egg whites
1½ cup milk (I use half ½ and ½, half 1% milk)
2 ½ cups cake flour
1 tblsp baking powder
pinch salt
½ cup – 1 cup dried Monmorency cherries, rehydrated in water and dredged in cake flour

Cream butter and sugar with a mixer until light and fluffy and then some – approximately 3 minutes. Add the cherry juice and the almond extract, beating thoroughly. In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg whites and the milk/½ and ½. In another separate bowl, combine all dry ingredients and mix well. Add 1/3 of the dry ingredients to the butter/sugar/juice mixture, and mix until incorporated. Add half of the wet ingredients and mix until incorporated, scraping the sides of the bowl as needed. Add half of the remaining dry ingredients and again mix until incorporated. Add the last half of the wet ingredients, mixing until incorporated. Lastly, add the remaining dry ingredients and mix until incorporated, and then mix for an extra few minutes at the end. In a small, microwave safe bowl, add dried cherries and cover with water. Cook for a few minutes in the microwave to rehydrate, drain cherries, and cut into smaller pieces (each cherry, maybe 4 pieces). Towel dry cherry pieces, and then mix with cake flour to coat. Add cherries to the cake batter and lightly stir in with a spoon. Pour batter into cake pans prepared by spraying with nonstick cooking spray (or rubbed in butter) and coated with a light layer of cake flour. Bake in a preheated oven set to 350 degrees F until a toothpick in the center comes out clean, approximately 30-35 minutes for a 10 inch round.

As you can see from the pictures, I made this cake a two-layer cake (as pictured, the purple and green cake), where each layer was made from two cake rounds. This cake recipe makes two 10 inch rounds. I doubled this recipe to make the cake as pictured. After the rounds cooled, I filled them with cherry preserves and iced them with a chocolate-cherry buttercream frosting before covering in fondant.

Even though this cake calls on the use of an unusual ingredient – Montmorency tart cherry juice – this recipe is well worth the time and effort it takes to acquire this product, and you won’t be disappointed. Enjoy!

Marzipan FIlled Sugar Cookies

Mmmm. Marzipan. Marzi-what? These cookies will hopefully give you a fabulous introduction to marizpan if you have not already tried the cherry-almond braided Danish.

Just saying Marzipan makes my mouth water and my mood lighten. I realize this is a big generalization, but if there was ONE European baking or dessert product that is not fully appreciated on this side of the Atlantic it would be marzipan. Sure, we’re familiar with almonds, as they make plenty of appearances in biscotti and we all know a dash of almond extract can go a long way in adding something special to coffee cakes or cookies, but it just is not the same as infusing a dessert with the fragrant and tasty flavor of marzipan. Infact, I’d say we Americans are most familiar with marzipan straight up as molded, brightly colored small fruit and animal (and other) shaped candies in Italian bakeries. But, this intensely almond, moldable paste/dough is popular in Europe paired with breads, chocolates, and is even used to adorn cakes similarly to the now-equivalent but much less flavorful fondant. It wasn’t until I moved to the Northeast (and yes, I admit, even more recently having German coworkers and a German boyfriend!) that I really began to appreciate this gem of a treat for not only its taste but its wide appeal on the dessert plate and palate from Turkey to Bangladesh to Germany, and everywhere in between.

Then it would come to you as no surprise that my next goal was to create a dessert with marzipan or almond paste that could be enjoyed by both non-Americans and Americans alike, and hence the marzipan filled sugar cookies were born, but not without some streamlining first! First and foremost, when you decide to try making these cookies, you will find yourself standing in the baking aisle at the grocery store, gazing at your almond paste and marzipan options. What is the difference between almond paste and marzipan anyway? Almond paste is typically not as sweet as marzipan, as marzipan has more sugar already mixed in, and it also does not have as smooth a texture as marzipan. For this recipe, I prefer to use almond paste and then mix in some egg and sugar to get just the right texture and flavor that will work well to be incorporated into the cookie, but if you would like to use marzipan, just be aware that you might want to use less sugar. But back to the intent grocery store gaze. Odense makes fantastic marzipan sold in tubes and is awesome for other recipes that call for marzipan, but for almond paste, Solo makes a nice can that works great in this recipe. So, even though this recipe uses Solo almond paste in a can, I will still refer to this recipe as marizpan cookies as the name just has that special zing. ☺

I was inspired by sugar drop cookies (cookies that do not require cutters) for the initial recipe, and modified it to include a healthy dose of almond extract. Stage two of my vision included taking a small piece of almond paste mixture and then placing it in the middle of two dollops of cookie dough, thinking it would spread out and become perfectly enrobed during the baking process. Fortunately, the recipes for both the cookie dough base and the almond paste filling were absolutely delicious both separately (Ok! I admit, I ate more than a few bites of the cookie dough!) and combined in cookie form, but it took a few tries to get cookies that looked as delicious as they tasted. Below are the recipes for the filling and the dough, as well as the play-by-play development to creating cookies that you’ll feel guilty to devour. ☺

Almond sugar cookie dough
1 tblsp. Almond extract
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp baking powder
1½ Cup Sugar
2¾ Cup Flour + 2 tblsp
1 Cup butter or margarine, softened (I used margarine)

In a small bowl, combine the baking powder, soda, and flour. In a large bowl using an electric mixer, cream sugar and margarine/butter until smooth. Beat in the almond and vanilla extracts and egg. Add the dry ingredients to the large bowl and mix well. If the dough is still moist, mix in flour one tablespoon at a time. Ultimately you want dough that is slightly sticky but still balls up, and scoops easily. When baking, bake in an oven preheated to 350 for 10-12 minutes (see below for details).

Almond Paste Filling
1 can (8 oz) Solo Almond Paste
2 tblsp egg substitute or egg white
6 tblsp powdered sugar

First and foremost, depending on your almond taste, an entire can of almond paste may yield a little extra, although for me that is not a problem. ☺ Scoop/dig the almond paste out of the can, and mash it up with a spoon in a medium sized bowl. Add the egg substitute (yes, I stock this in my kitchen for quick and easy baking needs, as well as for my health) to the almond paste and mash it in – you will probably feel like it will be difficult if not impossible to fully homogenize the egg/almond paste mixture, but I promise, it should only take a few minutes! Then, add in the powdered sugar to taste (5-6 tablspoons is perfect!). Next, the assembly! Please see below for the evolution of the perfect assembly of cookie dough and filling! (Or, just skip down to stage 3)

Stage one: My first attempt to generate edible and attractive cookies yielded a plate full of those on the left of the above pictures. To make these, I first cut parchment paper to the size of my cookie sheet, and then placed a ball of dough about the size of a teaspoon on the paper. Next, I took some almond paste about the size of a nickel rolled into a ball and placed it directly on top of the cookie dough, and topped the cookie dough/almond paste blob with another teaspoon sized dollop of cookie dough. As it probably does not surprise you, these cookies ended up looking like a pancake with a small circle or square of butter on the top, rather than what they were supposed to be: a chewy cookie with a stripe of almond running through them!

Stage two: Now, how to get rid of the bulge reminiscent of a cube of butter underneath the exterior of the cookie? Hmmm. I tried to use a little less cookie dough, turn the temperature down on the oven to limit overzealous cookie spreading, and I upped the amount of the almond paste to the size of a quarter and did not spend a lot of time rolling it into a ball. And, much to my surprise, the cookie looked basically the same, with just an increase in the variability of cookie shape (the middle cookie in the above picture).

Stage three… SUCCESS: After two batches of deliciously tasty but misshapen cookies, my fingers were crossed for the last attempt. I put a small bit of dough approximately the size of a small teaspoon on the parchment paper and flattened it a little, and then took my quarter sized ball of almond paste and flattened it out into a disk, and then placed this on top of the cookie dough. This might get a little tricky as the almond paste will be a little sticky; do not worry, just add a little powdered sugar to it to reduce the stick, or rub a little onto your hands to reduce the hand-stick. Then, place some cookie dough on top of the almond paste, approximately the size of a tablespoon, and pop the cookie sheet into the oven and cook at 350 for 10-12 minutes. As a small variation, and to see what works best for you, you can alternate – bigger amount of dough on the bottom, then covered with almond paste disc, and topped off with the smaller amount of dough – this may result in a little exposure of the almond paste during cooking, and may produce slightly different looking cookies. Lastly, take these cookies out of the oven right after the cookies are golden brown around the edges (~12 minutes, for a crunchy cookie) or just before this happens (~10 minutes, for a chewy cookie). The final product may also be delicious with chocolate drizzled over it, or just the way it is described here, represented by the cookie on the right in the top photo and highlighted in all its glory in the bottom photo.

Guinness Chocolate Cake with Kahlua-Chocolate Ganache

A few weeks ago I got this idea in my head that one could make a cake with beer and it would taste good, and I haven’t been able to forget this crazy idea. Maybe it isn’t so crazy, as I googled beer cake and did find a few possibilities. I decided to make my own chocolate-beer cake, selecting Guinness as the beer of choice – a tasty, chocolate stout that would mix well with chocolate, deepening the flavor of the cake, and being just as tasty to drink what didn’t end up in the cake. ☺ I also experimented with using less sugar, to bring out the flavor the Guinness, and the result was a moist cake with a subtle beer flavor that was complemented well with the sweeter Kahlua ganache topping (Baileys would have been great in the ganache as well!) Overall, this recipe yielded 6 small bundts and two cupcakes with the leftover batter.

Guinness Chocolate Cake
2 cups all purpose flour
½ Cup butter flavored shortening
1¼ - 2 Cups sugar (I used less because I wanted the flavor of the Guinness to come out more but adding the full 2 cups would also be delicious ☺)
¾ Cup unsweetened cocoa
2 tsp baking soda
1½ tsp baking powder
1 cup ½ and ½
2 eggs
1¼ cup Guinness
2½ tsp Vanilla

In a large bowl, cream together Crisco and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs and beat well. In a separate smaller bowl, combine flour, salt, baking soda and powder until mixed. To creamed Crisco/sugar/eggs, add dry ingredients and liquids, and mix well. Grease pans (I chose small bundt pans) and bake in a preheated 350 degree oven on the top rackfor approximately 30 minutes or until toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool and remove from pan, level the bottom of the bundts with a serrated knife, turn right-side up and glaze with ganache:

Chocolate-Kahlua Ganache
2 oz bittersweet chocolate
1 tblsp butter
2 tblsp ½ and ½
1 tblsp Kahlua
1 tblsp powdered sugar

Melt chocolate and butter in the microwave, mixing periodically to ensure even melting and to make sure the chocolate doesn’t over-cook. You can also use a double boiler on the stove to avoid obliterating your chocolate, but a microwave is completely sufficient as long as you have either a watchful eye or are an impatient cook (like me!). Stir in ½ and ½, powdered sugar and kahlua, mixing well. Spoon/drizzle over small bundts. Additionally, melt a small amount of white chocolate, and drizzle over the top of the chocolate-kahlua glaze.