Simple, but Fabulous.

I love this recipe because it is fast and incredibly delicious. I generally use Werther's chewy caramels. Sometimes I like to add salted nuts or toasted coconut. If you want to be fancy, you can cut the treats with cookie cutters, or mold them in an interesting pan/container.

Caramel Rice Krispie Treats
adapted from Trish Deseine's Caramel.
1 stick unsalted butter
125 g marshmallows
125 g caramel candies
7 cups crisp rice cereal

1. melt the butter and caramel in a heavy pot/saucepan over medium heat. When the mixture is mostly melted, add the marshmallows. Stir until the mixture is completely melted and smooth.

2. Put the rice crispies in a large bowl. Pour the caramel mixture over the cereal and stir until well combined. Pour this mixture into a 9x13 baking dish (but really, any size will do) and let cool completely before cutting into squares (or other shapes/robots.)

Kataifi with Cream Filling

This is a Lebanese dessert from Claudia Roden's Arabesque. It's an intriguing cookbook with gorgeous photos and interesting Lebanese, Turkish, and Moroccan recipes.

This particular recipe was slightly difficult to interpret. It's essentially a milk/cream pastry cream thickened with rice flour sandwiched between generous amounts of buttered kataifi (shredded filo dough.)

The recipe doesn't tell you how exactly to add the rice flour paste, and if you just throw it into the cream it will curdle into dougy chunks. I solved this problem by whisking small amounts of the hot milk into the flour until it was liquidy enough to add to the rest.

Afterwards, you coat the pastry with a generous amount of sugar syrup cooked with lemon juice and orange blossom water. Occasionally, I think orage blossom water makes desserts taste like soap. I was very pleasantly surprised when this pastry tasted delicate and not overly sweet!

The taxi cab just happened to be outside my window. I thought it was fun.

Kataifi with Cream Filling
For the syrup
2 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/4 cups water
1 tbsp lemon juice
2 tablespoons orange blossom water

For the cream filling
1/2 cup rice flour
4 cups whole milk
1/2 cup heavy cream
4 tbsp sugar

For the pastry
1 pound kataifi pastry, defrosted
2 sticks of 1/2 pound unsalted butter, melted
To garnish, 2/3 cupped chopped pistachios

Make the syrup first. Boil the sugar with the water and lemon juice over low heat for 5-8 minutes, until it is just thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Stir in the orange blossom water and cook a moment more. Let it cool and then chill in the refrigerator. (If you have overcooked the syrup and it becomes too thick to pour, you can rescue it by adding a little water and bringing it to a boil again.)

For the filling, mix the rice flour with enough of the cold milk to make a smooth, creamy paste. Bring the rest of the milk with the cream to a boil, preferably in a nonstick pan. **Add rice flour paste, stirring vigorously with a wooden spoon. Leave it on low heat and continue to stir for 15-20 minutes, until the mixture is quite thick, being careful not to scrape any burned bits from the bottom of the pan. Add the remaining sugar and stir well.

Put the pastry in a large bowl. With your fingers, pull out and separate the strands as much as possible. Melt the butter and when it has cooled slightly, pour it over the pastry. Press down firmly and flatten it with the palm of your hand. Bake in an oven preheated to 350 degrees for about 45 minutes.

Just before serving, run a sharp knife around the edges to loosen the sides, and turn it out onto a large serving dish. Pour the cold syrup all over the hot pastry and top lavishly with pistachios. Alternatively, you can pour only half the syrup over the pastry and pass the rest in a jug for everyone to help themselves to more. (I used half.)

** this is the part where you can curdle the flour mixture. I recommend adding hot milk to it seperately, whisking, and then pouring it back into the pot.

On Potlucks.

The Pie That Wouldn't Be Decorated

I really look foward to potlucks. This weekend, I planned to recreate the delicious dessert i'd made earlier this month: key lime pie with pecan crust and haupia (coconut pudding) topping.

I decided to be ambitious with my decorating. Instead of chilling the entire layer of haupia in a seperate springform pan, I tried cooling it down and piping it on top of the finished pie. Unfortunately, the haupia wasn't set enough to hold a shape, and I ended up just spreading it on.

I froze a second layer of haupia, hoping to cut some pretty shapes out of it. Once again, I pulled it out too early and it wouldn't hold. I scooped it all into a pastry bag and tried to pipe some decorative circles, but this time they were too frozen and looked lumpy and turd-ish.

Simple is better sometimes. When it warmed up I spread it flat and made a pretty border of toasted coconut.

South Side Soup Contest

Saturday was the third annual South Side Midwinter Soup Contest. I think this is one of the cooler events in the South Side (aside from the Zombie Walk...) There were 25 entries this year from various restaurants and organizations, some of my favorites being Gypsy Cafe (the owner, Melanie Evankovich, pictured below) Cafe du Jour, and Le Pommier.

Anyway, I headed down to the South Side and spent a good part of the afternoon walking up and down East Carson St. sampling the different soups. There were some interesting ones: a lamb soup heavily spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg, butternut squash with ginger-lime creme fraiche, celery root bisque with bacon and chevre, an amazing crab, shrimp, and sausage gumbo, and minestra.

I quite enjoyed myself. Here are a few photos of people enjoying serving/eating soup!

Auspicious Beginning.

I suppose every food blog has to begin somewhere, and mine begins with a mess.

The tabletop, floor, and inside of the freezer are splattered with drippings of chocolate ganache. The sink is full of various spoons, knives, and bowls coated with chocolate, dulce de leche, and a fine dusting of shortbread crumbs. The sponge seems to be irreparably soaked with chocolate.

An 8-inch square of Millionaire’s Shortbread, the cause of all this havoc, sits precariously on a rack in the freezer. There are fingerprints in the shiny glaze, and a rather large rip in the upper left corner. For now, I want nothing to do with it; I keep finding chocolate on my forearms and pajamas and I am grumpy.

One of my flamenco teachers says “si no es perfecta, es mierda” (if it’s not perfect it’s shit.) Fortunately, that statement doesn’t apply to baking. I gave up as soon as the dulce de leche wouldn’t spread evenly and ended up full of crumbs. I finished off the dessert as best I could. Even though it was slightly overbaked, messy, and falling apart, the shortbread was delicious.

Millionaire’s Shortbread
adapted from Trish Deseine’s Caramel
1x14oz can of cajeta/dulce de leche*
2 cups all purpose flour
1/3 cup granulated sugar
½ cup salted butter
6 oz bittersweet chocolate, broken into pieces
¼ cup unsalted butter

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8-10 inch rectangular baking pan.

In the bowl of a mixer, combine the flour, sugar, and salted butter and process until the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs, or place in a mixing bowl and use your fingertips to combine as if making pastry.

Form into a dough, then press into the prepared pan. Bake until just golden on top.

Remove from the oven and let cool before spreading on a layer of caramel.

Melt the chocolate and unsalted butter together in a heatproof bowl set over a pan of barely simmering water, or in a microwave, and stir well until smooth. Pour over the caramel layer and smooth with an offset spatula or palette knife.

To serve, let harden completely, then cut into squares.

*the original recipe has you make the caramel from a boiled can of sweetened condensed milk. I just bought a can of cajeta. I recommend you heat it up a bit to make it spread easier.