Ok, so I’m a little late with this week’s submission! This week's Tuesdays with Dorie recipe was chosen by Anne of Anne Strawberry: Tall and Creamy Cheesecake. I’d originally planned to make this as part of Christmas dinner, but due to the nasty weather in the Pacific Northwest, Christmas dinner turned out to be a very scaled-back affair. But I thought that this would be an excellent New Year’s Eve treat, so that became the plan. The recipe has a lot of variations so I took a look at those and figured out what I wanted to do.
I decided to make a gingersnap crust, since I love gingersnaps (maybe there’d be some left over) and to make it a lemon cheesecake. I thought that lemon would go well with the gingersnap crust. I’ve made cheesecakes before, but it had been a long time. Mine usually crack, which isn’t really wrong, but I want to find one that doesn’t crack.
This came together well, and it mixed for a long time before going in the oven. There was a lot of batter, but it filled the pan nicely. I had never baked a cheesecake in a water bath, and that seemed to work well. I’m not sure that I wrapped the springform pan securely enough. The crust seemed a little soggy when everything was said and done.
I liked the water bath, as my cheesecake didn’t crack! This cheesecake is really light, but still very rich. How can something be both light and rich? I refrigerated my cheesecake for the bare minimum that the recipe called for, 4 hours, but I think it could have gone for longer. It still seemed soft, but maybe that was the lightness of the cheesecake. This was a fairly foolproof recipe and I look forward to making it again.
This is a traditional spice cookie that you often see at Christmas. It a German cookie and I’ve found my American cookbooks to be fairly lacking in recipes for Lebkuchen. I’ve purchased Lebkuchen and really liked the ones I’ve bought, which are soft and cake-like. This recipe comes from a cookbook with a German author and was originally published in Germany, so I had high hopes for this recipe.
I didn’t have the candied orange and lemon peel that the recipe called for, so I substituted a little diced candied ginger. I’m not sure this was quite the right substitution, but you’ll never know unless you try!
This is a bit of an odd recipe, in that you form the cookies and then let them sit out and dry for 12 hours before baking them. Really, that’s what it says to do. I have no idea if this is common practice with Lebkuchen, but I followed the instructions as written.
These are really dry cookies, not cake-like at all. I guess I knew that they wouldn’t be too light, since they contained 2 cups of ground hazelnuts. I don’t even think that the spices come forward all that much, which is the key component of the cookies that I’ve liked in the past. Well, this was another try and it looks like my search for Lebkuchen will continue. (Isn't this a pretty plate? It was a Christmas gift from a great friend.)
4 eggs
1-1/4 cups brown sugar, packed
½ cup chopped almonds
2 cups ground hazelnuts
1/3 cup candied ginger, finely chopped
1 teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon cardamom
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
Icing
2 cups powdered sugar
3 tablespoons lemon juice
Cream together the eggs and the brown sugar. Add the flour, chopped almonds, ground hazelnuts, candied ginger, cinnamon, baking powder and remaining spices. Mix until completely combined.
Place 2 teaspoon-sized rounds on waxed paper. Moisten your fingers with water and press mounds into shape. (I found that they lost their shape after I worked with them, so you could probably skip this step.) Let the cookies dry for 12 hours.
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Place cookie dough on baking sheets lined with silicone baking mats. (I had better luck shaping the dough into mounds at this time.) Bake for 18 minutes. Allow to cool completely on a wire rack.
Combine the powdered sugar and lemon juice together to make a thin glaze. Glaze the cookies with the lemon icing.
Adapted from Christmas Cookies by Gina Greifenstein
Merry Christmas! This is another guest post from my husband. For Christmas dinner, my husband usually makes a Christmas cake, which is a traditional English fruitcake. Christmas cake is vastly different from the fruitcake sold in American stores, with garishly colored candied fruits. He wanted to try something different this year and wanted to make a sticky toffee pudding.
Browsing recipes online, my husband came across this recipe for sticky toffee pudding that is a cross between gingerbread and a traditional pudding. He thought that this would be great for Christmas and so planned on making this. Since the recipe is from a British publication, he had to make some substitutions since we can’t necessarily get the same ingredients here. (Especially when you are basically snow-bound at home and can only get to the local shops.) The recipe called for stem ginger preserved in syrup and ginger wine. He substituted ginger preserves and pear wine instead. The recipe also called for self-rising flour, and he substituted cake flour, baking powder and baking soda for that.
The measures for this recipe were in grams and milliliters, which have been converted to ounces. The measurements may seem a little strange, as 150 grams converts to a very odd 5.3 ounces! Luckily we have a good digital scale. The pudding basin that we have is a little smaller than the 1.7 litre one that is specified in this recipe, but my husband just filled the basin until it was basically full and called it good. It doesn’t rise all that much, so as long as you leave about a quarter inch at the top you’ll be fine.
This was so good! You do have to serve it right away and doesn’t keep well at all. It still tasted like sticky toffee pudding, but the ginger was a great addition.
TOFFEE SAUCE
5.3 oz. brown sugar
3.5 oz. unsalted butter
3 tbsp ginger preserves
5 tbsp pear wine
GINGERBREAD PUDDING
1.5 oz. pecans, toasted and roughly chopped
6.2 oz. butter, softened
4.2 oz. brown sugar
3 eggs
1 heaped tsp grated gingerroot
2 tbsp ginger preserves
3.5 oz. chopped dates
6.2 oz. flour
1-1/2 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp baking soda
1 tsp ground ginger
½ tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp ground allspice
Butter a 1.7 litre (1.5 quart) pudding basin. The basin should have a lid if it is the plastic sort or you'll need to cover it with a sheet of buttered, pleated greaseproof paper covered with a sheet of foil, secured with string.
To make the toffee sauce, gently melt the sugar and butter in a saucepan until the sugar has dissolved. Increase the heat and whisk in the ginger preserves and pear wine, bring to a low boil and boil for one minute. Remove from the heat and set aside.
For the pudding, add the pecans to the pudding basin and spoon 3 tbsps of toffee sauce over. Beat the butter and brown sugar together until light and fluffy, add the eggs one by one, beating well between each addition, followed by the gingerroot, the ginger preserves and dates. Sift the flour and spices over and fold in. Spoon into the pudding basin. Cover and put in a large, lidded saucepan. Add enough boiling water to come halfway up the sides of the basin and put over a low heat. Cover and steam for 3 hours, topping the water up occasionally.
Remove the pudding basin from the saucepan and leave to cool for 5 minutes. Invert the pudding onto a serving plate. Reheat the sauce and serve with the pudding.
Donna of Spatulas, Corkscrews & Suitcases chose this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe: real butterscotch pudding. This is an old-fashioned pudding that you cook on the stovetop and contains butter and real scotch. I don’t really drink so I was happy that my local liquor store sold little tiny bottles of scotch. I certainly wasn’t going to buy a big bottle of scotch for a recipe that used only 2 tablespoons!
This was an interesting recipe, in that you use a saucepan and also a food processor to make the pudding. I understand that this is how other puddings from Dorie’s book are also made, but this is the first pudding I’ve made since joining Tuesdays with Dorie. I have a food processor, so I didn’t think that it would be too much trouble.
You start off by heating up milk and cream in the saucepan, while whirling some other ingredients in the food processor. I was a little short of cornstarch, but I hoped that I was close enough to make it work. After the milk mixture came to a boil, you were supposed to pour the hot liquid mixture into the food processor. Well, I tried that and as I started pouring I knew that the mixture would go all over the counter rather than into the food processor, so I decided to scrap the idea of using the food processor. I got out a whisk and just used that instead of the food processor.
The pudding turned out perfectly smooth and I think that it was just fine without using the food processor. The pudding is really good and you can definitely taste the scotch! It was quite boozy the first day but that seemed to dissipate over the next couple of days. It’s not the rich yellow color that you expect from a butterscotch candy, but that’s just food coloring anyway. It’s not very exciting to look at (and doesn’t photograph very well) but it is really tasty. It’s quite a bit of work for pudding, but this one was definitely a success.
Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, page 386
