Frozen Chocolate-Peanut Butter Pie

Ladies, does this situation sound familiar to you?  You've baked something for an event, a potluck, or a friend or relative, and your fella asks you where that's going or says he would have liked some?  When Joe saw the heart-shaped cookie cutters and ate some of the chocolate cutouts from the Two-tone Linzer Hearts I made for my sister, he was a bit envious.  I had something different in mind for him though.  Since he liked the Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups that I made for Valentine's Day last year so much, this Frozen Chocolate-Peanut Butter Pie sounded like a winner.

People with Celiac will rejoice to hear this pie is gluten-free.  For the base, I used storebought gluten-free cookies that I had intended for a different purpose and recipient but never got around to.  But the Pamela's brand cookies were surprisingly delicious, so I used them.

I also made the recipe into four small pies, and you won't finish even one pie in a single sitting because they're so rich.  Two were made in 5-inch pie plates, and two in mini-springform pans that showcase the beautiful sides and base of the pies.

Joe was impressed with the beautiful pies, plus he went back for seconds.  I think I came out on top because my gift was a heart pendant, plus some of you might recall I'm no fan of mixing chocolate and PB.  And, I just might make those Linzer Hearts again.

This post was shared with:
Tea Party Tuesday
Crazy Sweet Tuesday
Sweet Treats Thursday
Sweets for a Saturday
Themed Baker's Sunday

Apple Butter Hand Pies

I have only one complaint about this recipe, and it's that these mini-pies can't hold any more apple butter.  So I spread more on top of a hand pie like it's toast.  But spoon more apple butter inside and it just squeezes out the sides when the pastry is folded up.  The crust is nice too, made tender and slightly tangy with the addition of cream cheese, and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar.  It comes out softer than your usual pie crust, almost like a cookie.  The pies are also good reheated in the toaster oven the day after.

The apple butter took some time to make, but not much work.  I used 6 pounds of Galas from the farmers market.  It was my first taste ever of apple butter, and I found it to be somewhere between applesauce and apple pie filling, and nicely spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, and clove.  You won't use it all up in the pies like the recipe indicates, but that's all right with me: The apple butter is also great on top of pancakes, or as part of a grilled cheese sandwich.  I think pear butter has to be next on my list.

Vanilla Bean-Pineapple Tart

The smells of pineapple, vanilla, and rum flooding my house when I baked this tart made me think of umbrella drinks and tropical vacations.   These ingredients are topped off by a beautiful, intricate lattice crust.  It may look complicated, but the only difficult part of this recipe was keeping the dough cold during the summer heat.  It kept getting melty and sticking to my board and tearing, and it took a few return trips to the fridge and a bunch of patience I was running out of.

But the smell of pineapple and rum instantly restored my mood.  And in the end the crust looked great and it's always fun to weave a lattice.  The filling tasted like the top of an upside-down pineapple cake (or the bottom, if you haven't up-ended it yet).

Half your dough is used for the tart bottom, but the other half is cut into strips for your lattice top.  The lattice is woven on parchment paper (or waxed paper, in this case), frozen until ready to use, and then carefully slid on top of the tart.

Fresh pineapple is simmered with rum, sugars, and vanilla bean.  The cooked and cooled chunks are added to the tart shell.  This tart is in the very sweet category, so next time I would personally halve the sugars.  If you enjoy sugar rush, follow the recipe.

The taste of rum is faint in the final product, if that's a concern of yours.  I'm not sure if this is because I used whatever rum was in the house instead of the dark rum that was called for, or if the alcohol simply cooked off.

The tart is then chilled with the lattice, which is brushed with egg wash before going in the oven.

And since I made this recipe in a square pan, having no rectangular tart pan, there was some filling and dough left over for a mini.  Isn't it cute?

This post was submitted to Sweets for a Saturday.

Banana-Walnut Chocolate-Chunk Cookies

Banana-nut bread and the chocolate chip cookie make a good couple.  These Banana-Walnut Chocolate-Chunk Cookies have the flavor and lightness of banana bread, with the taste and chocolate hit of chocolate chip cookies.  They're fun and easy to make, and just what I was looking for after slightly fussier apple crostatas and bar cookies.

I've been doing more, but my baking and cooking projects don't always end up on the blog.  Some I consider too ordinary or ubiquitous.  Sometimes I neglected to take photos.  Sometimes, as in this case, the recipe just didn't work out.  I had been looking for a pumpkin biscotti recipe but they're so few.  This recipe was halfway to a disaster.  The flavor was good, but they didn't get to the correct, hard biscotti consistency and had chewy middles despite repeat stints in the oven.  I finally decided that pumpkin puree must be too wet for proper biscotti, and that the storebought variety I'd tried before probably uses some industrial powdered pumpkin flavoring.

My pumpkin-carving didn't go so great either, since I cleaned it the week before and let it sit, and it grew moldy.  In the end, I carved a simple face in a very thick gourd since stores were sold out of pumpkins.  I had to envy Joe's pumpkin (bottom right), since he did a better job and his pumpkin is still mold-free.

These cookies went waaay easier.  Surprisingly, the recipe called for oats and some whole wheat flour, and I used some white whole wheat flour I had on hand.  Everybody's favorite start to cookie dough is that mixture of butter, white sugar, and brown sugar.  The remaining ingredients are added, and then scooped onto a cookie sheet.  The cookies bake up small, but I had a big yield of over 40.  The recipe calls for cutting up your own chocolate chunks, but I didn't realize and had bought 60% cacao chocolate chips.  But they were perfect, nice and big with a deeper, grown-up flavor.

Raspberry Crumb Bars & Citrus Bars

These raspberry crumb bars got inhaled here at home and will be making a repeat appearance, but those citrus bars?  Never again!  It's not that they weren't good, because what lemon bar isn't good?  Especially one with the addition of lime?  But where the raspberry crumb bars were relatively simple and fun, the citrus bars demanded more elbow grease and then ran into technical issues.

The raspberry crumb bars involved making an almond-y dough that would serve as both the base and topping.  The base gets baked briefly in a cookie sheet lined with parchment, then cooled and spread with jam.  Then the remaining dough is scattered on as a topping and baked.  When cool, a bench scraper works well as a cutter.  They were bagged with the citrus bars as thank-you gifts to volunteers at an event I organized and excitedly received.

The citrus bars?  This one photo speaks to my stress with this recipe.  There were lots of lemons and limes to juice, and the limes took more work.  And then I used a rimmed cookie sheet as directed for the base, but the dough came up to the rim, leaving no room for the pourable fillling!  So I moved and pressed the partially baked dough into this 9x13 pan and the rest into an 8x8 square pan, and poured the filling on top.  It worked, but some dough pieces floated to the top and it wasn't attractive.  But confectioners sugar covers up all sorts of ugly, so I was still able to gift them.

Now I did make this once before, halving the recipe and baking it in this 9x13 pan and it worked out just fine, if you want to try it.  But I'd had enough with this try, plus it's a heart attack special with the 8 eggs, pound of butter, and 4 cups of sugar (which I cut down to 3 cups without a problem).  But I really recommend those raspberry crumb bars!

Gougeres

I've been afraid to try my hand again at pate a choux ever since most of my eclairs deflated upon coming out of the oven.  But I'm glad to say no such thing happened with my Gougeres!  They're French cheese puffs, flavored here with Gruyere and Parmesan.  Have them with a glass of wine in the afternoon.  The taste reminds me of cheese straws, but they're simpler to make than puff pastry made from scratch.

Citrus Tart

If you like lemon bars, you'll like this citrus tart.  It's like the lemon bar's lighter, more sophisticated cousin.  At first glance you expect a heavy, rich custard, but the texture is light and the taste tart and tangy.  And it was way more successful than the lemon souffles I made around the new year and would rather forget, after they fell and tasted awful eggy.  But everyone raved about this tart, and my friend Charmie asked if it would "make an appearance on wasb."  "What does that stand for?" I asked.  "What about second breakfast!" she said.  It was so cute, I figure I have to start using the acronym.

On an unrelated note, check out this bottle of vanilla extract!  This monster is 32 ounces of top-quality Madagascar bourbon vanilla, with your usual-sized bottle next to it for comparison.  I was both horrified and excited to get this gift, which is larger than a bottle of cough syrup.

Potato Gratin

This is a great dish for just a regular steak night, like we had tonight, but fancy enough to be a holiday dinner side dish with guests.  I was excited when I saw it in the newest issue of Martha Stewart Living, since I just got a mandoline as an early Christmas gift.  We already own a standard one -- it wasn't sharp enough to slice vegetables properly but it was sharp enough to slash our fingers.  It's collecting dust.  This ceramic blade mandoline is less fancy and doesn't come with a standing end and all sorts of blades, but it does exactly what I want it to.  The potatoes slice up just thin enough to layer in a creamy sauce topped with a cheesy crust.  And it's very possible that for the first time mashed potatoes might take a hiatus from my Christmas table in favor of another potato dish!

Potato Gratin
From Martha Stewart Living January 2010 Issue

Serves 6

2½ pounds Yukon Gold potatoes (I had Russets, which worked fine)
1 garlic clove, halved
1½ cups heavy cream
1 cup whole milk (I used 1%)
¼ tsp freshly grated nutmeg
Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper
3 ounces Gruyere cheese, grated, about 1 cup (I had white cheddar on hand)

Preheat oven to 375°.  Peel potatoes, and place in a bowl of water to prevent discolorng.  Rub inside of a 9-by-12-inch oval baking dish with cut sides of garlic.  Heat cream, milk, nutmeg, and 1½ teaspoons salt in a medium saucepan over medium heat until bubbles form around edge.  Season with pepper.  Remove from heat.

Meanwhile slice potatoes ⅛ inch thick; transfer to a bowl.  Pour warm cream mixture over top.  Mix well, using your hands to separate and coat potatoes, then transfer to prepared dish.  Gently push potatoes down, and pour cream mixture from bowl over top.  Sprinkle with Gruyere.  Bake (with a baking sheet placed on the rack below to catch drips) until potatoes are fork tender and top is bubbling and brown, about 1 hour and 15 minutes.

A mandoline helps you create thin, uniform slices.

In dish before cream is poured on top.

Cheesy and crunchy on top.

Candied Sweet Potato Cupcakes

These cupcakes are just too cute.  They have a mild sweet potato flavor and are topped with toasted marshmallows.  They're a nice change of pace from frosting and faster to make.  If you're too busy during the holidays to make sweet potato pie, consider this quick treat.  Recipe after the jump.

The potatoes were a cinch to prepare.  I tossed them in my toaster oven for an hour the night before, and refrigerated them.

I don't recommend using the food processor to puree them, since you need a liquid to help the process along.  I ended up scraping them into a bowl, using a potato masher, and then back into the food processor for good measure, since I already dirtied the work bowl and blade.

Whipping up a creamy batter.

It looks curdly after adding the sweet potatoes, but it'll work itself out.

You can see flecks of sweet potato in the cups.  I used a cupcake pan instead of the muffin pan the recipe calls for, and ended up with 29 instead of 24 cupcakes.  The baking time and temperature remain the same.

Toasted marshmallow how-to: Group mounds of marshmallows, about 7 or 8 of them to a mound, on a silicone mat.

Stick them for a minute or two under the broiler, and watch carefully!  The marshmallows will swell and start to meld together.  Remove them when you get the desired coloring, and place atop cupcakes immediately. Recipe after the jump.