Plum Skillet Cake

Sometimes it's fun to conquer baking challenges -- braided bread, lattice-top pies, croissants -- but sometimes it's nice just to mix together a few ingredients and throw them in the oven. Here a cake batter is easily stirred up, poured into a skillet, and topped with fruit. No fuss, and a stunning and delicious dessert.

The cake is simple but tasty, and the cast iron gives the edges a nice crust. The plums, which I can find bitter in their fresh form, mellow out as they bake to become lightly sweet and tart, even the peel. A dollop of whipped cream makes a slice even better.

Some important tips to share: Wait until the cake is halfway done baking before adding the plums.  The top row is the first cake I made, and you can see that the beautiful plums sank into the batter as the cake baked.  Also, the plums were only in the center of the cake, so the outer edges didn't have any of the delicious fruit.  In the bottom row, I added the plums after 15 minutes of baking, and you can see that they barely sank in.  I also increased the number of plums to four, so every slice of cake has plenty of fruit.

Update: This post made the Foodbuzz Top 9!  Thanks for all the buzz!

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Rum Raisin Ice Cream with Caramel Sauce

I've bailed the ice cream maker out of the basement, and given it a home on the counter.  I know that sounds like neglect, but it's big and heavy due to the built-in compressor (no need to freeze churning bowl!) so I waited for ice cream season to begin.  I never thought Rum Raisin Ice Cream was my thing, until I had something like it at a local ice cream shop last summer.  And then I saw this recipe at Pastry Affair a few months ago, and it's been on my brain since.  And apparently it's Joe's childhood favorite.  I'm not a big fan of drinking rum, but I've concluded I love rum-flavored desserts like Vanilla Bean-Pineapple Tart, Black Bottom Tart, and Baba au Rhum.

This was excellent.  The raisins are briefly cooked in rum and soak up all the liquid.  When they were almost done I put the lid on my saucepan and turned off the burner, and the flame puffed up before going out -- except it must have caught some alcohol fumes because the lid rim was suddenly blue and aflame.  "Whoa!" I shouted.  "What's up?"  Joe called from the other room.  "Unintentional flambé!"  It was entertaining, but just be careful.

If you're like me, you might ask if you need the caramel sauce.  No one needs caramel sauce, but you want it.  Trust me.  The ice cream and the caramel are each very good on their own, but combined they might sing to you.

View the recipe at Pastry Affair.

Want more recipes for frozen desserts?  Here are some oldies but goodies:

Chocolate Gelato

Blackberry Ice Cream

Lychee Sorbet

Caramelized Pear Ice Cream

Maple Ice Cream in Waffle Cone Cups


Frozen Chocolate-Peanut Butter Pie

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Boston Globe review: The Bloomy Rind

Shirley Goh/Globe Staff

Check out my review of The Bloomy Rind in Hingham, Massachusetts.  It's a cheese and gourmet foods shop with a chef who used to cook for Todd English.  This is a cheese slate at the shop with manchego cheese (on the left), camembert (on the right), spicy plum chutney, Picholine olives, dried apricots, Medjool dates, and fresh figs.

Even if you're nowhere near the south of Boston, you might be interested in all the cheeses and gourmet items I tasted.  There were so many, I couldn't fit them all in the review.

Read the review here.  If you run into the subscriber pay wall, the review is also available here (but with only one photo).  Again, I'm open to suggestions of South Shore restaurants and food places to cover!

Cherry-Cream Cheese Hand Pies

After Memorial Day every year I must make two things: pie and ice cream.  Summer fruits are delicious on their own, but they're also so good inside of a pastry crust.  And even after baking the flavor of the fruit was fresh and maintained its shape, and it didn't turn into that cherry goop I hate in storebought pies.  The cream cheese mixture adds a nice sweetness and tang to the cherries.  I can see myself throwing these in the picnic basket all summer.

I was bummed at not posting last week, but look what I've had to distract me!  Nearly a year after losing my best buddy and the sweetest cat in the entire world, Baby, we found Shnooky a little brother.  We got Dalton,1½ years old, at the local shelter.  During the day he sleeps under the bed, but at night he's a furball of energy.  He loves chasing the laser pointer dot and cries if he loses sight of it, and he likes to sing at 2 a.m. when the world is asleep.  We're working on changing his name, and Joe is pushing for Gandalf the Grey because he waves his paws around like he's casting spells.  You'd think I'd love that, considering the name of this blog, right?  I'm not sure yet that Gandalf sounds cute enough for this fella.

I have a point to my digression.  I had done my baking prep, making the pie dough and quartering the cherries.  And since they were frozen cherries, I didn't have to wrestle with the pitter.  Then we got our new cat, plus my editor asked me to submit my next Boston Globe dining review a week earlier than we'd agreed on.  So no time for cherry pies.  The cherries stayed unspoiled in the freezer, as did half a batch of the pie dough.  For some dumb reason I didn't freeze both halves, so I substituted some storebought puff pastry sitting in my freezer and it worked great.  So when life gets busy, baking projects are salvageable!

Also, my next food review runs in The Boston Globe this Sunday, so check back here for the URL!

Update: This post made the Foodbuzz Top 9!

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Boston Globe Review: Sher-A-Punjab

Photos by Shirley Goh/Globe Staff

My dining review of Sher-A-Punjab is in today's Globe.  If you're in the Boston area, pick up a copy and flip over to the Globe South section.  It's the first of my occasional reviews of restaurants and other food places south of Boston.  And if you know about a place on the South Shore that should be reviewed, I want to hear about it!

I haven't really discussed my job on this blog, but I work at The Boston Globe as a copy editor on the news desk.  Some people ask me what that entails -- I edit metro, nation, foreign, and business stories, along with writing headlines and doing some page design.  In my down time I've written this food blog for fun, and now I'm enjoying this Globe South writing gig.

Sher-A-Punjab is an Indian restaurant in Quincy, Massachusetts.  You can also read my review online at http://tinyurl.com/7laohzl.

Update: If you hit the subscriber-only pay wall at that first URL, you can try viewing it instead at http://www.boston.com/yourtown/quincy/articles/2012/05/20/modern_indian_cuisine_at_sher_a_punjab_in_quincy/.

Hainan Chicken Rice

We ate lots of Hainan Ji Fan when I was growing up.  This poached chicken dish originates from Hainan, an island in China just south of the mainland where my grandparents are from.  It's also a popular dish in Singapore and Malaysia, where my parents were born.  And my mom continues to make it in her New York kitchen, where she taught it to me on a Mother's Day weekend visit.  The best part is the rice.  After the chicken is poached, the water essentially becomes chicken stock, and that liquid is used to infuse the rice, making it flavorful and rich.  If you have homemade chicken stock on hand, substitute it for some of the water for more potent chicken flavor.  The rice is also imbued with garlic and a hint of ginger.

This is how Mom rolls.  I don't have a problem with the head, but I have no use for it either.
So I bought the usual supermarket variety.

The poached chicken may be too simple for those used to loud flavors, but soy sauce and hot sauce are served on the side and my dad always partook.  He's always been proud of his Singapore-grown tolerance for heat, but by contrast I've only graduated to mild.  Yes, I said graduated.  Hainan Chicken Rice is also Singapore's national dish.

My parents, brother, paternal grandparents, and my twin sister and me.  Once again, not sure which runt I am.

One of my earliest memories includes this dish.  I had peeled off some chicken skin -- which I love when roasted and crispy but not when poached and soft -- just as my mother often instructed me to because it's healthier that way.  And my paternal grandmother, who was born a peasant in Hainan and was not into waste one bit, objected, pushing me to eat the skin.  "Eat it!  Go ahead, eat it!" she said, as my mother told me, "Don't do it!  It's not good for you!"  Whom to obey, mother or grandmother?  I think it must have been my mother.  Their reactions summed up their food philosophies, and the memory still makes me chuckle.

My twin sister with her daughter, Audrey, on Mother's Day weekend.

And this time a new generation of the family was introduced to Hainan Ji Fan.  My 16-month-old niece, Audrey, was a big fan.  I also decided she's now officially a Chinese lady.  When she would act up, my mother would chide her, saying, "Aiya!"  And Audrey, in a world-weary yet babyish voice, would sigh in echo, "Aiiyaaa!"

What are some of your quintessential family recipes?

"Fancy Twix," or Salted Caramel Chocolate Shortbread Bars

"Would I like a fancy, homemade version of a Twix?"  I asked Joe recently.  He said yes.  See, I'm not big on candy or candy bars.  My friend Charmie used to say I like "old people candy" -- Werther's and Raisinets.  Hard candies, gummies, and nougat don't do it for me.  I don't even know what makes a Twix different from a Snickers or Milky Way.  But when I saw this recipe at Tracey's Culinary Adventures, I thought the shortbread layered with caramel and chocolate looked pretty damn good.

If Twix tasted like this, I might be more of a candy bar fan.  Wow.  The shortbread is nice and crumbly when you bite into it, the caramel is smooth and rich, and the bittersweet chocolate topped with coarse salt is my favorite.  Don't skip the salt, which transforms the flavors of chocolate and caramel.  Tracey mentioned in her post that she halved the amount of caramel and thought the result was perfect -- I agree, but Joe wanted more caramel.  Depends on how much of a caramel fan you are.  Also, I like mine straight from the fridge because the bars get a little soft at room temperature.

This wasn't difficult at all to make, though you have to make the three components in stages and give them time to set.  I've done trickier candy-making, like homemade marshmallows.  If there's a deterrent to making this again, it's that a pound of butter -- that's right, four sticks -- goes into this recipe.  Two for the shortbread, one for the caramel layer, and one for the chocolate.  You can halve the recipe, but what would you do with the other half a can of sweetened condensed milk?  This will be a repeat in my kitchen, but we'll be giving a bunch away like we did this time.  Spread the love, and the calories.

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