Overwintered Carrot Cake

My wife, the baker in the family, took one look at our recent harvest of overwintered carrots and knew what she had to make: carrot cake.

I know what you are thinking: There could hardly be anything more mundane than carrot cake. But trust me: once you've made it with carrots you've grown in your own garden, carrots that have been storing themselves in the ground and getting sweeter all winter long just waiting for you to think of something to do with them--once you have some of those carrots to work with your carrot cake will rise to something special indeed.

Plus, my wife does not make ordinary things. Her baked goods invariably are extraordinary. This particular carrot cake is infused with the flavor of ginger and topped with an orange-cream cheese frosting. We liked the first one so much (meaning it lasted until maybe the next day) that she made it again and cut it into these cheery little morsels to serve at our recent chilaquiles brunch. It wasn't long before the only thing left on the buffet were a few crumbs.

Here's the recipe as found in The New Best Recipe, from the editors of Cook's Illustrated:

For the cake:

2 1/2 cups (12 1/2 ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour

1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/8 teaspoon ground cloves

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 pound carrots, peeled

1/2 cup finely chopped crystallized ginger

1 1/2 cups granulated sugar

1/2 cup packed light brown sugar

4 large eggs

1 tablespoon grated orange zest

1 1/2 cups canola oil

Place an oven rack in the middle position and preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a 13 by 9-inch baking pan with nonstick cooking spray. Line the bottom of the pan with parchment paper and spray the paper as well.

Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, spices and salt in a medium bowl and set aside.

Shred the carrots using the shredding attachment in a food processor(there should be about 3 cups). Add carrots and crystallized ginger to bowl with dry ingredients and set aside. Wipe out food processor and fit with metal blade. Process granulated and brown sugars with eggs and orange zest until frothy and thoroughly combined, about 20 seconds. With machine running, add oil through feed tube in a steady stream. Process until the mixture is light in color and well emulsified, about 20 seconds longer. (Note: these steps could also be done using an ordinary box grater, a mixing bowl with a whisk and some elbow grease.) Scrape the mixture into a large bowl. Stir in the carrots and dry ingredients and mix until everything is fully incorporated. Pour mix into prepared baking pan and bake until a toothpick or skewer inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean, 35 to 40 minutes, rotating the pan from front to back halfway through the baking time. Cool the cake to room temperature in the pan on a wire rack, at least 2 hours.

For the frosting:

8 ounces cream cheese, softened but still cool

5 tabelspoons unsalted butter, softened but still cool

1 tablespoon orange juice

1 tablespoon grated orange zest

1 1/2 cups (5 ounces) confectioners' sugar

When the cake is cool, process the cream cheese, butter, orange juice and orange zest in a clean food procewssor until combined, about 5 seconds, scraping down the workbowl with a rubber spatula as needed. Add the confections' sugar and process until smooth, about 10 seconds.

Run a paring knife around the edge of the cake to loosen it from the pan. Invert the cake onto a wire rack, peel off the parchment and invert the cake onto a serving platter or cake stand. Using an offset spatula, spread the frosting evenly over the surface of the cake. Cut into squares and serve.

Steamed Brown Bread

Steamed brown bread, a New England tradition, was a treat for us even growing up in the Midwest. We ate it out of a can (I never knew it any other way) and it was always something exotic and mysterious when it arrived on our dinner plate, almost on a par with getting chow mein carryout from the local Chinese restaurant.

My memory is of the B&M brand of canned brown bread. This is a proud company from Portland, Maine, that first opened for business in 1867 and was canning corn long before it thought to can brown bread or Boston baked beans, the company's most important product. B&M has since been bought up by a succession of bigger food corporations over the years. But the brand and the factory still exist in Portland. The beans, cooked in open pots in brick ovens, come in a can as well as a jar uniquely shaped to look like a classic bean pot.

Making steamed brown bread at home is simple, but the technique may be new to you as it was to me. Instead of baking in an oven, the bread cooks in a pot of boiling water, usually in some sort of tin can or similar mold. (You can even make it in a flower pot). To get the can, I had to buy a pound of coffee at the supermarket. We don't normally get our coffee in a can anymore. Then, after I had mixed the batter, I found that the recipe I was following in Aliza Green's The Bean Bible was much more than enough to fill the 1-pound can she called for. I see now that James Beard, who included an almost identical recipe in Beard on Bread, called for "cans," plural.

An iconic New England food, steamed brown bread typically calls for three types of whole-grain flours, starting with rye flour, corn meal and either whole wheat, graham flour, oat flour or, in my case, since it was what I had in the pantry, barley flour. The batter must contain molasses--a staple ingredient in bygone New England--to give the bread its distinctive color and sweetness. Baking soda and buttermilk react to give the bread its rise. Traditionally, it can be made plain or with raisins.

If you are using coffee cans to make the bread, you'll need to grease the inside or line them with parchment paper. You'll also need a tall pot ( or pots) to steam them in, with a wire rack or empty tuna cans or something similar (I used stainless baking rings) to put at the bottom of the pot so that the bread is not touching the heat source. Since I only had one coffee can, I improvised at the last minute with a small, high-sided cake pan. It worked just as well. Either way, the mold should be covered with a double layer of aluminum foil tied securely with a length of butcher's twine.

To make your bread, mix together 1 cup rye flour, 1 cup cornmeal, 1 cup oat flour (or substitute barley, whole wheat or graham flour), 2 teaspoons baking soda and 1 teaspoons salt. In a separate bowl, mix together 2 cups buttermilk and 3/4 cup molasses.

Pour the buttermilk mixture into the dry ingredients and mix well. Pour the batter into 2 greased, 1-pound coffee cans (I used spray canola oil) or molds lined with parchment paper. Each can should be about 2/3 full. Place the cans into tall pots with a wire rack or empty tuna cans on the bottom. Fill the pots with water to a depth halfway up the side of the bread can (or mold). Bring water to a boil, reduce heat and continue boiling for about 2 1/2 hours, or until a skewer inserted into the bread comes out clean. When the can is cool enough to handle, simply remove the foil, invert the can and tap the bread out onto a cutting board. You may have to use a thin knife initially to separate the bread from the inside of the can.

Note: Aliza Green suggests cooking the bread 2 1/2 to 3 hours. Meanwhile, James Beard calls for cooking the bread 1 1/2 to 2 hours. Quite a difference. We cooked ours for2 1/2 hours and it seemed fine. If two loaves seem like too much, cut the recipe in half and just make one.

My wife thinks the bread gains from sitting a day or two before being eaten. We agree that the only way to serve it is with a generous slather of cream cheese and preferably a bowl of Boston baked beans.

Kids Make Gingerbread Cake

The aroma of old-fashioned gingerbread baking in the oven automatically signals the arrival of Christmas. With its strange mix of molasses, cloves, nutmeg and other spices, gingerbread is an anachronism. Yet somehow it has maintained its grip on the holiday tradition.

Personally, I don't care much for gingerbread cookies or the stuff that gingerbread houses are made of. But this cake has a wonderful moistness to go with its heft and spiciness. There's nothing difficult about it once you have all the ingredients assembled. And that's part of the fun making it with children--all those ingredients arrayed on the counter top and the extra time and care it takes to mix them all together.

The original recipe calls for mixing first the wet ingredients, then the final batter with an electric mixer. But we found that mixing with a hand whisk worked just as well and was more fun. The original recipe also calls for baking the cake in an 11 by 7-inch baking pan. But our pan was a little smaller and square: 8 1/2 by 8/12 inches. This increased our baking time from the suggested 40 minutes to 52 minutes. The key to doneness is that the cake should be fully risen in the center and should bounce back when pressed with a finger. A toothpick inserted in the middle should come out clean. In a smaller pan, this may mean that the finished cake is a little crispier around the edges, which cook first.

Try serving this cake with plain yogurt or even a dollop of sour cream to cut the sweetness.

2 1/4 cups sifted (9 ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1 teaspoon Dutch-processed cocoa
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted and cooled to room temperature
3/8 cup molasses
3/8 cup dark Karo syrup
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup milk
1 large egg

Place oven rack in middle of oven and preheat to 350 degrees. Grease the bottom and sides of an 11 by 7-inch baking dish and dust with flour, tapping out the excess. Or spray with Baker's Joy.

Whisk together flour, baking soda, salt, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, allspice and cocoa in a medium bowl.

Beat butter, molasses, sugar, buttermilk, milk and egg in a large bowl. Add dry ingredients and beat until batter is smooth and thick, scraping down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula as needed. (This should take about a minute with an electric mixer, longer if done by hand.) Scrape the batter into the prepared baking dish and smooth the surface as needed.

Place baking dish in oven and bake until the top springs back when lightly touched and edges have pulled away from the pan sides, about 40 minutes. Set on a wire rack to cool for 10 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Sweet Potato Pie

Really, all I wanted from my wife the baker were a few tips for making a sweet potato pie.

We have all these sweet potatoes harvested from the garden and sweet potato pie was pencilled in as dessert for our choucroute dinner. But as so often happens, making this pie would not be as easy as--well, pie. We first had to have a discussion.

My idea was to make the pie in Bill Neal's classic Southern cookbook, Biscuits, Spoonbread, and Sweet Potato Pie. What could be more authentic, I reasoned,
than a pie from the legendary Bill Neal and a book with sweet potato pie right in the title?

But my wife was not convinced. As she so often does in these situations, she first wanted to check Bill Neal's recipe against the one in The New Best Recipe, the tome from Cook's Illustrated that my wife considers her recipe bible. Sure enough, she started picking Bill Neal's version apart, piece by piece. Too much molasses. Not enough egg. Dry sherry--huh?

My wife thinks I'm crazy not to be in love with The New Best Recipe. My main beef is, the authors seem to be less interested in authenticity than in their own idealized vision of how certain foods should be. Using their personal bias as a starting point, they then weed through recipes from hither and yon, adjusting and changing them as they go until they arrive at something that more or less matches their preconceived notions.

Apparently, that suits my wife just fine. And being a man of a certain age, I've learned that beating your chest is useless. The female species is always right. It's wiser to just submit.

Hence, sweet potato pie from The New Best Recipe, wherein the authors seek "to create a distinctive sweet potato pie, a recipe that honored the texture and flavor of sweet potatoes while being sufficiently recognizable as a dessert. Neither a custardy, pumpkin-style pie nor a masked-potatoes-in-a-crust pie would do."


For the pie filling:

2 pounds sweet potatoes

2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened

3 large eggs, plus 2 large egg yolks

1 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon salt

2-3 tablespoons bourbon

1 tablespoon molasses

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2/3 cup whole milk

1/4 cup packed dark brown sugar

Prick the sweet potatoes several times with a fork and place them on a double layer of paper towels in a microwave (I bake my sweet potatoes at 325 degrees in the oven). Cook at full power for 5 minutes, turn each potato over and continue to cook at full power until tender but not mushy, about 5 minutes longer. Cool 10 minutes. Halve a potato crosswise, insert a small spoon between the skin and flesh and scoop the flesh into a medium bowl. Discard the skin. (If the potatoes are too hot to handle, use paper towels as a wrapper.) Repeat with remaining sweet potatoes. You should have about 2 cups. While potatoes are still hot, add butter and mash with a fork or wooden spoon. Small lumps of potato should remain.

Whisk together the eggs, yolks, sugar, nutmeg and salt in a medium bowl. Stir in bourbon, molasses and vanilla. Whisk in milk. Gradually add egg mixture to sweet potatoes, whisking gently to combine. Set aside.

For a pre-baked crust:

1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting the work surface

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon sugar

3 tablespoons vegetables shortening, chilled

4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch pieces

4-5 tablespoons ice water.

Process flour, salt and sugar in a food process until combined. Add shortening and process until mixture has the texture of coarse sand, about 10 seconds. Scatter butter pieces over flour mixture, then cut butter into flour until mixture is pale yellow and resembles coarse crumbs, with butter bits no larger than small peas, about 10 1-second pulses. Turn mixture into a medium bowl.

Sprinkle 4 tablespoons ice water over mixture. Use rubber spatula and folding motion to mix. Press down on dough with broad side of spatula until dough sticks together, adding up to 1 tablespoon more ice water if dough will not come together. Flatten dough into 4-inch disk. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate at least 1 hour or up to 2 days before rolling.

Remove dough from refrigerator and let stand until malleable. Roll dough on lightly floured surface into a 12-inch circle. Transfer dough to a 9-inch pie plate by rolling the dough around the rolling pin and unrolling it over the pan. Working around the circumference of the pie plate, ease the dought into the pan corners by gently lifting the edge of the dough with one hand while gently pressing it into the pan bottom with the other hand. Trim the dough edges to extend about 1/2 inch beyond the rim of the pan. Fold the overhang under itself; flute the dough or press the tine of a fork against the dough to flatten it against the rim of the pie plate. Refrigerate the dough-lined pie plate until firm, about 40 minutes, then freeze until very cold, about 20 minutes.

Adjust an oven rack to the lower-middle position and heat the oven to 375 degrees. Remove the dough-lined pie plate from the freezer, press a doubled 12-inch piece of heavy-duty foil inside the pie shell and fold the edges of the foil to shield the fluted edge. Distribute 2 cups ceramic or metal pie weights over the foil (my wife used some pennies in addition to her pie weights). Bake, leaving the foil and weights in place until the dough looks dry and is light in color, 25 to 30 minutes. Carefully remove the foil and weights by gathering the corners of the foil and pulling up and out. For a partially baked crust, continue baking until light golden brown, 5 to 6 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack and reduce the oven temperature to 350 degrees.


While the crust is still warm, cover the bottom with 1/4 cup packed dark brown sugar and the pie filling. Pour pie filling over the brown sugar. Bake on the lower-middle rack until the filling is set around the edges but the center jiggles slightly when shaken, about 45 minutes. Transfer pie to a wire rack and cool to room temperature, about 2 hours, before serving with your best whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

The brown sugar creates an unexpected layer of flavor at the bottom of the pie. We knew the pie was just right when our friend Pete, a West Virginia native who has an unerring taste for home-cooked food, sat bolt upright at the dinner table and nearly dropped his fork.

"Dang, that's good!" Pete exclaimed. "How did you do that? Mine is almost always flat."

Well, my wife would say it's all about The New Best Recipe, Pete. And I ain't gonna argue. (Bill Neal, wherever you are, eat your heart out.)

Kids Make Apple Crisp

This week we started a culinary world food tour in our "food appreciation" classes and our first stop outside the District of Columbia is the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia where fall means apples. Kids love using a mechanical apple peeler. It used to be every family had one, apples were such an important food. We are using ours to make a simple apple crisp, a traditional dessert that takes only a few minutes to prepare.

First, we peel and core 6 medium apples. We used Golden Delicious. Cut the apples into bit-size pieces, a job made easy by our peeling device, which turns the apple into a spiral while it is coring.


Squeeze the juice from 1 lemon.

Toss the apples with the lemon juice in a pie plate or tin. We used a standard, round Pyrex pie plate.

Meanwhile, mix the "crisp," first whisking together 1/2 cup all-purpose flour, 1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar, 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Next, cut 1/4 cup chilled, unsalted butter into the dry ingredients using quick, pinching movements of your fingers to squeeze everything together.

Sprinkle the crisp mixture over the apples, then slide into a 375-degree oven and bake for 35 minutes, or until the crisp is beginning to brown and the apples are starting to bubble.

Serve warm or room temperature. This crisp is delicious as is, the cooked apples all muddled together with the cinnamony topping. But you could also serve it with vanilla ice cream, sour cream or--my favorite--fresh, tangy, homemade yogurt.

Baking Ain't For Sissies

What you see here is an angel food cake that started out with great hopes and expectations and ended in utter disaster.

Why, you might ask, is The Slow Cook making angel food cake? Shouldn't he be out tending his garden?

The short of it is, we had a freezer full of frozen egg whites from months of recipes calling mostly for egg yolks. The plan was to convert these whites into angel food cakes that I could deliver to the kids in my "food appreciation" classes as an end-of-year treat.

The first blunder was dumping a four-cup container of egg whites into the blender bowl. Somehow I had it in my head that this constituted one dozen eggs. In fact, four cups (almost) equates to 24 egg whites--something that was clearly indicated on the label my wife had affixed to the container. I soon realized my error when the eggs white under influence of a rapidly beating blender began overflowing the bowl.

After reading the recipe several times and having gotten the procedure more or less fixed in my head, my wife intervened, urging me to measure out the ingredients for both of the two cakes I had in mind, rather than doing them each separately. This is how time is saved in a busy kitchen, she intoned.

Not only did I measure out the dry ingredients for two cakes, I mixed them all together. But by some fiendish trick of physics, two cups of double-sifted cake flour mixed with three cups of granulated sugar does not result in five cups of material. Questioning my own sanity at this point, and after a brief huddle with the baking-expert wife, I decided that I must have forgotten two of the three cups of sugar, so I added two more.

This is how you end up with a sticky, treacly sweet angel food puddle rather than the light, fluffy angel food cake we had in mind. Make that two cakes down the drain.

Kids, I hope you like pound cake from Whole Foods.

Our Favorite Banana Bread with Chocolate Nibs

There are so many things to keep track of in this life and bananas are just one of them.

Is there a single household in American that doesn't have a banana or two sitting somewhere on the kitchen counter? I doubt it. I can hardly remember a day when there wasn't a banana within easy reach. We used to slice them into our Cheerios. Now we reserve them for fruit smoothies.

Bananas continue to ripen after they're picked and do require a certain amount of vigilance once they've found a spot to rest in your kitchen. A perfectly yellow banana beckons to children, even though it might not have reached the apex of ripeness. A dark blotch here or there, on the other hand, becomes a major defect in the eyes of a pre-adolescent. Such a banana may be lost to the usual peel-and-eat routine and enters a kind of fruit limbo. No one in the family is quite sure what to do with such a banana. It may go uneaten for a long period, getting darker and darker as bananas are wont to do.

In our house, I've seen bananas turn almost black just sitting in the fruit basket. Then they begin to ooze. You may notice fruit flies hovering about. This would be good time to consider putting the banana in the refrigerator to slow the ripening process. Often as not, my wife has already designated this banana for a banana bread and will put the lovelorn fruit in the freezer with a number of its kin.

Yesterday my wife cleaned out the freezer and, lo, there was more than one bag of overripe bananas in there. Within a short time, the aroma of banana bread baking in the oven wafted through the house. Then out came two loaves, destined to last not very long. One of them went off to school this morning with our daughter. Friday is special treat day in her class. The other is very quickly getting smaller. It sits on a cutting board with a chocolate-smeared bread knife nearby, subject to being reduced even further at any moment.

We are huge fans of banana bread. My wife, the baker in the family, otherwise detests bananas. She will turn away from the faintest whiff of bananas. But for some reason she loves banana bread. She used to add chocolate chips to her banana bread occasionally. But about a year ago she discovered chocolate nibs. These are pebbly, unsweetened bits of cacao that add a bit of chocolate crunch to things without the cloying sweetness.

"You know me," says the wife. "I'm all about crunch."

They might even do as a substitute for nuts in your banana bread, if you have an allergy or just don't like nuts. Our last purchase of "roasted cacao nibs" was from The Spice House in Chicago.

To make one 9-inch loaf, adapted from The New Best Recipe:

2 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour
1 1/4 cups walnuts, chopped coarse
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 very ripe, soft, large bananas mashed well (about 1 1/2 cups)
1/4 cup plain yogurt
2 large eggs beaten lightly
6 tablspoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 cup chocolate nibs
1/2 cup bittersweet chocolate chips

Place an oven rack in the lower-middle position and heat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease the bottom and sides of a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan and dust with flour.

Spread walnuts on a baking sheets and toast until fragrant, 5 to 10 minutes. Set aside to cool.

In a large bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, baking soda, salt and walnuts. Set aside.

In a bowl, mix mashed bananas, yogurt, eggs, butter and vanilla. Fold banana mixture, nibs and chocolate chips (if using) into the dry ingredients until just combined. The batter should look thick and chunky. Scrape batter into prepared loaf pan and bake until the loaf is golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, or about 55 minutes. Cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack.

Note: My wife likes a smaller loaf. She increases the recipe by 50 percent and makes two 8-by-4-inch loaves. If you don't have chocolate nibs handy, just increase the chocolate chips--or not, as you prefer. You don't have to use any chocolate at all. The bread will still come out fine.

Lavender-Vanilla Dusted Scones

Some foods don't have to take forever and a day to make my favorites list. Take these scones from Marion Cunningham's The Breakfast Book.

The recipe requires only eight incredients that you probably already have in your pantry. It takes about five minutes to throw them together and make the dough. Then 15 minutes to bake. So in less that a half hour, you have warm, delicious scones to go with your morning coffee.

The attraction of scones is biting through the only slightly crusty exterior and finding a soft, warm interior dotted with bits of dried fruit. They are only a bit crumbly and hold together almost as well as a muffin. When my wife makes them, they aren't even browned, really. Just hinting at the baked look you see in this picture.

I'm not a baker. I'm much more comfortable around the barbeque. But I started making these scones for the monthly meetings of a local gardening organization here in the District of Columbia (D.C. Urban Gardeners, which you can find ahttp://www.dc-urban-gardeners.com/). I also bake a batch on Saturdays to sell at the produce stand we hold during the warmer season outside my daughter's charter school.

The recipe calls for chopped dried fruits such as apricots, prunes or figs, plus a small amount of golden raisins. But I usually use whatever I have on hand, sometimes dried cranberries, sometimes dried blueberries, sometimes just raisins. Feel free to improvise. I also like to use a long chef's knife to cut the dough into wedges. But you can also divide the dough with a round cookie cutter, or even make heart shapes.

These are a comfort with breakfast or to display on a brunch buffet. After I made them several times, my wife bought a bottle of lavender-scented vanilla sugar to dust the scones instead of the plain granular sugar that Marion Cunningham calls for.


For One Dozen Scones (Or Ten Large Wedges)


2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup sugar

1/2 cup chopped dried fruit (apricots, prunes, figs, etc.)

1/4 cup golden raisins

1 1/4 cups heavy cream



Glaze


2 tablespoons butter, melted

2 tablespoons sugar (or lavender-vanilla sugar)


Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Use an ungreased baking sheet.

In a large bowl, mix all the dry ingredients and the fruit. Pour in cream and mix just until all the ingredients are incorporated. Turn the dough out onto a flat surface lightly dusted with flour and kneed about eight times, or until the dough is firm with just a bit of shine to it.

Use your fingers to press the dough out into a circle about 3/4-inch thick. Cut into wedges or use a cooking cutter to cut into 3-inch circles. Place cut dough onto baking sheet. Brush with butter and dust with sugar. Place in oven.

Bake 15 minutes, or until scones are lightly browned. Place on a wire rack to cool. Serve warm.