Orange Mascarpone Tart

I learned something when I made this tart a month ago: I am not a cheesemaker.

The original recipe tells you how to make your own mascarpone cheese, which of course I was eager to try, if only because I needed heavy whipping cream for another recipe and could therefore kill two birds with one stone. I don't think my cheese turned out quite right, and I didn't enjoy attempting to make it as much as I thought I would (I got too impatient waiting for the temperature to rise). Maybe someday I will attempt to make cheese again in the future when I am more prepared, but that future is not now.

Still, I'm glad I tried it. And the tart still came out well, in spite of any cheese difficulties. It was even better that we had all the other ingredients on hand.

Oh. And I am in love with my tart pan and its removable bottom. It was $6.95 total, as I was doing a free trial of Amazon Prime at the time, and somehow finagled free shipping and no tax out of that. It was well worth it!

Orange Cranberry Scones

I am down to a small handful of cereal (plus crumbs), and one packet of dinosaur egg oatmeal (to be saved for emergencies, or cold weather). The yogurt is gone. I had pancakes, toast, and scrambled eggs at various points over the weekend. Needless to say, the breakfast options for this morning were very few, indeed. So I was quite lucky to run across a recipe for scones before my hunger zapped my capacity for all rational thought. (Sneaking crumbles of dough as I made the scones also helped stave off said hunger.)

Admittedly, that first recipe, that brilliant beacon of an idea to the half-starved (or thereabouts) called for unholy amounts of butter. You know how I am about butter. Yet Fate would not allow me to despair! It just so happened that, while checking my favorite food blogs, I saw a link that took me to another link that took me... to scones. Scones with not 1/3 cup of butter... but three little tablespoons. I rejoiced! (Or mostly, my stomach growled in approval.)

I was a little bit skeptical about using a mix of whole wheat and white flour, just because whole wheat sometimes makes things... not as delicious (compare a partially whole wheat flour pizza crust to an all-white flour crust, for instance). But I trusted my recipe in the end, and got ten beautiful scones because of it – scones you wouldn't have any idea were lightened up, because they tasted so good.

Plus, I got to drink the leftover, fresh-squeezed orange juice, which is always my favorite part. And, now I have something to eat tomorrow morning before my eight AM discussion section.

Blackberry Pie (and Blackberry Mini Pies)

I have two confessions:

1. We ate the pie without taking pictures because,

2. The pie was ugly. I had never attempted a lattice-top crust before, and it was not a pretty sight. I felt badly about that, of course, the pie being for my roommate's birthday, and all. In spite of its unattractiveness, though, the pie didn't fail to taste wonderful.

After making (and eating) the pie, I had a little bit of crust dough left and a lot of filling. (I blame that on my small, Marie-Calendar-sized pie pans.) I probably could have sat there and eaten both (to my detriment), but I had a better idea: mini pies!


Please forgive the out-of-focus picture!

Baked Spice Doughnuts

I've been having an off week. Not consistently bad, just... off. So on the days where I've come home feeling rather sour, I've hung up my keys, flung my backpack to the floor, whipped out my laptop, and done the best thing I know to make me feel a little bit sweeter: I've baked. I may have stormed into the kitchen on one occasion, glowering at anything that moved, but what really matters is that I emerged sometime later feeling happy and relaxed.

Sometimes I just know when I need to bake. Sometimes without even thinking, I will gravitate toward the kitchen and automatically begin gathering ingredients from my cupboards like wildflowers. Times like these, I bake not for sustenance, but for peace of mind. I bake because there is nothing better at cheering you up than doing something you love.

But it does help that I love both the baking and the eating, especially when it comes to these doughnuts. They're a lot healthier than normal doughnuts because they're not deep-fried, and have the potential to use some low fat ingredients without compromising taste. Plus, they're light on the butter! Whoo hoo!

They also couldn't be easier to make, which is a good thing, since you may find yourself wanting to make another batch immediately after.

Lemon Frozen Yogurt

Remember when I mentioned yesterday that we'd eaten frozen yogurt with our carrot cake? Well, surprise! (Or not-so-surprise, for the foreshadowing-detecting-savvy.) I figured that birthday cake without something vaguely ice cream-like is just shy of a travesty, especially when you've had an ice cream maker staring at you morosely from your cupboards all winter. As an added bonus, the lemony flavor matched the lemon zest in the cake's frosting.

Now, our ice cream maker is a little unusual – it's one of those Donvier ones (look at the picture of the blue one, that's it), where you don't use ice and salt and don't have to crank it like a maniac. Instead, you chill the magic, cylindrical metal container overnight; the next day, you pour in your would-be ice cream, and turn the funny handle on top once or twice every three minutes. (They say you're supposed to do it for twenty minutes, but it usually takes an hour.) I've got it on a long-term loan from my mother, because I'm the only one who's used it in the last six months (read: years).

Personally, I am fond of the ice cream makers you have to crank like a maniac. They bring back memories of Girl Scout Camp and slightly runny vanilla ice cream. (We had to crank in shifts.) But I'm not about to look a gift horse in the mouth – especially one that makes ice cream. And I can say that I have successfully made three or four batches of ice cream in it.

I'd never made frozen yogurt before, though, so I was a little skeptical about it working. The instruction booklet said you could do it, but since when do instruction booklets know anything?

You may laugh, but it turns out I was a little bit right in my skepticism, just for a different reason. You see, the ice cream maker worked too well. Upon contacting the bottom of the chilled cylinder, the yogurt mixture instantly froze, so that there was a solid block of frozen yogurt about two-inches deep on the bottom, and just enough climbing up the sides to make it impossible to turn the handle. This meant that for the next half-hour or so, I would get to systematically poke at the remainder of the frozen yogurt mixture, which was behaving as it was supposed to.

I don't know if our freezer is just possessed, and went above and beyond the call of duty when freezing the cylinder; or if maybe nonfat Greek yogurt has mystical freezing properties heretofore undiscovered. Whatever the case, we ended up with a thick, gorgeous layer of perfect frozen yogurt, and a bottom layer of ice-like crumbles that one could happily eat with an ice pick. It did taste good, though I was a little dissatisfied with the aftertaste, or afterfeeling, I suppose: the same one you get after drinking lemonade (and which is why I don't drink lemonade). Personally, I think it tasted better as unfrozen yogurt. I'm sure you could fix that by omitting the lemon juice, though, and increasing the amount of lemon zest.

(Somewhat) Low Fat Carrot Cake

I love waking up early on Saturday mornings to bake. Or I suppose any morning, really, but Saturday is best; I can work as slowly as I like, taking my time because I know I have no other plans but to relax and recover from the week.

There's something to mornings, too. Being that we're in college, my roommates (and I) often don't wake up until around noon (give or take an hour). This means that, if I happen to wake up at nine, as I did yesterday, and venture downstairs at ten, I will be the only one about. So I can assemble my ingredients, set the oven to preheating, turn on the 2008 Mamma Mia! soundtrack, and fall into peace. And maybe one of my roommates will appear an hour or so later, but I've still been able to enjoy that secret time, that secret delight of knowing I'm the only one awake while everyone is sleeping – that I've been able to greet the world that day before anybody else.

Yesterday, as you have probably inferred, was one of those mornings. I started baking/preparing at ten, and continued at various points throughout the day. The reason was that we were all going to celebrate our roommate Louisa's birthday, which was during spring break – thus the reason we were only just now getting to it. She wanted carrot cake as her special birthday treat, and I was determined to make it a bit healthier, thereby somewhat guilt-free, as she is on a diet.

I don't know how healthy it turned out (that frosting was determined to ruin my good intentions), but it did taste good with frozen yogurt after we spent a while playing games and eating pizza. I can also tell you that it continued to be good as we snuck seconds while watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Just in case you were wondering.





Recipe and more pictures if you read more...

Healthier Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Well, well, well. It's already April – April Fool's Day, to be exact. If I were perhaps a bit more mischievous, I'd have thought up some clever prank to post here today. (Yes, food pranks do exist!) But as I am not, my small readership shall be spared. Instead, I've got a batch of oatmeal cookies to share – ones which I made roughly two weeks ago and, you guessed it, forgot to tell you about. (Luckily for my roommates, they got the memo anyway.)

Keeping with my butter-vendetta, these cookies use yogurt instead of butter, and in the general "health" trend, contain other lovely things like skim milk and egg whites. The original recipe technically didn't call for chocolate chips, but there are limits to my health-consciousness when it comes to cookies.

I know I've been absent most of March, but I promise there are more things to come this month! The weather lately went from an utterly frigid – by California standards – winter to a rather humid summer with little transition and regard for Spring's feelings, so I've been craving more seasonally-appropriate treats. Plus, we are celebrating two of my roommates' birthdays within the next week, and I've a few tricks up my sleeve not quite of the sort that an April Fool might have in mind.



Recipe and more photos if you read more...

Chocolate Rum Cake

We had some rum left over from the Tiramisu, and as we didn't really want it sitting around, we decided to turn it into a Chocolate Rum Cake. I was a bit skeptical at first, because I don't like a strong rum flavor. However, after letting it sit overnight, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the rum flavor had, indeed, mellowed out, and made a lovely complement to the almond extract.

Unfortunately, this is the best picture I was able to get. I forgot to take a picture of the cake while it was whole, and by the time I got to it to take a picture, there were only a couple of pieces left.

Tiramisu

Two of my roommates have been on a rigorous diet for the past few weeks in order to lose weight for their Judo tournament. Or rather, they had to lose weight to get to a specific weight for their weigh-in, so they could be in a lower weight class. (How many more times can I use a form of the word "weight"? Any bets?) Their weigh-in (that's one more!) was on Thursday night. If you recall, Thursday is my night to cook; so they asked me to make something fatty and delicious for dinner.

I admit, I panicked at this. I've been trying to cook healthier lately – healthy, and more inclined to vegetarianism, as one of my roommates is a vegetarian. So we all came to the conclusion that I could make something unremarkable (my words, not theirs) for dinner, and something spectacular for dessert. I told them they could have any dessert they wanted in the world. They chose tiramisu. (If you're curious, we had Spinach Lasagna Rolls for dinner.)

After Googling for a bit, I found a tiramisu recipe that doesn't use store-bought ladyfingers. I don't like using store-bought things like that if I can help it, because it feels a little bit like cheating. I knew this would make it one of the more complicated recipes I've made, but I was excited for the challenge.

Three Biscotti

I have something to confess: I have a vendetta against butter. I avoid using it as often as possible, and have passed by many a scrumptious-looking cookie recipe because of it. "1/2 cup of butter" on an ingredients list makes me cry inside.

Don't get me wrong. I love buttery things. I've just somehow gotten it into my head that something with little to no butter is a lot healthier than something with lots of butter. I'm not the healthiest eater, not by any means. But lately, I've been trying hard to make steps in the right direction, for both my sake, and the sakes of my roommates, whom I feed at least once a week.

Cue the biscotti. I've never liked biscotti. NEVER. I thought, though, that maybe that was because I'd only ever had the store-bought stuff. After all, I wasn't a big fan of fruit pies until I started making them myself. The fact that I stumbled upon a LiveJournal post about biscotti with absolutely no butter in them whatsoever looked promising. I told you. I have a problem.

Then when I was searching for recipes and found one with a comment that said that real biscotti aren't meant to have butter in them anyway, as it makes them gross after a while, I was finally convinced.

So a week ago, I took advantage of all the nuts, candy canes, and Craisins we had lying around in our cupboard, and made three different types of butter-free biscotti.



I cut my biscotti wider than you're supposed to, and my roommates got into the pumpkin ones before the biscotti could go in for their second round of baking, so I got less than expected. Still, they tasted so amazing! I am officially a biscotti fan.