It’s wonderfully crispy the day you make. If you refrigerate leftovers, just reheat in the oven and it gets crispy again.
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Strawberry slab pie. Inspired by Pastry Love, used the recipe from SK. This is my first time making this recipe with strawberries; I used 1/3 cup of sugar and it was still a little sweet for me. The Joanne Chang recipe used 1 cup of sugar! Strawberries were handpicked by me! Overall a huge hit at a 4th party.
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I recently saw a blueberry cornbread on ATK’s channel and I have been wanting to make it ever since. My initial inclination was that I only wanted 1/2 cup (100 g) of sugar, but I decided to try it as written since 3/4 cup (150 g) to 350 g flour (AP flour + cornmeal) isn’t too bad. I upped the salt to a full tsp rather than 3/4, so it would be closer to 2%. Well, having tasted it I wish I’d gone with 1/2 cup of sugar. I don’t hate cornbread with sugar in it, but I like it to be more subtly sweet than this. The salt increase was right on the money.
I’d make again, but definitely decreasing the sugar.
Browning the butter might also be fun to try, but I wanted the simpler flavor of melted butter.
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Sourdough simit today. They are not whole grain, but I used date molasses in place of grape molasses and they make the dough pretty dark— a shade similar to when barley malt syrup is added. I dipped the rings in a solution with a mix of date and pomegranate molasses to try to have something closer to grape molasses. I keep forgetting that I have some saba which I think should have some similarity.
These are delicious and I ate two in quick succession.
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Peach Melba Shortcake, a lovely combination of FM fruits. Very , very juicy peaches were so delicious. For the dairy, I used Fage yogurt as this was breakfast.
Also made a strawberry version, I was surprised to see strawberries still at the FM. I this case, I used Daisy sour cream to top the biscuit.
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My kind of breakfast!
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Actually they are pretty quick to put together, the longest time is heating the oven to 425* ish. Bake time is only about ten minutes , I slice the fruit during that time, so it’s a relatively quick meal.
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I made the rhubarb crumble cake from Snacking Cakes this week-end when in Ottawa visiting my mother: she didn’t have sumac but lemon was fine!
Back home now and catching up with a friend ( and finally meeting her baby!!), so I made Tara O’brady’s CCCs (again. They really are the best!). Used up some random chocolate bars that I found lurking in my cupboards.
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My favorite kind of bakery, right there. Possible my favorite food. Bread is the essence of foods to me. Looks like flour is going to take some big jumps soon. Scary.
Oh really? Fallout from the Ukranian conflict, or…?
Kansas is cooking. There are going to be large swathes of land, that formerly produced wheat ,that are fallow this year from the drought. If the Ogallala aquifer dries up, we’re in trouble.
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I sloppily made Cook’s Illustrated blueberry layer cake. I wanted to try it because it seemed delicious to me with cream cheese frosting and blueberry jam between the layers, so I made a smaller version to test it out.
This cake is made with a white cake and I knew I didn’t want CI’s recipe because it calls for quite a lot of sugar and reducing it as much as I’d like would cost me volume. So I made 3/4 of Stella’s white cake with the modifications I always make it with and it was delicious. I used 3 8-inch pans, but cut out 6-inch rounds because I didn’t want an 8-inch cake.
The frosting I made 3/4 of it and I made half of the jam.
Unfortunately the frosting was a pain. Cream cheese frosting just doesn’t like too much agitation, and here with adding the strained jam to provide the color, the two darker shades were very loose and needed to be refrigerated. I had to play with blue and red food coloring to get the right shades. This is likely due to using frozen blueberries, which can lean towards gray. So the appeal of all natural coloring is lost.
Plus with the temps here, the darker shades really wanted to melt.
I wouldn’t mind making this cake again but with freeze-dried blueberry for the frosting. I know they likely wanted something that could be easily made, but freeze-dried berries would really be better.
The cake is quite tasty and certainly worth trying again with some further changes.
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My turn for Luisa Weiss’s Kirschkuchen from Classic German Baking.
I used a mix of bright red Montmorency sour cherries and dark Lapins sweet cherries – both picked fresh from our trees. Some I chopped, and some I left whole. I folded 2/3 of the fruit into the batter, and topped with the remainder. I made an oleo-saccharum with the zest and sugar, added 1 t. limoncello to the batter, and drizzled a simple sugar-and-vanilla glaze over the top before baking.
So utterly delicious! The cherry flavor really comes through. This is just the kind of thing we like for a sweet-but-light afternoon snack. Will certainly make again.
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Where are you with those trees?
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Pacific Northwest. We’ve had an unbelievably mild spring and early summer - warm and dry. Makes up for last year, I guess, when it was cold and wet throughout, and in general a dismal event for gardeners.
Just yesterday we packed in the strawberry picking for the season - harvested everything that was left, gifting out the good stuff and feeding the rejects to the deer. At the same time we were already a week into cherry picking, and just today I started on the blueberries. I’m in heaven. It doesn’t happen like this most years.
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I’m in SF and only once have I seen sour cherries here, at Monterrey Market near Berkeley. I don’t get over there anymore, don’t want to fight traffic, pay bridge toll that keeps increasing.
Lucky you!
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I think you need to make the big version to test it out.
I will volunteer as a tester.
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Lol. The guy who sold us the lot is responsible. We mentioned to him we were thinking of planting fruit trees along the property line, and his response was “Pie cherries!”. So we did. 
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I saw this cake made on Cook’s Country last year and even though I knew I’d never attempt it myself, it remains one of my favorite dessert episodes ever. Looks absolutely delicious. I think you accomplished quite a feat there. Or as my granddaughter would say - good job!
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The PNW sour cherries that do show up occasionally in the Bay Area just keep climbing in price. I’d bought boxes of them a few times at Berkeley Bowl, but the last time I saw them there, a couple of years ago, they were in bulk at $16.99/pound. When I lived in NYC, I missed CA produce, but here, I miss sour cherries.
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