Berry crisp for one...and other happenings

I'd intended to call this post weekend recap but time flies and here we are nearing the start of a new weekend.  It's been a busy and exciting week or so here and being the introvert that I am, I needed to take a few days to recuperate.  

Vanilla cupcakes with chocolate frosting I recently auditioned made their birthday reappearance

To recap just a little bit...last weekend was a big one - first, we celebrated the little guy's 12th birthday!  A birthday is always special but this year, the excitement was heightened by the fact that I had planned a little surprise birthday party for him!  It's nerve-wracking trying to pull off a surprise party even on a small scale - in this case, a small group of kids gathered at the house to spring the surprise, digging into some pizza and cake, followed by a trip to the bowling alley for a couple of games.  

I was a nervous wreck by Saturday morning, as we tried to figure out all the last minute details from the weather to timing, to all the little things in between - all the while hoping our secret was still safe!  Happily, the planning and effort was worth it because wonder of wonders...we actually pulled off the surprise!!  The birthday boy was shocked!  It helps that my son is pretty laid back and undemanding.  It's hard to believe but he literally did not ask about birthday plans and made little mention of his birthday beforehand.  That made it easier to pull off the little surprise.  All in all, I'm glad we did it and I hope he'll think back on it with a smile as he gets older... 

On the heels of the birthday festivities, we celebrated Father's Day.  These two events always converge and make for a busy weekend (not to mention plenty of prepping beforehand).  Here's a little snapshot of our Sunday.

It involved strolling around a car show in our town early in the morning.  Then, we came home for brunch.  I made one of my husband's favorites, a Dutch baby pancake.  Even though we have it very often, he always requests it!  For dinner, I made crab cakes, served over some cappellini with lemon and caper sauce.

In between meals, I whipped up a little sweet treat for my husband (who has a major sweet tooth to match his personality), a simple berry crisp for one.  It was thoroughly appreciated.  I'm very lucky that my husband is a great person to cook and bake for!

June is full of celebrations.  It's both exhilarating and a little exhausting at the same time!  My son just wrapped up 6th grade - another milestone we happily toasted.  And by "toasted", I mean we had more cake!

A 6-inch version of our favorite chocolate cake

Now, things are quieting down and I'm ready to savor the slow days of summer!

Yeasted coffee cake

My friends, let's talk about yeasted coffee cake!  Did you know there was such a thing?  Maybe it's just me but I'd never thought of it or had it before...at least not knowingly. 

Maybe it's not a huge stretch of the imagination when we think about yeasted sweet doughs we know and love - everything from cinnamon rolls to brioche, to babka. Well, now I've had yeasted coffee cake and I'll just say it is big-time tasty!  Not only that, this recipe is easy...oh so very dangerously easy...

This recent sweet breakfast came to be thanks to my son's love of these coffee cake muffins - we adore the small-batch recipe from Dessert for Two so much that I now have to double the recipe when I make it!  So I went looking for other ideas and came across a yeasted version of coffee cake that had me totally intrigued.  

Like many of Christina's recipe, it seemed almost too good to be true, too easy to be the case but again, the proof was in the results.  The process is so simple.  Just mix the ingredients together to form the dough, then spread it into a loaf pan (this is a small-batch recipe, perfect for feeding my family of 3) - no kneading involved!  All you need is about 45 minutes to an hour of time for proofing, to let the dough do its magic.  If you plan to serve it for breakfast, I can tell you it's a great do-ahead.  I made the dough and crumb topping the day before and stored everything in the refrigerator.  In the morning, I let the dough proof before popping it in the oven and we had warm, fragrant yeasted coffee cake to start the day with.

Through the magic of yeast, the cake is soft, fluffy, and a bit chewy; it has a wonderful light texture.  The crumb topping is what you know and love, with an added chocolate bonus!  I thought of the cinnamon rolls I make and how I always include a little chocolate in the filling; in that vein, I scattered a couple of tablespoons of mini chocolate chips among the streusel for this cake and it was lovely; I highly recommend it. 

If all that wasn't enough, drizzle a bit of glaze on top and there you have a sweet breakfast worthy of waking up early on a weekend morning for.  For us, it certainly perked up a cloudy Saturday morning.

Small batch coffee cake muffins (and other things)

I have been having a great time baking and cooking from Christina Lane's books and website, Dessert for Two.  You might know that I favor small-batch baking; it meshes well for our family of 3 and lets me bake and cook (i.e., have fun) more often.  It took me a while to discover Christina but it's certainly better late than never!  I love her signature small-batch recipes and I've had a lot of delicious success with them.

I know I can't (or shouldn't) post every one of the recipes I've tried but I had to post this one for a small-batch of 4 coffee cake muffins.  They were just glorious!  Plus, I always feel the need to give muffins some love and attention every once in a while because they are just so darn lovable.

These coffee cake muffins have crumb topping not only on top of them but also a bit tucked in the center...because if you're going to eat coffee cake or crumb cake, you want plenty of those sweet crunchy crumbs! 

I whipped the batter up one morning by hand (many of Christina's recipes use a handheld mixer and since I don't have one, I've found they can easily be done by hand with a whisk or a wooden spoon given a little patience) and had these 4 muffins fresh for breakfast.  I was impressed by how nicely risen they turned out, with a sturdy firm cake lightly infused with cinnamon and nutmeg, anchoring all the delicious sweet crumbly goodness.

Some mornings call for a muffin, or two.  Next time you feel like indulging in a sweet treat for breakfast, this is a great way to do that with a little restraint.  After all, it's only 4 muffins...but I think they're 4 fabulous ones!

An apple and a pear crisp

In the land of "things I've never made", live many, many dishes...

Fruit crisps are among the long list of inhabitants in that world.  How can that be?  Well, I've never been one for fruit desserts growing up.  I was always the girl who preferred chocolate without fail.  I'm basically still that girl but I've expanded my horizons, and my palate, quite a bit in the last few years to include a taste for a wider variety of things.  

Why not make more than one kind:  Individual pear (left) and apple (right) crisps baked together

This past weekend, we went apple picking.  It was more like apple, pumpkin, and tomato-picking (I not-so-secretly enjoy picking the grape and cherry tomatoes best of all and now have an extra batch of roasted tomatoes stowed in the freezer).  The fresh apples we walked away with, as well as this Fall season, inspired me to tackle fruit crisps.  They always appealed to me on a small scale - being less complicated than pie and more manageable for my family and I to polish off (though we couldn't convince the little man to join in...he's currently like his mother when it comes to a preference for chocolate over fruit, I'm afraid).  

I used a Bartlett pear and a combination of Golden Delicious and Macoun apples for my individual crisps

Then I got to thinking: why just limit it to apples?  I have not forgotten pears since I talked about it about this time last year and I've been making sure to buy and eat plenty of them.  So I thought I'd make two individual-portion crisps - a pear and an apple.  I used the same streusel topping for both - a classic combination of oats, flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, and butter.  I also added some chopped walnuts because, for me, nuts usually make things better!  

For the apple crisp, I tossed the thinly sliced apples with some cinnamon and brown sugar.  

Digging into the apple crisp

For the pear crisp, I coated the diced pears with granulated sugar, a pinch of cinnamon, and a teeny bit of freshly grated ginger for a little zip.

The pear crisp

And when in doubt, add ice cream!  Warm desserts just scream out for a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Anything 'a la mode' works for me. 

I can now check fruit crisps off my things-to-make list.  Never mind that there are something like ten thousand other things on that list!

Hazelnut marble coffee cake

When I go to the big bookstore (you know the one since there are so few nowadays), I'm always drawn to the magazine racks and to the cooking magazines.  These days, aside from the usual monthly issues, there are all these special edition magazines featuring everything from seasonal cooking/baking to one-pot meals.  I'll find myself flipping through these mini cookbooks and with all the great photography, everything looks delicious.  Every once in a while though, for whatever reasons, something especially calls out to me.  This hazelnut marble coffee cake did that the other day and I just wanted to make it. 

I wasn't really sure what it was that made me want to make this little cake so much.  I supposed we simply like what we like, and this cake has a lot of the characteristics that I like in a cake.  I'm a big fan of basic cakes that don't need frosting; I love hazelnuts and anything with chocolate (the duo/marbled layers really appealed to me).  I've also realized that old-fashioned coffee cakes need to make a serious come back and that crumb toppings are something to swoon over.  

As it turns out, this was also something of a light recipe - another thing that appealed to me because ideally, I'm looking for tasty, balanced, treats I can enjoy everyday.  But I have to admit I started second-guessing my decision to try this out when I looked deeper...I started thinking: "Really?  Just 1 tablespoon of butter (never mind that the original recipe uses vegetable oil spread) for the crumb topping?  Light sour cream, 7 tablespoons of water and just 3 tablespoons of canola oil in the cake?" Is that going to taste good?

I decided to go for it and give it a try.  The recipe left some room for interpretation as far as using other types of flours and even sugar substitutes.  I stuck with the framework of the recipe but used a tablespoon of butter (as opposed to oil spread) for the topping, an actual egg (instead of egg product, which I've never bought) in the cake, and I choose to substitute half the all-purpose flour with whole wheat pastry flour.  A little extra vanilla extract worked out well, too.

I really wasn't sure this coffee cake would taste as appealing as it looked in the magazine but the good news is it was very good!  The cake is moist and tender, and you can taste the cocoa of the top layer. That really makes a difference, adding some dimension and giving you the feeling that you're eating some hybrid between coffee cake and a marble loaf or light pound cake.  Though the cake itself isn't very flavorful, it goes nicely with the strong flavor of the crumb topping.

The hazelnuts in the topping packs a punch of flavor.  If you're not a fan of hazelnut, I see no reason not to substitute with something else like walnuts or almonds.  For me, the hazelnuts work really well with the cocoa layer and gives you a ton of flavor in the topping.  And speaking of the crumb topping, I found that just one tablespoon of butter and 1 tablespoon of brown sugar does get the job done here! If you are feeling generous (or a little greedy), I wouldn't discourage anyone from making a bit more topping to go on top of this coffee cake.  Thanks to those flavorful, toasted hazelnuts though, I think it works just as it is.

All you need is a cup of coffee...

Coffee cake muffins, stuffed...

I saw a recipe for coffee cake muffins on the Williams-Sonoma blog recently and thought I'd give them a try.  I'm always on the lookout for good muffin recipes.  I love to make them because they're usually quick & easy and versatile enough to have for breakfast, as a midday snack, or even as dessert.  I love a muffin for dessert, actually.

I don't know if it's a seasonal craving or what, but again, I'm talking about coffee cake muffins today while I posted about an old-fashioned coffee crumb cake this time last year.  Amazingly enough, I looked back and I'm posting this on the same day that I posted that coffee cake last year.  The timing wasn't intentional at all (same with the marble cupcakes previously), which makes me scratch my head a little but however coincidental it is, I'm just happy I made these little guys.  

Coffee cake can be really good, don't you think?  I love the streusel or crumb topping on them.  It adds a layer of sweetness, sometimes a little spice or nuttiness, and a nice coating of crunch that I adore.  There's a key element to this recipe that rounds out the whole thing and that's a little surprise stuffing inside...  

Having fun with the stuffing, using strawberry preserve, apricot preserve, Nutella, and chestnut cream

These muffins are quite moist, thanks in large part to the sour cream in them.  On their own, they don't actually have a ton of flavor or sweetness to them but that's okay because they're not meant to be plain.  The filling is a key component that adds another layer of flavor and sweetness.  The recipe suggests your preferred fruit preserve.  For my half-dozen muffins, I stuffed them with a variety of fillings.  Having some fun with it, I not only used apricot and strawberry preserves but I also went with Nutella and even tried a dollop of chestnut cream in one.

Aside from the filling, I played around with the recipe a bit more by substituting some of the all-purpose flour with whole wheat pastry flour.  I also added a touch of cinnamon to the streusel topping.  Surprisingly, it wasn't in the original recipe and though I'm not a big fan of too-much cinnamon, I seem to be craving it lately - at least in moderation.  I'm glad I used it because it added a warm flavor and scent to the muffins, and made the kitchen smell like cinnamon rolls while they were baking. 

It was fun digging into these muffins and taste-testing the different fillings.  The little guy called dibs on the Nutella ones and my husband really liked the one with apricot preserve.  I think they all came out great, and the filling of choice is simply a matter of preference so have fun with it.  I like the whole package but I have to admit I'm really partial to that sweet crumb topping!  These muffins go down easy with a cup of coffee or tea.