Category: baking

Love in the Transitions: Vanilla Cupcakes with Pomegranate Cream Filling and Marshmallow Frosting

Vanilla Cupcakes with Pomegranate Cream Filling and Marshmallow Frosting

Phew. That’s a mouthful, that title, but isn’t it just the way? Sometimes you’re so full up of things there’s no way to be brief.

These were created for my a good friend in The Menopause Supper Club. We meet once a month to talk about the next stage of life, and we are all in various places along that line. She is officially done with the Red Tide, and it’s time to celebrate swimming to the other side.

But transitions aren’t usually easy, and we need to love our people hard through them. My way is The Way of the Cake, applied liberally and often.

So whether you’re celebrating a transition or struggling through it, these are for you.

Vanilla Cupcakes with Pomegranate Cream Filling and Marshmallow Frosting

Vanilla Cupcakes

350 grams (about 2 1/2 c.) gluten-free all-purpose flour mix (or cake flour if gluten isn’t an issue)

1 tablespoon baking powder

3/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup butter (one stick), softened

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

310 grams (about 1 1/4 c.) sugar

2 eggs

1 cup milk (non-dairy works here — I use oat milk often — but don’t use skim)

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Use 24 cupcake liners in two pans (this recipe makes two dozen cupcakes)

In a small bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, and salt.

In the bowl of a stand mixer (or a large bowl with hand mixer), cream butter with sugar and vanilla extract. Beat in eggs, one at a time, until smooth. Add dry ingredients and milk, starting and ending with dry (flour, milk, flour, milk, flour).

Add 3 tablespoons of batter to each cupcake liner (I use a 3T cookie scoop). Bake for 20-25 minutes. Remove and let cool completely in the pan before proceeding.

These can also be frozen at this point or frosted with ready-made frosting if you like.

Pomegranate Cream Filling

4 ounces softened cream cheese (full fat. Please.)

3/4 cup sifted powdered sugar

2 tablespoons pomegranate molasses (see Recipe Notes)

1/2 cup heavy whipping cream

Method

Chill a wire whisk or the beaters of a handheld mixer before you begin.

Place cream cheese, powdered sugar, and pomegranate syrup in the bowl of a stand mixer (or a mixing bowl if using handheld beater). Cream together until blended and smooth, then slowly add heavy cream as you beat until fluffy. This might take awhile, so be patient.

Store this in the fridge while you prepare the frosting.

Marshmallow frosting

250 grams (approximately 2 cups) powdered sugar

1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar

2 teaspoons light corn syrup

2 egg whites

1/4 cup water

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Method

Add ingredients to a medium metal bowl and whisk to combine. Place metal bowl over a saucepan of simmering water and beat with a hand mixer on medium until the mixture begins to thicken (like marshmallow Fluff). Continue to beat on high until mixture stiffens (stiff peaks). This whole process takes 10-15 minutes.

Remove from heat and add vanilla. Continue to beat the frosting until it is completely cool.

Assembly

Start by cutting a divot out of the center of each cupcake. Do this by inserting a paring knife at a diagonal into the top of the cupcake and twirling to remove a cone of cake. Lop off the pointy end and set the now-flat top aside.

You can use a teaspoon to put cream into the center of each cupcake (easiest and what I did), or make a DIY piping bag. Place pomegranate cream filling in a ziploc and seal it. Cut off one corner and pipe filling into your cupcake. Top with the flat piece of cake you removed.

Frost with a liberal hand using a piping bag with the tip of your choice if you’re fancy, or use a knife and swirl away (again, easiest and what I did).

You can sprinkle with a little coconut if that’s your jam, or break out the blowtorch and add a little toastiness to the top. The smoky flavor pairs well with all of the other flavors.

Recipe Notes

Every component of these cupcakes doubles easily.

You can reduce a cup of pomegranate juice down to 1/4 or 1/2 cup and use that instead of molasses. You can also add another tablespoon of pomegranate molasses for a really punchy filling.

If you’d like a less-sweet cupcake, skip the marshmallow and slice each cupcake in half horizontally. Fill with pomegranate cream and put it together like a sandwich.

Snow Day: Lemon, Ginger, And Walnut Scones

Two scones sit on a white plate in front of a snowy background
Snowy bokeh for snow day scones.

You wake up to a wintery landscape, snow blowing in delicate flakes, adding to the two inches that has already fallen on the railings of your balcony and weighed down your plant’s new leaves that last week’s 65-degree temperatures coaxed unseasonably into life.

Scones. That’s the thing for today. It’s too blustery for walking, and there is no need to go anywhere, so you pile up books and paper and pens and lists of movies (or whatever you really like when you’re hunkering down), and you throw together scones, ready in 30 minutes (but better after cooling if you can wait that long).

When you realize you don’t have an egg, you don’t panic. You substitute a tablespoon of vegetable oil, a tablespoon of water, and a few splashes of cream. And it all turns out just fine.

Lemon, Ginger, and Walnut Scones

Ingredients

2 cups gluten-free all-purpose flour (or regular AP flour, but don’t knead too much)

1/3 cup sugar

1 ½ tsp. baking powder

½ tsp. salt

½ tsp. baking soda

8 T. butter, frozen and grated

½ cup sour cream or yogurt

1 egg, beaten

1/4 cup each chopped walnuts and chopped crystallized ginger

Zest of one lemon

Turbinado sugar for topping

Method:

Make sure your butter is frozen before you start.

Preheat oven to 400⁰.

In a medium bowl (big enough to get your hands in) mix together dry ingredients. Grate butter into dry ingredients, and quickly rub flour into butter until the mixture resembles cornmeal (this can also be done in a food processor).  Add chopped walnuts and ginger and stir to combine.

If you are using sour cream, mix egg and sour cream together in a small bowl. Stir this mixture into the dry ingredients, pressing and stirring the sticky dough until it comes together.

On a lightly floured surface, shape the dough into a circle that is approximately 8” across. Cut into eight triangles and place on a parchment-lined baking sheet about one inch apart. If you want smaller scones, you can also cut the triangles in half.

Sprinkle each scone with turbinado sugar.

Bake scones for 15-18 minutes or until they are golden brown. Let cool slightly before serving.

We Could All Use Some Sweetness: Vegan (Sugar-free) Mixed Berry Tart

Glossy, delicious, vegan, and sugar-free (with no artificial sugar, either). Truth.

Friends, if you are even a semi-regular reader of this blog, you know that the above headline for this recipe is an anomaly here.

I am a HUGE FAN of sugar. I like it in all of its forms.

I like it in the form of a big piece of cake, balanced on my chest as I lie in the bed and watch TV.

I like it in the form of empty wrappers of Dove dark chocolates, the ones that I used to hand out at the end of my yin classes at Yoga Tree.

I love drippy ice cream cones, cheesecake, caramel apples, scones, muffins, pies.

Watermelon and fresh peaches.

I. Love. Sugar. ALL OF IT.

So imagine my surprise as I find myself in week three of a seasonal Renewal with my good friend Martha at Full Moon Acupuncture with nary a fine grain of sugar anywhere.

THREE WEEKS. I have not had sugar for THREE WEEKS. I haven’t cheated (which I think is stupid language to begin with. “Cheat days” and “cheating” are, in general, ridiculous constructs when it comes to food, and I do not in any way, shape, or form condone the use of them. I use it here to indicate that I have, against all odds, stuck with the program and eliminated all processed foods, including sugars in all forms, for a period that will last four weeks-ish. But I digress.)

Thankfully, and speaking of Weeks, my particular friend KWeeks had a birthday October 1st, and it is traditional for the birthday people in my life to get the dinner and the dessert of their choice on their day. KWeeks has simple taste, so dinner was (for him) French lentils over cornbread and topped with a fried egg.

TRUST ME. This is rustic and delicious. But I couldn’t eat it. See referenced Renewal above. And it’s hard to not share a meal on the birthday of someone you love.

He doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth, but I thought perhaps I could make something sweet that we could both eat.

Enter the vegan, sugar-free mixed berry tart.

Apple syrup made from 100% cold-pressed apple cider provides the sweet, and the gluten-free crust is six simple ingredients: walnuts, almonds, oats, salt, coconut oil, and apple syrup. Technically the oats are not allowed in the Renewal (no grains), but everything else is so damn good for you it doesn’t seem to matter.

It’s pretty, and it’s festive, and it gets real close to satisfying my (still) voracious appetite for sugar.

Vegan (Sugar-free) Mixed Berry Tart

KWeeks and I ate about half of this on his birthday and then shared the rest with his vegan co-workers at The Friends School of Baltimore. They have not been the beneficiaries of my baking, ever, and I am glad to finally be able to have something to share with them.

Ingredients

80 grams almonds (about 2/3 cup)

80 grams walnuts (about 2/3 cup)

70 grams oats (you guessed it: about 2/3 cup)

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons coconut oil

1/4 cup + 3 tablespoons apple syrup (divided)

1/2 cup lemon juice/water combo

1/2 teaspoon agar

3 cups chopped fruit of your choice (see Recipe Notes)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Method

Preheat oven to 350. Use cooking spray to grease a 9″ tart pan with removable bottom (you can use butter if you don’t want to keep it vegan) and set aside.

Place almonds, walnuts, oats, and salt in a food processor, and pulse to chop fine.

Add coconut oil and 3 tablespoons of your apple syrup and pulse until the mixture begins to come together. Dump into your tart pan and press into an even layer along the bottom and the sides.

Bake until brown and the bottom is firm (between 15 and 20 minutes). If the edges of the crust begin to burn, pull the tart out of the oven and place aluminum foil strips over the edges, then replace and finish. Remove to a wire rack and cool completely while you make the filling (the ‘fridge is great for a quick chill).

To make the filling, place 1/4 cup apple syrup and the 1/2 cup of lemon juice/water combo in a saucepan with the agar. Whisk to combine, and bring just to a boil.

Add the fruit and stir. Warm the fruit (especially if it’s frozen), then add to the chilled tart crust. Place back in the ‘fridge and allow to chill for at least three hours.

Serve with vegan whipped cream, or ice cream, or plain for breakfast. Just as you like.

Recipe Notes

Apple syrup is a delicious way to add sweetness to desserts (or yogurt or granola or whatever) without adding sugar. Well, ok, technically it’s fruit sugar, which the body does still recognize as sugar, but it’s not processed to within an inch of its life. Essentially, you are taking pure apple cider (NOT juice) and boiling it down until it reduces by half. I make this in two-cup batches, so I start with four cups of apple cider. Bring to a medium boil (not a simmer, but not too rolling either). Boil until the cider is reduced by half. If you want it to be even sweeter, keep going and reduce it even more.

Any fruit works here, fresh or frozen. I have used fresh and frozen blueberries, cherries, and nectarines in my tests, and they have all been delicious. You can also switch up the extracts if you like and use an almond extract, but use just 1/4 teaspoon if you do that.

Men Behaving Badly, Subtitled: A Day That Ends In “y”

A sheer slope of peanut buttery excellence.

Sigh.

For your edification, shock, and awe, a few links today. Take what you need, want, or like, and leave all the rest.

Start with the execrable Ernest Hemingway who spent a quarantined summer with his wife, his mistress, a sick toddler, and a nanny.

Take a break with Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Anne Porter’s novel about the 1918 Spanish flu.

Keep going with Luy Irvine’s memoir Castaway (here’s just a sample) or E.M Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” about a society where people live underground in individual cells and communicate only by screens. Written in 1909.

Console yourself with this one-bowl chocolate sheet cake with fluffy peanut butter frosting (pictured above). CAUTION: This cake requires more than a 9″ x 13″ pan. It overflowed my entire oven and required many minutes of frantic fanning to avoid setting off the smoke detector. The dip in the middle indicates this interrupted baking time (you cannot open the oven mid-bake without consequences), but we are none of us perfect.

But it was, in the end, slathered with frosting and FUCKING DELICIOUS. I made changes, of course. I used my gluten-free flour blend, and the frosting was one stick of butter (really soft), 1/2 cup of peanut butter, a splash of vanilla, some salt, and enough powdered sugar, added a cup at a time. Really, you could use any cake and just add the frosting. Jesus. So good.

And also, before you go, listen to this lovely little song: “I Wish You Love.” The singer might surprise you.

Anyway. Today is Friday, in a long string of what have now become meaningless name markers of days.

What was interesting, infuriating, or rather lovely about your week?

Apropos Of Nothing (With Brownies)

A chocolate nut brownie sits on a marble countertop in front of a cut glass bowl and a brick wall.
The end pieces are the best pieces. #FightMe

Apropos of nothing, I have come across the following proverb from William Blake: “The cut worm forgives the plow.”

I don’t feel the need to belabor the point, but it got me thinking. Who is the plow in my life?

Also, remember the World’s Best Brownies that I crowed about (linked for your convenience)?

Well, throw that recipe out, because I just made the basic brownie recipe from The Joy of Cooking, 1997 edition, and I believe, firmly, that this is the best recipe for brownies ever. I made it with my gluten-free flour blend, reduced the sugar by a smidge because I used bittersweet chocolate, and needed to bake it for much longer than the recipe time, but good lord. These are the best brownies I have ever eaten. Crispy, shiny top, deep chocolate flavor, and the best mouthfeel/chew of any brownie I have perhaps ever had.

Turns out, more sugar + real chocolate = amazing brownies.

Also, kudos to Austin Kleon, an artist/writer I have recently started following again after a dust-up on Twitter caused me to block him in a fury many years ago (the internet makes me sensitive). There is still something about him that rubs me the wrong way, but I am enjoying his lists and (nearly) daily blog. So maybe more of that in this year – short missives instead of a once-monthly tome.

Who is the plow in your life?