Pink Cake and My Apprentices

A little produce shop I go to has great seconds of fruit and vegetables for 2$ a basket. This week I was able to get tons more strawberries so I made a strawberry cake with strawberry icing...decorated with a strawberry.

The cake took a while to make but I think that was only in part due to the recipe. Clara and I were having a slow afternoon and had fun taking our time while making it. To assemble the cake, I placed one cake face side down topped that with some strawberry preserve, then placed the other half right on top and drizzled the top with icing and let it run down the sides.

I realized how much Jimmy watches me cook when I saw him pull a pot out of our cupboard and start mixing in it with the wooden spoon. He looked at me quite impress with himself as if to say "Look mama, I'm cooking too".

Strawberry Cake

3 cups + 2 tbsp (780 mL) cake-and-pastry flour

2 tsp (10 mL) baking powder

3/4 tsp (4 mL) baking soda

1/4 tsp (1 mL) salt

2 cups (500 mL) halved strawberries (8 oz/250 g)

1/2 cup (125 mL) buttermilk

1 cup (250 mL) unsalted butter, softened

1-3/4 cups (425 mL) granulated sugar

4 eggs

1 tsp (5 mL) vanilla

Butter two 9-inch/23 cm diameter cake pans; line bottoms with parchment paper, then flour sides; set aside.

In bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder and soda, and salt. In blender, purée together strawberries, and buttermilk.

In large bowl, beat butter until light and fluffy; on high speed, beat in sugar, 1/3 cup/75 mL at a time, until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Beat in eggs, one at a time; beat in vanilla. Gradually stir in flour mixture and buttermilk mixture, making 3 additions of dry and 2 of wet. Divide evenly between cake pans, smoothing tops.

Bake in centre of 350F/180C oven until cake tester inserted in centre comes out clean, 30 to 35 minutes. Let cool in pans on racks for 10 minutes. Slide knife around edges and remove from pans; peel off paper. Let cool on racks.

Strawberry Icing
1/2 cup frozen strawberries thawed
1/2 C butter
1/2 brick cream cheese
4 cups confectioners sugar
3/4 tsp vanilla

Cream the butter and cream cheese together. Add vanilla and the confectioners sugar. Puree the frozen strawberries until smooth and add to the icing.

Rhubarb...Oh the possibilities

Rhubarb Lime Spritzer

Makes 6 drinks

• 3/4 pound rhubarb, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
• 1/2 cup turbinado sugar
• 1/8 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 36 ounces sparkling water or prosecco
• 6 lime wedges

1. Place the rhubarb, sugar and 2 tablespoons water in a medium saucepan. Cover and place over medium heat. Simmer until the rhubarb is soft enough to mash with the back of a spoon -- then mash it! Stir in the vanilla.

2. Pass the rhubarb mixture through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl, pressing the solids with the back of a spoon to extract as much syrup as possible. You should have 3/4 cup syrup.

3. Fill 6 tumblers with ice. Add 2 tablespoons of syrup to each glass. Top with sparkling water (or prosecco). Squeeze a lime wedge into each glass. Give each drink a stir. Then toast to your thirst and happiness.

Stawberry Rhubarb Abundance

My gramma left me a little crop of rhubarb in the yard to maintain. I have watched it grow and thought of all the lovely things I would make with it. However, a very sad thing happened. I picked up a ton of strawberries on sale and was excited to make some strawberry-rhubarb jam. Much to my dismay, the jam burned on the stove while I ran outside to assist clara after she fell out of the cherry tree...A very sad moment for so many reasons. (Clara is totally fine.)

After we mourned the loss of a couple pounds of strawberries and an entire crop of gramma's rhubarb for a few weeks I felt ready to try again. This time Im going to keep it a little simpler and make muffins. My kind sister, Renee, bought me some more rhuby at the market and I'm going to make these.

Strawberry - Rhubarb Muffins

(Soulemama.com)

1.5 cups unbleached flour
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 tsp salt
1.5 tsp baking soda

1 egg, beaten
1/2 cup maple syrup
1 stick melted butter
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp grated orange rind (optional, but oh-so-good)

1 cup chopped rhubarb
1 cup sliced strawberries

Mix dry in a large bowl. Mix wet separately.

Add wet to dry. Stir in berries and rhubarb. Spoon into greased muffin pan.

Bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

Oat cakes and honey

Since we've had a couple of cold days I have been back at the stove a lot more again. I made a batch of oat cakes for our Truth Application Group Sunday night and served them with some cooked raspberries and cheddar cheese. We liked them so much that I made them again for us to snack on this week. They are so easy to whip up and only cook for 15 minutes. I'm going to try one with some cinnamon honey we bought from Boards Honey a couple weeks ago.

Oat Cakes

• 2 cups old-fashioned oats
• 1/4 cup light brown sugar
• 3/4 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 cup oat flour, plus more for dusting work surface (I grind up Oats in my coffee grinder. But if you want, oat flour can be purchased at bulk food stores)
• 1/4 cup butter, cut into small pieces
• 3/4 cup buttermilk

1. Preheat oven to 325°F. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper, or coat with cooking spray.
2. Stir together oats, brown sugar, baking soda, and salt in large bowl.
3. Place oat flour in separate bowl. Rub butter into oat flour with fingers until mixture is crumbly.
Stir in oat mixture, then buttermilk.
4. Dust work surface with oat flour, then roll out dough to roughly 10- x 8-inch rectangle 1/4-inch thick. Cut rectangle into 12 squares with chef’s knife. Cut each square into 2 triangles. Place triangles on prepared baking sheets, and bake 15 to 20 minutes, or until oat cakes are light brown. Cool.

Blueberry Raspberry Crumble

This is probably one of my favourite desserts because it's fast, portable delicious and everyone loves it. I doubled some of the ingredients and added others to make this recipe feed crumble to more people (or feed some people more crumble).

Blueberry Raspberry Crumble

(adapted from an ina Garten recipe)

Fruit

6-8C raspberries and blueberries

3t lemon zest

3T lemon juice

2/3 C sugar

1/3 C flour

Crumble

2 C flour

2/3C sugar

1/2 C brown sugar

1 t kosher salt

1/2 t cinnamon
1/2 C oats

1/2lb butter

1. Preheat oven to 350. Set out a deep 9x13 baking pan.

2. Mix fruit, zest, juice, sugar and flour in baking dish.

3. For the topping: combine flour, sugars, salt, cinnamon, oats and butter in an electric mixer with paddle attachment on low speed until butter is the size of small peas.

4. Pour over fruit distributing evenly.

5. Bake 40 mins or until top is golden and fruit is bubbly.

6. Serve warm with ice cream.

Quote of the Night.

In an effort to console me Jim said this regarding our, very bizarre, dinner....

"You have been cooking for me for 7+ years now and nothing has been comparable to {how bad} this dinner is...so on the bright side, you're effort to success ratio is really quite good!"

The Everyday Bagel

Our family has always eaten a lot of bagels and it wasn't even something I thought about making until Jim bought me the book Artisan Breads Everyday by Peter Reinhart. I love his technique for bread making. For some reason they just work! Multi-grain and whole wheat breads are my favourite but I always had terrible results with them being hard or yeasty or flat. Not so with Peter's recipes. I have made 4 beautifully delicious loaves so far. I highly recommend the book.

For the last month I have not bought bread at all because I have found his method so easy and the results so perfect.

Peter says in his book that bagels are one of the easiest breads to make so I felt confident and went for it. He was right. Though there are a few steps to the process, each step is easy and quite fun.

This batch yielded 8 whole-wheat honey bagels so I topped one half with a little fleur de sel and the other with melted butter and cinnamon sugar.

My bagel loving family was eager to come share the hot morsels straight away so we had a little impromptu brunch.

All that remains is a lonely quarter bagel, a few crumbs and a smear of cream cheese.

I will be making bagels again very soon.

**Recently found someone (The Wednesday Chef) who typed out the whole method...for anyone out there who is interested in giving these bagels a try. They are fantastic. Im making them today.