I’ve Been a Busy Bee in the Kutchen…I Mean Kitchen

You name it, I baked it.  First up Pearkutchen. You ask, what is the Pearkutchen? It’s my version of a German cake called (more or less) Aprickuchen. Instead of apricots, I used bartlett pears. It’s a pear cake with an almond filling. Well, it’s actually not quite like a cake either. The base is a short crust, with an almond custard like filling then whatever kind of fruit is available is your topping. Quite easy to make and pretty tasty.

Apricot would have been a tad more colorful but it’s taste that counts! Did someone say Lemon Squares? Why yes, I made those too! I’ve been using a recipe from Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food. It’s pretty easy and always turns out well. I love using Meyer’s lemons for these so when a friend dropped off some Meyer’s Lemons, I knew what was going to come of it.

The crust has to be baked, then cooled slightly before the lemon curd can be poured in and finish baked. I tried to rush it once and poured the curd in while the crust was still hot and it was a soggy mess. Next on the list, Apple Cake. This one was tricky. It was a recipe that I used for the first time from allrecipes.com. The photo accompanying it showed it as a bundt style cake but based on the bake time in the recipe, it clearly wasn’t meant to be. The bake time was 25-30 minutes and I had to bake it for over an hour. It was an odd batter, more like cookie dough than a cake. Fresh apples were folded into it after mixing but since the dough was to stiff, I couldn’t get an even distribution of apples. It did taste good though. There was a caramel icing to go with it but I opted out.

I had been itching for a while to bake some bread so I tried my Italian Chocolate Bread again. The first time I made it, I didn’t use a bread pan and I didn’t like how it spread more than it rose, so in a pan it went.

I love bread and it is easy to make but whenever I make it, there is no moderation whatsoever. Next, it was Cream Cheese Chocolate Cupcakes. I had been eying this recipe for a while. I get a spice cataloge from Prenzy’s Spices. In it, there are a bunch of recipes from customers and employees. These muffins looked really good and I found the cake batter method interesting. It wasn’t your basic creaming method, It was like the muffin method. Fat, sugar get mixed for a little while, liquid added then all the dry ingredients get mixed in. Simple and to the point. They were really great. Cocoa powder was the only chocolate in the batter and chocolate chip in the cream cheese made this easy and inexpensive.

Did you know that there is such a thing as Kale Chips? I just heard about it and it’s wonderful. My garden is finally producing a bunch of Kale so a friend suggested this. Just remove the leaves from the stems, cup into pieces, toss with olive oil, salt, pepper and ground cumin. Bake in the oven at low heat (200 degrees) until crisp and you got it.

I can’t wait to show you some pictures from my garden. I actually have pumpkins, or at least that’s what the package said. They kinda don’t look like a pumpkin but whatever it is, it’s getting pretty huge. I also have several watermelon, butternut squash, fennel beginning to bulb and actual ears of corn on the stalk. Until next time…ciao!