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People often ask me what I do with all the treats I bake. Doesn’t that sound like I’m constantly being swarmed by the paparazzi screaming “over here, Miranda! What do you do with all those cookies?!” Not quite. But, it is a question I have been asked by more than one person so I think it’s fair that I’m saying “people.” The answer is that I try to give away as much as possible. I can usually come up with an easy way of disposing the sweet thousands of calories—a gathering of friends, a building meeting, my writing group etc. I should say that it is easy on me in that I can say “here, take this,” but it isn’t necessarily easy on the recipients as I may be giving them something they don’t like or weren’t in the mood to eat. Then they have to say with a forced smile, “wow, thanks,” when they want to say, “no, thanks.”
There is a down side to all this surrendering. Sometimes I’m left with nothing and find myself, like I did last night, digging in my freezer for buried sweet treasure. Pushing aside frozen turkey burgers, bagels left over from a brunch I gave two years ago, and three Ziploc baggies filled with egg whites I unearthed a plastic container of lemon squares, ate one despite the shimmering coating of two months’ worth of freezer burn, and then hit the opened bag of chocolate chips I had in the cupboard—truly pitiful.
The ideal situation is when I’m making something because I’ve been asked to do so. When I do projects with my nieces it is usually because my sister and I have had a pow-wow about a time eating activity that will shorten an endless day with two kids who’ve been up since 6am. I’ll steal enough of whatever we (I) have made for me to enjoy but not gorge on, and leave the rest for them.
Another positive scenario is when my mother requests a dessert for one of her dinner parties. I love coming up with a complementary ending to whatever she is serving without participating in the drama of the preparation (or clean-up!) of the actual meal. Then I get to play in my kitchen and receive (hopefully) kudos the morning after. Recently we settled on the Barefoot Contessa’s Orange Chocolate Chunk Cake to put the exclamation point on a party that started with drinks and nibbles of parmesan crackers and salmon rillettes before a dinner of tomato tart, boneless pork loin with prosciutto, roasted baby brussels sprouts and endive salad. (I know. I wish I’d been invited too!) I suggested something more regionally appropriate to fit in with the Tuscan feast she’d been inspired to make after reading a recent issue of Saveur. I was thinking of something with pine nuts or mascarpone or olive oil (the taste of which makes her gag) but, no, she wanted this cake which I’d made over last summer and was a huge hit. I have a feeling she also knew there would be massive leftovers for her to just happen to stumble upon when she was drinking her morning coffee.
The one thing I did ask her to do for my own selfish purposes was to take photos of her giddy guests enjoying the fruit of my labor. This was a bit of a challenge since we are talking about a woman who can’t turn on the television without an assist from her husband. In all fairness, their absurd audio visual set-up would drive a NASA engineer insane so it really isn’t her fault. Still, after delivering her cake order, I demonstrated how to use my very basic Sony digital camera and left her to get ready for the party.
I should also add that parting with the cake was quite painful for me. After the various stages the recipe requires it seemed almost cruel that it was ripped from my hands and given to others to enjoy. So, I asked for another thing for my own selfish purposes. “Save me a piece!” I begged. Or rather, demanded.
The next day I returned to the scene of the party to receive the kudos I was waiting for, pick up my piece of the cake I’d been thinking about all the previous night (like Cinderella whose step-sisters went to the ball leaving her with no dessert) and collect my camera. No one was home so the applause and fan fare joined the flash-popping paparazzi in my head. Mom had warned me that perhaps she didn’t quite capture the spirit of the evening with her photography which I knew was code for “don’t be mad when the pictures are terrible.” I wouldn’t say terrible. Maybe the flowing vino affected her ability to hold her hands still and let the auto-focus focus? 
And frankly, as long as I got to have my cake and eat it too I didn’t care. This piece is mine, all mine.
Save Me a Piece of Ina's Orange Chocolate Chunk Cake
From Barefoot Contessa Parties by Ina Garten, 2001
Printer Friendly Version
Ingredients
1/2 pound unsalted butter at room temperature
2 cups sugar
4 extra-large eggs at room temperature
1/4 cup grated orange zest (4 large oranges)
3 cups all-purpose flour plus 2 tablespoons
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 cup freshly squeezed orange juice
3/4 cup buttermilk at room temperature
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 cups good semisweet chocolate chunks
For the syrup
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup freshly squeezed orange juice
For the ganache
8 ounces good semisweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 teaspoon instant coffee granules
Directions
Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). Grease and flour a 10-inch Bundt pan.
Cream the butter and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment for about 5 minutes, or until light and fluffy.
Add the eggs, one at a time, then the orange zest.
Sift together 3 cups flour, the baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl.
In another bowl, combine the orange juice, buttermilk, and vanilla.
Add the flour and buttermilk mixtures alternately in thirds to the creamed butter beginning and ending with the flour.
Toss the chocolate chunks with 2 tablespoons flour and add to the batter.
Pour into the pan and smooth the top.
Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until a cake tester comes out clean. Let the cake cool in the pan on a wire rack for 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, make the syrup. In a small saucepan over medium-low heat, cook the sugar with the orange juice until the sugar dissolves.
Remove the cake from the pan, set it on a rack over a tray, and spoon the orange syrup over the cake. Allow the cake to cool completely.
For the ganache, melt the chocolate, heavy cream, and coffee in the top of a double boiler over simmering water until smooth and warm, stirring occasionally.
Drizzle over the top of the cake.
My goal, regarding many of the choices I make every day, is to keep self-flagellation to a minimum. When you aren’t working at an office and you have no kids or spouse then you have very little you can hide behind and few things or people to use as an excuse. If you don’t exercise, keep the place neat, pay your bills on time and stay in touch with family and friends you have no one to blame but yourself. There are enough real things I can beat myself up for that I certainly don’t need to borrow trouble from the stuff I can actually control. That’s why, if you should drop by my place any time 30 minutes post wake-up, you will find my bed made. It would have been made immediately except someone like Heloise once Hinted that a bed needs ½ hour to breathe before it is re-made! Something about an unmade bed says “I have given up” and that is not how I feel or the message I want to send to anyone else.
So, after the bread baking debacle of last week any sane person, who, like me, doesn’t eat a ton of bread and lives within two blocks of several artisanal bakeries, would have said, “Oh well,” and moved on to sweeter and easier treats. But, having sufficiently wounded my pride as well as awakened the competitive side of my personality I should have tapped into more effectively in high school, I decided to try again and damn well succeed.
For my next yeast foray I turned to Martha Stewart and her Baking Handbook. There is something user-friendly-meets-academic in the word “handbook” so I instantly felt like I was in trustworthy hands and could follow the guidelines of something produced by home-keeping’s most successful perfectionist with confidence. Her recipe for Cranberry-Pecan Rye Bread has tempted me since I bought the book a few years ago. I love the idea of the tang of rye infusing a fruity, nutty bread and was especially happy that in this case cranberries replace the previously mentioned idiocy of raisins, and pecans replace the roof-of-mouth itchiness of walnuts (raisin-walnut being the more common combo). I was also relieved to see Martha called for “Active Dry Yeast,” five envelopes of which were left over from last week’s attempt at improvising “Instant Yeast.”
So, Saturday morning I set up shop and got to work. I was feeling pretty confident, the instructions were straightforward, I’d set aside a nice, relaxed chunk of time and was calm, cool, and collected—until I wasn’t.
Now, as much as I respect Martha’s meticulousness, I realize she is not immune to screwing up (to wit, her stint in the big house). The problem was in her use of the word “foamy” when referring to the result the baker is waiting for when she dissolves the packet of yeast in the 1 ¼ cups of 110 degree water. I was beginning to blame myself for being the purchaser of five packets of dead yeast. Foamy? Um, no. Not at all or in the least. One after the other I poured the cloudy beige yeasty water down the drain along with my calm, cool, collected and time. I was going to be late to the movies once again and I left my apartment. My dry ingredients were still mixed and waiting patiently, pecan pieces toasted and cranberries chopped.
Again, a sane person would have woken up Sunday morning and headed to the store to replenish her yeast supply and hopefully buy a little luck—but, not me. Instead, I thought I’d be clever and hit the nice supermarket downtown before heading back home post The Hurt Locker and dinner with friends (see the movie before the Oscars by the way, it’s excellent and already on DVD!) and what do you know? The only yeast they had was the kind I needed last week, “Instant.” Ugh. This meant that I had to go to a different store once I got back uptown, adding several blocks to my walk from the subway all while wading through the pools of melting snow at each corner in my five pound boots. At least I was gaining some calf muscles. And did I mention it was 12:15am?
The good news was when I did wake up Sunday morning I had everything ready to go for "take two" (or should we call it ‘three’?) of the bread project...after making my bed of course. And here is where I handled things differently. Upon reflection, I realized there was no way all of those packets of yeast could have been dead. My luck isn’t that bad. So, this time, I dissolved the yeast in the water and stared at it for the full five minutes. After about three there was a shifting, a change. All of a sudden a cloud of a more opaque-y color and sandy consistency seemed to be rising from the deep up to the surface of the water, which now looked like thin, mushroom soup. Aha! Maybe not bubbly or "foamy" per se but this yeast definitely had some life and I decided to go for it.
And everything fell into place beautifully! The mixer does a lot of the work—however I did give the dough a bit of a knead after adding the cranberries and nuts, just to make sure they were incorporated. The rolling out couldn’t have been easier. It was the rolling up where I got a little wobbly. Not surprising given my yoga mat often looks the same way. My mistake and it won’t be yours.
The great thing was that this bread is fantastic--chewy, crusty, salty, sweet, and crunchy deliciousness and I think I have eaten more of it than anything else I've baked in the last three months! As soon as it cooled I brought half the very large loaf down to my parents’ where somehow my phoning Dad to alert him I was coming with bread turned into my mother greeting me with “I hear you’ve brought a spread.” Eh? (I know I speak quickly but how about a hearing test folks?) I have learned two valuable lessons; 1) I will never go “fast no-knead” again and 2) it’s okay to question Martha. But the most important thing is not only did I have an entire day free from self-flagellation but, in fact, full of self-congratulation. Yay me! At least for today. Now, go make your bed and then make this bread!
Should Have Started with Martha's Cranberry-Pecan Rye Bread
Adapted from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook, 2005 Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc.
Printer Friendly Version
Ingredients
1 cup (4oz) chopped pecans
Vegetable oil for bowl and baking sheet
1 1/4 cups (10oz) warm water (about 110 degrees)
1 envelope (1/4 ounce) active dry yeast
10 oz (about 2 cups) bread flour
5 1/2 oz (about 1 cup) rye flour
2 1/2 teaspoon table salt
1 Tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons caraway seeds
3/4 cup chopped dried cranberries
1 large egg
Sea salt or other coarse salt for sprinkling
Directions
Preheat oven to 350
Toast pecans till fragrant, about 10 minutes. Set aside and cool completely and turn off oven.
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and brush with oil, set aside.
Lightly oil a medium to large bowl and set aside.
In bowl of electric mixer whisk yeast into warm water to dissolve and set aside for 5 minutes until mixture goes from beige water to a creamier, opaque beige color.
Using mixer's paddle attachment, add flours, table salt, sugar and caraway seeds and mix on medium-low until dough comes together. (If dough seems excessively dry add warm water one tablespoon at a time and continue beating till it comes together.)
Remove paddle attachment and switch to dough hook. Beat on medium speed until dough is smooth, elastic and slightly tacky, 4-5 minutes.
With mixer on low add cranberries and pecans. Feel free to use your hands to knead in nuts and fruit if they are not being incorporated.
Transfer dough to oiled bowl, cover with oiled plastic wrap and let rise in a warm, draft free place (I put mine in my oven, which was off) until doubled in bulk, about an hour.
In small bowl beat egg with 1 Tablespoon of water.
Turn dough onto a lightly floured work surface. Roll out with rolling pin into a rectangle, about 13x10 inches and 1/2 inch thick.
Fold 1/2 inch flaps inward on both short ends. Starting at the top, roll the dough towards you gently pressing as you go to form a tight log.
Gently roll log back and forth to seal the seam. If seam doesn't stay sealed brush it with beaten egg and press down again to seal.
Transfer loaf to baking sheet, seam side down. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place until dough is puffed and holds an impression from your fingertip, about 45 minutes.
Preheat oven to 350
Brush the loaf generously with egg wash and sprinkle with sea salt.
Bake, rotating sheet halfway through, until the crust is deep golden brown, and an instant-read thermometer inserted in the center of the bread registers 190 degrees on an instant read thermometer, 35-40 minutes.
Transfer bread to a wire rack to cool completely before slicing.
People often ask me what I do with all the treats I bake. Doesn’t that sound like I’m constantly being swarmed by the paparazzi screaming “over here, Miranda! What do you do with all those cookies?!” Not quite. But, it is a question I have been asked by more than one person so I think it’s fair that I’m saying “people.” The answer is that I try to give away as much as possible. I can usually come up with an easy way of disposing the sweet thousands of calories—a gathering of friends, a building meeting, my writing group etc. I should say that it is easy on me in that I can say “here, take this,” but it isn’t necessarily easy on the recipients as I may be giving them something they don’t like or weren’t in the mood to eat. Then they have to say with a forced smile, “wow, thanks,” when they want to say, “no, thanks.”
There is a down side to all this surrendering. Sometimes I’m left with nothing and find myself, like I did last night, digging in my freezer for buried sweet treasure. Pushing aside frozen turkey burgers, bagels left over from a brunch I gave two years ago, and three Ziploc baggies filled with egg whites I unearthed a plastic container of lemon squares, ate one despite the shimmering coating of two months’ worth of freezer burn, and then hit the opened bag of chocolate chips I had in the cupboard—truly pitiful.
The ideal situation is when I’m making something because I’ve been asked to do so. When I do projects with my nieces it is usually because my sister and I have had a pow-wow about a time eating activity that will shorten an endless day with two kids who’ve been up since 6am. I’ll steal enough of whatever we (I) have made for me to enjoy but not gorge on, and leave the rest for them.
Another positive scenario is when my mother requests a dessert for one of her dinner parties. I love coming up with a complementary ending to whatever she is serving without participating in the drama of the preparation (or clean-up!) of the actual meal. Then I get to play in my kitchen and receive (hopefully) kudos the morning after. Recently we settled on the Barefoot Contessa’s Orange Chocolate Chunk Cake to put the exclamation point on a party that started with drinks and nibbles of parmesan crackers and salmon rillettes before a dinner of tomato tart, boneless pork loin with prosciutto, roasted baby brussels sprouts and endive salad. (I know. I wish I’d been invited too!) I suggested something more regionally appropriate to fit in with the Tuscan feast she’d been inspired to make after reading a recent issue of Saveur. I was thinking of something with pine nuts or mascarpone or olive oil (the taste of which makes her gag) but, no, she wanted this cake which I’d made over last summer and was a huge hit. I have a feeling she also knew there would be massive leftovers for her to just happen to stumble upon when she was drinking her morning coffee.
The one thing I did ask her to do for my own selfish purposes was to take photos of her giddy guests enjoying the fruit of my labor. This was a bit of a challenge since we are talking about a woman who can’t turn on the television without an assist from her husband. In all fairness, their absurd audio visual set-up would drive a NASA engineer insane so it really isn’t her fault. Still, after delivering her cake order, I demonstrated how to use my very basic Sony digital camera and left her to get ready for the party.
I should also add that parting with the cake was quite painful for me. After the various stages the recipe requires it seemed almost cruel that it was ripped from my hands and given to others to enjoy. So, I asked for another thing for my own selfish purposes. “Save me a piece!” I begged. Or rather, demanded.
The next day I returned to the scene of the party to receive the kudos I was waiting for, pick up my piece of the cake I’d been thinking about all the previous night (like Cinderella whose step-sisters went to the ball leaving her with no dessert) and collect my camera. No one was home so the applause and fan fare joined the flash-popping paparazzi in my head. Mom had warned me that perhaps she didn’t quite capture the spirit of the evening with her photography which I knew was code for “don’t be mad when the pictures are terrible.” I wouldn’t say terrible. Maybe the flowing vino affected her ability to hold her hands still and let the auto-focus focus? 
And frankly, as long as I got to have my cake and eat it too I didn’t care. This piece is mine, all mine.
Save Me a Piece of Ina's Orange Chocolate Chunk Cake
Cream the butter and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment for about 5 minutes, or until light and fluffy.
Add the eggs, one at a time, then the orange zest.
Sift together 3 cups flour, the baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl.
In another bowl, combine the orange juice, buttermilk, and vanilla.
Toss the chocolate chunks with 2 tablespoons flour and add to the batter.
Pour into the pan and smooth the top.
Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until a cake tester comes out clean. Let the cake cool in the pan on a wire rack for 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, make the syrup. In a small saucepan over medium-low heat, cook the sugar with the orange juice until the sugar dissolves.
Remove the cake from the pan, set it on a rack over a tray, and spoon the orange syrup over the cake. Allow the cake to cool completely.
For the ganache, melt the chocolate, heavy cream, and coffee in the top of a double boiler over simmering water until smooth and warm, stirring occasionally.
Drizzle over the top of the cake.
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