A Thanksgiving tart and moving into citrus season

Thanksgiving is now behind us, and we look ahead to the upcoming weeks of December holidays and festivities.

This time of year I start thinking about citrus - all the lovely oranges and grapefruit that come to us from warmer climes.  There's the Cara Cara orange (a lovely pink fleshed navel), the blood orange and the standard navel orange.  And let's not forget tangelos, tangerines and clementines.  Nothing like a bunch of Vitamin C, right?!

As Thanksgiving approached I debated what I wanted to make for dessert to follow the classic American turkey-and-all-the-fixins meal.  Would it be a caramel nut tart or perhaps apple-cranberry or pumpkin ginger?  No - this year I opted for something citrus!

citrus browned butter cream tart

This tart is based on a recipe from Fine Cooking magazine some years ago.  Basically a blind baked pâte sucrée crust filled with browned butter pastry cream and topped with fresh citrus.  What's not to like?

I used my favorite pâte d'amande dough for the crust (I happened to have some in the freezer which made it an all the more attractive option).

lining the tart ring

all lined and ready for blind baking

baked and cooling - just waiting for the pastry cream

The filling is a pretty standard pastry cream made with milk, sugar, egg, cornstarch and, in my case, some added orange zest and vanilla bean seeds.  Yes!  Oh - and some browned butter added at the end of cooking.

les ingredients

In general I like to lighten pastry cream with a little whipped cream, so once my pastry cream was made, I chilled it in the fridge before whipping up a little cream and folding it in.

ready to fold and fill

all filled up

I segmented navel oranges and red grapefruit . . . .

and after drying the segments on paper towel, I did a practice layout . . . .

before the final assembly.

Et voila!

all assembled and ready to transport

We had a delicious Thanksgiving feast at cousin Garrett and his wife Laurie's home in nearby Rockford MI.  We took a break after dinner for some games and chit-chat, and, when it came time for dessert, enjoyed Laurie's pecan and pumpkin pies along with the bright taste of citrus and the smooth creaminess of the vanilla-orange crème pâtissière.

All in all a great day!

The first Michigan snowfall this season, plus some tea shortbread cookies

It's gently snowing at the moment and quite lovely.  We had our first real snowfall over the weekend, about 3 inches or so - really not much, but seeing that first snowy ground cover is always kind of exciting.  What might this winter bring, we ask?

still a few leaves on the burning bushes

looking north

For some time now I've been using a tea shortbread recipe that I received some years ago at a Women Chefs and Restauranteurs conference in Washington DC.  The presenter of one of the seminars on uses of tea in baking and cooking was Chef Laurie Bell of Great Falls Tea Garden.  She had cookie samples to share with us, having chosen a fennel chai tea as that day's particular flavor. So yummy.

I just checked out their website and the business is still going strong. Great stuff for you tea lovers.

http://greatfallsteagarden.com/

Here in GR one can find many varieties and flavors of tea at Schuil Coffee Company. I paid them a visit to pick up some Earl Grey jasmine tea and, in the process, found a Mayan chocolate tea (the staff described it as “peppery”) that sounded like just the ticket for a delicious shortbread cookie.

As you can see above in my much used copy, the recipe includes ground almonds and finely ground tea of choice. Feel free to change up the nut choice to marry with whatever tea you’ve decided to include - lots of options here!

les ingredients

In the bowl above I have 57 gm almond flour (you can grind your own toasted, sliced or slivered almonds easily enough), 130 gm all purpose flour, 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/4 teaspoon salt and 75 gm sugar. In the forefront is my 10 gm of ground Earl Grey jasmine tea which will go in with the dry ingredients.  Then I simply dice my butter, sand it into the dry mix until it comes together.  Wrap and chill.

For the Mayan tea I opted to make two batches - one using the above recipe, obviously replacing the Earl Grey with the Mayan chocolate tea, and one substituting pistachios for almonds and adding cocoa powder to the mix. After all, when I hear "Mayan chocolate", I see a chocolate cookie in my mind's eye. Among other things, the Mayan tea contains cardamom pods, cocoa and ginger pieces and black pepper - all good with chocolate if you ask me.

Oh! FYI - for the pistachio chocolate version I cut the flour back to 110 gm and added 24 gm of cocoa powder to the dry ingredients.

Once the doughs were completed, wrapped and chilled, I prepared for baking.

I love the many different cutter shapes available, and I chose three different ones to help me keep track of which cookie was which.

ready for the oven

These bake at 325 convection for about 20-25 minutes - remember to pay attention to what's going on in that oven of yours!

just out of the oven

Et voila!

getting into the holiday spirit

Bien sûr Steve and I had to do a little taste testing. The Earl Grey jasmine was delightful with a subtle floral hint compared to the more classic Earl Grey with bergamot with which most of us are familiar. And I'm normally not much of a floral flavor fan (how's that for alliteration?)

While the straight Mayan chocolate tea version was smooth and tasty with a nice peppery aftertaste, the pistachio cocoa version was a tad dry, most likely due to the added cocoa powder (but delicious nonetheless).  Next go around I'll back down the cocoa powder a bit to 15 gm and up the flour to 120 gm.  And I'm considering a skosh more butter for that version as well.  The choice of pistachios is great for this flavor profile.

As I anticipate the upcoming December holidays and preparing gift boxes of shortbread,  I'm working on a special tea assortment.  I have a couple more flavor ideas bopping around in my head and hope to have the final assortment chosen soon.  Can't wait!

And Happy Thanksgiving to all from snowy Michigan.

Italian cookie trials and more

It's already November and the holidays are creeping up on us - watch out!!

Lately I've been busy in the kitchen testing out some Italian cookie recipes for holiday gift boxes for a local café. Brutti ma buoni (ugly but good), a ground nut (hazelnut version here) meringue cookie . . . .

Ricciarelli - a classic Senese almond cookie . . . . .

Biscotti doppio cioccolato - double chocolate biscotti . . . .

of course I had to dip some in chocolate!

and semolina shortbread (sorry - no pic!). They all turned out pretty darn tasty!

In the meantime I'm cranking out my own petite shortbread for some sample give away boxes.  I love to hand out goodies for folks to try.

Eight flavors of goodness

Recently I made a batch of reverse puff pastry to have on hand for whatever might come along.  And, being apple season, there's nothing like the combo of buttery puff and lightly sautéed, caramelized apples.  Yum, yum.  Here are some chausson aux pommes I made a couple of weeks ago.

Last week I visited Aquinas College's Browne Center to speak to the ladies there about getting on their "lifelong learning" adult education schedule to teach some pastry classes.  Yeah!

I never like to arrive empty handed so an assortment of treats was in order. In a slightly different take on a chausson I rolled out some puff, cut hexagons, brushed with milk and sprinkled with sugar . . .

and baked them.

puffed and sparkly

I make an indentation in the top of the baked puff, top them with a scoop of the above mentioned apples, drizzle some caramel on and bake them again just to warm the apples through.  So delicious.

I included these apple feuilletée along with matcha-berry financier and some gateau Breton aux amandes et confiture in the goodie box for the Browne center crew.

A brief postscript to the above:  I wrote about gateau Breton in my last post, but this time I topped the dough with either apricot or four fruits jam, a ring of almond cream and some sliced almonds before baking.  What buttery, nutty goodness.

all baked and ready to eat

Lots of fun and much more to do before New Year's Day hits!

Stay tuned.