This little bird…

… is taking a vacation!!! No, not from the blog especifically, but a real 3-week vacation to the US. New York, Seattle and Charleston await, and I can hardly wait myself.

It´s been years since the last time I took a trip like this, and it´s a trip I´ve been planning for months, and working my ass off to afford, and in many ways it´s a very unusual vacation because it´s gonna be mostly about things that aren´t typically touristy, which is exactly how I like it.

For me, traveling is about remembering everything that´s out there for me to discover, realizing that most of the things that I take for granted or assume are common really aren´t, and then on the other hand, many aspects of my own life and culture are shared with people I would have previously assumed to be completely different.

I know that world peace couldn´t even be achieved with awesome cookies like these, but I always find myself pondering about common traits when I travel in the sense that even though there is lot to split people from different countries apart, there´s just so much that could potentially unite.

 
But anyways, I know you don´t come here to read my ramblings about world cultures and peace, and I´m getting behind in my packing frenzy since I need to be at a friend´s apartment in like half an hour for a going-away party in my honor (by the way, I still haven´t decided if they love me, want tons of presents from the trip, or are really just looking for whatever excuse to throw a party… maybe all three of them, either way, not complaining!).

So I hope everyone has a marvelous time while I´m gone, and I promise to be back with tons and tons of pictures, and a story or two to share with you all.

Spring, here I come!

Manises x dos

Today we have another installment in my 2-for-1 peanut butter recipe saga. For someone who´s just starting to cook with peanut butter, I´m certainly making up for the lost time lately.

But it couldn´t be helped. You see, I checked the peanut butter jar I had bought a few months ago, and its best by date was just around the corner, so I listened to the devil angel on my shoulder, and set about disposing of that jar in the most honorable way…

Which, needless to say, leads us to cookies, and brownies. For the cookies, I turned to the almighty Dorie, and she delivered since these cookies have three delicious elements which are combined to give life to some seriously heavenly morsels: chocolate, oats, and peanut butter.

And for the brownies, I simply created a recipe using my typical brownie recipe as a starting point. Basically, I substituted peanut butter for the butter and added an extra tablespoon of regular butter just in case, and altered the cocoa amount slightly to get the right consistency.

The result was wonderful, and even served as a kick-ass dessert when I took some brownies I had left in the freezer and served them along this ridiculously-easy banana ice cream with a drizzle of dulce de leche sauce on top (no pictures though because it was around midnight and the girls devoured it.)

And you tell me if Phoebe isn´t the best-behaved dog ever… just look at her pondering about life´s mysteries while there are brownies right next to her!

Oh, and speaking of peanut butter recipes, I came across this other peanut butter brownie recipe today by Dorie which looks very promising.

So now you certainly know what to do with a jar of peanut butter… it´s so good to be THIS useful, now I finally feel like I´m saving the world, one crisis at a time.

Not so perfect

To keep the birthday theme going for yet another post, this month Daring Baker challenge chosen by Morven was Dorie Greenspan´s Perfect Party Cake, which made the perfect choice for one of my birthday cakes.

Yet even though it turned out delicious, it was one of those near disaster stories. As wise people know, it´s not… well, wise, to bake when you are tired, in a hurry, and have a massive headache from the previous night´s festivities.

But the clock was ticking and it was my one opportunity to make the challenge, so I forged ahead. And I had a few problems: first of all, the cakes were quite flat (it might be the lack of cake flour in Argentina, so I had to use all purpose minus 2 tablespoons per cup), which had me rushing to make a third cake to create more height, but said cake broke into pieces when trying to unmold it, so I had to make do with a 2 layer cake instead of a 4 layer cake because I didn´t dare splitting my thin cakes into 2.

I had earlier on decided to skip the buttercream and use flavored whipped cream instead because I´m not a big fan of buttercream and I think I mentioned I was a BIT stressed out, so the simpler, the better. So my flavor combo was coconut whipped cream + dulce de leche, just because dulce de leche and coconut are those flavor combos destined to live happily ever after.

Another problem I had was not having two cake pans of the exact same size and not having enough time to make two batches, hence the irregular shape of my so-not-perfect cake.

Once assembled, the cake looked a bit blah, so I drizzled some of the leftover caramel sauce I had from this other cake, and it improved quite a bit.

And, stress and all, everyone raved about the flavor of the cake. The lemon zest in the cake (I didn´t use the lemon extract because I´m not too fond of extracts) was the perfect complement to the sweetness of the dulce de leche and the coconut. And the texture of the cake was delightfully spongy even though it hadn´t risen much. So this one might call for a repeat performance.

If you want to see much more polished versions of this cake, check out the creations of the rest of the Daring Bakers. And if you don´t have time to see them all, at least check out Helene´s version, it´s so chic it hurts.

Having your cake, and eating it too

So the birthday parties were a blast, but did leave this birthday girl a bit exhausted (I guess I am getting old!). Luckily, my gym gave me a free massage for my bday, so I´m all better now, and ready for a quick recap of the menus.

On Friday, I made a simple meal that didn´t need knives and forks, because, well, I really don´t have that many forks! So it was time for homemade burgers (with store-bought buns because making the buns would have added another layer of stress, and another layer of dirt to my overworked, tiny kitchen). As a “starter”, I served these arugula-sundried tomato-prosciutto-cheese bread rolls I discovered last year… which, incidentally, if you haven´t made them, you really, really should, trust me on this one.

And for dessert/birthday cake, I went with something that had no way of going wrong: Dorie´s Caramel-Peanut Topped Brownie Cake. It was marvelous, as is to be expected, but I think next time, I´m gonna underbake the cake even more because it came out a bit drier than brownie-style cakes are meant to be even though I baked it for 30 minutes instead of the 40-45 indicated in the recipe. Other than that, the cake is a keeper, especially the caramel sauce (which produces about half a cup of extra sauce and Dorie instructs to reheat later on with some more cream and drizzle on ice cream… I haven´t tried that yet, but I see that working and I also envision that sauce over homemade flan, that would be just sigh-inducing deliciousness.)

I´ll tell you about Saturday´s menu next time, but in the meantime, I´d like to recommend another recipe I made for my birthday (this time for the pre-bday party on Thursday night): David Levovitz Black bottom cupcakes. The combination is very interesting and easy to whip up. Though next time I´m gonna try making my spoonfuls of unsweetened cocoa a bit skimpier because I´ve discovered there is such thing as too much chocolate sometimes.

You say it´s your birthday!

Oh yeah, as of today, I´m closer to 30 than to 20, yikes!

And I have been planning on writing all day, but today has been crazy busy so far, my guests arrive in less than 4 hours and I still have to make my own cake (yes, I do that, I don´t mind one bit) and wrap up the other dishes that are halfway done in the fridge.

So this is going to be a quick one just to let you know that I´m old and to share two hilarious pics of Phoebe:

Yes, the poor thing had to be neutered this week (that´s a surgical jacket to make it harder for her to mess with her stitches) because the cataracts she had can be inherited, so I wouldn´t want to do that to some poor puppies. But she´s doing great, and tonight she´s going to have a great time surrounded by tons of hands to pet her (though I have yet to figure out how to keep her jumping to a minimum).

Anyways, off I go, I hope you all have a fantastic weekend! I promise to post pics of the birthday parties and the food sometime next week. Love you!

Paris je t´aime

So here we are again, it´s Daring Baker time, but for this challenge, you´ll only need a handful of ingredients, one of them being patience of course, because this month we are making French bread!

I was very glad when I saw what Sara and Mary had chosen for us this month… though I have to admit the thought of using the oven in the middle of summer wasn´t particularly appealing, but it was a bread I hadn´t tried before and by someone who seems to be a legend between US bloggers: Julia Child.

No, we didn´t grow up watching Julia Child cook around here, we had our very own Doña Petrona, who seems to have had the same grandmotherly feel to her. You know, the type of books you go back to again and again. And that´s why I was interested in trying a recipe by Julia Child, someone as beloved and classic as that couldn´t steer me in the wrong direction.

But she could give directions, tons and tons of them, 8 pages in this recipe alone! But it´s the sort of recipe that´s good for someone who hasn´t made bread before and might be a little freaked out by the whole thing, so I won´t blame her for it.

The recipe itself was quite easy (but beware that you have to find a way to enjoy sticky hands if you are doing all the kneading by hand like me). Oh, and I did sort of make it twice since the first time when I was about to give the dough its first rise I realized the flour I was using had long passed its sell-by date, which meant quickly throwing it in the trash, and when I took out the trash the next night, I had a huge monster dough that had been happily fermenting away, yuck!

So anyways, while I waited for the (second and not rotten) dough to rise I turned to Peter Reinhart to find some photos of different bread shapes I could play with. And I settled for a baghette (which I can´t really call that since my cuts and the shape itself needs some work), an epi (sheaf of wheat), a tabatiere (pouch), and a dinner roll with a spiky top made with sharp scissors.

As for the veredict: the bread was delicious and the texture was quite impressive, so I´m planning on making it again during the winter. I served it quite simply with good olive oil, homegrown tomatoes and basil, and some smoked ham. Sometimes it doesn´t take expensive or exotic ingredients to create a remarkable meal, give me simple Mediterranean any day!

Dark and handsome

It´s not that I´m feeling uninspired in general at all. Daydreaming about new apartments and my trip has been my favorite pass-time lately. But it might be that food and I are trying to find some middle ground (like still loving each other but going easy on sweets and stuff like that,) and when that happens, I don´t want to be thinking or writing about that particular chocolate cake that made me swoon last month but I´d better not recall while on a “diet” and PMSing.

But I hate not writing here for that long, and that chocolate cake was too good not to pass along. So here it is:

It uses stout beer and unsweetened cocoa, and it´s covered with a velvety ganache on top. And I don´t even like beer in general, but here it compliments the chocolate beautifully because it creates a subtle contrast to the sweetness.

And since it´s most likely winter where you are right now instead of summer like in Buenos Aires, I urge you to make it today, it´s that good, and bathing suits are far, far away.

PS: I´ve just updated and reorganized the Recipe Index you can find above the header, so drop by to get some fresh, or not so fresh, ideas.

How to do acid…

…well, using lemon of course. Even though this isn´t really the best season for lemon desserts here, I have always been a sucker for lemon meringue pie, so when Jen chose it for our January challenge I was delighted. Yes, the lemons wouldn´t be the most lemony they can be, but it was the first challenge with something I had made before, so I must admit deep inside a little voice said “hell, yeah, something easy!”

But then I started reading comments by other Daring Bakers in our blog crying over liquidy lemon curds and I started to worry a little bit, maybe 15 minutes in the oven after the curd had set were a bit too much… I didn´t really fancy the idea of lemon-meringue soup.

Yet luckily, it all turned out fine, except for the fact that the meringue started “weeping” after a few hours, which was very annoying and made a mess, and ended up with one sticky Phoebe… though that should teach her not to be around begging for food when I´m unmolding a tart!

The curd wasn´t my favorite either, but that could be the weaker lemons anyway. As for the meringue and the weeping-shrinking problem, I´ll go back to my usual French meringue or Italian meringue recipe and that should fix it (French meringue requiring you to heat up the whites with the sugar a little bit and then whisking the meringue, and Italian meringue using a hot water-sugar syrup instead of granulated sugar: what you want to do is cook the egg whites so that the meringue sets better and has a better staying power.)

As for the decoration, there wasn´t really much going on except for the variation I did using lemon curd topped with softened guava paste I had laying around and wanted to use somewhere. Oh, and I do use cherries to decorate EVERYTHING these days, can´t help it!

Check out Jen´s blog for the recipe, and the other DBs takes on the recipe, it´s bound to be hilarious with all the mixed reactions to the recipe and the disaster stories!

Buenos Aires in bits and bites V

First of all, I´m sorry for the slow pace the blog has been having this year. It´s just that I´m spending quite a considerable amount of time daydreaming about and planning for my trip to the US in April.

The backlog of recipes and pictures is getting bigger with each passing week, but I can´t seem to focus on writing about food right now. I promise I will try to sit down and describe a recipe or two soon, but in the meantime I was hoping to entertain you with some pictures I took in the Japanese garden in Buenos Aires around two months ago.

It´s quite the interesting place to visit because it´s just such a quiet little spot in the middle of the city. So one delightful spring afternoon my friend Jenny and I went there to relax, and chat about everything and nothing at the same time… not to mention attend a free seminar about Japanese cooking which turned into a true test to Jenny´s Spanish skills because, as you should know, if you can understand Spanish with a thick Japanese accent, you are on your road to success, so way to go, Jenny!

Anyways, I hope the new year is being kind to you all. I´m gonna be back in a few days with recipes, and I also see a post about the trip coming up since that´s all I seem to think about lately.

The translation would be “do not climb the waterfalls, danger”. First of all, the waterfalls are more like an open faucet, and secondly, who does that?

Starting off the year with leftovers

If there´s one thing the holidays leave behind, besides enlarged bodies and resolutions no one is going to stick to, is leftovers.

And unless you freeze them, you end up getting tired of eating the same old thing for days. Which is why I try to at least use the same old thing to create something else.

This year´s leftovers included a huge piece of grilled pink salmon. And the sad thing is, I don´t even enjoy salmon much (long story short, I don´t like fish that tastes too fishy, I know, I know, but I can´t help it… luckily that doesn´t include shrimp, squids and all sorts of tasty seafood.) So this was originally a recycling effort aimed at my parents and brothers.

You basically make a yeasted dough with beer, put a mixture of the salmon, capers, olives and cheese in the middle, make a few cuts and braid it… my braid wasn´t particularly OCD, since it´s not in my nature, but it still looks quite pretty.

And the big surprise was that I actually liked it! It must be the bread. I find that bread makes everything better, and a bit of cheese never hurts either. I tried it warm and it was delectable, but it was even better out of the fridge the next day.

So even if you don´t like fishy fish like me, you might be surprised with this recipe. You could even use some tuna instead, minced meat, leftovers from a stew wouldn´t be bad either.

I can see myself making this particular dough over and over again with different fillings because it took only 1 hour and a half from start to finish (55 minutes for the 2 proofings and 35 minutes in the oven.) The dough recipe is from my favorite bread book and the filling is a personal creation, which means you are free to let your imagination, and the leftovers in your fridge, get to work.