Apricot Oat Bread

August 13, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 19 Comments

Once upon a time, my good friend and fellow tea partier Lynette was also my roommate. Being a tidy sort, one of her cardinal housekeeping rules was Everything Shall Have Its Own Place in The Fridge. This comes to mind frequently when surveying the inside of my own over-stuffed, disorganized and messy fridge, so last week I finally did something about it. During the subsequent clearing-out and re-organizing, I discovered two things: 1) I have neglected my poor sourdough starter at the back of the fridge for too long (luckily, nothing a good feeding couldn’t fix), and 2) I have a very large collection of half-empty jars of jam. These two things added up to one obvious solution: time to bake bread!

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Shaker Lattice Strawberry Rhubarb Pie with Buckwheat Sourdough Pastry (Daring Bakers: Pies, Part II)

June 28, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 30 Comments

Rachael from pizzarossa was our lovely June 2013 Daring Bakers’ host and she had us whipping up delicious pies in our kitchens! Cream pies, fruit pies, chocolate pies, even crack pies! There’s nothing like pie!

The title of this post is a bit of a mouthful, but there’s a lot going on in this pie (which is the second pie I made for the Daring Bakers Challenge this month). There’s perfectly ripe strawberries and rhubarb, a pâté brisée crust enriched with sourdough starter and buckwheat flour, and a funky lattice pattern.

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Daring Bakers: Strawberry Savarin

April 27, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 48 Comments

Natalia of Gatti Fili e Farina challenges us to make a traditional Savarin, complete with soaking syrup and cream filling! We were to follow the Savarin recipe but were allowed to be creative with the soaking syrup and filling, allowing us to come up with some very delicious cakes!

Before this month, I had of course heard of the great epicure and gastronome Brillat-Savarin, but not of this cake by the same name – which is quite unlike any other cake I’ve ever made. It starts with a rich brioche dough baked in a ring pan (there are special Savarin pans, but a bundt or angel food cake pan works too). The baked cake is soaked in a flavoured syrup, which it soaks up like a thirsty sponge, and then the hole in the middle is filled with pastry cream and topped with fruit. Savarin is very similar to baba au rhum, which is soaked in rum syrup and usually made into individual cakes, and both baba and Savarin are somehow related to Polish babka (sort of like this babka – it’s all one big extended brioche family).

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Lemon Meringue Coconut Macaroon Tarts

April 10, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 21 Comments

Lemon Meringue Coconut Macaroon Tart Lemon curd. Toasted meringue. Coconut macaroon. What’s not to love?

(I told you there’d still be plenty of butter and sugar in these parts… no flour in this one though!)

In the course of making these little tarts, the only thing I didn’t really love was that for some reason, my meringue topping just would not whip up to stiff peaks. I started it off by hand with a whisk, because I thought how hard can it be to whip one egg white into a stiff meringue? Apparently it’s pretty hard (and I think I know the reason I’ve ended up with tennis elbow, or more accurately, baker’s elbow!), so I transferred it to the KitchenAid mixer, ending up with sticky meringue on half the utensils in my kitchen, and still only achieved floppy peaks. Nonetheless, the meringue toasted nicely under the broiler, which worked out much better than my failed blow-torch attempt.

I used my wacky creaming method for the lemon curd, and this I did manage to make successfully by hand. And then I made the coconut macaroon tart shells by hand, too. ;)…

Sourdough Banana Bourbon Upside Down Cake

March 20, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 36 Comments

Sourdough Banana Bourbon Upside Down Cake This might be the most unattractive cake I’ve ever made, which is both disappointing and hilarious.

Disappointing because the pictures from the recipe I based it on are quite pretty, but somehow it didn’t translate (more on that later).

Hilarious because, as my darling Nate pointed out when he went to cut himself a piece, the bananas look like penises (yup, I just said that).

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Silky Lemon Curd

February 17, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 17 Comments

Silky Lemon Curd As mentioned in my previous post, I loves me some lemon. Lemon curd is one of my favorite things to spread on toast, dollop on scones, stir into plain Greek yogurt (or layer with granola in a dessert-for-breakfast parfait), or just eat straight off a spoon. It’s also darn good in a tart shell or as a Danish filling, which is the reason I came across this particular incarnation.

Greek yogurt, lemon curd, and granola parfait

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Lemon Heart Danishes

February 14, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 15 Comments

Lemon Heart Danishes Valentine’s Day. An excuse for heart-shaped baking. I’m in!

Lemon is my favorite sweet/dessert flavour second only to chocolate, but it’s hard to buy decent lemon baked goods. I hate fake lemon even more than I love real lemon, and unfortunately most of the time, store-bought lemon-flavoured things are pretty dreadful. So in the case of lemon, it’s best to take matters into your own hands.

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Lemon Ricotta Cornmeal Waffles with Berries

February 2, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 12 Comments

Lemon Ricotta Cornmeal Waffles with Berries This Christmas I asked Santa for a waffle iron (mainly so I could make Belgian Liège waffles, which I plan on doing soon), and he delivered! I christened it by making a totally wonderful waffle recipe that yielded over a dozen gigantic waffles – luckily they froze well! These are not those waffles (that recipe is coming though, I promise!), but they are just as good. I’ve been collecting lemon ricotta pancake recipes for years – ever since having some of the lightest, most delicate and delicious pancakes at a bed and breakfast – and a week or so ago I happened to have both lemons and ricotta on hand… and a new waffle iron! A quick Google search revealed this lemon ricotta cornmeal waffle recipe, and I was on my way…

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Vanilla Risotto with Red Wine Poached Pears

January 14, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 13 Comments

Vanilla Risotto with Red Wine Poached Pears In the winter I often get massive cravings for rice pudding – warm, creamy, comforting, and delicious. I was having one of those cravings when I found these adorable miniature Seckel pears at the grocery store, and I immediately thought of poaching them in wine and spices and serving them with rice pudding. But not just any rice pudding: sweet dessert risotto flecked with vanilla bean seeds. If you like creamy rice pudding, you’ll love this. All the stirring that makes a creamy risotto with broth makes an even creamier dessert risotto with milk.

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Salted Butter Caramel Apple Strudel

November 24, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 21 Comments

Almost every fall, I end up with a whole bunch of apples from my Mum (usually from the tree of a friend of hers), and more often than not, those apples end up in one of my very favorite things to make: apple pie. For me, fall is not complete without an apple pie or two.

But sometimes it’s good to change things up. My friend Sibella feels the same way about apple strudel as I do about apple pie, and when I saw her recipe – complete with homemade strudel dough that you stretch and stretch until it is see-through-thin and big enough to cover your entire kitchen counter – I changed my tune from apple pie to apple strudel.

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