Whole Wheat Rhubarb & Spice Muffins

March 28, 2020 By Korena in the Kitchen Leave a Comment

If the empty shelves in the baking aisle of the otherwise fairly well-stocked grocery store are anything to go by right now, there are lots of people dealing with the current global pandemic in same way I am: with lots of baking therapy. These whole wheat muffins stuffed with tart rhubarb, spiced with cinnamon, and topped with crunchy sugar are an extremely comforting thing to bake and eat, so they were the first thing I made when sh*t started to get real a few weeks ago. They are quick and easy to mix up, don’t require any special pantry ingredients, and unlike most muffins, which are best eaten the day they are baked and then decline from there, these are excellent two, three, even four days after baking, thanks to their nubbly whole grain ingredients which help keep them moist and fresh. They are also a great way to use up that bag of slightly freezer burned rhubarb from last summer that you discovered at the back of the freezer when doing a pandemic inventory of all the edible things in your kitchen.

…

Soft Gingerbread Squares with Rum-Butter Glaze

January 6, 2020 By Korena in the Kitchen 4 Comments

It’s already the first week of January, and as usual, I missed the boat on posting about all the Christmas cookies I made – because somehow this year, I ended up doing three separate rounds of cookie baking madness: one for the Food52 Holiday Swap (which I actually *did* manage to post about, whew!), the second a few weeks before Christmas to take to a family celebration in Vancouver, and the third in the days before Christmas when I decided I wasn’t happy with my existing cookie selection. This third bout of cookie baking madness included these soft gingerbread cookies from Tartine, which is a recipe I’ve had bookmarked for ages. Last year I made a similar cookie from the book Sweet which included a rum-butter glaze that was absolutely to die for, however the gingerbread itself wasn’t my favourite. So I kept the glaze and instead put it on the Tartine cookies, and holy cow, these cookies won Christmas! Nate and I both loved them. The spice level is perfect – cinnamony and gingery with a hint of molasses and black pepper – and they have a lovely soft texture. And that glaze! *heart eyes*

…

Cinnamon Apricot Pie with Crème Anglaise

September 8, 2018 By Korena in the Kitchen Leave a Comment

This is another pie from The Four and Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book, and boy, do they really know their stuff. In fact, this may be the tastiest pie that I’ve ever made. I’ve never done much baking with apricots and holy smokes are they ever delicious here! I loved their tart floral flavour next to the warmth of the cinnamon. I finally found Angostura bitters in the grocery store (I guess I didn’t look hard enough last time!) and I like what they added to this pie – the flavour I got from them was almost like allspice, and it was really good with the apricots.

…

Franzbrötchen {Cinnamon Sugar Buns}

March 10, 2018 By Korena in the Kitchen 10 Comments

Imagine if a cinnamon bun and a croissant had a baby, only the baby was smarter, taller, better looking, and more popular than both its parents. This baby would be the Franzbrötchen, a cinnamon-sugar filled flaky pastry of German persuasion that is right up there among the best things I’ve ever baked.

…

Dorie’s Cocoa Linzer Cookies

April 19, 2017 By Korena in the Kitchen 2 Comments

I should really bake more cookies.

They are basically the perfect baked good: portioned as a single serving (not that it stops me from eating five in one sitting), endlessly variable in flavour, texture and shape, and they can be a simple or as complicated as you could possibly want. Yet other than the annual Christmas cookie madness and the occasional (and necessary) batch of chocolate chip, I don’t actually bake cookies very often. So I set out to remedy this, and my solution was these pretty little cocoa linzer cookies.

…

Zimtsterne {Cinnamon Stars}

January 1, 2017 By Korena in the Kitchen 4 Comments

I woke up this first morning of 2017 to a pretty dusting of snow outside, which reminded me of these snowy white meringue-topped Zimtsterne cookies that I promised to post about before the New Year… oops. That strep throat I mentioned in my last post has hung on through two rounds of antibiotics and also morphed into laryngitis and a fun nighttime cough, rendering me unable to speak above a whisper and totally unmotivated to do anything but binge watch Gilmore Girls on Netflix. But sickness aside, these cookies are worth knowing about, so here they are!

Zimtsterne are a traditional German Christmas cookie made of meringue and ground nuts, usually almonds and sometimes hazelnuts, cut into star shapes and topped with more meringue. This particular recipe comes from Classic German Baking by Luisa Weiss (which I got for Christmas after having lusted after it for months!). The literal translation of Zimtsterne is “cinnamon stars”, but a more accurate one would be “finickiest cookies in the universe” because – well – they are: the dough is sticky and soft and challenging to work with, you have to cut out hundreds* of individual cookies and frost each of them by hand, and then you have to dry the cookies overnight before finally baking them while keeping the meringue on top from browning. I managed to come up with a few techniques to make things a little easier, which I will share below, because while these cookies are certainly a project, they are also worth it: nutty, chewy, not too sweet, lightly spiced, and easy to eat by the handful if you’re not careful. Definitive proof that the Germans know their Christmas cookies!…

Cinnamon Raisin Swirl Bread

November 1, 2015 By Korena in the Kitchen 3 Comments

The bakery in the town I grew up in made a delicious cinnamon raisin bread, and on the occasions that I could convince my mum to buy a loaf, I would eat practically the entire thing myself, toasted and slathered with butter. Now, being an adult, I can, of course, go to the store and buy a loaf whenever the urge strikes – but in this particular instance, the urge also struck to make it myself.

…

Cocoa-Cinnamon Palmiers {and what to get the foodie on your list}

December 12, 2014 By Korena in the Kitchen 2 Comments

Cocoa Cinnamon Palmiers | Korena in the Kitchen As the foodie in my family and circle of friends, over the years I have received a good amount of useful, useless, awesome and/or strange kitchen gadgets for Christmas. And while I always appreciate a gift and the fact that someone thought of me when they saw those silicon pot holders or these teeny tiny tongs or this decorative cheese knife or that Slap Chop (OK, so maybe the Slap Chop ended up at the thrift store…), there’s only so much room in my kitchen. In my case, the kitchen gadgetry gifts are combined with being “the one who likes cats”, which explains how I came to own not one but TWO cat-shaped ceramic creamers.

cat creamers | Korena in the Kitchen …

Maple Cheesecake with Roasted Apples

November 14, 2014 By Korena in the Kitchen 11 Comments

Maple Cheesecake with Roasted Apples | Korena in the Kitchen Now that fall is here, ’tis the season for everything pumpkin-pie-flavoured – but I have a confession to make: I don’t actually like pumpkin pie all that much. I make it every year for Thanksgiving because tradition, yo, but it’s probably my least favourite kind of pie. I’d much rather eat cheesecake, so this year for Thanksgiving (which in Canada was back in October), we ate both. I made this maple-flavoured beauty and topped it with thin slices of maple-cinnamon roasted apples. It was a big hit at our family dinner, and judging by how quickly the leftovers were eaten versus how long the remaining pumpkin pie languished in the fridge, it was the clear winner of that dessert battle.

Maple Cheesecake with Roasted Apples | Korena in the Kitchen …

Daring Bakers: Schichttorte

January 27, 2014 By Korena in the Kitchen 19 Comments

The January 2014 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Francijn of “Koken in de Brouwerij“. She challenged us all to bake layered cakes in the tradition of Baumkuchen (tree cake) and Schichttorte (layered cake).

When I first read Francijn’s challenge, I thought I had no idea what I was getting in to. I’d never heard of Baumkuchen – a traditional German cake baked in layers on a rotating spit in front of a grill, whose final spiraling layers resemble the cross-sectional growth rings of a tree [see how it’s done] – but when I got to the Shichttorte – a layer cake made by baking very thin layers of batter one by one on top each other – I realized that I had in fact bookmarked a similar recipe in a cookbook, probably close to fifteen years ago! I thought the recipe was just an extremely complicated way to bake a cake, which is why I had never attempted to make it before – I had no idea it was a legitimate traditional method, and I was excited to finally give it a try.

…