Pistachio Petit Four Cake

August 6, 2018 By Korena in the Kitchen 4 Comments

Every year I carefully plan what kind of birthday cake I’m going to make myself, and this year I was imagining some kind of over-the-top creation with chocolate and peanut butter. But my chocolate cake craving was satisfied when I made a Devil’s Food Cake with Marshmallow Frosting (OMG) for a co-worker’s last day potluck, and then I changed tacks completely when I came across this little pistachio layer cake beauty, boasting not only pistachio sponge but also apricot jam, thin ribbons of marzipan, chocolate ganache, and flowers. And as a cake project lover and general fussy-pastry enthusiast, it seemed like the perfect birthday present to myself.

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Mini Mile-High Lemon Meringue Pie

July 13, 2018 By Korena in the Kitchen 3 Comments

How is it that I had never made a lemon meringue pie before now? In fact, I’m not even sure I’d ever actually eaten lemon meringue pie before I made this half-size one – which is surprising, because lemon things are second only to chocolate things on my dessert hierarchy. I’ve eaten many a lemon curd tart, but not a lemon meringue pie. What is the difference, you might ask? Well, according to me, the differences are:

A lemon curd tart has a sweet shortcrust pastry (like a shortbread cookie), whereas a lemon meringue tart uses a blind-baked flaky pie shell. It should be noted that this particular blind-baked pie shell was the best I’ve ever made, owing to a few tips courtesy of Stella Parks, aka BraveTart: the first being her low-and-slow blind-baking method using sugar as a pie weight, and the second being the use of bleached all purpose flour, which has a more predictable profile of starch to protein than unbleached all purpose flour and results in a more tender and flaky pastry. (I have been an unbleached flour user for as long as I’ve been buying flour because the alternative sounds scary and chemical-laden… but once I read about the difference and about the bleaching process (which doesn’t actually use bleach), I realized that it’s not scary, it’s just chemistry, which is what successful baking relies on.)

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Rhubarb and Marzipan Pie

May 18, 2018 By Korena in the Kitchen 8 Comments

According to Instagram, it’s been rhubarb season since about January, judging by all the gorgeous rhubarb baked goods that have been showing up in my feed since then. I guess spring comes a lot later here in the Far North (ha) because even now that it’s mid-May, the rhubarb in my garden is not quite ready to harvest yet. But it has finally been showing up in the grocery store, and when I snapped some up a few weekends ago I knew exactly what to do with it: I had just seen a delicious looking rhubarb and marzipan cake, and my first thought was, “That would make a good pie.”

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Lemon Sunshine Layer Cake with Lemon Curd and Marshmallow Buttercream

April 26, 2018 By Korena in the Kitchen 6 Comments

I noted previously that I was having a moment with Stella Parks, aka BraveTart, and wanting to bake all of her stuff. Well, the moment continues, and this cake is the result. I got the BraveTart cookbook for Christmas and have been drooling over it ever since. The things I’ve made from it have been fantastic so far (including Oreos, oatmeal cookies, English muffins, and caramelized white chocolate blondies), and the recipes are wonderfully researched, tested, and always teach me something new about baking and pastry cheffing. So I figured I’d be in good hands using BraveTart recipes for attempt number seven in my quest for the perfect lemon layer cake. And – spoiler alert – while it wasn’t quite perfect, it was pretty darn good.

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Swedish Kanelbullar and Chokladbiskvier

November 30, 2017 By Korena in the Kitchen 4 Comments

To make up for the fact that I’ve been a slacker these last few months with Around the World in 12 Plates, I’m bringing not one but TWO recipes to this month’s party. Sweden was November’s destination, and similar to their Danish neighbours’ appreciation for hygge – enjoying simple pleasures and general coziness – the Swedes have a serious appreciation for fika, which you could sort of think of as coffee break hygge. But fika is not buying a to-go coffee and inhaling it in your car on the way to somewhere else – it is intentionally slowing down to drink a cup of coffee (or tea), eat some kind of delicious baked good, and enjoy yourself – either alone or with friends. It is so much a part of Swedish culture that workers have fika breaks built into their work days.

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Maple Pecan Shortbread Bars

November 22, 2017 By Korena in the Kitchen 4 Comments

Our American neighbours have a certain important holiday involving turkey and pie coming up tomorrow, and I wanted to share these maple pecan shortbread bars because they would make the perfect last minute addition to a Thanksgiving (or other) dinner menu. I actually made these for Canadian Thanksgiving back in October (along with this pumpkin roulade) because I wanted something like pie but I couldn’t manage rolling out a pie crust with my busted elbows (which have both now healed and I’m back to full force in the kitchen – now there’s something to be thankful for!).

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Spiced Pumpkin Roulade with White Chocolate & Mascarpone

October 15, 2017 By Korena in the Kitchen 8 Comments

Nate and I usually host our families for Thanksgiving dinner, but with my bum elbow making it a little difficult to stuff a turkey – let alone maneuver it in and out of the oven – my parents took on the hosting duties this year, and I brought dessert. Pumpkin pie is traditional of course, but I don’t actually like it all that much. The slightly wet, heavy filling manages to make even the flakiest pastry soggy and just doesn’t get me excited about eating it. However I was very excited about eating this pumpkin roulade the minute I saw the recipe.

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In Search of the Perfect Lemon Layer Cake

October 1, 2017 By Korena in the Kitchen 9 Comments

Ahhhh the lemon layer cake. You’d think the combination of cake, lemon curd, and frosting would be relatively simple, right? Well you’d be wrong, especially if you’re me. I’ve been on the search for the perfect lemon layer cake for almost as long as I’ve been writing this blog – as evidenced by my previous three attempts (and a fourth here, if you count a crêpe cake) – but I have yet to find The One.

So this summer, I tried again – twice. First, I made Nate yet another lemon birthday cake using Bon Appetit’s Lemon Curd Layer Cake recipe, which sounded absolutely spectacular with its whipped-cream-and-lemon-curd frosting. Things started out well with a solid lemon curd recipe and a beautifully fluffy, spongy, light cake recipe, but the frosting let me down (why does this always happen?!). According to the picture accompanying the recipe, it should have been stiff enough to pipe, but it definitely wasn’t, and it – and the lemon curd filling – ended up running all over the place. To save the cake, after I filled and stacked the layers (which were totally crooked!), I had to chill it with a skewer down the middle to hold everything in place long enough to solidify and hold its shape.

As a last resort I added some gelatin to the remaining whipped cream frosting – which is a common way of reinforcing whipped cream – only I overestimated the amount of gelatin and ended up with bouncy whipped cream that set as I spread it on the cake (NOT IDEAL), and the rosettes I piped around the edge of the cake to hold in the lemon curd topping ended up sliding off because they also set before they could stick. So all in all, not a slam dunk, but still pretty delicious – especially the cake itself, which included lemon curd in the batter and was definitely the winner in this particular recipe.

Take two was a Lemon-Blackberry Cake with Lemon Buttercream adapted from the Flour cookbook by Joanne Chang, which I made to take to a family gathering. I doubled the recipe, and the resulting cake weighed about thirty pounds and included over a dozen eggs and an entire forest of lemons! I had high hopes for this recipe, but sadly, it did not deliver for me.

The lemon curd recipe was good (and it made a ton) but cake itself was a bit too dense for my liking and it didn’t soak up even half of the lemon syrup it was supposed to. It was the frosting that was the real disaster though: a hybrid of Swiss meringue frosting (which uses egg whites) and French meringue frosting (which uses egg yolks), it was the soupiest mess I’ve ever dealt with – even worse than the Swiss meringue cream cheese frosting misadventure of several years ago. It WOULD NOT emulsify or thicken properly, and I literally worked on it for hours, using every trick I know – chilling, resting, beating, stirring – you name it, I tried it. I was taking process pictures as I went with the intent to post the recipe, but the frosting was so demoralizing that I deleted them all. Eventually I just held my breath and crossed my fingers and went for it with frosting the cake, chilling it as often as I could during assembly and surprisingly, I was somehow able to pipe a border around the top of the cake. After all that effort for a less-than-perfect result, I sort of hated this cake, even though in the end it tasted pretty good (albeit a little dry) and the family all appreciated it 😉

So, after all this, I have come to some decisions. The next lemon layer cake I will probably use the cake layers from the Bon Appetit version, either the lemon curd from Flour or Tartine’s lemon cream (so good!), and a regular Swiss meringue buttercream frosting – unless anyone has a brilliant, perfect lemon layer cake recipe to recommend, in which case, I’m all ears! Sadly, any experimenting will have to wait a while though, as I’m currently nursing a fractured left elbow and banged-up right arm from a mountain biking spill two weeks ago, and any mixing, beating, kneading, rolling, piping and other lovely baking actions are currently off limits – but I can still drool over lemon layer cake recipes 😉

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Fancy Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

July 27, 2017 By Korena in the Kitchen 2 Comments

I’m a sucker for a beautiful pie, and especially a strawberry rhubarb one, so even though rhubarb season may be nearing an end, I had to share this pie I made a while back. I love love love rhubarb pie, and this one is a riff on Anne Dimock’s Straight-Up Rhubarb Pie as seen on Food52 – which is a damn good rhubarb pie and needs no embellishment – but when I made this one, the very first strawberries of the season were also hitting the grocery store and I couldn’t resist.

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Greek Kataifi

April 30, 2017 By Korena in the Kitchen 1 Comment

Greek kataifi is a cousin to baklava, a similar combination of chopped nuts and crispy dough soaked in syrup, only instead of being made with thin, stacked sheets of phyllo dough, kataifi is made with what is commonly described “shredded phyllo”: fine strands of dough wrapped around a nut filling like a little bundle of hay. Only when I decided to make kataifi for this month’s Greek installment of Around the World in 12 Plates, I discovered that kataifi dough isn’t shredded phyllo at all, but actually something quite different.

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