Cran-Apple Crisps

It's Tuesday and I'm still making up recipes from Baking From My Home to Yours like my life depends on it. At the beginning of the year, I had 78 recipes to make up. I'm not sure how many are left, but it's lots less than 78.

This recipe is perfection as a do ahead, and even if you're making it from start to finish, it's still very doable on a weeknight. I made some changes:

• We have tons of desserts around so I made 1/4 of the recipe, yielding 2 crisps.
• I didn't have dried cranberries, so I substituted chopped walnuts.
• I considered adding cardamom to the crisp topping but didn't. I think it would be awesome so if you try it please let me know how you liked it.
• You can use practically any fruit with this one. Really, grapefruit, pears, berries, stone fruit, you can use them all.
• Dorie's crisp topping is quite unusual in that it has oats and coconut, but it works beautifully, and is easy to throw together as it's made in the food processor.

If you'd like the recipe, you can find it here.

Daring Bakers - Cranberry Orange Apricot Bread

I have been remiss in posting Daring Bakers challenges of late, even though I've made at least two that I could never get written and posted. When I saw this month's challenge however, I knew I had to participate.

The Daring Bakers’ February 2012 host was – Lis! Lisa stepped in last minute and challenged us to create a quick bread we could call our own. She supplied us with a base recipe and shared some recipes she loves from various websites and encouraged us to build upon them and create new flavor profiles.

This bread is one that I've cobbled together from various recipes (starting with a recipe from The Silver Palate Cookbook) over the years, completely reworking the assembly to the point that I think it's perfect. Your mileage may vary, but I encourage you to incorporate some of these techniques in your quick bread making. They've given me tender, delicious quick breads for many years now.

• MEP, or mise en place, is critical. Have all of your ingredients ready, including chopping, measuring, melting, heating, etc.
• Flavors and add ins are critical, because without them, you've made a block of cake in a loaf pan with bits of things every slice or so.
• DON'T OVERMIX. Really. My technique (I've never seen it in another recipe) is to add your mix ins when your dry ingredients are about half way mixed into the wet ingredients. This way, you don't over mix while you're trying to incorporate the mix ins. Quick bread batter quickly (no pun intended) starts to stiffen the more you mix it, making it harder to thoroughly combine the mix ins.
• Also to address the mix ins, I mix mine together in a bowl before adding them to the recipe. Again, this makes it easier to have a homogenous loaf instead of one where all the nuts are in one half and the fruit in another.
• Texture. I address this in a couple of ways. If I'm using a wet fruit, I let it drain on a dish towel before adding it. I try to use a variety of mix ins, including nuts or poppy seeds or oats or something to provide an interesting crunch to break up the monotony of the bread.
• Short on time? Muffins. A muffin is a mini quick bread.
• Plan ahead. If you want muffins for your Saturday breakfast, you can make the batter Tuesday night and freeze (well wrapped, of course) in the muffin tin. Set the muffin pan on the counter while you preheat your oven the day you plan to bake. Bake the muffins for about 20 minutes at 350 degrees F.
• I use my food processor for this bread because there's a lot of chopping, and I find frozen cranberries to be the most frustrating thing to chop by far. In this recipe I start with the nuts (if I'm using nuts), then go to the cranberries and finally the dried fruit. No need to wipe out the bowl.
• Think outside the box, er, recipe. Chopped crystalized ginger goes so well with many fruits (think lemon, orange, cranberry, banana, etc.) Likewise, chocolate will play well with many fruits (orange, raspberry, strawberry, apricot, etc.) 

Cranberry Orange Apricot Bread
Printer-friendly recipe

2 cups/280 grams unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 cup/100 grams sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup/60 grams walnuts
11/4 cups/138 grams cranberries, fresh or frozen

1/2 cup/75 grams dried apricots
2/3 cup fresh orange juice (I've used store-bought, and substituted POG)
2 eggs
3 tbsp/42 grams unsalted butter, melted
2 tsp grated orange zest

Grease or coat an 8 x 4½ x 3 inch loaf pan with baking spray. Place oven rack in the center of the oven and pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.

Weigh or measure the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt into a large mixing bowl, whisk until combined, make a well in the center and set aside.

In the bowl of a food processor, pulse the walnuts until coarsely chopped, and empty walnuts into a medium mixing bowl. Repeat with the cranberries, then the apricots, pulsing each individually until coarsely chopped and them transferring to the mixing bowls with the walnuts. Stir the chopped ingredients until they are equally distributed.

In a small mixing bowl or 2 cup measuring cup, add the orange juice, eggs and melted butter, then zest the orange into the wet mixture and combine.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and with a spatula, fold them together until about halfway incorporated, then add the nut and fruit mixture, folding just until combined. Make sure you're getting to the bottom of the bowl with your spatula so you don't have dry pockets of flour.

Transfer batter to the pan and bake on the center rack of the preheated oven for 45 to 50 minutes, or until knife inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then remove the loaf from the pan and transfer to a rack to cool completely.

Wrap in plastic wrap and store for a day or two before serving (I've never done this because it smells too good when it comes out of the oven!)

Cranberry Lime Galette, Sort Of

This sad object resembles a broken dam more than it does a tempting dessert, and for that I'm truly sorry. It all boiled down to one thing:

Operator error.

Yes, that means me. I forgot to add a very important component. The one that soaks up the juices and makes this recipe a luscious slice of fall:

Yup, I forgot to add the bread crumbs and ground nuts, and the juices ran out of the crust, all over and under the parchment paper and then they burned while it baked.

I can report that cranberry caramel is tasty. The burned parts, not so much.

I used my easy all-butter pie crust (you can find it here) and we did break off parts of it to enjoy. That part was good.

What did I learn:

• Read the recipe through before making it. No really, I think this would help.
• Make sure you scrape all of the sugar out of the mixing bowl. Between the cranberries and the lime, this dessert is plenty tart, and it needs all of the sugar the recipe calls for.
• I supported the sides of my galette with empty ramekins before putting it in the oven, with the exception of one side that looked fine. That was the one that flopped over and let all the juices run away. Oops.
• I used a full bag of cranberries and a diced apple, and that was way too much filling for my galette. Follow your instincts: if it looks like too much filling, it probably is.

Our host this week for Tuesdays with Dorie was the blogging family of Sarah, Rachael, Whitney, Lizzie and April who are behind Celestial Confections. I'm telling you, if I had sisters and sisters-in-law who were willing to cook and write about it on my blog, I'd be posting a lot more. Or I'd be posting less but there'd be more content. Anyway, they make the most amazing creations. They picked the cranberry lime galette and they'll have the recipe for you here. I wish mine had turned out better, but sometimes it's OK to have a fail, as long as they're funny stories, right?

By the way, have you entered my giveaway? Ghirardelli and BlogHer have teamed up for a wonderful promotion and YOU can win a $100 Visa gift card! You can enter here. You'll also find a killer double chocolate scone recipe I dreamed up just for the occasion. Let's just say these were so good, they didn't make it to work.

Cranberry Shortbread "Cake"

I never, ever, ever would have made this "cake" if it wasn't for my esteemed blogging buddy Jessica of A Singleton in the Kitchen. And that would have been a real shame. Jessica, who will be faced with renaming her blog next year when she and beau Dudley get married, chose Dorie Greenspan's Not-Just-For-Thanksgiving Cranberry Shortbread Cake as this week's Tuesdays with Dorie selection.

I had a VERY hard time forcing myself to make this "cake." First, there's no photo in the book and I just couldn't wrap my head around how it would look. Second, although I like cranberries, I don't wake up in the morning and think "Gee, what can I make with cranberries today?" And last, the dough sounded finicky and difficult to work with. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A shortbread "cake" (I keep using quotes because it's all crust to me) surrounds a jam you make with cranberries and orange supremes. I went with a Texas pink grapefruit, both in honor of Jessica and, well, because it was what I had available. I made the super easy jam several days before I made the "cake" and tucked it away in the fridge. Last night, I checked Jessica's post (you can find it here) hoping for a photo of the completed "cake" to inspire me to make it. Yes and yes! So this morning I got up at five and started on the "cake." Surprise of surprises, I LOVED working with the dough. In fact, I plan to try this as a tart crust because I love it so much.

This recipe, except for my procrastination, was completely uneventful. Here's what I learned:

• Knowing my natural proclivity for not evenly measuring two dough halves, I weighed them on my scale.
• Jessica's "cake" looked as though she left a small border around the jam and pressed the crust closed around the jam. I liked that idea so I did the same.
• Tracey tweeted that she measured the top crust to get it the right size. I didn't do that, although I did use the ring of the springform pan to gauge it. My top crust ended up a tiny bit bigger than I wanted, so I pushed down the excess.
• Although I didn't do it this time, I am currently enamored with adding ginger to many of my recipes. I think some diced fresh ginger would make a great addition to the jam.
• I sprinkled Demerara sugar on top of the "cake" before baking.

In case you think I'm on the fence about this one, au contraire. I loved it. The tartness of the cranberries played perfectly against the sweet, crunchy pastry. It will be hard to share this one.

Jessica, thanks for a fantastic pick. I heart you, and not just because you chose this TART.

If you'd like the recipe, I have one thing to say...buy the book already! It's the best baking book, period. But if it's not in the budget this week, Jessica has the recipe for you, as well as a tasty apple version. And there are hundreds of us baking through Baking From My Home to Yours. You can find out what the other bakers thought here.

Check back next week...I'll have something exciting for you!