Modification Mondays: Orange-Spice Upside Down Cake

"You know when you start with one recipe and then end up with something totally different? Or start with a vision in your head they you can’t find a recipe for, so you find 3 or 4 recipes that are sort of similar and awkwardly mash them together, with a bit of your own flare? Or have to adapt well-loved favorites to new dietary restrictions? Or look at old stand-bys and think: “This should totally have bacon. Or tomatoes. Or bourbon.”? Yeah, the Modification Mondays series is for you. Don’t worry, we don’t expect you to follow our recipes either."

Do you ever buy a bag of oranges, eat two of them, and then think to yourself, "Okay, now what the hell am I going to do with the rest of these oranges?" Anybody? No? Well anyway, I do that at least once a year, and then I either force myself to eat them and get thoroughly sick of oranges, or throw them away and feel super guilty. Either way, it sucks. So this time, I said to myself, "No, I will find something delicious to do with these oranges, and it will be amazing!" And, well, not to brag or anything, but I kinda did.

My basic idea was a pineapple upside down cake, but with oranges. I found a basic pineapple upside down cake recipe in the Red Plaid Cookbook, as well as a recipe for something called citrus cake. I also found a recipe for maple-glazed pineapple upside down cake in The Old Farmer's Almanac Everyday Baking, which a friend who knows me very well got me for Christmas last year. So I took all those recipes, sat down with a pencil and Google, and set about smooshing them together and modifying for maximum orangey goodness.

The working copy, stuck on the fridge for optimal accessibility.

The cake part is pretty standard yellow cake, except I added a bunch of cloves and put some orange juice (fresh squeezed!) in with regular milk instead of using buttermilk. I also added some orange zest (freshly zested from the peels of the oranges I just juiced!).

Protip: Zest the orange peels, not your hands.

It's worth noting that you can significantly cut down your prep time by using store-bought orange juice and orange zest, and I wouldn't judge you at all for doing so; that just wouldn't have contributed to my goal of using up as many oranges as possible. I used two oranges for juice and zest, and then I sliced two more for the upside down topping, leaving only two more for me to force down my gullet (or suck it up and juice them for breakfast).

You mix together the cake batter pretty much like normal cake batter; start by creaming together the butter and sugar. (An electric mixer will be helpful here, but an industrious baker can do it by hand if they're dedicated.) I made a rookie mistake and realized halfway through my prep work that I didn't have enough butter for both the cake and the topping, so I substituted mashed banana and a touch of vegetable oil for the butter in the cake. This added a subtle banana-y flavor to it that wasn't bad, but it's not exactly what I was going for, so I'm leaving it out of the official recipe, since it was a last-minute substitution instead of an intentional modification.

Anyway, once the butter and sugar are creamed, add in the other liquid ingredients. (If you're using fresh orange zest, add that in here, too. If using store-bought, you can put it in with the dry ingredients.) Mix together the dry ingredients in a separate bowl, then add them to the wet ingredients and mix it all together.

Now, for the fun part - the topping! For the orange slices, peel before slicing, and make sure you get as much of the white stuff off as possible. Slice the oranges side-to-side, and slice the top and bottom off very thinly and discard to get rid of all the nasty white stuff where the ends of the sections come together.

If you have a 10-11 inch cast iron skillet, now's the time to break it out. If you don't, you can use a small saucepan for this part and bake the cake in a 9-inch square baking dish instead. It'll still be good, but it might lack a certain je ne sais qua. (Actually, the edges will be slightly less crisp. That's really the only difference.)

Melt the rest of the butter in the pan and stir in the brown sugar and maple syrup. If using a baking dish, pour it in and spread it over the bottom. If you're already in the cast iron skillet, carry on. Lay out your orange slices in a single layer in the butter/sugar/syrup mixture. Sprinkle some raisins in the spaces between them.

Pour the batter in on top and stick that sucker in a 350° oven for 35-40 minutes or until the cake tests done.

Turn the cake over onto a heat-proof platter...

 Or pizza pan - y'know, whatever you've got on hand.

 Let it cool as long as you can stand to, then slice, serve, and enjoy!

Orange-Spice Pineapple Upside Down Cake

Prep/Cook Time: 1.5 hours (less if you use store-bought orange juice and zest)

Servings: 8

Ingredients:
(US Customary)

Cake

• 1/2 c. butter
• 3/4 c. sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1/3 c. milk
• 1/3 c. orange juice
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1 Tbsp. molasses (If you don't have any, you can leave it out without dire consequences)
• 2 Tbsp. grated orange peel
• 1 1/2 c. flour
• 1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. cloves (this gives you a pretty strong flavor; if you're not a huge fan of cloves, you can cut it to 1/2 tsp., use cinnamon instead, or just leave it out altogether)

Topping

• 1/4 c. butter
• 2 Tbsp. maple syrup
• 3/4 c. brown sugar
• 2 medium oranges, peeled and sliced horizontally
• 1/4 c. raisins

Special equipment: Juicer and zester or box grater (use smallest side) if using fresh orange juice/zest. Electric mixer useful but not essential. Cast iron skillet optional.

Instructions:

1. Cream together 1/2 c. butter and sugar. In a separate container, mix together milk and orange juice. To butter/sugar mixture, add eggs, milk/OJ mixture, vanilla, molasses, and orange peel. Mix well.

2. In a separate bowl, mix together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cloves. Add to butter etc. and beat to combine.

3. Melt 1/4 c. butter in cast iron skillet, if using. (Otherwise use a small saucepan). Stir in maple syrup and brown sugar.

4. If using separate baking dish, pour butter/sugar/syrup in and spread over the bottom. Otherwise leave it in the skillet. Lay orange slices in a single layer. Scatter raisins in the spaces between.

5. Pour cake batter over oranges. Bake at 350°F for 35-40 minutes or until the edges of the cake are pulling away from the sides of the pan and the cake tests done. Turn cake over onto a heat-proof platter, cool, slice, and serve.

Pumpkin-Raisin Bread

I mentioned on Facebook awhile back, and I fully believe this to be true: when Jesus said "Man cannot live on bread alone," I'm pretty sure he was forgetting about pumpkin bread. It is, as far as I'm concerned, the perfect quick bread: sweet enough to spread on a little cream cheese frosting and call it dessert, but healthy enough to butter it and eat it for breakfast instead (or lunch, or dinner, or elevensies, or afternoon tea, or whenever you damn well please).

This recipe is slightly modified from one I found in The Red Plaid Cookbook, which I inherited from my mother, and is the cookbook of the gods:

Don't be fooled by the cover; all true disciples know that this is actually called "The Red Plaid Cookbook". (All true disciples being my mother and me.)

Their recipe is for pumpkin-nut bread, but I think it's better without the nuts. I also used slightly different seasonings, because I am very opinionated when it comes to pumpkin-flavored things. Anyway, let's begin.

I think a couple of the seasonings are missing here. That, or they're hidden behind the pumpkin and salt. I'm bad at photography.

Christmas Morning Cinnamon Rolls

We don't have a lot of food-based traditions in my family apart from Thanksgiving, and even those are mostly the same ones that everybody has: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, the souls of children, that sort of thing. But one that we do have is that my mom always makes cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning. She usually gets the Pillsbury rolls in a can, and that's fine, I don't judge, but for the man-panion & I's first Christmas as a married couple, I decided I wanted to try from-scratch cinnamon rolls for breakfast.

(Then I woke up Christmas morning and realized I was out of flour, so we had cereal and I made Boxing Day cinnamon rolls instead. But no matter, they were still tasty.)

I started out where so many of my culinary adventures start, in the Red Plaid Cookbook. It yielded a fairly straightforward recipe for cinnamon rolls, which I followed pretty closely, with the exception of halving it and omitting the raisins (raisins are delicious, and they belong in many baked goods, but not cinnamon rolls).

If you've never made any sort of yeast bread before, it might seem a little intimidating, but I promise, it's not. It helps to have an electric mixer with a dough hook...

Not least of all so you can play pirates in the kitchen.

...but with only slightly more effort, you can make these suckers by hand, and it's still totally worth it.

Fancy Foodie Friday: Macarons, Part 1 (Macaron d'Amiens)

Feel like a treat after a long week? Splurge on a special ingredient? In the mood to spend a little longer in the kitchen? Got a hot date to impress with your culinary prowess? Check out the recipes in our ongoing Fancy Foodie Fridays series. These recipes might be a little too complex, time-consuming, or expensive for the every day, but are a nice challenge or treat for a fancy evening in. 
  
So I'm currently taking a bit of time off of work until my new job starts and my visa transfer escapes bureaucratic purgatory. While I'm (f)unemployed, one of my plans for the downtime had been to learn lots of new things. I'm learning to play the ukulele. I took an awesome sailing class. I even painted a painting that didn't totally suck!

Although that hill behind the bird is the grave mound of his misshapen brother who had to be eaten by the earth and replaced by a less terrible bird for it to reach that stage.

Last week, I took an awesome macaron-making class at the Paris International Cooking School in Sydney. It was an intro class/demo, and we rushed through making 5 different styles of macarons in just a couple of hours, did some generous sampling, and then got to take home a box of our creations. (Side note to my Sydney friends: I'll probably go back for one of their longer weekend workshops early next year--let me know if you're interested in joining me!)

Testing the consistency of the meringue in class.

I've never attempted macarons before, because I've heard they're very finicky, but after this class, I've undertaken the adventure. I thought I'd do a short series on my adventures.

I thought I'd start with the easiest and least finicky macaron I learned, Macaron d'Amiens. These macarons are the regional variety from Amiens, a small city in the Picardy region in northern France. They're apparently not very popular or well-known outside of the region, which is unfortunate because they are delicious. They're a super chewy, heavier honey and apricot macaron. Serious amounts of yum.

Modification Mondays: Chocolate Chip Banana Cookies

You know when you start with one recipe and then end up with something totally different? Or start with a vision in your head they you can’t find a recipe for, so you find 3 or 4 recipes that are sort of similar and awkwardly mash them together, with a bit of your own flare? Or have to adapt well-loved favorites to new dietary restrictions? Or look at old stand-bys and think: “This should totally have bacon. Or tomatoes. Or bourbon.”? Yeah, the Modification Mondays series is for you. Don’t worry, we don’t expect you to follow our recipes either. This is the first post in the series.

Greetings, fellow eaters, creators, and lovers of food. For this, my first post here, I will be sharing my all-time favorite classic chocolate chip cookie recipe, plus a new (and healthy?!) twist. [ETA: Two twists! Read to the end!]

Behold, the recipe:

This, dear friends, was clipped out of some forgotten newspaper or magazine by my mother before I was even born. This piece of paper was printed when the Berlin Wall was still a thing. It also contains what I am convinced is the greatest chocolate chip cookie recipe known to man.

(It should be noted, however, that it also makes the largest chocolate chip cookie recipe known to man. I always halve it and still end up giving cookies away.)