The Curator » recipe

White Cranberry Crumb Cake

Annelies Zijderveld — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:00:19 +0000

White Cranberry Crumb Cake

CRUMB TOPPING

1/4 cup almonds, chopped
1/2 cup AP flour
2 tablespoons maple sugar
2 tablespoons light brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
Pinch of salt
2 1/2 tablespoons butter, melted

CAKE

1 cup All purpose flour
½ cup almond meal
½ cup amaranth flour
¼ cup light brown sugar plus
1 ½ tablespoon brown sugar
¼ cup maple sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
Pinch of salt
1 cup plain low-fat yogurt
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted and cooled
2 cups fresh or frozen white cranberries

Heat the oven to 425º. Grease a 9×9 pan. In a small pan, melt 2 ½ tablespoons butter for the crumb topping. Pour into a bowl and let it cool. In the same pan, melt ½ cup butter and set aside for use in making the cake.

Begin by making the crumb topping and toast your chopped almonds in small pan on stovetop for a few minutes over low heat or in toaster oven. Mix together the flour, maple sugar, light brown sugar, baking powder and salt. Add the melted butter and toasted almonds when cool. Stir. With your hands, pinch ingredients together to create clumps of crumb topping. Set aside.

Pour almond meal into a medium bowl. Then sift the amaranth flour, flour, baking soda, and baking powder into the bowl on top of the almond meal. Stir in the ¼ cup light brown sugar and maple sugar. In a large bowl whisk together the yogurt, egg and melted butter. Stir together. Slowly start stirring in the flour mixture until combined. In a separate bowl, bring together the white cranberries with the extra 1 ½ tablespoon of brown sugar until somewhat coated and then stir into the batter.

Scoop batter into the pan and even out the distribution of batter to all four corners of pan. Then spoon the crumb topping onto the batter. Press down onto the batter slightly, as you want the crumb topping to stick. Bake for 50 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted into the middle of the cake.

SERVING SUGGESTIONS: Serve warm if possible. And let me just say this would taste dynamite with a small scoop of vanilla ice cream if you want to go all out with decadence or serve it with a dollop of plain Greek yogurt with a smidge of brown sugar or maple syrup mixed in. You’ll still get that dairy decadence without all of the sugar.

Banana Split Cake: All-American Dessert

Lindsay Crandall — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:00:47 +0000

My cooking skills are laughable – or they were, until a few months ago. No one ever taught me to cook, so my abilities never stretched beyond making macaroni topped with shredded cheese or popping a frozen pizza in the oven and pairing it with a sliced cucumber. It’s embarrassing to admit. My husband jokes that when he married me I could burn water. And it was more or less true.

After thumbing through Alice Waters’s The Art of Simple Food, devouring Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and recently reading Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life, I made the conscious decision to take my culinary destiny into my own hands. A life lived well cannot be sustained exclusively on food that originates in a box. With the help of my husband, who cooks intuitively and has been designated cook at the fire station where he works, I have taken to slow roasting vegetables, building homemade pizzas, and experimenting with soups. I may still fumble around the kitchen, but I can follow a recipe (most of the time).

Though I’m not much of a cook, I’ve always loved baking. My early repertoire included boxed brownies and cookies from a tube – though, again embarrassingly, I did forget to add egg to a batch of brownies I made for my husband early in our marriage, and they were just plain disgusting. In recent years, I’ve taken on breads, cookies, cereals, and cakes, all from scratch and all delicious. Somehow, whipping together baked goods comes more easily to me – perhaps because, to me, baking equals love. Taking the time to piece together a dessert, in particular, is akin to lavishing my own “sugar” on others.

But now it’s summer in Alabama, and baking when the it’s nearing 100 degrees outside is absurd. That’s why the perfect summer confection should never go near the oven. My perfect summer dessert is banana split cake – a no bake, layered dessert that shouts to be eaten outdoors at a picnic in July. It evokes memories of the Fourth of July, swimming and running around before recharging with a sugary slice.

Now, I want to get one thing straight – this isn’t an organic whole food dessert. It is heartily all-American: buttery, sugary, and layered with fruits shipped from tropical locations or packed into a can or jar. Surely, Alice Waters would slap me on the wrist for suggesting it to you. The recipe was passed to my mother from an older neighbor when I was a baby, so we’re not exactly sure where it originated. All I know is, when I fed it to my husband, he oohed and mmmed all the way through it.

Banana Split Cake

3 1/2 sticks of butter (do not substitute)
3 cups of graham cracker crumbs
2 cups of confectioners’ sugar
2 eggs
4 bananas
20 oz. can of crushed pineapple
Chopped walnuts
Maraschino cherries
Large tub of whipped topping

Melt 1 1/2 sticks of butter in a small sauce pan. Mix in graham cracker crumbs. Be sure to mix thoroughly or your crust won’t lift out of the pan with rest of your slice (this happened to me). Press into a 9 inch by 13 inch pan and put into the freezer to harden.

In a large bowl, mix the confectioner’s sugar, eggs, and 2 sticks of softened butter. Beat on high speed with a hand mixer for about 10 minutes, until the mixture becomes a thick, creamy custard.

Pull the pan out of the freezer. Layer the custard mixture before adding a layer of sliced bananas, each about a half inch thick. It helps to slice the bananas as you add them, rather than slice all four bananas beforehand. Drain the can of crushed pineapple, and spread on top of the bananas. Next, layer the whipped topping and top it with as many walnuts and cherries as you want. Chill for 1-2 hours before serving.

Voila! A dessert perfect in the sweltering summer. As much as I try to make my foods from scratch and buy local, fresh ingredients, I can’t imagining tinkering with this recipe. But I’m sure with a little creative forethought, several of the ingredients could be substituted to suit your fancy, or the recipe could be tweaked to include fewer processed ingredients. To me, it’s perfect as is.

I will offer one tiny serving suggestion: Enjoy it with someone you love! All those oohs and mmms make sharing this cake all the better.

Arancello, or How One Italian Combats The Summer Heat

J.G.C. Wise — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:00:57 +0000

Despite my northern upbringing, I’ve always been partial to the summertime, and increasingly so as I get older. The beauty of autumn, the magic of winter, the new life of spring – it’s all just ad copy in my book.

Sure, there is a weekend in the fall when I like to return to New England for no reason other than to see the brilliance of natural leaf color painted beneath the vast expanse of Connecticut sky. And yes, if we find ourselves fortunate enough to have anything resembling a white Christmas, I can still be found making snow-angels and trying to catch flakes on my tongue. I’m not opposed to the seasons, nor do I sulk until they end, leaving me with only three months of the stuff I like best.

But the isolated pleasantries of a season are not enough to warrant the profession of my love. I much prefer a season that boasts of little else besides pleasantries, where those very same novelties we cling to in other times of the year are naught but icing on the bright, yellow cake of longer days, fewer clothes, and cheerful smiles.

“But what about the summer heat?”

Indeed, what to do about the one obstacle to the utopian season. But the complaint is nearly moot in this day and age. Air conditioning – whether you choose to use it or not (ahem, New Yorkers) – is readily available and much more affordable than ever before, thanks to “energy saving” units. Ice water remains plentiful, ice cream becomes a justifiable necessity, water balloons are making a comeback, and water pistols never went out of style in the first place. In fact, summer offers more variety than any other season in fighting back against the element with which it attempts to oppress us. The rub is to find something new, something different, and in this case, something alcoholic.

My proposed solution? Arancello.

“Doesn’t he mean ‘limoncello’?” No, I don’t, although since limoncello tends to be more popular, I’ll include the recipe with lemons as well. But lemons hoard too much of the limelight (haha) of summer, and I propose that there are plenty of other refreshing, tropical fruits to be paid mind during the dog days. Thus, I’d like to take this time to say a few words about one of my favorite summer beverages that does not involve our little yellow friend.

The name “arancello” comes from the Italian for “orange,” which is “arancia.” Because of this, arancello is sometimes spelled “aranciello,” and in typical Italian fashion, there is no stone rule about which spelling is correct, though “arancello” remains more common.

I was first introduced to the beverage by my aunt during a brief stay in Bergamo a couple of years ago. After dinner, she brought out a large, glass bottle and I could already tell from the condensation on the bottle that it was cold. I’m talking arctic cold, here. It also appeared to be full of thick, cloudy orange juice.

“What’s that?” I asked, not so much out of impatience, but because I got the sense it was precisely what she wanted me to do. She didn’t answer verbally at first, but smiled with a glint of something like mischief in her eye.

“Just drink it,” she said, “but only a little sip!” She poured the liquid into a tall shot glass and, as instructed, I sipped. I’d imagine my expression was well worth the suspense.

It was rapturously sweet, and I was tempted to roll the arancello over my tongue a few times to take in all of the orange and sugar, but no sooner had I considered it did I change my mind as a subtle, pleasant burn began to creep over my taste buds. I swallowed, and the burn lost all quality of subtlety, dispersing through whatever maze of pipes stretch and twist through my insides. But despite what sounds like the miserable experience of swallowing something equivalent to rubbing alcohol, there was something else about it, something entirely counter to its nature which made it not only tolerable, but delectable: it was served ice cold.

There will doubtless be skeptics among you that such a potent alcoholic drink could be any sort of desirable summer companion. This is where the serving temperature of arancello becomes vital. Even in the dead of winter, warm arancello would be disappointing, if not vile; the sugar content is simply too high and the strength of the alcohol too intense. The beverage must – I cannot put enough emphasis on “must” – be stored in glass containers in the freezer. The refrigerator simply will not get the job done. Because the alcohol used is 150-proof or higher, there’s no need to worry about the stuff freezing; I’ve had the same bottle of arancello in my freezer for months. (Just make sure to shake it from time to time so all of the orange doesn’t settle on the bottom.) If, by some chance, you have access to a shock freezer, use that for storage.

The mantra here is: The colder, the better.

But enough stalling already. Let’s move on to more important things – the recipe.

You’ll need:
‚Ä¢ 5-6 large oranges (or 9-10 lemons for limoncello)
‚Ä¢ 1 liter 150-proof or higher clear alcohol (over-proof vodka or grain alcohol works the best)
‚Ä¢ 1 liter water
‚Ä¢ 1 kilo (2.2 lbs) granulated sugar

Begin by peeling the oranges with a vegetable peeler. It’s important to get as little of the fleshy, white part of the orange as possible; all you really want is the zest. Once the oranges are peeled, use a funnel to disperse equal parts of the vodka into three liter-sized bottles. Distribute equal portions of orange zest into all three bottles and cork or cap. Shake each bottle vigorously and store in a cool place. (Those of you without air-conditioning this summer may even want to consider the refrigerator for storage during the steeping process.) Shake each bottle two to three times daily for 20 days.

Twenty days later, bring the liter of water to a boil, leaving at least two inches above the water level for the sugar. Slowly stir in all of the sugar so the water becomes a simple syrup. Let the syrup cool for about five minutes, then distribute evenly across the three bottles. Shake the new mixture in each bottle and return to storage. Continue to shake each bottle 2-3 times a day for another 20 days. The mixture should appear to be a cloudy, orange color.

Once the arancello has steeped, transfer to glass containers without any zest. (Note: If you leave the arancello in the containers with the zest, it will ruin the flavor over time.) If you have an empty “handle” jug lying around, that works really well, and cuts down on the number of bottles you’ll have in storage. Seal the container(s) and put them into the freezer. Arancello should be ready to drink in about three hours.

Serving suggestions: Serve in tall shot glasses and sip. If you are throwing a dinner party, try drizzling a moderate amount of arancello over a colorful fruit salad or vanilla ice cream for dessert. The stuff is pretty versatile, so don’t be afraid to experiment. Just remember that it’ll take another forty days to make more if you run out!

I’ll admit that if the heat if the summer really bothers you that much, nothing – not even the magic of arancello – will bring you the relief you desire. But I can also tell you this: If arancello cannot alleviate your discomfort, it will most certainly help you to forget about it for a little while. That said, please enjoy responsibly!