Another Edition of the Pink and Yellow Season and What I Am Thankful For

So, this will be the last of the Pink and Yellow Season posts for another year. For this week I am posting about making a Lemon Yogurt Pound Cake and my litany rosary of thankfuls.


To begin with, the litany rosary of thankfuls.

• I'm thankful my parents are still around. I'm so fortunate that I can still pick up the phone and talk to them as if I were still a 20-something kid.

• I'm thankful for my sister; I know she's got my back.

• I'm thankful for aunts and uncles and cousins and other family members who share that quirky gene.

• I'm thankful for friends who love me just the way I am.

• I'm thankful for my impatient kitty who wants his lunch - now.

• I'm thankful I have the wherewithal to spend time and resources exploring and experimenting with different lemony recipes for my pink and yellow birthday season.

I'm thankful for much more, but those are the biggies, so I'm just leaving them there to think on a while.

Now, for the Lemon Yogurt Pound Cake. Here is the link to the original recipe. But you know, there were a lot of things in this recipe that seemed a little overdone and pretentious, a little more expensive than I wanted to be, too. Maybe they weren't, but I chose to do things a little differently. Besides, the original recipe seemed a little light on the lemony flavoring for me, so I added lemon wherever I could easily (like substituting lemon juice instead of milk in the glaze). So here is what I did:

Cake ingredients:
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon regular salt
1 cup lemon yogurt (regular old diet Yoplait. Takes 2 containers to make a cup. I did half Greek lemon and half diet Yoplait regular yogurt - they were on sale.)
3/4 cup white sugar
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
3 large eggs
2 teaspoons grated lemon zest (Or thereabouts, depending on what you get from 2-3 lemons)
1/2 cup canola oil

Candied Lemons:
1 Lemon
1 cup water
1 cup sugar

Glaze:
1 cup powdered sugar
2 tablespoons lemon juice

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease an 8 x 5-inch or 9 x 5-inch loaf pan. I didn't flour or use parchment paper because  I wasn't worried about getting it out of the pan or presentation or anything.

2. In a medium bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt. In another medium-sized bowl, whisk together the yogurt, white sugar, brown sugar, eggs and lemon zest.

3. Slowly whisk the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, and then with a rubber spatula, fold the oil into the batter, making sure it’s completely incorporated.

4. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for about 40-45 minutes, or until a cake tester placed in the center of the loaf comes out clean.




5. Meanwhile, I candied the lemon slices, but if I were to do this again, I'd candy the lemon slices first to make sure they're set by the time the cake is ready. It's about 1 : 1 : 1 or 1 lemon to 1 cup water to 1 cup sugar. a) Clean off and slice lemons. b) Put water in a saucepan with lemon slices, bring to simmer for a minute or so (I actually let them simmer for a few minutes because I forgot about them). c) Carefully remove the slices with a pair of tongs and transfer to a plate or something.  d) Pour water into a container to measure how much you have and scoop out the seeds. e) Add the lemon water back to saucepan with an equal amount of sugar. f) Layer in lemon slices. Let simmer for a while, say 30- 45 minutes or an hour. The water/sugar mixture reduces a little. Lemons will be translucent. g) Remove the lemons from the mixture and transfer to a cooling rack or a parchment-lined baking sheet (I just used a plate - see what I mean about pretentious with this recipe?). h) After the lemon water/sugar mix has cooled a bit, then pour it through a cheesecloth or coffee filter or mesh filter into a container and put in the fridge. You now have lemony simple syrup for cocktails and such.

Candied lemon slices all pretty on their own.

4. The glaze: Measure the powdered sugar into a medium bowl and run a fork through it a few times. Stir in a tablespoon of lemon juice. Stir well. Stir in a half tablespoon of lemon juice. Stir well. Then the last bit, only if you need it (depending on if you want runnier or thicker).

5. I like to put the glaze on the cake while it's still warm. And then I garnished with the lemons.

Pound cake with glaze. I made my glaze a little thicker.

With glaze and candied lemon slices. I used to two lemons to come up with this many candied slices.

The result is a very moist loaf cake and it was just right lemony for me with all the additions of lemon I added (lemon yogurt instead of plain, lemon juice instead of milk, etc.). Careful not to over bake, though. I noticed on mine that at 40 minutes it still looked a little undone on top, so I put it in for another five minutes. It wasn't overbaked in the middle, but outside bottom and sides were a definite 16th inch of brown, not burned, but brown. So, maybe 42 minutes next time?

And that's it for postings for the Pink and Yellow Season this year. Hope you've enjoyed the recipes I've shared.

Welcome back for another installment of cooking for the Pink and Yellow Season

So, this week, I tried a couple of different things, not all lemony and sugary. I was going to attempt more, but I was also making dessert for Easter dinner at a friend's house so I ran out of time. But there's always next week.

 

First up were these Tea Marbled Eggs or Marbled Tea Eggs, which I think is appropriate for the Passover/Easter season. But first a little story.

Back when I was in college *mumble* years ago, I spent a summer in Shanghai, China and fell in love with the culture, but mostly the food. When I came home one of my aunts gave me a set of Sunset cookbooks, one covering a selection of dishes from Asia in general and the other focusing on Chinese fare. I remember going to a friend's house for lunch when I was in Shanghai and being overwhelmed at the food. Now, you may scoff that Sunset cookbooks may not have the genuine article as far as recipes are concerned, but I've used them for years and they help me get my fix when I need it.

Among my favorite recipes is this one for Marbled Tea Eggs that's in the 1979 edition of the Sunset Chinese cookbook. It's a savory and distinctive flavor. Not everyone likes it (as I have learned), but I love them. I like them best either alone or with olives and pickles, but I've also chopped them up into salads.

Usually these eggs are cut into quarters and served as part of a cold appetizer selection (like serving them with pickled things and olives as mentioned above). But they are so pretty-with the marbling of fine dark lines-that if you serve them for hors d’oeuvres you may want to present the whole shelled eggs nestled in shredded lettuce and slice them to order, or just the whole eggs period. They make a fine addition to picnic fare, too.

Ingredients:
8 eggs (I usually just do a dozen and expand the recipe accordingly)
3 black tea bags or 3 tsp. loose black tea (I add an extra tea bag for a dozen)
2 Tb. Soy sauce (about 2 1/2 Tb. for a dozen)
1 Tb. Salt (about 1 1/2 Tb. for a dozen)
1 whole star anise or 1 tsp. anise seeds and a 2 inch stick of cinnamon
(maybe toss in an extra one for a dozen)

Place eggs in a pan and cover with cold water. Bring water to simmering and cook for 20 min. Drain; rinse eggs with cold water until cool enough to handle. Gently crack shells of eggs with back of spoon (but don’t take shells off, just crack them) until there is a find network of cracks.

Return eggs to pan. Add 4 cups of water (or whatever you need to cover the eggs), the tea, soy sauce, salt and star anise. Heat to simmering and cook, on low heat, for 1 hour. Cool and chill eggs in the liquid for at least 8 hours or up to 2 days. Shell eggs before serving.



Next up, after whipping together more of last week's lemon bars (turned out well) and the week before that's lemon fudge (not so well), I decided to try these things I saw online called Lemon Brownies. Yes, you saw that correctly, Lemon Brownies. No, they don't have chocolate in them; they are a form of lemon bar, but the way one would make a lemon bar if one were making brownies. Instead of cocoa in the recipe, you have lemon juice and lemon zest.

The "Brownie" Batter:
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
2 large eggs
2 tablespoons lemon zest
2 tablespoons lemon juice
 
Tart Lemon Glaze:
1 rounded cup powdered sugar
4 tablespoon lemon juice
8 teaspoons lemon zest

Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease/Spray an 8-by-8-inch baking dish with butter/cooking spray and set aside.

Zest and juice two small/large lemons; set aside. {whatever you have}
In the bowl of an electric mixture fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the flour, sugar, salt, and softened butter until combined.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the eggs, lemon zest, and lemon juice until combined. Pour into the flour mixture and beat at medium speed until smooth and creamy, about 2 minutes.

Pour into baking dish and bake for 23-25 minutes, or until just starting to turn golden around the edges and a toothpick inserted into the center of the brownies comes out clean.

Now, by the time I got to this part, I was all out of white sugar and I only had a tiny bit of powdered sugar (I didn't plan well) and was down to brown sugar, so my lemon brownies have a darker hue than the Becky Charms' brownies do.

Batter before it went into the oven.

Allow the brownies to cool completely before glazing. Do not overbake, or the bars will be dry.

Becky Charms' lemon brownies.

My lemon brownies.

When brownies are cooled completely, make the glaze...sift the powdered sugar, add lemon zest and juice, and whisk together all three ingredients.

Spread 1/2 the glaze over the brownies with a rubber spatula. Let glaze set.

My brownies and glaze.

Becky Charms brownies and glaze.

 Spread the remaining glaze over the bars, and let it set again. This glaze does not harden like most. Cut into bars, and serve!

For the record, I haven't tried these yet. I covered them and put them in the fridge for another time, or to take to work on Monday. But, they're supposed to look like this.

Becky Charms finished lemon brownies.

I will report back and let you know how these turned out for me.

Next weekend, I'm going to try the Lemon Yogurt Pound Cake that I didn't have time to tackle this weekend.

More Fun in the Kitchen for the Pink and Yellow Season

Today I'll share my fun with apple chips, lemon curd and lemon bars.
First off, apple chips. I heard about these on a PBS cooking show but didn't get all the details so make them going off what I heard and what I researched. They aren't an "official" food of my Pink and Yellow Season, but I've been doing them a lot lately. A way to snack and appease my sweet tooth and not feel too guilty. Easy and fun.

1) Heat oven to 225 degrees. One of the websites I looked at in getting a feel for doing this says she makes them every time she's been baking. She just leaves the oven on when she's done but turns it down to 225. For me it's a perfect Sunday thing to do where I can set things up and walk away without thinking about it.

2) Take a cookie sheet and put parchment down on it.

3) Slice apples thinly, or use a mandolin if you have one, but then maybe it's best to core the apple first. I don't have one, so I just do what I can with my knife and then I keep the star in the middle and pick out the seeds as I go. You might get thick slices, but it's still good, just more like dehydrated apple than apple chips. On my cookie sheets I get one big apple per sheet or 1.5 or 2 small apples per sheet.


4) If you feel like it, sprinkle with something - sugar and cinnamon, or just cinnamon maybe or lemon juice or salt. I was sprinkling the slices with a sugar, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg, which was good. But you don't really need it with Gala apples (the ones I use). I don't do sprinkle anything on them anymore.
5) Put in the oven for an hour (or so - I've noticed if I forget and leave them in too long it's not a tragedy).
6) At the end of the hour, take out and flip slices and put back in for another hour.


7) Pull out and put sheets on stove top to cool for a bit. Helps crisp up the chips.

8) Put in a not-so air tight container and don't put it in the fridge to store. This seems anti-intuitive. But if you put these in an air tight container in the fridge then they just get soggy. They still taste okay, but they're soggy. And they don't crisp up again. So, since I have mostly air tight tupperware, I've saved a take out container to hold the chips. But, they still go limp. They're just best and crispy fresh out of the oven.


 They're tasty and I recommend them. I'd even call them a little addictive.

~~~

Next, lemon curd. You can use lemon curd for so much. There's a lovely lemon mousse pie I'm thinking of making sometime that uses lemon curd, but you can also use it on toast, pancakes, waffles, stirred into your yogurt, over your fruit, or anything else you want a fresh bright taste. The recipes I used say you can make up to a week ahead of time, but I have made it and used it over the course of a month or more. Just keep refrigerated.

This recipe I got off of Epicurious.com and they say it's from the December 2000 of Gourmet magazine and makes 1 2/3 cups. There's another recipe from the January 2001 Gourmet that's slightly different, but it's all the same ingredients, just makes a little less.

Ingredients:
3/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon finely grated fresh lemon zest
3/4 cup sugar
3 large eggs
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter

Whisk together lemon juice, lemon zest, sugar, and eggs in a 2-quart saucepan. Cut butter into bits and add to mixture. Cook mixture, stirring constantly, over moderately low heat until curd is thick enough to hold marks of whisk and first bubble appears on surface, about 6 minutes. I have a gas stove so I kept it on low heat so I wouldn't have the boil over I had last weekend, so it took about 10 minutes or so.

I used the whisk attachment on my handmixer and kept it on the highest setting until around the end when I switched to a lower setting so I could see whether or not the mixture was thickening. It happens fast. One minute it's watery, the next it's beginning to thicken. I also kept stirring a little longer after I turned off the burner. Don't cook too long.

You can add an egg yoke or some cornstarch to thicken it if it's not firming up, but I didn't need to. Another note is that you can use a double boiler set up to avoid the scrambled egg effect that may happen. I think keeping the burner at low and constantly stirring helps avoid that.

I happened to have a preserve container from some marmalade I had used up, so used that jar to store some of the curd because it's pretty, but Tupperware work just as well, or probably better as far as keeping it fresh is concerned. The recipes on Epicurious suggest covering the surface with plastic wrap.

~~~

Finally, lemon bars. I got this recipe from a friend of mine who got it from her mother. It also reminds me of a recipe my mom used to make when I was a kid, but that I've lost track of since. If you haven't had these before, there's a soft dough base with a lemon custard/curd "filling" and then a sprinkle of powdered sugar on top.

Base ingredients:
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup powdered sugar
2 cups all purpose flour

Custard ingredients:
4 eggs, slightly beaten
1 tablespoon grated lemon peel
5 tablespoons lemon juice
2 cups sugar
1/4 cup all purpose flour

Topping: Powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Blend butter, salt, 1/2 cup powdered sugar and 2 cups sifted flour to make a soft dough. Press evenly into a greased 9x13 inch glass dish. Bake 15 to 20 minutes until golden.


Meanwhile, combine eggs, lemon peel, lemon juice, sugar and 1/4 cup sifted flour and blend until smooth. Pour over baked crust. Reduce heat to 325 degrees and bake 25 minutes until firm.


Cool. Dust with sifted powdered sugar.


Slice into bars when cooled.







Nice and not too sweet. Excellent with coffee or tea. Just beware of the powdered sugar flying everywhere.

And that's all for today for our continuation with the Pink and Yellow Season.

Have a great week!

Pink and Yellow Season Kick Off

Around this time of year I go into my own private Pink and Yellow Season. For me, it's usually about bright sunny days, bright flavors, shiny newness and fun just for me. Not quite feeling it yet this year, but I have about some time to get into it.

One of the things I like to do during this season is experiment with lemon dishes in the kitchen. I love that burst of flavor lemon gives you. Most years I just get a box or two of lemon cake mix and a couple of tubs of lemon frosting and experiment with what to do with that (use lemon juice or limoncello instead of water, toss in yogurt or white chocolate chips or coconut, etc.). It may or may not turn out anything edible, but that's not the point. The point is to have fun and experiment. (I think I need a chemistry set.)

This year, I decided to up the ante a little and I kicked off the Pink and Yellow Season by baking a couple of different types of lemon fudge.

The recipe for the first batch I got here. It's the easier of the two I found - no need to check for candy status. It uses marshmallow cream, condensed milk, white chocolate chips and lemon extract. I grated some lemon rind and tossed that in, too. And had some of it set in a mini-tart pan, which was fun, but not as cute as I was imagining.
Though it doesn't taste like good fudge, it is "melt in your mouth". Very rich. It's something you can whip up quickly and take somewhere if you need to. And it does taste good, but not quite what I imagined it should be.

I had some chocolate and butterscotch chips, enough to make a half a batch with what was left of the condensed milk and marshmallow cream. I've packaged it and put it in the freezer to save for bad days. Again, it was good, but it didn't have that burst of flavor on the tongue that good candy/fudge rewards you with.


The second recipe I got from here. It was more complicated but it does reward you with that burst of flavor you're expecting.  Years ago a friend of mine sent me her grandmother's praline recipe. And I remember her telling me that once I started making the pralines to be prepared to keep at it until it was finished. Making this fudge is a bit like that. Once you begin you can't stop until you've poured the fudge into the containers. So have everything set out, pans prepped, ingredients measured out before you begin and be prepared to do a lot of stirring.

For me, it took longer for it to reach boiling than the recipe said it would. And also took longer for evaporated milk and sugar to reach 234 degrees than the 5-6 minutes the recipe said it would. There was at least one time when the milk and sugar mixture grew up on me and made a little mess around the burner, but otherwise, it was just a long haul of stirring.

A couple of tiny things I did differently is that I was a titch short on the lemon extract so added a squeeze or so of lemon juice. Not too much. I used white chocolate chips and not a white chocolate bar broken up. Also, I used foil and butter for the pans instead of parchment. I can never get parchment to fold and stay put. But I think next time I'd use parchment. I also added the optional yellow food coloring.

Again, this second recipe takes more work, but you are rewarded with that candy flavor that you can't mistake. I tasted a couple of broken pieces as I was packing the fudge away for later and I felt like I'd gone to heaven and back.


I have a few more lemony recipes planned throughout the Pink and Yellow Season. I'll report back and let you know how they turned out.