mix, mix… stir, stir

I hear plum cake and just can’t help but to think of little Jack Horner.

Little Jack Horner sat in a corner,
Eating his Christmas pie,
He put in his thumb and pulled out a plum,
And said, “What a good boy am I.”

photo by David Peterman

There is no need to stick one’s thumb into this cake for a plum, as they are perched right on top and get beautifully caramelized while baking. I embraced fall and selected Italian Prune Plums that are now showing up at the farmer’s markets in my area. They are small little gems, so I decided to make small little cakes to suit them.

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie baking group selection of Dimply Plum Cake was selected by Michelle of Bak-en. I can’t say this is a recipe that ever jumped out at me when flipping through Dorie’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours, and it just proves that personal biases can lead one to miss out on some great things. Though it is difficult to select a recipe that is less interesting when there are dozens of recipes that are highly enticing on other pages, I will try to remember to expand my interests now and again just to see what surprises await.

This cake is interesting in that it is “hearty,” as in a bit dry and crumbly, but oddly in a good way. For me it worked in the mini-muffin format, but I am not so sure how I would feel about it as a plated dessert requiring a fork. Though served warm with a little vanilla ice cream could be another magical surprise. As a mini-treat the solid structure of the cake makes it easy to eat from the hand and would be an excellent nibble to serve at a party of finger food or for an afternoon tea. This recipe gave me great inspiration to make all sorts of cakes in mini-muffin tins with a delicious dollop of something paced on each one. I think a cardamom rosewater cake with a dollop of thick fig jam in the center would be delightful.

I knew I wanted to add a hazelnut garnish, but never like to garnish with something not in the dish, so I added 1/3 cup of chopped hazelnuts to the cake batter. The garnished nuts were given a little bath of simple syrup before placing them on the cakes and baking. The hazelnuts worked really well adding a nutty flavor and the crunch was lovely in contrast to the baked plum. The other deviation I made was adding a 1/2 teaspoon of allspice in addition to the cardamom. I have been reading a lot about allspice lately and just couldn’t resist adding a touch. I had a tendency to want to fill the muffin tins a little too full and it worked better when the cake did not rise over the top of the mold, so half-full of batter is all that is needed. Of course for the tiny cakes the baking time is reduced, I pulled them out after about 18 minutes.

photo by David Peterman

Allspice has been my spice obsession of late. Allspice is the dried berry of a large evergreen tree called Pimenta dioica that grows in Jamaica, West Indies, and Central America. Jamaican allspice has been long held as the premier product for its higher essential oil content which is primarily made up of eugenol. The name comes from the spice tasting like a combination of cinnamon, clove and nutmeg. Allspice crosses between sweet and savory cooking beautifully. It is an essential ingredient in Jamaican jerk seasoning as well as being  used frequently in curries, pickling, and even ketchup. The warm sweet aromas of course are a natural match to sweets and baked goods. I tossed a few berries in a pot of potato leek soup over the weekend with delicious results.

I highly recommend buying whole berries and grinding them as needed to best preserve the flavor and aroma of the volatile oils. Whole berries also makes it easy to infuse the flavor of the spice in soups, mulled wine, spiced cider, and poaching liquids for fruits, where the ground spice would make the liquid cloudy and less visually appealing. If your interaction with allspice has been limited to holiday pumpkin pies, I hope you will explore the warm peppery flavors it can bring to all sorts of dishes.

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie baking adventure continues with more cookies. I wasn’t sure how these cookies would stay together with chunks of bittersweet chocolate, semisweet chocolate, and white chocolate, in addition to peanuts, and only a third cup of flour, even less cocoa powder and a couple of eggs acting as a structural binder. Impossible. The ingredient list just didn’t look structurally sound. It is deliciously confounding, and maybe I shall have another to further analyze the situation.

photo by David Peterman

Not only are these cookies structurally sound, they are so delicious. They taste like the cookie version of a Dairy Queen Peanut Buster Parfait. Sandwich a couple of them around some vanilla ice cream and you might have to pay a flavor royalty fee to DQ! The recipe also called for raisins, but I omitted them out of respect for David’s aversion to raisins, and no harm was done to the end result. I used honey roasted peanuts that I raided from David’s personal snack supply, which he wasn’t too happy with initially but seems to be enjoying his peanuts in the cookies just fine.

These powerfully chocolaty cookies deserve to be made with really good chocolate. With so many varieties of chocolate involved it is important to incorporate the full spectrum of chocolate flavors or the end result might border on sickly sweet. What I mean by the full spectrum is chocolates that are distinctly different from one another based on how sweet they are. If you are interested in the differences and learning how to decipher chocolate labels, read on… but first you need to know you can find this fantastic recipe in Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours and I would like to thank Claudia of Fool for Food for selecting such a winner of a recipe for this week.

Deciphering Chocolate Labels
The common terms used in describing different types of chocolate are cocoa powder, unsweetened, bittersweet, semisweet, milk, and white. It seems reasonable enough that these terms alone would sort out the different types of chocolate on the market, and in some situations that’s the case, but too often there are big differences between two chocolates that are both labeled “semisweet” for example. In a few instances the labels are pretty clear; with unsweetened chocolate you know it’s going to be bitter chocolate with no added sugar, but beyond that it can be a bit of a mystery.  The way to determine the difference between one bar and the next is to decipher the formula of cocoa solids, sugar, and total fat in the chocolate.

This has become easier with the increasing variety of specialty chocolates available on the market these days. More information is available on the chocolate packaging as manufacturers work to distinguish their product from all the others on the shelf and we consumers benefit from this additional information because it gives us some data to work with that is consistent across the board rather than relying on terminology that is open to interpretation. The data I am referring to are the numbers such as 58%, 61% 70% that are very common on chocolate packages anymore. You might also see a series of three numbers like this, 60/40/38. This is the key to knowing what you are buying. One company’s bittersweet might be another company’s semisweet, but when you are dealing with the numbers, the terminology doesn’t really matter.

The three ingredients in chocolate are cocoa solids (also called cocoa mass or cocao liquer), sugar and fat. Cocoa solids are simply cocoa beans ground into a fine paste. The numbers indicate the composition of the chocolate with regard to the percent cocoa solids, percent sugar and percent fat. A bar labeled 70% indicates that 70% of the weight of the chocolate is cocoa solids and fat, therefore 30% is sugar. A 62% chocolate will have more sugar and taste less bitter. When the numbers are shown as a series of three, such as 60/40/38, the first number is the percent cocoa solids, then the percent sugar, and the third indicates the percent fat. Knowing the percent fat is important when melting chocolate to dip candies or coat molds because the greater the amount of cocoa butter the better the melted chocolate will flow.

Referring to the percentage of cocoa solids in a chocolate is a more accurate indication of the sweetness of a chocolate than relying on a term. However, it does not determine the flavor because like coffee beans or wine grapes, cocoa beans are very complex and the flavor is influenced by where the beans grow, how they are fermented, roasted and processed in to chocolate. The best way to determine what kind of chocolate you like to eat is to taste a lot of it!

Milk chocolate is milder because it has added milk and a high percentage of sugar. Because of the added milk and large amount of sugar, the ratio of cocoa solids and cocoa butter are lower. This makes milk chocolate softer so it won’t have the crisp snap that a 70% dark chocolate has.

White chocolate doesn’t actually contain any cocoa solids at all, which is why it doesn’t taste like chocolate. It is made from purified cocoa butter, milk solids, and sugar. It has as soft creamy texture rather than the crisp snappy texture of dark chocolate.

Cocoa powder is made from the left over cocoa bean once the cocoa butter has been extracted. It is really a by-product of cocoa butter. It is this left over part of the cocoa bean that has all the flavor and color, so it provides a very intense chocolate flavor when added to foods. Cocoa powder is naturally very acidic so some cocoa powders are treated with the alkaline agent, potassium carbonate, to neutralize the pH. This is referred to as “Dutched” cocoa powder because the inventor of the process was Dutch. Dutched cocoa powder has a milder flavor and a darker color.

I hope this helps you sort out your chocolate choices the next time you are standing in front of a dizzying selection of chocolates trying to decide what to buy.

Parchment paper and cheese cloth are two things I like to always have on hand in the kitchen. Not that I use cheese cloth everyday, but often it’s a handy solution for an impromptu straining or infusing task, and I really hate trips to the grocery store mid-recipe.

photo by David Peterman

With all of my stock making lately I have been going through more cheese cloth than normal, so when I was at a fabric store recently it occurred to me to ask, “Do you sell cheese cloth?” Yes they do, and for a fraction of the cost of the packages sold in the cookware isle of grocery stores! Even better, I had a choice between a lose weave, or a tight weave. I just bought two yards of 36″ wide tight weave cheese cloth for five dollars! What a deal.

More delicious cookies are piling up in the kitchens of the Tuesdays with Dorie online baking clan. This week we indulged in Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops. Oh yes, it was off to the candy isle to stock up on a big carton of whoppers!

photo by David Peterman

I love malt and whoppers so I knew these would be a big hit with me, though I also know from experience that desserts with candy mix-ins run the risk of being cloyingly sweet. I am not a fan of the sickly sweet stuff, so I hedged my bets with extra bitter 70% dark chocolate chunks in place of the bittersweet chocolate or chocolate chips that Dorie calls for. I am happy I did. The cookies are rich and chocolaty, and the sweet hits of melted malt balls are nicely tempered by the bitter chocolate chunks. Additionally, I topped them with a light sprinkling of Murray River Flake Salt as a final counterpoint to the sweet candy and a flavor enhancer to the chocolate.

The biggest factor for these cookies slipping from “ooh-ahh” reviews to “eh” is baking time. They are a bit of a cakey cookie and the difference between soft and gooey or dry and cakey could be as little as an extra thirty seconds to a minute in the oven. Error on the side of underdone and they will be “ooh-ahh”‘ good.

photo by David Peterman

So now that I have a big jar of leftover malt powder in my cupboard what do I do? Oh, sure I could make more cookies, but it’s not like the extra whoppers are going to even last until tomorrow, so I thought I had better come up with another plan. My need for a future-use plan is due to the last time I had a jar of malt; it languished in the back of my cupboard for about five years and the remaining contents was so rock hard I finally tossed it out a few months ago. Feeling a bit guilty, I decided to put it behind me and move on. Then this recipe comes along forcing me to face my demons! I vow to use the entire jar of malt and not let a single bit go to waste. Or should I say every bit will go to waist!

The first thing that came to mind is a spicy malted hot cocoa. Like it or not the air is starting to have that crispy nip of fall, at least here in the Northwest where we never really even had summer this year, and hot cocoa is one of my favorite cold weather treats.

Wed. 8/17 - I have updated the recipe now that I have been drinking it for a few more days. I decided it needed more malt and more cocoa.

Spicy Malted Hot Cocoa Mix
1 cup malted milk powder
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 cup sugar
3 teaspoons cinnamon
2 teaspoons ancho chile powder
1 1/2 teaspoons allspice
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Combine all the ingredients together and mix well. Store in an airtight container.
To make a spicy hot beverage, heat one cup of milk and whisk in 3 Tablespoons of Spicy Malted Hot Cocoa Mix. Relax and enjoy.

This has a pretty good kick, so if you don’t like spicy cut back on both the ancho chile and cayenne pepper. Hot cocoa is the perfect place to use a high quality dutch processed cocoa powder if you can. After tasting this, I am not the least bit worried about that extra malt powder languishing in the cupboard this time. I may even need to buy another jar before the winter is over.

Thank you to Rachel of Confessions of a Tangerine Tart for this week’s recipe selection. You can find the recipe for Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops in Dorie Greenspan’s book Baking: From My Home to Yours.

I think I have finally conquered stock. Partly because I have realized that the biggest challenge for me is figuring out how to fit it into life. Though I have made stock now and again throughout my cooking life, I never managed to adopt it as a way of life. Reaching for a can of stock in the store is always accompanied by a tiny bit of guilt with hearing a faint chorus of cooking show host and chef voices ring through my ears saying, “you should make your own stock.” Now I think I will finally be making my own stock on a regular basis.

photo by Carol Peterman

The primary reason? I just made three batches in the last few weeks and managed to work out some little issues that make all the difference. The inspiration behind my stock-fest is an online culinary program I am participating in at Rouxbe.com. Rouxbe is a great cooking site with the best quality instructional video I have come across and this summer they started a self-paced online cooking school complete with lessons, homework and tests. Sign me up! The site has some free content, but the cooking school and bulk of the content requires purchasing a subscription to access. Though I received my initial subscription as a gift by being a Metrokitchen.com customer, I will resubscribe next year.

The revelations I have had come from seeing the stock making videos and finally understanding what “simmer” looks like. Seeing a great example of what clear stock looks like and realizing I achieved that; I can see a carrot at the bottom of my bowl! Having confidence that I am doing this right makes me want to make stock. Hooray for my new found confidence, but there is still the issue of working out a few irritating kinks. They may seem trivial, but I tell you it’s the little stuff that can make the difference between something becoming second nature and it just feeling like too much darn work.

The first batch of stock I made I carefully scooped out the bones and vegetables into a bowl and moved on to straining and cooling the stock. I now have this large bowl of very hot drippy wet stuff I need to throw away. I don’t want to just toss it in the outside garbage can loose, I can’t put it in a paper garbage bag, so I scooped it into a plastic bag that I then nearly burned myself carrying outside and was worried the contents would melt the bag before I got to the garbage can. That would be a fun mess to clean up! Not to mention that I now have a giant messy bowl to wash. The better way - empty milk cartons!

photo by Carol Peterman

Next issue of contention: cooling the hot stock. From a food safety aspect the only way to go is an ice bath. I now have the stock divided between two more large bowls that I then set in two more even larger bowls containing the ice bath. That’s four more large bowls to wash! It’s late and I am tired and not liking all this effort. Revelation: Plastic dish pans for the ice bath. They are light weight and really just need a rinse and quick dry before putting them away. I am now down to only dirtying two large bowls and a stock pot. This is progress! The ice bath is nice because it is fast and the stock can be portioned for freezing and put away within about 30 minutes. The tip for a good ice bath: buy a bag of ice at the store so there is enough ice on hand to make an effective ice bath.

photo by Carol Peterman

After reading Harold McGee’s latest article in the New York Times on ice and cold things I learned how to make the most effective ice bath - add salt. It is colder and will chill faster. I had two ice baths going anyhow, why not have a little contest? The bath on the left was just ice and water the one on the right I added about a third cup of kosher salt. Sure enough, the stock in the salted water cooled to 40 degrees F in just about 30 minutes and the other one was still at 47 degrees F. After 30 minutes, the water temperature of the salted bath was 28 degrees F and the non-salted water had climbed to 37 degrees F. I didn’t get quite as dramatically different cooling results that McGee did in his tests, but my two samples weren’t so perfectly controlled as I suspect his were. I don’t know how long it would have taken the non-salted stock to cool completely because in the interest of getting to bed I moved the lagging bowl of stock into the salted water bath to wrap up the project as quickly as possible.

With only three practice batches of stock I managed to work out a few little process issues that make it just enough easier that stock-making is on the verge of becoming second nature to me. I now have the timing down - as in start early in the day so I am not up to all hours, know the volume of ingredients off the top of my head, and don’t end up dirtying every bowl in my kitchen during the process. I don’t stir and have learned to control the heat so I never let the stock boil, just simmer. Best of all I have a freezer full of great tasting stock. The true test will come when my freezer supply runs low. Will I pull out my stash of bones from the freezer and get cooking, or head to the store and once again hear that little chorus of voices?

I bet you already own many cookbooks with instructions on making stock, plus you have the Internet at your fingertips as a further resource. I hope you will have your own little stock-fest and figure out how to work this core element of cooking into your life.

Big, thick, chewy, peanutbuttery, chocolaty chunky cookies is what I’m talking about. How could that be anything but good?

photo by David Peterman

The Tuesdays with Dorie group had me making cookies this week. This recipe, which you can find in Dorie Greenspan’s book Baking: From My Home to Yours, brings the three classics of chocolate, oatmeal, and peanut butter, together in a delicious and harmonious way without letting one single ingredient steal the spotlight. I really expected these to be peanut butter cookies with stuff in them, but far from it. It could be that the addition of cinnamon and nutmeg ends up keeping all the star ingredients in check.

Two process discoveries I made: I preferred them cooked a bit crispier than I normally bake cookies, and the dough was better after aging in the fridge for two days. Dorie recommends baking at 350 degrees F and because I usually bake with the convection fan on, which makes the oven a bit hotter, I dropped the temp to 325 degrees F. The second batch I baked at 350 with convection and let them go until I saw the tops just starting to brown, and though they were a bit crispy they weren’t dry. The crunchier bite worked becasue of the peanut butter component in the dough.

photo by David Peterman

The idea of cookie dough benefiting from a 24 to 72 hour rest in the fridge was first brought to my attention by a New York Times article on the perfect chocolate chip cookie. I can’t honestly say that I noticed as dramatic a difference as the article set me up to expect when I tried their recipe and baked batches off at different time intervals, but with this dough I did prefer the extended resting period becasue the oats softened and became more integrated into the baked cookie. The hearty thick cut oats I used were a bit toothsome the first day I baked them. I didn’t intend to test the resting period with this dough, it just worked out that I didn’t have the time to bake the whole batch at once and ended up with a happy discovery.

The NYT article did have a permanent impact on my cookie baking, but because of salt not resting time. A light sprinkle of salt on the cookies before baking delivers a perfect delicately salty counterpoint to the sweetness of the dough and chocolate. Though my choice is flake salt, specifically Murray River Flake Salt over sea salt.

It was fun to bake cookies this week. Thanks to Stefany of Proceed with Caution for the great selection.

 Before I share the details of the two baking tangents I explored this week I will stick to the topic of this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe. I have never understood the appeal of ice cream cakes, in fact, I don’t even like the term “ice cream cake” because they never seem live up to the “cake” part of the name. Granted this is billed as a torte, so I was feeling a little better, but it looked like ice cream and chocolate to me. What could be so special about that?

 When I first read through the recipe, which you can find in Dorie Greenspan’s book Baking: From My Home to Yours, I was very perplexed and intrigued by the use of eggs, and a lot of them, in making chocolate ganache rather than cream. I have never come across this before and suspected the eggs must create a better texture for ganache when it is served frozen. Bingo! The bands of chocolate had a rich luscious texture and flavor that played more like a molten chocolate cake element against the ice cream layers than traditional frozen ganache ever could. I was really surprised at how much the ganache was transformed by using eggs. Additionally, the ganache delivered a rich chocolate flavor that was beyond what any layer of frozen cake sandwiched between ice cream could ever hope to.

I was so thrilled to love this dessert after expecting it to simply be ice cream and chocolate. Dorie comes through on her promise that this is a “thoroughly  grown-up rendition” of the ice cream cake. The big issue I have with other ice cream cakes is that frozen cake isn’t very tasty, soft, or moist. All the things that make cake good are lost in an ice cream cake. If the cake is actually just ice cream shaped like a cake I consider it false advertising. This ice cream torte offers bold flavors and the ganache layers have just enough textural contrast to the ice cream to be interesting yet still come across as an integrated element of the dessert.

I chose to use a Dulce de Leche ice cream and mix in toffee pieces for a bit of crunch. This is an easy recipe to make, but requires a fair amount of lead-time as each layer need to freeze before the next can be added. I think cocoa nibs mixed into the ganache layer would be an excellent crunch alternative to the toffee pieces I mixed into the ice cream.

On to my two baking tangents…pasteurizing eggs and making toffee…

I was concerned about using eight raw eggs in the ganache and the simple solution of buying pasteurized eggs at the store didn’t work out so I turned to my favorite cooking resource, Harold McGee’s book On Food and Cooking to see what I could learn. McGee states that eggs are generally considered safe from the risk of salmonella if they are held at 140 degrees F for five minutes or at 160 degrees F for one minute. His comment that egg yolks remain runny at 140 degrees F and that it was possible to eliminate salmonella in eggs to be used in yolk-based sauces had me up for some experimentation. McGee states that eggs in the shell, blended whole eggs, or separated yolks and whites can all be pasteurized by carefully heating them to a temperature between 130F and 140F, so I decided to give it a try.

I tested it first with one egg to make sure I wouldn’t end up with eight soft-cooked eggs, and sure enough, after sitting in a water bath that hovered between 135 degrees F and 140 degrees F for five minutes, it looked like any other raw egg when cracked open. The temperature of the egg once cracked open wasn’t in the 135-140 range so I decided to let the others have a longer bath in the warm water. I set eight eggs in the pan of 140 degree F water for fifteen minutes and applied more heat if the water temperature dropped to 135, so I could maintain the range between 135 and 140 for the entire fifteen minutes. When I cracked the eggs open there were a few small spots of white that had turned opaque, but still easily mixed into the ganache with no problems. The internal temperature of the eggs was 127-128 degrees F, so I don’t know that I successfully pasteurized my raw eggs, but I gave it a good try. In retrospect, I should have cracked the eggs into a bowl and set that in the water so I could stir and monitor the temperature of the eggs directly. Next time.

The other tangent I explored is making toffee. I love English Toffee, but have never made it. After reading many different recipes on line, I got on with melting sugar and butter very excited to soon have my very own toffee. Disaster strikes as the sugar begins to separate from the melted butter. I stir and stir, but soon realize they are not going to come together. I re-read many online recipes and everyone seems to be successful simply melting butter and sugar together, hum. Second try, again a clump of sugar sitting in a pool of clarified butter. I am no stranger to sugar work and making caramel, so by this time I was really irritated that I can’t get this to work. Next attempt includes a bit of water and some corn syrup - success! Well, moderate success in that I didn’t caramelize it enough for my taste. You can see in the photo the toffee garnish is a bit blond.

This got me thinking, why couldn’t I caramelize sugar the way I would for caramel and then just add butter? I was able to take the sugar nice and dark, stirred in the butter and things were looking good. A bit more stirring and it all started to separate again, argh! Maybe the 1:1 ratio of butter to sugar was too high, so I started sprinkling in more sugar and what do you know, it came back together! Success was mine, now a bit of salt because there is nothing better than caramel and salt. Beautiful. A touch of vanilla out of habit and yikes, the mixture begins to separate again. I quickly put it back over the heat and stir like crazy and managed to salvage what turned out to be a beautiful dark caramel toffee.

I still don’t know what was going on with my first attempts that separated into an oily mess, but I really like the method of caramelizing the sugar dry and then adding butter. I will work out the details of proportions and get a toffee recipe posted soon!

Thank you to Amy of Food, Family, and Fun for selecting this weeks recipe that changed my opinion of ice cream cakes and inspired some very interesting tangents that I enjoyed exploring.

photo by David Peterman

Ice cream with no eggs. How interesting and potentially convenient for the times when I don’t want six or nine egg whites left over and challenging me to do something clever with them.

Blueberry Sour Cream Ice Cream is the pick of the week by Dolores of Culinary Curiosity for Tuesdays with Dorie. I added a bit of a flavor twist by infusing the milk with some fresh lemon thyme for about fifteen minutes. The lemony herby notes played in the background against the tangy sour cream and blueberries really well. Lemon verbena would also be great with this ice cream. The sour cream flavor was very prominent and really delicious. Surprisingly, when I added the chocolate sauce the blueberry flavor came forward.

Though I was very pleased with the flavor and color of this ice cream, I wasn’t so wild about the texture. I missed the creaminess from the eggs. It was more crystallized and melted in the mouth in a different way than egg-based ice cream. I would make this again if I needed an egg-free ice cream, but I am more interested in trying to find a perfect balance between some sour cream and a few eggs because I loved the flavor of the sour cream with the blueberries.

I have always frozen spare egg whites for future use, but been perplexed over what to do with spare egg yolks. Over the years I have made attempts to freeze yolks and they just never thaw correctly. I was always left with gummy, pasty, yellow balls of goo that were clearly ready to cause catastrophe to any recipe I dared use them in.

While flipping through Harold McGee’s book, On Food and Cooking, I came across a great bit of information. Firstly, he confirms what I discovered, that yolks frozen directly and thawed results in a pasty consistency that does not readily combine with other ingredients. Being the smart food science guy that he is, he provides a solution!

Mixing yolks with either salt, sugar, or acid solves the problem. He recommends mixing 1 teaspoon of salt, 1 tablespoon of sugar, or 4 tablespoons of lemon juice per pint of whole eggs or egg yolks. One large U.S. egg is equivalent to 3 Tablespoons and an egg yolk is equivalent to 1 tablespoon. I was working on a much smaller scale and just for simplicity sake I did some rounding and for six egg yolks mixed in 1 teaspoon of sugar and it worked great.

I no longer feel the need to make ice cream every time I make an angle food cake, meringue, or marshmallows. It’s a whole new world!

photo by David Peterman

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie baking task selected by Ashlee of A Year in the Kitchen found me, unfortunately, short of such luck at the store and a bit short on time for baking-worthy ripeness to develop on my bananas, I proceeded none-the-less. Despite not having the perfect banana situation I managed to make some very tasty banana bread. What made this recipe delicious and unique is the addition of nutmeg. What is so lovely and surprising is the nutmeg hangs back letting you experience the chocolate and banana flavors before revealing itself. It is such a delightful bloom of flavor at the finish of each bite.

I found the chocolate portion of the bread less interesting. I suspect if I had a stronger banana flavor from truly ripe bananas, the chocolate flavor would have been better balanced and integrated with the banana flavor in a more interesting way. Either way I found myself coming back for more.