Personal Pies

There's something to be said about me and fall. As soon as the light changes a little bit and (oh, right, I'm in deciduous tree territory again!) the leaves start to get crispy, I make for the pumpkin/apple/spice rack like a rat from a sinking ship. Except the thing about moving constantly for work is that you don't exactly have an abundance of space, or stomachs if it comes to that. Enter the slightly sad, slightly ridiculous, probably not one bit healthier desserts-for-one industry. Now, as someone who for some reason can never get a mug cake to work (Better with ovens than with microwaves? Who knows?), I was duly appreciative of this pumpkin pie for one recipe that came out in Bustle recently. I happen to have both 5-inch Pyrexes and ramekins in ample supply, so obviously I needed to make one.

Well, sort of....

Some days you make personal pan pumpkin pie 'cause there was a recipe. Except you say fuck that and alter the hell out of the recipe. This is that pie.

Using the ingredients available in my fridge/pantry and my own kick-ass pie crust making skills, I made this instead (note, you may use a blender/mixer, but...why?):

Crust:
6 tbsp flour
2 tbsp butter
approx. 1 tbsp water
pinch of sugar
pinch of cardamom
pinch of sea salt

Filling:
1 egg, lightly beaten
4 tbsp sugar
6 tbsp pumpkin puree
6 tbsp nonfat yogurt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground ginger
smithereens from 3 cloves

Preheat oven to 350F. Butter the bottom and sides of a 5-inch ramekin. Mix the flour, sugar, cardamom, and salt together, then cut in butter and work until mixture resembles buttery crumbs. Mix in water a little at a time until dough just comes together. Press into bottom of ramekin, lay ramekin on a baking sheet, toss in oven and bake for about 10 minutes.

Mix together eggs, sugar, pumpkin, yogurt, and spices until a thick, almost smooth liquid forms. Pour into baked crust inside ramekin. Pop back in oven and bake for 45 minutes or until the top just sets.

You may serve this in the ramekin, but if you want to take it out for display like I did, make sure to cool the damn thing thoroughly or else it will fall apart on you. When it seems sufficiently cool, run a small knife around the edges (all the way to the bottom), invert pie onto your hand if you like to live dangerously, and then immediately transfer to a waiting plate. Serve immediately if you like, or chilled, and/or topped with whipped cream or what have you (I have not). If anybody asks, I'll be off in a corner, finishing my pie.

More green, less glowing

Hello, and welcome to the ______ post, wherein I show off pictures of ALL OF THE THINGS which have been languishing in the pile of wool I call my brain. And also some actual piles of wool. Or are these wool? I actually don't remember the fiber content of this shawl, but it consists of two contrasting skeins of Yarn Love: Marie Antoinette in the Paper Flowers colorway and Mr. Darcy in the Vitner Green colorway. I picked these up on an impulse shopping trip at the Renegrade Craft Fair almost exactly a year ago, as I recall, intending to make this pattern. And then, well, stuff happened. Like knit-300s and such. Even the short rows were...not short. So after a lot of being intimidated and whining and moaning and knitting a glow-in-the-dark beret, it was finally back to this.

To celebrate, I decided to recreate a melon bar. Just kidding. Except really, I decided to recreate a melon bar.

See, I'm in the midst of moving almost all the way back east for work, and to do a sort of cross-taper between leases I put my crap in storage, bundled up the cat and a few weeks' worth of supplies, and dropped in on Mad Scientist Boyfriend. His kitchen is...interestingly stocked (read: what is this flavoring and is it even edible?). While snooping around, I came upon a vial of melon flavoring that smelled just like the melon bars of my youth, and a challenge was born. Probably best not to leave me alone too long...

Now, for those of you who don't know what a melon bar is (um...it's not technically whitesplaining if I'm Asian, is it?), it's basically like a very dense and buttery Fig Newton flavored and filled with some sort of green melon confection. Like most sweet things I grew up with, it ain't very. Feeding it to my American friends was basically playing food roulette.

Not wanting to mess up a perfect re-creation, I decided to go the homage route.

For the cake, I wanted something relatively dense and buttery but not terribly sweet, so my immediate thought was Victoria sponge. Actually my immediate thought was "what are those Victorian tea sandwich cake thingies that you spread jam between the layers and I tried to make one once and ran out of cake pan?" I chose Mary Berry's Perfect Victoria Sandwich recipe because the name says it all. Except who the crap keeps self-rising flour around so I substituted AP flour and added the requisite 2 teaspoons baking powder and 1/4 tsp salt per approximately 6 oz of flour, taking the grand baking powder total to (gasp!) just over 4 tsp (trust me on this one, it works!). It took approximately 20 drops of melon flavoring folded into the batter to achieve that perfect green buttery flavor, but I had to restrain myself from licking the bowl, so that's good, I guess? Also, the batter is incredibly scary-thick (think more like Creature from the Black Lagoon meets cookie dough), so imagine my surprise when 5 minutes into the baking I had two tins of the most gorgeously rising cakes! P.S. They come off the edges nicely if you remember to butter said tins, so cleanup is surprisingly painless.

For the filling, I decided to improvise a honeydew melon jam. Now, have I ever made jam from scratch before? Nope. Do I have a clue how to use pectin? Also nope. So a quick intarwebs search turned up tips for how to make your own pectin-less preserves and I went for it. Hint: it involves a metric crap ton of the ingredient I don't like to overindulge in. Ever. One plastic tub of honeydew chunks (chopped to within an inch of its life), a half tablespoon of white vinegar, and 3/4 of a cup of sugar later, and I had a saucepan of low-boiling green goo. Speaking of lagoon creatures, amirite? Spike in as much Midori as you dare without messing with the texture, ladle your sweet sweet slime into a refrigerator-safe container, cover, and let chill until assembly. It might be alive come show time.

For the cream, I splashed about a tablespoon of Midori into 300ml of heavy whipping cream and gave my arms a workout. Now, you may ask, "why the crap does this cake have a cream top? No self-respecting Victoria sandwich has a cream top!" My friends, that is because I am a blithering idiot. Not having a wire rack to cool my cakes on, I decided to cool mine, FACE-DOWN (*facepalms*) on sheets of wax paper. Goes to peel off wax paper, strips off top of cake. Never fear, we'll just use a bit of cream to fence in the jam in the middle, and then use the remaining cream to cover our mistakes. Everybody likes a foam top on a naked Victoria sandwich, right? Right??? That's not sun tea in the jar behind the cake: why are you asking?

Still, Mad Scientist Boyfriend informs me that not everyone can make a Midori-spiked honeydew melon jam with no pectin on their first try, so at least I did that right! I give you a few moments to admire my layers. Behold them! Be-hold them!

In other news, there were frozen cranberries and pecans in the freezer this morning and I wanted to get some more baking out of my system, so I made a giant muffin. Alternatively it's a baked Christmas pudding. Either way, perhaps it's time to put a loaf pan in this place.

Until the next time, when stir-craziness sets in and I (finally) decide to revisit another yarn project!

All Things Green and Glowing

This is unfortunately a very short and disjointed post. Bear with me. There was simply too much cool stuff going on and not enough time/motivation to blog it all.

That and...one day I'll finish this hat. Attempt #1 was simply way too big and was going to run me out of yarn, so I had to frog it. But without further ado, and only a whole month late, this was how I spent my St. Patrick's Day weekend.

Take UV light source (like, say, the sun, or a light box if you happen to be in someone else's lab at the moment).
Shine onto glow-in-dark yarn.
Bring project into dark room (like, say, a microscope room), and watch it morph into a deep sea anemone.
Actually, I'm not sure deep sea anemones are this badass.

Follow up this performance by making Guinness chocolate cake with whiskey-infused cream cheese frosting. Variations of the recipe can be found all over the intarwebs, apparently, but I personally like putting booze in baked goods in such a way that it doesn't all cook off. I think this was supposed to be a foam top-like frosting, but I had so much fun frosting the cake that I covered the whole thing instead (in other words, I love baking but hate decorating and wish someone would make my cakes pretty for me, but alas mad scientist boyfriend doesn't seem all that interested in the decorating part either...).

Also I'm making it my life's goal to convert people to the gospel of the Meyer lemon. But that's a story for another day. Maybe in less than a few months' time, even.

You'll Never Shine If You Don't Glow?

To be honest I haven't had a lot to blog about lately. Well, not as far as my usual blog fare goes, in any case. If you've been to my oh-so-exciting Ravelry page, you've probably noticed my totally unchanging "wip" status on Baridee shawl dating back to some heat wave or another. Yep, it's still on the needles. Nope, I have no idea when I'm going to work up the gumption to get it off the needles. The medical profession, my friends, is an abusive husband, and a one-year fellowship is no exception to that rule.

Which is not to say that there haven't been a few pie experiments, a boozy cream puff or two dozen, some truffle disasters, and a whole lot of shenanigans in the process. Just...maybe not exactly Pinterest-level results. Unless "nailed it!" counts...? Witness "chess pie." This was a joint venture that will eventually need to be repeated. If for no other reason than to preserve the dignity of both parties involved in the concoction of such a diabolically bad pun.

But we were speaking of glowing. Well, I was. You'll just have to keep up.

Part of my Christmabirthdaykah present from mad scientist boyfriend* was glowing yarn. No, seriously. It. Glows. In. The. Dark.

There appears to be a sort of worsted-to-aran weight and a sort of fingering-to-sport weight. The Red Heart will probably have to get incorporated into something practical, like a hat band or mitts so caution-tapey that they can even tell Southern California drivers in a rainstorm to please, for the love of all things holy, DO NOT RUN OVER THIS PEDESTRIAN!!! The lighter stuff, though...


My first thought was hair accessory, since there isn't that much of it (somewhat less than 200 yards, I think). Basically a miniature triangular or rectangular shawl. But then, a miniature shawl would last about 20 seconds in my hair and end up in a grubby blob on the floor thereafter. So while a glow-in-the-dark-not-a-wedding-veil was an appealing idea on paper, let's get real here. Let's talk lace hat/snood things.

Remember Blackberrying? I almost didn't because I lost the actual beret at Banc restaurant/bar in Kips Bay/Murray Hill during an office holiday party. Looking back over my "pattern," I think it's time for a rewrite. With actual instructions. Which I will actually follow this time. Since we're talking a finer-gauge yarn, the weave should be considerably more open to give it that lacy not-a-veil effect to go with the eerie green glow.

I had so many other project ideas in my head when I first moved out here, but somehow this is what stuck? Oh well. I blame the chicory-blended coffee that was also part of Christmabirthdaykah present. The way to a girl's attention span. Besides, who doesn't want glow-in-the-dark clothing and accessories?

And here concludes my first piece of "creative" prose writing in an extremely, unconscionably long time. Till the next time, which should be sooner, I sincerely hope....

*darling, if you're reading this, I've finally updated my blog!