Lemon Poppyseed Muffins

Saturday mornings in Urbana meant a lot of things: math tutoring, soccer games, but mostly breakfast. My drink of choice was--and still is--hot chocolate, but not just any hot chocolate. My chocolate powder just had to be Nestle, and from France. Nestle chocolate powder was a very important component of the sacred food suitcase brought back from France twice a year, along with Carambar caramels and assorted cookies, soups, etc.

Nestle chocolate powder has a main advantage: when it's -20 degrees Celsius in Urbana, it can be added to hot milk. When it's 40 degrees Celsius, the magic of Nestle is that it's just fine with cold chocolate milk as well. Conveniently, one of my favorite treats with both hot and cold chocolate milk is lemon poppyseed muffins. Storebought and delicious, they were perfect; sort of sticky and just the right consistency with chocolate milk. Especially when dipped in milk, they became even softer but didn't fall into the mug, which, all the dippers out there will agree with me, is oh-so-important.

On a side note, some people find that dipping pastries in milk or cafe au lait is something "qui ne se fait pas", or completely devoid of savoir-vivre. I really couldn't care less, and don't fully appreciate a good pain au chocolat, croissant, or lemon poppyseed muffin if it can't be dunked into a mug of chocolate milk.

Anyway, I had been wanting to recreate the taste of those Saturday mornings for a while, and finally decided to give it a try. After marveling at the price of poppyseeds around here (here being the West Village), I ended up with all the ingredients necessary for the perfect muffins from the America's Test Kitchen book (notice a trend?). The batter smelled of fresh lemons and was more than promising.

Like all things linked to a specific food memory, you can hardly ever make them as good as they are in your mind. My muffins were really quite delicious--tasty, soft with a little crumble, crunchy but not too much so with the poppyseeds--but they still lack that special something. I'm thinking maybe I should use oil instead of butter, but that will be for another day. In June I'll be back in Urbana for a few days and who knows, maybe my muffins will be there, waiting for me on a warm Saturday morning just like they did 10 years ago.

(Of course I forgot to take a picture.)

Brownies : To be (fudgy) or not to be...

Blurry Brownie

I believe I've pretty much mastered the one single blondie recipe I've ever made. A sign of 'mastering' a baking recipe, in my opinion, is being able to eat the whole thing--even better, hiding it from friends to keep more for yourself--and that's exactly what baking a blondie results in for me.

Brownies are on a whole different level. Sure, I can eat a brownie, but I can't really eat 15 of them. Not that I could eat 15 blondies, right? I can sense that I'm not really fooling anyone--I can eat 15 blondies, but over the course of a 24-hour day. That sounds better.

Anyway, prior to last week I had only made one batch of brownies. It was more cake-like than fudgey, and my disappointment shot up every time I would bite into them and taste...cake. So imagine my excitement when I found an America's Test Kitchen recipe for Ultimate Fudgy Brownies. I was already picturing dense and gooey fudge brownies, especially since there are other non-fudge-like recipes in the America's Test Kitchen book. If this is the "ultimate" fudge brownie, I thought, I'm in for a wild ride.

It started out great: the batter was delicious. So delicious that I had too much and got a stomach ache for the rest of the night (note: this never ever happens with blondie batter). I followed the recipe's baking instructions and even took them out 3 or 4 minutes earlier than recommended. I didn't wait for them to cool--who does, really--and popped a tiny chunk into my mouth.

Fudgey, sort of. Cakey, sort of.

How can that be?? I was so disappointed, but they were still good. Not as good as I hoped though (however my expectations were high and very precise), so I'll have to try again. Or just make plain old fudge, and let the brownie be itself.

Ultimate Fudgy Brownies - America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book

makes 16 brownies

5 oz bittersweet chocolate, chopped coarse

2 oz unsweetened chocolate, chopped coarse (I didn't differentiate between the two and just used Nestle Dessert Noir brought back from France)

8 tbsp (1 stick) unsalted butter

3 tbsp Dutch-processed cocoa powder

1 1/4 c. sugar

3 large eggs

2 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 tsp salt

1 c. all-purpose flour.

Preheat oven to 350°F and adjust an oven rack to the middle position. Line an 8-inch square baking pan with a foil sling and grease the foil--I used a standard rectangular glass pan and it was fine.

Melt chocolates, butter, and cocoa together in the microwave (or over a double boiler). Let the mixture cool slightly.

In a large bowl, whisk the sugar, eggs, vanilla and salt together. Whisk in the melted chocolate mixture until combined. Stir in the flour until just incorporated.

Bake the brownies until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out with a few moist crumbs attached, 35 to 40 minutes (test it at 25 minutes, it might be just how you want it!). Rotate the pan halfway through baking. 

Le the brownies cool completely in the pan, about 2 hours (ha! yeah right, like anyone can wait that long). Cut into squares and serve.

From Russia with Love

The sun, the beach, and Russian food : my idea of a wonderful Spring afternoon.

Saturday was the warmest day I've had so far here in New York, and we only had one thing on our minds--if you can go to the beach by subway, really, why refrain from doing so? So there we were on the Q train, headed for a sunny Russian picnic in Brighton Beach. When we arrived, it was just as I'd hoped: Eastern Europeans shopping for food in places where everything was in Cyrillic, and therefore completely mysterious to the French and English speakers we were.

After deciding that the first store we stopped at had delicious looking pastries but way too much of a line, we headed down to another deli-type shop on Brighton Beach Avenue. Once inside, everything looked good, but I had no idea what half of it was. This was my first time trying out Russian food, and I was pretty excited. I ended up asking a very nice woman about some of the self-serve entrees, and she was more than helpful: she basically walked me through the whole place, with a description of all the non-obvious foods as well as recommendations. I wasn't hungry hungry, so settled for a few pirozhki--although I'm not sure they were pirozhki, because they were made from puff pastry--one pumpkin and one lamb. There was also a small variation on a cheesecake that I couldn't resist taking, so I grabbed it and decided I needed something fresh to go along with this greasy goodness. A bottle of "mineral water", first, which turned out to be incredibly salty sparkling water, and grated carrot salad.We then settled out on a quest for Russian pastries and ended up in the first store, where I excitedly bought a Hungarian beigli, a soft poppy seed-filled roll.

We were finally ready to hit the beach. I was expecting something dirty, but it was alright. Good enough for our improvised picnic, anyway.

My two puff pastry "pirozhkis" (still trying to find out what they were) were indeed delicious, but definitely satisfying. I wasn't hungry anymore after a single one, which was amazingly good, but the second (lamb) was great nonetheless. In between both, I had some of the carrot salad. The taste was completely different from the carrot salad I'm used to in France; there was a lot of oil (too much in my opinion), but also a lot of garlic and a little spiciness. From what I've read, Russian carrot salad is actually Korean by way of Siberia, which explains its distinctive taste.

This recipe from Yulinka Cooks seems to sum up the tastes I got pretty well, from the garlic to the small hint of sweetness.

Next came the "cheesecake" : tangy but not quite creamy, overall nothing that I would go looking for again. It was like a mix between a dry cheesecake and a weird gateau au fromage blanc, so not that great.

Finally came my favorite part of the meal, dessert. I was completely over-full by that time, but the thought of a poppy seed pastry was enough to make me forget about my exploding stomach for a couple minutes. I love poppy seed patries, and especially those from the Patisserie Viennoise next to the Ecole de Medecine in Paris. The sweetness paired with a little crunch is what I like most about them, even if I wish I could skip the "checking my teeth because 9 times out of 10 I have poppy seeds stuck everywhere" part.

Well, the beigli was great--the top was golden and had a nice eggy shine, while the inside was really fresh. When we bought them, they were still warm from the oven, and it really showed in the taste.

I wish I could go back to Brighton Beach every weekend to grab a couple pastries, but the weather is supposed to get even warmer this weekend, which means more beaches to explore. Now if only each country had its neighborhood at a beach in New York, it would make things even better.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins

...Finally!

After much consideration, I decided that my failed muffins came from a combination of me not knowing my "new" oven well enough, and the fact that my baking soda was a little old--to be honest, I used the one that was already here when I moved in, which isn't the smartest thing to do.

Once I realize this, I didn't have much of a choice, and set out to prove to everyone (well, myself, anyway) that my pumpkin chocolate-chip muffins could be as good here as they are in Paris.

And they were!

To be honest, I wasn't quite concentrated when I started to bake. I was probably thinking about dinner plans or something like that (we had guests over for the week), and I only decided to taste the batter once I had scooped it all into my muffin pan. That's when I realized they tasted strangely salty. I brushed it off, thinking I just didn't remember the taste of the batter and that this was absolutely normal. I set them in the oven, and three minutes later it hit me. I had forgotten to add sugar. Not looking for an "interesting" sweet & savory mix, I promptly removed the muffins from the oven, put everything back into a bowl, and added sugar. I noticed the chocolate chips were starting to melt, so I added another half cup or so. 

Now I wouldn't really recommend making this same mistake, but it turns out the combination of non-melted and half-melted chocolate chips was a success, at least from what I was told. The batter had a hint of chocolate, and the full chocolate chips added a little something.

OK, so they weren't like my muffins in Paris, but that's what baking is all about, right? Out with the old (or at least set it aside, unwillingly), in with the accidentally new!

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins - successful Paris version

makes approx. 30 muffins

adapted from a Nestle recipe

3 c. flour

2 tsp baking soda

2 tsp baking powder

2 tsp pumpkin pie spice

1/2 tsp salt

4 eggs

2 c. sugar

1 15 oz. can of pumpkin puree

1 c. applesauce or oil

1 1/2 c. chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350°F / 180°C.

Beat eggs and sugar together; add pumpkin and applesauce (or oil) and combine.

Stir in dry ingredients until combined, without overmixing.

Finally, add chocolate chips.

Fill each muffin cup 2/3 to 3/4, and bake for 20-25 minutes.