Tarte a l'Orange: Not a Love Story

You know that famous Seinfeld break-up line -- It's not you, it's me.  Well, in the case of this tart -- It's not me, it's the recipe.

I made this Tarte a l'Orange for the latest installment of the Ballet Cook Book Dinner Series, an ambitious project where a group of us recreate meals in the 1966 Ballet Cook Book, by Tanaquil Le Clercq.  Each chapter features recipes contributed by choreographers and/or dancers.  We chose Tanaquil's chapter for the most recent dinner.

Balletomanes can read about the entire dinner (our most successful to date) and the tragic life of Tanaquil here, in ballet blogger Ryan Wenzel's post, and here in Balletcatessen, Antonio Carmena's new culinary-dance blog.  Antonio, a soloist with the New York City Ballet, chefs all the Ballet Cook Book dinners (and beautifully, I might add).

I had high hopes for this dessert yet they were dashed not once, but twice.  The first tart, made for the dinner was a disappointment on many levels.  The pastry shrunk a lot, causing the sweet filling to cement itself to the sides of the pan.  It was only the skill of Antonio -- a true kitchen magician -- that enabled him to extract 12 presentable slices.  (Antonio would normally have been involved in the dessert making, but he had both a performance and a rehearsal the day of the dinner.  I tried to channel him as I prepared the crust, for he is truly gifted in the pastry department, but even that couldn't save it.)

One serving of Tart a l'Orange, plated with an eggnog so thick (thanks to me over-beating the cream) that we piped it on the dessert plate. Luckily, it was so booze-laden that it was good as both a beverage and a garnish.

Determined to conquer this recipe, I made the tart again a few days after the dinner. But it suffered the same fate as the first, making me think of the saying, the sign of a crazy person is repeating an action and expecting a different result.

The original tart, top picture, was made with naval oranges; the repeat performance, below, was made with Cara Cara oranges, which are larger and have a redder hue.

Pastry #1, below.  I'm ashamed to even post a photo of this patched disaster.

The second time, it looked better before baking (below), but it still shrunk horribly in the oven.

As expected, an orange tart requires both orange zest and juice...

...but the unexpected ingredient is apple "water" made by pressing cooked apples through a sieve.

The Cara Cara oranges, below.

To create sections without the white pith, peel the orange with a small knife and cut into each section with the same small knife to release it.

The second tart, below.

I managed to get only four decent (sort of) slices from the tart, which I quickly brought to my neighbors and their two teenage boys.

Watch Antonio's entertaining, fast-action video of the dinner, our most successful yet, even accounting for the disappointing disaster.




In case anyone cares to try this, here's the recipe.  The topping part is flawed too. First, it's way too sweet. Second, it needs to cook way longer than five minutes to achieve a glaze-like consistency.  Luckily, for the dinner, Antonio's partner, the ultra-talented positive thinker Michael Pereira, talked me into letting the sauce reduce or we would have had an even bigger disaster on our hands.

I (Still) Love Lucy

Three years ago today, I wrote this post about a cake I made for my mother-in-law.  Sadly, she died on Monday, so I'm reposting this in tribute to a wonderful mother, grandmother and true New York character.  Lucy -- you will be missed.

Now most Midwestern Jews might find cooking and baking for their New York Italian mother-in-law a bit intimidating.  Not me, because my MIL Lucy, unlike 99 percent of Italian-American grandmothers, does not like to spend any time in the kitchen.

Born in a tenement on Mott Street in Manhattan's Little Italy, and raised in another in East Harlem, Lucy grew up in a large family whose matriarch cooked enormous Italian meals from scratch.

When Lucy went on to have her own family, she did not carry on that tradition.  She raised three fabulous children (one of whom I married) but none will remember her for her culinary skills.  My husband jokes that even today, at age 83, her diet is similar to that of our 20-year-old son:  fast food, anything fried, and anything sweet. And she is no locovore. The further the food is from its source the better -- she recently gave me a dozen eggs that were purchased directly from a farmer, saying she preferred to get hers from the supermarket.

Lucy has been under the weather lately, so DH and I have been visiting a lot, bringing her groceries and home-made food (though she would truly prefer entrees from Wendy's or Burger King -- maybe next week).

Last week, short on time before our visit, I whipped up a Kitchenette Cake, a simple one-egg cake with a broiled icing.  The recipe, originally from 1890, was updated to 1955 standards in the Gold Medal Jubilee cook pamphlet, "A treasury of favorite recipes modernized by Betty Crocker."  It's a delicious cake; DH says it's his favorite (but he says everything is his favorite). While I normally follow these old recipes to the letter, I cheated on this one.  Knowing Lucy would love more sweetness and more of a "candy" topping, I embellished the broiled icing with extra butter, sugar, nuts and coconut.  Both she, and her companion Perdy (she's perdy good, says the DH) enjoyed the cake.

I'm happy to report that Lucy (pictured below, in the 1970s) recovered from that bout of illness, and went on to enjoy nearly three years of good health before she passed.

Date Fills

I've had a love affair with dates ever since my fourth grade teacher brought some to our Fairlawn Elementary School* classroom, covered each with a generous sprinkling of powdered sugar (as if dates need more sweetening!) and invited us all to try one.  Never had I tasted anything so exotic and delicious.  It made all my trips to the local penny candy story for Lemonheads and Smartees seem so, well, juvenile and one-dimensional. I begged my mother to buy a box and I've been enjoying all varieties of dates (medjoul are my favorites) ever since.  Sometimes I buy too many -- hence another date recipe, this one a "date newtons" or date sandwich cookie.

This recipe is from an Amish collection I purchased recently on eBay, a collection filled with the most wonderful confections.  Here, they are called date fills, but they often go by the name date sticks.  It seems that almost every recipe box or notebook I have, most from 1910 to about 1960, have at least one version of this cookie.

Date fills are not super simple to make, but so worth the effort.  I prefer to buy dates with their pits intact which adds another step, but you can buy pitted dates.  Make the filling first.  Pit and chop the dates, and cook them with water, sugar and lemon juice.  You will soon have the date paste for the filling.

The butter, sugar, flour and oats dough is easy to put together.  Roll it out between two sheets of parchment or wax paper.  Plastic wrap might work well too.

Place the rolled pastry on a baking sheet and spread the date filling on top, a step I sadly neglected to photograph.  This is best accomplished using an offset spatula, but the back of a spoon and a butter knife can be employed for this task, as well.

The slightly tricky part is placing the top crust layer on the date filling.  As you can see, mine looks rather rustic, but that's ok.

Bake it in the oven until it's browned.

When it's cooled, cut it into small squares.  The uneven ends -- quite delicious -- are well-deserved treats for the cook.

*Fairlawn Elementary was renamed the Judith A. Resnick Elementary School for its former astronaut alum who perished during the Challenger disaster in 1986.

Got Snow? Make Candy!

If your world (like mine) is covered in fresh, virginal snow, this morning is the perfect time to make Molasses-on-Snow candy, the confection popularized by Laura Ingalls Wilder in The Little House on the Prairie series and enjoyed by scores of adults and children since.

Turns out I made this twice before for ACakeBakes, and if want an illustrated guide to make this delightful and truly seasonal candy, please click here or here.

Ten Reasons to Eat Ice Cream in Winter

There's a blizzard raging outside my window now, but that's no reason to avoid the grand dame of all desserts --  ice cream.  Plus I want to share a wonderful photo essay, Ten Reasons to Eat Ice Cream in Winter by Heather Phelps-Lipton (which features ACakeBakes) that was just published on Nona Brooklyn, a delicious food blog.  Reason #2 is "The whole warm gingerbread situation."

Heather, above, stopped by one day last week with a pint of the most delicious ice cream ever (Steve's Small Batch Bourbon Vanilla) to photograph it atop a slice of  warm gingerbread I had just pulled from the oven.  She did, and once she was finished taking pictures, I ate the gingerbread a la mode.  And after she departed, for I do have some dignity left, I devoured the rest of the ice cream.

Perfect Angel Food Cake

On Sunday, I found myself with 15 egg whites (the leftovers from a misplaced foray into homemade eggnog) and about three hours before the DH and I were to host a Super Bowl party.  There was but one thing to do:  Make angel food cake.

I have a lot of angel food cake recipes in my vintage collection, but because I didn't have time to fail, I turned to a tried and true, albeit new-ish, recipe in my personal collection, clipped from a magazine more than a decade ago.  (When someone buys my personal recipe collection at a Brooklyn stoop sale in 20 years, this will be in it.)

But this isn't just any recipe -- it was developed by The Bakers Dozen, a group of passionate professional and amateur bakers founded in 1989 by Marian Cunningham and Amy Pressman in San Francisco.  This recipe has all the kinks worked out, and its clear and explicit directions provide a fearless introduction to angel food cake, which relies only on the air in the whipped whites for leavening.  (Not as scary as it seems, especially if you use a standing mixer.)

This wonderful recipe that consistently yields a perfect result, if you follow the recipe precisely, including sifting the dry ingredients two times.  You don't need a sifter; just pass the ingredients through a strainer.

The dry ingredients are carefully folded into the whipped egg whites, using a large spatula.

Spoon or pour the batter into an ungreased tube pan.  Smooth the top (as I did right after snapping this photo).

After pulling the cake from the oven, turn it upside down over an empty wine bottle.  Not having one, I simply put it over a bottle of Chateau Diana, a vile "wine product" that no one should ever be forced to drink but somehow made its way into my liquor cabinet.  At last, I found a good use for it.

Angel food cake has no fat, but plenty of sugar.  It's great served plain, or you can ramp it up a bit with a sauce.  I made a sour cherry sauce, which didn't photograph well -- the cake looked like it was bleeding, so best to leave it on the side.

Do You Write in Your Cookbooks?

On Wednesday, The New York Times published a fabulous story about the value of hand-written notes in the margins of cook books.   In case you missed it, you can read it here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/dining/cookbooks-echo-with-the-wisdom-of-chefs-past.html?ref=dining&_r=0

I take this one step further, collecting hand-written recipes, whether they be written in composition notebooks, above, or on cards, at bottom.  And some of the hand-written recipes I collect even have "margin notes," as this one for sausage cake which has a big X through it and the notation: no like.