Scott's cherry pie

Hi Ginny,
Happy autumn! I made this cherry pie a few weeks ago for a dinner party. The recipe is really simple, from the Betty Crocker cookbook: just cherries, almond extract, sugar, and cornstarch. The only catch is the cherries have to be SOUR pie cherries, and for some reason only sweet pie cherries are available east of the Continental Divide. So every time we go to Idaho to visit Scott's parents, we stock up on cans of Oregon brand sour pie cherries. Our suitcases are really heavy on the way home! This is Scott's absolutely favorite dessert, and I usually only make it on his birthday, so this was a special treat. I served it with Haagen-Dazs Honey Bee ice cream, which is a recent obsession. It's just vanilla ice cream flavored with honey, but apparently the proceeds benefit research into the declining honey bee populations. I was pretty happy with how the lattice top came out. I know there is some trick for weaving the strips easily, but I've never bothered to learn it.
Caitlin

New York Times Chocolate-Chip Cookies

Hi Ginny,
So I lost a bet with my sister and the price was that I had to bake the New York Times's recent recipe for perfect chocolate-chip cookies with as few compromises as possible. As it turned out, it was quite a task to track down all the ingredients. Plus, I had to plan thirty-six hours in advance of serving them, to allow for the recommended "marinating" peeriod for the dough. Finally, by Saturday morning, I had found 60 percent cacao bittersweet chocolate chips (though not the discs the recipe recommended), cake flour (surprisingly hard to come by here), sea salt, unsalted European butter. I don't have a mixer with a paddle attachment, so I had to do the mixing by hand. But I think I did a pretty good job of it, and I followed their advice and pressed a piece of plastic wrap to the dough before refrigerating it. By Sunday at 10 pm, the dough was ready to bake. I used a Silpat baking mat, sprinkled each dough dollop with sea salt, flatteded the chips that were poking up, and let them rest on the cookie sheet for ten minutes before transferring them to the rack to finish cooling. In the end, the cookies were pretty professional-tasting, but I'm not sure they were that much better than the normal Nestle Toll House recipe. Maybe if I'd used the discs, or mixed the dough with a mixing paddle....
CVD

Old Favorites

Dear Caitlin,
This weekend I woke up early on Saturday morning and did some baking. As far as I'm concerned there's nothing better than losing yourself in the act of measuring, mixing, and following a recipe...my favorite way to relax. As I mentioned to you the other day, I had some bananas that needed to be mashed, so I went ahead and made a batch of banana bread using a new recipe from my Magnolia cookbook. This recipe uses sour cream to moisten the bread rather than a bunch of oil like my other recipe and I think I like it better. The bread is lighter and crumbly but with good texture and flavor...and of course it was topped with crystallized ginger!

For my second recipe I made a batch of butter mochi to take to Matt and Malena's for dessert. Malena made a Japanese curry for dinner so I thought it would be fun to have a Japanese (sort of) dessert too. Although traditional mochi is made by pounding rice, this mochi is made using mochiko flour and therefore it's much easier! It is the ugliest baked good ever! But it is always a crowd-pleaser, in fact it's really popular with little kids in Hawaii. It has a chewy texture that kind of melts in your mouth and the flavor is like custard. Here is the recipe if you'd like to try it:



Butter Mochi

1 pound mochiko flour
2 1/2 Cups sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
3 Cups milk
5 eggs, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 Cup butter, melted and cooled
1 Cup coconut (I never put the coconut in)

Preheat oven to 350

Combine mochiko, sugar, and baking powder. Add milk, eggs, vanilla, butter and coconut to dry ingredients and mix well. Pour into a greased 9x13 inch pan. Bake 1 hour. Cool before slicing.

I usually slice it into small pieces since it's pretty rich. Yum!

*If you're not familiar with mochiko, it's a rice flour that you can find at Japanese markets. One box is usually a pound.

Bread or Cookies?

Hi Caitlin,
So I heard that you're due at any moment! So exciting. I imagine that you haven't been baking alot, so I thought I would leave some treats "on the doorstep". These are Banana Walnut Chocolate Chunk cookies with a bit of ginger thrown in. I think they're a little cakey for my taste, but they're reminiscent of banana bread and therefore they're yummy. Malena loves these, and she insists that I make these instead of banana bread whenever possible.

We missed you guys at the big easter bash this year. I posted a picture of the award-winning bloody mary garnish for your enjoyment.
Hope all is well, and we can't wait to see pictures of little Reents-Van Dusen!
-Ginny


I cant figure out how to turn this picture...