I wish that I had a photo of these to show; they were just too delicious, though, and didn’t last long enough. The addition of a little bit of almond meal to the crust gives them a complexity of flavor that plays very nicely with the clean tartness of the lemon curd.

Lemon curd is tricky

Lemon curd is a very difficult beast. It’s too easy for it to be off-balance: the butter, sugar or tartness from the lemons can easily dominate, and then it’s just good, not sublime like it can be. There are no hard and fast secrets for getting the balance right, either, as it depends entirely on the particular lemons you’re using. As their sugar levels vary, the amount of juice and sugar you’ll need to use to balance out the curd will change. This means that you should taste the curd while it’s cooking, so that you can balance it out at the last minute if it needs it.

The second tricky part to a good lemon curd is making it so that it sets properly, and doesn’t have those nasty little bits of egg white that cook too soon and gum it up. I came across a discussion of lemon curds online somewhere, and one of the participants had a suggestion which worked perfectly: that’s the basis of the recipe below. The secret is two-fold. First, you cream the butter and sugar like you’re making a cake. Second, you must stir the lemon curd constantly while it’s cooking. When you first put it on the heat it will be chunky. As you stir, it will go smooth. It will take several minutes for the transition to smoothness to start, but once it has started it will be quite rapid. This is when you have to taste it to correct the balance of flavors. Similarly, when it thickens it will happen very rapidly. The whole cooking process should take no more than 10–15 minutes.

Recipe

Crust

• ½ cup flour
• ½ almond meal
• ¼ confectioner’s sugar
• ½ melted butter

Curd

• ¼ cup butter, cut into pieces
• 1¼ cup sugar
• 4 eggs, lightly beaten
• ¾ cup lemon juice
• 1 tbsp. minced lemon zest

First, we prepare the crust:

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F
2. Sift together the flower, almond meal and powdered sugar
3. Stir in the melted butter
4. Press into the bottom of an 8-inch baking pan
5. Bake for 20 minutes

While the crust is baking, let’s make the curd:

1. Cream the butter
2. Gradually beat in the sugar
3. Beat in the eggs
4. Mix in the lemon juice and lemon zest
5. Cook over a double-boiler, while stirring constantly
6. The curd will thicken: it is done when it coats the spoon you’re stirring with, and you can use your finger to draw a line through the curd on the spoon that stays

Now assemble the bars:

1. Pour the curd into the pre-baked crust
2. Return the bars to the oven for another 25 minutes
3. When baked, let cool to room temperature and then refrigerate
4. Before serving, cut into 2-inch squares and sprinkle with powdered sugar

I brought a pile of these into work and they vanished: they’re quite tasty.

Who doesn’t love chocolate?

That’s what I thought. Nobody raised their hands.

I love to make desserts that finish a meal in style, and this chocolate mousse certainly fits the bill. The best part is that it’s very easy to make.

Choose your chocolate wisely

Like with flourless chocolate cakes, you have to choose your chocolate very carefully. If you look at the ingredients for this recipe, it’s chocolate with a little bit of butter, some eggs, and a smidgen of coffee. If your chocolate is no good, your mousse won’t be any good either. The mousse will highlight the characteristics of the chocolate; if the chocolate is bitter, the mousse will be bitter. If the chocolate is very fruity, the mousse will be fruity. So choose carefully.

I tend to make this with the blocks of Ghirardelli (dark, of course) that Trader Joe’s sells. It’s a very good all-purpose chocolate.

Pots de chocolat

• 8 ounces of any semisweet chocolate, broken into chunks
• 1½ tablespoons butter
• 2-3 tablespoons of strong coffee, rum or brandy
• 3 eggs
• Pinch of salt

1. Put the chocolate, butter and coffee (or liquor) into a double boiler over moderate heat. Stir until completely melted and smooth.
2. Let the chocolate stand for a few minutes to cool.
3. Separate the eggs.
4. Once the chocolate has cooled slightly (it should still be warm), add the egg yolks one at a time, stirring until smooth after each addition.
5. Beat the egg whites and the salt until they hold a firm shape. They should be stiff, but not dry.
6. Fold the whites into the chocolate. Start with a large spoonful of whites, and fold it in. Then do a second large spoonful. Then do half of the remaining whites, and then the rest.
7. Gently transfer the mousse to serving dishes like ramekins, small bowls, or martini glasses.
8. Put the dishes in the fridge for 6-8 hours or overnight. If overnight, the texture will be firmer when eaten; be sure to cover them with plastic wrap so that the tops don’t dry out.
9. Serve with a dollop of whipped cream and a garnish — grated chocolate, a mint leaf, or some fresh berries.

This recipe makes 6–8 servings.

Enjoy!

My upstairs neighbor gave us some macha: Japanese powdered green tea. The Japanese are the only people on the planet who still drink this stuff — it’s a very primitive form of tea, and when brewed it’s quite bitter. They eat it with sweets that are too sweet, alternating bites of too-sweet with sips of too-bitter, and it all balances out.

I like drinking macha, though; but I’d rather make delicious tasty desserts with it, like this one which I made this afternoon. The recipe is based on the “Rich roll cookies” from Joy of Cooking.

Green tea cookies

Rich green tea roll cookies

• 1 cup softened butter
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2¼ cups flour
• 1 tbsp. powdered green tea
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Cream together the butter and sugar. Beat in the egg and vanilla. Sift together the dry ingredients, and stir in to the butter mixture. Since there is almost no water in the dough, don’t worry about over-working it. When the dough has an even color and texture, form it into a ball and chill for 3-4 hours.

Preheat the oven to 350°.

Roll the dough out on a very, very lightly floured surface. Too much flour is death for these cookies. Cut them into your favorite shapes with a knife or cookie cutters. Bake them on a cookie sheet that either has a piece of parchment paper on it or has been lightly greased, for 8-10 minutes or until the corners get slightly brown.

Eating them reminds me of being in Japan!

Yesterday Sally and I went to Sauvie Island Farms to pick marionberries, and what a bountiful harvest it was. After a few hours with only a couple of minor scratches (those things have thorns!), we weighed in with 23 and a quarter pounds of gorgeous marionberries. When they are super fresh off the plant, and are warmed by the sun, they have a wonderful musky spiciness to them that I had never quite experienced like this. To date my marionberry consumption, though non-trivial, has been through farmer’s market berries, which are usually picked a day or two before they are sold. As good as those have been, freshly picked is better.

The first batch of marionberry jam

So what do you do with 23 pounds of berries? You make jam! Sally has been wanting to try canning for a while, and so we got the equipment we need assembled, and made marionberry jam. Our first batch produced 3 large jars. Professor Snape says, “I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death.” Well, without any kind of wizardly training, anybody can bottle summer. I’m looking forward to enjoying these jams all winter long.

First batch: Marionberry jam

• 8 cups marionberries
• 5-6 cups sugar
• ½ cup lemon juice
• 1 tbsp. pectin
• Big splash of Chambord

I won’t delve in to the details of the jam-making process: essentially, you boil all of the ingredients, pour the hot jam into sterilized mason jars, seal them, and drop them in to boiling water for 10 minutes to “process” them, which means driving the air out. Then, as they cool, they seal themselves. But there are a lot of tips and tricks, for which I would refer you to a good canning book. Most of them have to do with keeping sterile and how to tell that your jam will set, and not be fruit soup or jello.

The second batch was more of the same, with the pectin adjusted a little bit (to 1 tbsp), and a smidge less sugar (5 cups), to bring out the berry flavor more. It was better.

The third batch was different, and included some things we got at the farmer’s market yesterday morning.

Third batch: Modified black and blue jam

• 6 cups marionberries
• 6 cups blueberries
• 7 cups sugar
• 2/3 cup lemon juice
• 4 teaspoons of lemon zest

It’s called “black and blue” because it’s intended for blackberries and blueberries. It’s more of a purple and blue when made with marionberries. This is a spectacular jam, full of rich flavor as the blue and marion play off of each other, and the whole thing is lifted and brought out by the zest. I highly recommend it.

The fourth batch was spiced.

Fourth batch: Spiced marionberry and apple jam

• 4 cups peeled, cored and chopped apples
• 1 cup red wine vinegar
• Zest of 2 lemons
• 6 cups marionberries
• 5½ cups sugar
• ½ teaspoon each of nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves

In this case, you start out the apples, vinegar and lemon for about 10 minutes before adding the rest of the ingredients and the proceeding as you would with any other jam. The spices are subtle in the finished product, and they mesh with the muskiness of the berries very well. This would be fantastic on vanilla ice cream or on cheesecake, and tastes very autumn-like because of the spices.

All in all, it’s been a very productive day; we made a lot of jam. And we’ll be sure to enjoy it for the coming months.

Ingredients

• New bottle of Jim Beam bourbon
• 3-6 vanilla beans

Method

First, slit the vanilla beans down one side. Second, open the bottle of bourbon. Third, put the beans in the bottle. Fourth, put the cap back on the bottle. Fifth, let it sit for at least 1 month.

If you get a handle of bourbon instead of a fifth, add a vanilla bean or two. The longer the bottle sits, the better it gets; the first 10% of the bottle is good vanilla extract, and the last 10% of the bottle is fantastic vanilla extract. The best part, though, is that when you’re finally done with the bottle, you can take the vanilla beans out and still use them for making vanilla ice cream, pastry cream, or any other vanilla-based confection.

To get vanilla beans, you can pay far too much money for them at your local grocery store or cooking store, or you can try Vanilla Plantations.

A good friend of ours just came up from L.A. to visit over the weekend, and as a special treat I thought I would make a tasty breakfast Sunday morning. I gave our guest some choices, and she settled on pancakes. My current favorite is a recipe for some very, very thick and solid yeast-risen sourdough pancakes. I’ve been growing the starter for a little over a month, and I have to say that it’s very good and getting better. If you make pancakes regularly, you have to make the sourdough starter once, and then just refresh when you make ‘em. The recipe these came from is called “Ventry Sourdough Pancakes,” from Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s Home Baking, which is a pretty good book about baking traditions from around the world. In any case, the pancakes from this recipe come out easily a half inch thick, and absorb maple syrup like nobody’s business. The sourdough isn’t overpowering, and provides a subtle alternative to buttermilk; the yeastiness of them is fantastic.

Ingredients

Sourdough Starter

• 1/4 teaspoon active dry yeast
• 2 cups lukewarm water
• 2 cups all-purpose flour

Pancakes

• 2 large or extra large eggs
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• About 2 cups all-purpose flour

Method

To make the starter, dissolve the yeast in the water, then add the flour and stir vigorously to make a smooth batter. Let stand, covered, for 12-24 hours at room temperature. Before using the starter, take out 1/2 cup and save in a well-sealed glass jar in the refrigerator for use at a later date. The next time you make these, take the starter out of the fridge the day before, and add 2 cups of water and 2 cups of flour and stir well, then cover and refrigerate overnight. Bring back to room temperature and save 1/2 cup before using.

To make the pancackes, place the remaining 3 1/2 cups of starter in a bowl. Stir in the eggs, sugar, oil, salt and baking soda and beat until smooth. Add the flour and stir until you have a thick, pourable batter.

Cook the pancakes in a lightly oiled heavy skillet over medium heat. Feel free to encourage the batter to flow around the pan by tilting it to make round shapes. Cook each pancake until the top surface shows bubbles all over, about 3 minutes, then flip and cook until the second side is golden, about 2 minutes more.