EveJohnson, Author at Ant & Anise • Page 3 of 4

Deck the halls with boughs of chocolate

Ah, cookie night. Ten years old this year, and going strong.

I get to be Mom and provide the playtime part of Christmas baking: the dough already made, and ready to go, the decorations ready. The “kids” – all women dear to my heart – shape dough into coffee beans, or mice, or balls to roll in icing sugar or cocoa.

The regulars are Mary, my partner in Yoga on 7th, Marla, our long-time friend who does the studio graphics, and Judy, once a yoga student, for many years our informal business coach.

They cut out cookies with Mom’s cookie cutters from the 1950s and some new ones – the Christmas moose is one of my favorites. They decorate gingerbreads with royal icing, colored sugar and Smarties, and dip just about everything else in chocolate.

We drink Prosecco and play Elvis singing Blue Christmas, repeatedly, and rather loud, until Alan takes over the playlist. It’s chaos and hilarity, and I love it.

When we’re cookied-out, we eat supper – Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic this year – and the cookie makers go home with as many cookies as I can press on them.

This year we had cookie night on Wednesday, December 12. Maybe the auspicious string of twelves made it an especially happy night. Whatever the cause, it was splendid.

The standards we make every year: Cappuccino shortbreads, Gingerbreads, and Kris Kringle Krackles – the ones that get rolled in icing sugar or cocoa.

Back for the second year: Peppermint Patties, (from Gourmet’s 2011 Holiday Special Edition). Ridiculously easy, and Gourmet is right, “so much better than anything you’ll find in a foil wrapper.”

New this year: Clove Snaps, and Lemon-Lime Butter Wafers, both a success.

And then the best thing of all, also new: Jackson Pollock chocolate lace.

It’s dead simple, as Jamie Oliver would say, and maybe did say, when he made it in the Christmas special Alan and I watched.

To make it, you lay down a light layer of flavored sugar on a cookie sheet covered in parchment paper. Then you melt the chocolate, and using a wooden spoon, drip the chocolate onto the paper: solid enough that you can pick it up later, but lacy enough that it looks like it wouldn’t hold together. Then you put it in the freezer until the chocolate is good and solid. (You can brush up on your technique at the fabulous Jackson Pollock website created by Miltos Manetas.)

It softens quickly at room temperature. Luckily, if there are a few interested people around it won’t last long enough for anyone to notice.

Jamie Oliver didn’t talk much, if at all, about how to make it the powdered sugar.
I’ve made vanilla sugar before and I knew I didn’t have enough time to wait for vanilla beans to flavor the sugar. So I Googled, and after finding instructions, grated the rind of an orange into one cup of sugar, massaged the rind in, and let it sit around for a day.

Just before we started, I melted a pound of 70 per cent Belgian chocolate and passed out wooden spoons. Magic.

One great joy of the evening was the newest “kld,” Shirley. I met Shirley when I was eight and she was the sparkling, laughing, impish new best friend of my big sister Ann. You can see from the photo above that not much has changed.

What I didn’t know until cookie night is how they met.

When Ann was 14, she spent a couple of weeks in Kelowna visiting Grandma Johnson with our Auntie Glad and her two little boys, David and Bobby.

The boys were a handful, so Ann was along partly to babysit and partly because she had always been close to Auntie Glad, and they had fun together.

Shirley lived in Kelowna. They met, hit it off, and ended up a few years later being each other’s bridesmaids. Next time I hang out with Shirley, I’ll be looking for a few more details on that story.

And for now I think I’ll work on getting some of the cookie night recipes posted here.

An upside-up torte: welcome back

I can’t imagine a better reason to stop blogging than moving house. What could be more disruptive? But it’s great to have you so much closer, only 10 minutes away instead of an hour.

All it took for me to stop blogging was the beginning of the fall yoga session and getting the outside of the house painted and repaired while the sunshine lasted. September was noisy, messy, and complicated by schedules that hinged on class times and when someone could be home for the painter and carpenter. Oddly, out of all that, I found my own comfort dessert: an upside-up torte to match your upside-down cake.

Just after Thanksgiving weekend, Kevan, the painter, brought a bag of prune plums from his place on Gabriola Island. I love prune plums, and think of them as one of the consolations of fall. I used to make plum crisps, and I still keep a bottle of Slivovitz, Polish plum brandy, in the liquor cabinet, to macerate the fruit with, just in case. But I’m off crisps at the moment. Just between us, they bore me.

So I went looking for a prune plum dessert, and found a very simple torte, which, like your upside-down cake, is infinitely variable.Once I followed an online suggestion and added more plums, inserted sideways instead of place face down. It came close to doubling the number of plums, and reversed the ratio of fruit to batter. Excellent!

Next I made it with some grapes from a friend’s vines, a little sour for eating, but surprisingly good in a torte. And then last Saturday we made the pear and ginger version: four Bartlett pears, sliced thin, the slices inserted vertically into the batter, the top scattered with a generous amount of thinly sliced candied ginger.

It’s the perfect homey dessert recipe: based on fruit, quick and easy, and so simple you can put it together from memory. It can adapt to any season: a peach or berry torte in the summer, a pink grapefruit torte, or even a banana torte in the depths of winter. For bonus points, it freezes well. If you happen to have a glut of fruit, you could make two or three, and bring them out later in the fall.

I so understand baking as a psychic anchor. My Mom baked all the time – odd that your Mom didn’t. There’s something sunny and uplifting about flour, sugar, butter and eggs. You get to create an edible, often beautiful, treat. It has a moment of glory, and then it’s eaten and disappears: joy to minimalists everywhere.

Pear-Ginger Torte

Serving Size: 6-8 people

I found this recipe, originally from Marian Burros’s Elegant But Easy cookbook, on Epicurious. It’s worth looking at the link for the story of the recipe, and for the helpful reader comments. I’m reprinting the recipe here for the pear and ginger topping, and to correct what may be a typo in the original. It calls for an ungreased pan. That’s not a good idea. Grease it.

Ingredients

3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour, sifted
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 eggs
Pinch salt
4 medium-sized ripe pears, sliced thin
2 to 4 tablespoons candied ginger, sliced thin
Whipping cream or ice cream, optional

Instructions

Arrange a rack in the lower third of the oven. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
In an electric mixer, cream the sugar and butter. Add the flour, baking powder, eggs, and salt and beat to mix well.
Place in a 9-inch greased springform pan. Cover the top with the pear slices, arranged vertically, pushing them down into the batter. Scatter the candied ginger over the pears.
Bake for 40 to 50 minutes, until the center tests done with a toothpick. Remove and cool to room temperature or serve warm.
Serve plain or with whipped or ice cream.

Accidental Blackberry Sorbet

I saw some blackberries on 6th Avenue yesterday, right near where I parked to go to the studio. They were poking through a chain-link fence that encloses an empty gravel lot. There were lots of berries, many of them not ripe yet.

So yes, I know it’s not over, but it’s been cool and cloudy, which is bad for developing sugar in the berries. And there are a few bright red leaves on the cherry tree down the lane, the unwelcome first signs of season change.

Which would all be fine except that I’m watching my mind switching to fall mode, and I don’t like it.

It will be pure luck if I pick again over the weekend, and after Labour Day, finding time will be much harder than it is now.

Eventually I’m going to have to pick again, or come to terms with not picking, and it’s driving me crazy. Yes, that would be the dark side of blackberry madness.

At least I’ve built up a small stock of frozen berries. That means this winter I can indulge in one of my favorite cooking accidents, sorbet made in the food processor from frozen berries.

A few years ago I was planning to make a raspberry sauce to go with a cold lemon soufflé. True to form, I ran out of time before dinner, so I planned to make the sauce after the main course was cleared.

After all, it’s a pleasant little pause that allows the guests time to recover their appetites for dessert – so why not?

The flaw in the plan? Not only had I not made the sauce, I hadn’t defrosted the berries. I popped them in the food processor anyway, with a little icing sugar and lemon juice, and, oh delight, ended up with a very nice sorbet.

I’ve made it several times since then, on purpose, with frozen raspberries.

When it came to blackberries, I had two questions:

Would the blackberry flavor come through?
And would the seeds, which can be prominent in blackberry jam, be okay?

The answers were yes, and yes.
The sorbet was a triumph of blackberriness and the seeds were no problem.

We were getting ready to leave for Read Island, so there was no time to fuss with a cold lemon soufflé, as nice as that would have been.

But I was making chocolate chip cookies to take to Read. And there you were, available to shape and bake them.

So Kris, here’s a confession. Although I sometimes tease you about your tiny-food fetish, I really liked those tiny, uniform cookies you made with the cookie scoop. And they made a great dessert with blackberry sorbet.

Accidental Blackberry Sorbet

The original inspiration for the sauce was Lori Longbotham's. I've played fast and loose with quantities and method.

Ingredients

3 cups frozen blackberries
1/3 to 1/2 cup icing sugar
1 tablespoon lemon juice

Instructions

Add berries, icing sugar and lemon juice to the work bowl of the food processor. Pulse until smooth.
Serve immediately, or pack into a freezer container and keep frozen.
Take the sorbet out of the freezer 20 minutes before you plan to serve it.

Old-fashioned Blackberry Roll

When Alan told me that we were going to go pick blackberries at Vanier park, I was, frankly dismissive.

Half of Kitsilano is in easy walking distance of Vanier park, and any blackberries there would surely be picked over. So I only brought three small containers that I could hide in my backpack, not wanting to arrive with a bucket at a show that was already over.

Imagine my surprise.

The whole wild area of the park, on the trail that winds east from Chestnut street, then north to the boat yard and the water, has been taken over by blackberry bushes. And there were plenty of ripe berries, especially in two zones: the ones you can get if you’re willing to squat, and the ones you can get if you’re tall and have a long reach.

Between us, we covered both possibilities, and could have filled our containers three times over, easily. And they were good berries, the kind that confirm my belief that a good blackberry is better than any other berry, period.

Being able to walk to the berries and home again was an added pleasure.

Free food within walking distance? No wonder I’d had my doubts.

Later that afternoon Mary came over to work on the Yoga on 7th website, and staying for dinner. Mary, Alan and me: a family that’s been forming over the past 10 years of running the studio together.

So I was planning a simple family dinner, with a simple family dessert.

I’ve wanted to make the Canadian Blackberry Roll again ever since blackberry season started. It’s an old-fashioned recipe, one that I made while doing promotions for the Edith Adams Omnibus, a collection that came out in 2005.

Edith was the Betty Crocker of the Vancouver Sun, the newspaper where I spent 10 years as a food writer. She specialized, in the early days at least, in printing recipes from readers, and this one, printed in the 12th annual prize cookbook, published in 1948, came from Mrs. N. P. Frost, of Abbotsford.

Along with her recipe submission, she wrote: “Blackberries are hanging ripe and luscious on the bushes in the pastures and vacant lots, so here is my favorite recipe for our own Canadian Blackberry Roll.”

Being an old-fashioned dessert, it’s simplicity itself to put together, just a standard biscuit dough, rolled out into a rectangle, spread with melted butter, sprinkled with sugar and blackberries, rolled up like cinnamon buns, and baked.

The list of ingredients is short and the only thing it asks for that you wouldn’t naturally have in your pantry is fresh blackberries.

I added an extra half-cup of berries because the two cups called for seemed scant. In fact, the extra half-cup probably contributed to the two breaks in the dough that appeared as I was shaping it into a circle – the recipe below is for the original amount.

In fact, it didn’t matter at all. Yes, more juice came out into the pan, and there was no question that the blackberry roll wasn’t going to come off the parchment paper, but it still looked, and tasted, fantastic, with a pure, clear taste of blackberry against the biscuit.

We had it with crème fraîche instead of the recommended milk or cream. And I used butter instead of the “shortening” that was called for.

For the gluten-free majority in the family, this ought to work just fine with a gluten free dough – the one you used in your cinnamon buns seems like a natural candidate.

Because I can’t for the life of me think what’s especially Canadian about it, I vote we re-christen the recipe Old-Fashioned Blackberry Roll.

Old-fashioned Blackberry Roll

Adapted from the Edith Adams Omnibus

Ingredients

1/2 cup sugar
2 cups blackberries
1 tablespoon lemon juice
2 cups flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
1/4 cup butter
2/3 cup milk
2 tablespoon melted butter
1 tablespoon sugar
ice cream, whipped cream or crème fraîche, for serving

Instructions

Preheat oven to 425 F. Line a jelly-roll pan (a cookie sheet with sides) with parchment paper.
Combine sugar, blackberries and lemon juice in a bowl. Set aside.
Combine flour, baking powder and salt. Cut in butter, add milk to make a soft dough. Roll out into a 12 by 14 inch rectangle about 1/8 inch thick.
Spread the dough with melted butter. Cover dough with the berry mixture, leaving an inch along each of the long sides.
Starting with the long side, roll the dough up like a jellyroll, pinching the ends of the roll closed.
Transfer the roll onto the parchment paper. With scissors or a sharp knife, cut the top crust of the roll at 3-inch intervals. Sprinkle the crust with a tablespoon of sugar.
Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until lightly browned.
Serve warm with ice cream, whipped cream or crème fraîche.

The Joy of Cabin Cooking

So Kris, we’re back.

Two sunny weeks in a cabin on a lake, no electricity, no traffic, just loons, ravens, tree frogs, eagles, and my favorite kind of cooking: roughing it.

I know you’re a five-star hotel kind of girl, not a camper.

For me, cooking at the cabin is some of the happiest cooking I do all year.

Truth be told, I was even more entranced with cabin cooking when the stove was a two-burner Coleman, and the only fridge was the little one we now use for keeping drinks cold. It made whatever came out of the kitchen so much more a triumph of skill over circumstances.

Now, with a propane fridge and a four-burner propane stove with an oven, and this year – oh luxury – hot water on demand in the kitchen sink, it’s arguable how much roughing it is actually going on.

Still, we have to bring in anything we intend to eat, or else persuade one of our land partners who’s coming in from Quadra Island to replenish the milk, eggs and bread that always disappear fastest.

Sometimes the weather’s cold and I bake. This year we hit the sweet spot of summer, day after hot, sunny day, and there was no incentive to heat up the kitchen.

Some years we have blackberries in profusion; this year we were about a week early. I spent a lot of time clearing out the bracken fern, salal and salmonberries on the slope where the blackberries grow, but that was contemplative, not culinary.

Oddly enough, we were awash in avocados. We brought in 10 and found another five waiting in the fridge. Guacamole, cream cheese, avocado and tomato sandwiches, avocado and radish salad: it was a theme….

Blackberry Madness

It’s August, and the bushes are heavy with blackberries. I find myself thinking about them a little too much, speculating on what kind of a blackberry season it will be. Will it be a good crop? Will I find a good place to pick? Will there be good weather, and lots of time for picking?

Yes, blackberry madness is about to set in, the delirious state in which I attempt to use blackberries in as many ways as is humanly possible before the season ends.

Last year, I have to say, was about was about as good as it gets.

We spent a week at the end of August at the Captain’s Quarters on Galiano Island. It’s a combination B&B and basil farm, up near Pebble Beach.

We’d never been there before, and it was a lovely shock to discover a field, bordered with blackberry bushes, just outside the cabin door. Plus, we had an open invitation to pick.

Breakfast: blackberries in yogurt for me, blackberries on cereal for Al.

Snacks: blackberries eaten in handfuls out of a bowl.

And desserts? Blackberries and ice cream was lovely, but the one I liked best was this:

Saint Andre triple creme brie, on a thin crisp bread, drizzled with honey and topped with blackberries.

If we picked the berries after supper, we could have them while they were still warm from the sun.

I’m not going to try to describe it, beyond saying that it was cream-and-berry heaven, but I do plan to do it again this year, repeatedly, for as long as blackberry season lasts.

There are, in fact, a whole pile of things I want to do with blackberries this summer – lots of old favorites, and a few I’d like to try for the first time.

So let’s hope it’s a good year.