Refined-sugar free matcha cake!

A recent trip to the local "hippie" store saw me bringing home my first ever tin of matcha powder, which called to mind the green tea castella cakes which were ubiquitous in our old neighbourhood. I thought I'd try adapting the refined-sugar free cake recipe I developed several years ago. This version, then, uses:

• ⅔ c. coconut milk
• ½ t. apple cider vinegar
• 1 c. pitted dates (the Medjool ones were unavailable), soaked and drained
• ⅓ c. avocado oil
• 2 t. vanilla extract
• 1 c. packed all-purpose flour
• 1 T. matcha powder
• ¾ t. baking powder
• ½ t. baking soda
• ¼ t. salt

This cake was baked in a greased loaf pan for about 20 minutes at 325° F. The cake is very lightly sweet, tender and fluffy. It's a hit!

Snow day, so cookies!

Kara helped me bake up a batch of Mrs. Fields Chocolate Cream-Filled Hearts from the (very) out-of-print Mrs. Fields Cookie Book: 100 Recipes from the Kitchen of Mrs. Fields, or, at least, I think that's the book this recipe came from. Caty got it as part of a Scholastic order back when we were in elementary school, and I've long-since photocopied out the recipes I liked most. Strangely, I think this is the first time anyone in our family has made this recipe, but it's a keeper!

My only complaint has more to do with the butter substitute I use than the recipe itself. I've been using Earth Balance Soy Free in my baking so that I don't risk causing digestive troubles for myself, but it doesn't handle as well as butter does: it's much softer, which means that any attempts I've taken at making a sugar cookie (as in this case), results in very crumbly dough. I find I have to let it warm considerably before there's any structural cohesion while raw. When it's baked, it makes a good cookie, but getting it there is a task!

I also used a mini can of coconut milk for the heavy cream, and added a pinch of salt to the dough and the ganache.

These are good!

Much Better

This cross-section is from the second batch, following the two aforementioned letter-fold double turns and a full rise. These are the best homemade croissants I've made.

Kinda-Fail: Homemade, From-Scratch Croissants

It looks like my technique for attempting to make dairy-free croissants hadn't changed in over a decade. I'd make up a batch of puff pastry, roll it, and end up with under-baked dough in the resultant pastries. I've recently been following YouTuber Alex French Guy's croissant series, and realized early on that I wasn't going to bother with the more technically-intensive steps (like building a lamination device), but that I could reasonably aim for his recipe technique, which involves starting with a yeast bread and laminating that. I've had great success with the bread recipe from The Complete Guide to Cooking Techniques, and wanted to try using that dough as my jumping-off point. And so it was, with Kara home with a cold and all of us house-bound with blizzard conditions yesterday, I worked on a croissant dough.

Sadly, I suspect I didn't give the dough enough time to rest between rollings, and found that the croissants weren't "flaky", so much as pleasantly bread-like with odd cracker-like leaves. I gave the remaining half-batch of dough another two letter-fold turns this morning in the hopes that I'll have created a flakier pastry. We shall see. If this doesn't work as intended, I think I'll modify my technique so that I'm brushing or rubbing the fat between the layers, rather than trying to encase it. I'm thinking that the soy-free margarine I'm using, because it's softer than butter when refrigerated, just doesn't have the structure I need to keep it manageable, and that's affecting the texture.

Homemade veggie dumplings with whole wheat wrappers

On Sunday, I made a batch of veggie dumpling filling using onion, shallot, garlic, ginger, shitake and cremini mushrooms, and cabbage. Today, I made up a batch of whole wheat dumpling wrappers, using China Sichuan Food's Dumpling Wrappers recipe as my reference, but replacing ⅓ of the flour with whole wheat flour. I was able to use up ½ of the dough — creating twenty 16g wrappers — on the filling, freezing half of the batch for later.

The dumplings hit the spot and I think I'll use up the remaining dough on a batch of beef and onion filling I can make up with stuff in my pantry and freezer.

Chinese green onion pancakes!

In light of the fact that this weekend's likely to be fairly cooking-intensive (it's going to be our first Christmas gathering at the new house!), we're doing soup and sandwiches for dinners this week. Consequently, this means there are odds and ends in the fridge. Given that I've got about ¼ lb. of cooked roast pork to use up, plus a few avocadoes, plus a bit of leaf lettuce, and had a bunch of green onions, I decided to make up a batch of Chinese green onion pancakes (having had the forethought to pick up garlic hoisin sauce and sunflower oil — which I use as a sesame oil substitute), and make wraps.

I used the quantities provided by Chef John's Chinese Scallion Pancakes recipe, with the modifications suggested by "Huadong Feng" (currently the pinned comment in that video's comment thread), using chopped, whole green onion, and cooking the onion in oil. I departed from those by then adding flour to the cooked onion and oil mixture until my roux was pale blonde.

Pictured is the first cooked pancake of the day. Not pictured are the wraps I made, stuffed with chopped pork, hoisin, avocado, and leaf lettuce (which is about as close to Heaven as you can get in food-form, methinks).

First batch of (this home) homemade bread!

This recipe is from the much-admired (around these parts) The Complete Guide to Cooking Techniques by Norma Macmillan (which is also the cookbook that taught me how to make risotto and pie crust). This is also the first time I used the dough hook on my 15 year-old KitchenAid stand mixer. It kneaded the dough considerably faster than I could have, for a double-batch of bread dough. I think I'll use it again.