Mini Black Bottom Cupcakes & A Winner!

{First, an announcement: wegarden is the winner of Small Sweet Treats! Email me at writtenbyaz@gmail.com with your name and address and I'll send you the book!}

I can remember making these tiny black-bottom cupcakes as a child to wrap up and distribute to teachers and neighbors at Christmastime. Our yield was pretty carefully allocated, but if I was lucky, I got a cupcake or two to eat and use as a snack for a tiny doll tea party. I especially liked biting the top half of the cupcake off. This perfect bite, stuffed with mini chocolate chips and creamy cake, was exceptionally decadent.

Decades later, not much has changed. This time it was my kitchen and my cooking project.  I was baking late at night and packing up the just-cooled cakes into a pretty package. And just like before, I was biting the top off the cupcakes. This time it was a wacky attempt at portion control {you see, I'm only eating the part I want} and sending the rest to work with Sean.

That's what I love about cooking: the way it bridges the old and the new. The way that it allows you to both remember and experience at the same time.

Black Bottom Cupcakes
From: More from Magnolia by Allysa Torey
cream cheese filling:
3/4 pound (one-and-a-half 8 oz. package) cream cheese -- not softened
1/2 cup sugar
1 large egg, at room temperature
1/3 cup mini semi-sweet chocolate chips or chunks

cupcakes:
1 and 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup unsweetened dutch process cocoa
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 cup sugar
1 cup buttermilk
2 teaspoons vanilla

Preheat oven to 350. Line mini-muffin tins with small cupcake papers.
Make cream cheese filling: In a medium sized bowl beat cream cheese until smooth. Add the egg and beat well. Stir in the chocolate chips. Set aside.
Make cupcakes: In a small bowl combine flour, cocoa, baking soda, salt. Set aside. In a large bowl, on the medium speed of an electric mixer, beat together the oil and sugar. Add the dry ingredients in two parts, alternating with the buttermilk and the vanilla, making sure all ingredients are well blended.
Carefully spoon cupcake batter into liners, filling about 2/3 full. Drop a small scoop of the cream cheese filling on top of each cupcake. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a cake tester inserted in the center of the cupcake comes out clean. Cool in the tins for a few minutes before removing to cooling racks.
Yield: 3 dozen mini-cupcakes

Cinnamon-Sugar Scone Recipe & Small Sweet Treats Giveaway!

[I'm giving away a copy of Small, Sweet Treats by Marguerite Marceau Henderson. To enter to win, leave a comment on this post or follow @poeticappetite on twitter and then re-tweet information about this give-away. A winner will be chosen at noon on September 23rd.]

Memory is a funny thing. Last weekend I went to the wedding of an old friend. We didn't meet in childhood, but I can't remember exactly when we did meet. Was it college? The fateful summer between high school and college? I can't recall. All I remember is that we were working at Cucina.

In those days, Cucina, an upscale Italian delicatessen in the Avenues District of Salt Lake City, was run by my friend Sarah's mother, Marguerite Marceau Henderson. For a couple of summers I worked at Cucina taking orders, serving salads, wiping down tables and clearing dishes. On rare days I ran the cash register or made a sandwich or two.

At Cucina I tried leeks and pesto for the first time (imagine!) and learned that on a bad day a big meatloaf sandwich can be immensely satisfying. Eventually I moved on and Marguerite did too. But she's continued to instruct me in the hows and whys of cooking and entertaining through her books. There are several of them now: Savor the Memories, Small Plates: Appetizers as Meals, Small Parties, and the newest, Small Sweet Treats.

Marguerite is amazing (think Ina meets Martha) and her recipes are my go-to. She's constantly coaching me through weeknight meal making and dinner parties. In her newest book she's become my guide to all things sweet with dozens of recipes for cookies, pastries, cakes, pies and other desserts that are ideal for the holidays, entertaining, or just because. As I write this, there's a chocolate-orange bundt cake with chocolate ganache (page 146 in the book) staring me down. I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to resist cutting into it. 

The summers that I worked for Marguerite, I often took the morning shift. I arrived while it was cool and quiet, and though there was coffee brewing, I never needed it. Occasionally someone would take a broken or day-old sweet and cut it into chunks for us to eat while we did our side work. I never got more than a bite or two of Marguerite's epic cinnamon-sugar scones, just enough to make me hope that at the end of the shift there'd be one leftover for me to take home. This hardly ever happened.

For years my mother has tried to replicate the cinnamon sugar scones, best eaten warm with a bitter cup of coffee, but they've never come out quite right. The morning after the wedding I padded into the kitchen to find my mother baking from her new copy of Small Sweet Treats. Finally, she told me, Marguerite had shared the recipe for cinnamon-sugar scones. Hurrah!

The scones, packed with cinnamon-sugar ribbons and plump golden raisins, tasted exactly as they should. Just as my mom said, a dark cup of coffee helped to cut the sweetness and kept us happily munching. Best of all, they brought back vivid adolescent memories of giggling, gossiping, and trying not to sever my hand with the meat slicer.

This, my friends, is what good food should do: create and revive memories while feeding you physically and spiritually.

I'm excited to share this recipe (and Marguerite's newest book!) with you. 

[I'm giving away a copy of Small, Sweet Treats by Marguerite Marceau Henderson. To enter to win, leave a comment on this post or follow @poeticappetite on twitter and then re-tweet information about this give-away. A winner will be chosen at noon on September 23rd.]


Cinnamon-Sugar & Golden Raisin Scones
From Small Sweet Treats by Marguerite Marceau Henderson
Scones:
2 cups all purpose flour
2 cups cake flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 heaping tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
About 1 cup of half and half or buttermilk
Cinnamon, brown sugar, golden raisin ribbons (recipe follows)
Glaze (recipe follows)


In a medium bowl combine flours, suga, baking powder, baking soda, and salt; mix. Add the butter and with a pastry cutter, cut into the size of peas. With a wooden spoon or heavy duty spatula mix in enough half and half or buttermilk to make the batter just moist, not too wet. The dough should hold together when formed into a small ball. Add cinnamon, brown sugar, and raisin mixture (recipe follows); mix until just combined.

Use a small ice-cream scoop or spoon to shape the scones and place them on silpat or parchment lined baking sheets.

Bake on the middle rack of a 375 degree oven for 20 minutes. Remove and let cool slightly before glazing.

Cinnamon, Brown Sugar, and Golden Raisin ribbons:
In a small skilled, heat 2 tablespoons unsalted butter. Add 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, and 1 cup golden raisins. Mix over low heat until sugar has softened, about 1 minute. Cool for 10 minutes. Set aside while you make scone batter. Fold the ribbon mixture into the batter after the half and half or buttermilk has been added. Do not over-mix.

Glaze: 2 and 1/2 cups powdered sugar thinned with half and half or milk.

My Chicken Monterey

Right now, I'm in love with cooking from real cookbooks. I like having to bend the spine a bit to get it to lie flat on the counter, and I like getting the pages a little messy with my fingerprints. Most of all, I like being able to write a little note in the margin.

Even if I never make this dish again, I'll love looking through my cookbook and seeing this: "Made for Mom & Dad, Labor Day Weekend 2011. SF made pasta and fresh pesto to start. We drank Champagne and Vermentino. Blackberry-apricot cobbler for dessert."

My Chicken Monterey
Adapted from The Silver Palate Cookbook
I made some liberal changes to this iconic recipe: cilantro instead of parsley, wine instead of stock, and fresh tomatoes instead of canned. It was a beautiful way to use up a ton of that red-yellow-orange summer produce we got last week in our CSA. I wasn't sure about the orange juice and zest, but I had an orange on-hand, so in it went. It did add something beguiling. Sean said it was a pernod flavor. To me it was more undefinable but equally evocative. It tasted like long late summer days: fresh, vibrant, but with true, deep flavors.   

5 Tablespoons olive oil
1 chicken 2 ½ to 3 lbs, quartered
salt and black pepper to taste
1 cup finely chopped yellow onion
4 garlic cloves, peeled and minced
1 cup white wine
½ cup fresh orange juice
½ cup chopped tomatoes with juices
1 T dried rosemary
1 medium red bell pepper, cut julienne
½ zucchini and ½ yellow squash, sliced diagonally
1/3 cup cilantro
grated zest of 1 orange

1. Heat 3 Tablespoons oil in large skillet. Rinse and pat chicken pieces dry; season with salt and pepper, and cook in oil 5 minutes. Turn chicken, season; cook another 5 minutes. Do not brown; it should be pale gold. Remove chicken and reserve.
2. Add onions and garlic to oil and cook, covered, over low heat until veggies are tender, about 15 minutes.
3. Uncover skillet and add wine, tomatoes, and rosemary. Season with salt and pepper to taste and simmer mixture uncovered, 15 minutes.
4. Return chicken pieces to pan and simmer 20-25 minutes or until chicken is nearly done. Baste pieces with sauce and turn once at 15 minutes. You can refrigerate chicken in sauce and reheat gently before serving in you want to complete recipe here.
5. Heat remaining 2 Tablespoons olive oil in another skillet and sauté pepper 5 minutes. Add sliced zucchini and yellow squash and season with salt and pepper. Raise heat and toss vegetables until tender, but still firm, about 5 minutes more. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Serves 6-8

Dinner Parties and Lentils

Oh, M.F.K. Fisher. How right you were when you wrote that "sharing food with another human being is an intimate act, which should not be indulged in lightly."

Eating is intimate -- very intimate. But so often we make it public. We sit at communal tables or against large windows where the people outside can walk by and wonder exactly what's on our plate, and if it tastes as good as it looks. 

Occasionally at a restaurant you're seated so close to strangers that you can't help but eavesdrop. Only rarely is the conversation very exciting, but it is thrilling to hear what strangers have to say about their new shoes, the fights they have with their mother, or how they never really learned to like beets.

Then there's the dinner party. The true intimate act; the one that should not be indulged in lightly. The other day I heard someone say that the dinner party has gone out of fashion -- that thanks to the fervor over food, it's widely believed that you simply can't have a "special" dining experience in someone's home.

I shake my head with wild disagreement. I believe there's nothing more intimate, nothing friendlier, sexier, or more loving than inviting people into your home and cooking for them. Sure, there's an element of trouble (must clean bathroom, pick clothes up off floor, vacuum) and expense (flowers for the table, a lovely bottle of wine, and oh my -- how much was that bundle of herbs?) but lingering over a dinner at home with friends old or new is one of life's great pleasures.

When a dinner party is good, it's good. And by good I mean clean plates, multiple wine glasses, empty bottles of wine, laughter, music, droopy eyes, missed bedtimes, and forgotten worries.

I'm talking about the kind of evenings where you want to linger, where no one wants to say goodbye, where you wish -- if only for a moment -- that your dinner party could turn into a sleep-over just so you could wake up and do it again over coffee and eggs and piles of toast. Those are the kind of parties I want to have all the time.

I had one the other night, and it was good, so good. There was champagne, and deep red dahlias, and these funny little olives that managed to be dried and wrinkly and beautiful and delicious all at the same time. There was whole-wheat walnut bread from Acme Bakery which, just like the olives, seemed to be both the most ordinary and revelatory thing.

There was pork dressed in fresh herbs and red wine from the Jura, and fresh peach-strawberry crisp with a healthy plop of vanilla ice cream.

Oh, and there was lentil salad, the recipe found in The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters. In classic Chez Panisse fashion, there was nothing revolutionary about these lentils, but man-oh-man were they good.

Dinner parties and lentils. Who'd have thought they'd have similar alchemy but they do. Both begin with a very simple equation, but depending on ingredients, flavors, and how everything adds up, they can become magical.

Lentil Salad a la Chez Panisse
Sort and rinse 1 cup lentils (French green or beluga are best)
Cover with water by three inches and bring to a boil. Turn down to a simmer and cook until tender all the way through (adding more water if needed), about 30 minutes. Drain and reserve 1/2 cup of the cooking lentils. Toss the lentils with:
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar [essential! and pleas do this while the lentils are warm]
Salt & fresh ground pepper
Let sit for 5 minutes. Taste and add more salt and vinegar if needed. Add:
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
3 tablespoons finely diced shallots or 1/4 cup finely chopped red onion
3 tablespoons chopped parsley
Stir to combine. If the lentils seem dry and are hard to stir, moisten them with a bit of the reserved cooking liquid.

Add to the salad as you like from here. I toss in a cup of baby tomatoes sliced into halves, a zucchini that I sliced thin and pan fried just a bit to soften it up, and handfuls of crumbled goat cheese. Cucumber would be nice, so would yellow or red pepper.