raspberry – AT-AT Everywhere

Pink Lemonade Bars (Raspberry Lemon Bars)

As a fruity compliment to the decadent Chocolate Cake with Espresso Buttercream that I made for our extended family potluck last month, I made a batch of Pink Lemonade Bars (a.k.a. Raspberry Lemon Bars) just to make sure I had all my bases covered. And yes, this bar is the more fibrous sister of the Gorgeous Strawberry Blonde Bars I made a couple of years ago.

Here is the recipe as adapted from Smitten Kitchen:

INGREDIENTS

For the crust:

1/4 C sugar
1/4 tsp freshly grated lemon zest
1/8 tsp salt
1/2 C (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into chunks
1 C all-purpose flour

For the pink lemonade layer:

1 C raspberries
2 large eggs
3/4 C sugar
1/4 C freshly squeezed lemon juice (about 2 lemons’ worth)
1/3 C all-purpose flour
Powdered sugar, for dusting

DIRECTIONS

Preheat your oven to 350°F and line an 8x8x2-inch baking pan or Pyrex with parchment, letting it extend up two sides. Butter or coat the bottom and sides with a nonstick spray and set the pan aside.
Make the base: In a food processor, pulse together the sugar, zest and salt until combined. Add the butter and pulse until it is evenly dispersed in the dough. Add the flour and pulse the machine until it’s just combined and the mixture is crumbly. Press the dough into the prepared pan and about 1/2-inch up the sides. Don’t worry about making this perfect – no one can tell once the filling is in it. Bake for 15 minutes, until lightly browned at edges. Let cool on a rack while you prepare the filling. Leave the oven on.
Make the pink lemonade layer: Puree the raspberries in a food processor until they’re as liquefied as they’ll get. You don’t have to wash the food processor in between steps, but just make sure there aren’t any huge chunks of dough in there before adding the raspberries. Run the puree through a fine-mesh sieve, pressing out all the raspberry puree that you can. Leave the seeds behind. You’ll net about 1/3 cup strained puree, but don’t worry if you have a little less than that.
Strain Raspberry Puree
In a medium bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar and lemon juice until smooth. Whisk in 3 tablespoons of raspberry puree. Stir in flour. Pour into cooling crust and return pan to the oven, baking the bars until they’re set (they’ll barely jiggle) and slightly golden at the edges, about 25 to 30 minutes. Cool completely before cutting into rectangles. (You can speed this up in the fridge.)
Filling Mixture
I cut these into 16 2×2-inch squares and each one fit snugly in a standard cupcake liner. Dust with powdered sugar just before serving. You can store these in the fridge in an airtight container for up to a week.

I didn’t get to try these because they were eaten up by our family potluck attendees, but I typically assume running out quickly is a good sign!

Sprinkle Powdered Sugar Just Before Serving

Basic Macarons

I’m a Macaronaholic. Part of why I love these cookies so much is because I respect the fact that it’s really easy to make bad ones. Different factors come in to play when making these chewy little clouds of heaven – humidity, room temperature, sifting, distribution of heat in your oven, etc. I’ve been too intimidated to make them on my own out of fear of having new content to contribute to my list of crafting/baking disasters. If only there was some sort of alert to let you know when you’re about to over mix, over (or under) dry, or over bake your macarons…

I braved the Black Friday madness once again, this time to take an Intro to French Macarons class at the mall in Santa Monica with the goal of quelling said fears. We made a basic vanilla macaron with four different fillings – raspberry buttercream, passion fruit buttercream, coffee buttercream, and a very buttery salted caramel. The salted caramel was made from scratch, and we made an Italian meringue buttercream, split it three ways, and then added the secondary flavor for the other fillings. The raspberry filling just had freeze-dried raspberries added to it, and concentrates were added to the buttercream for the passion fruit and coffee fillings. Pretty straightforward.

The class was really informational and fun, with the exception the one student in my class who also happened to be named Allison. She referred to me throughout the class as “Other Allison”, probably because her macaron cookies came out cracked and in any shape but round. She didn’t like this, and made comments like “Leave it to Other Allison to show the class up.” However, once the cookie sheets came out of the oven, she “accidentally” took one of mine and started applying the filling to those. I would have blamed it on a mix-up with the name, but she had written “Allie” on her cookie sheet. Really? I was already annoyed with her for being obnoxious, but as I looked at the sad “Allie” misshapen macaron cookies I was left with, I was just about ready to stab her with my offset spatula. Luckily, as a test of my learnings, I got asked to make a second batch and those turned out great. Suck it, Allie. #notbitter

Basic Vanilla Macaron with Raspberry Buttercream Filling

I’m taking an intermediate class next week to learn how to make different types of macaron fillings (custards, ganaches, etc.), as well as different flavored cookies (rose petal, pistachio, hazelnut, etc.). Really exciting! After that, I think I may try them on my own. Eek!

Raspberry Coconut Oatmeal Bars

I recently reformatted my computer all by myself (+10 geek squad points!) and ended up using these to pay off a friend who got me Microsoft Office and a couple of clutch photo editing programs (Photoshop and Lightroom, here I come!). Thanks, Jay!

I randomly came across the recipe while perusing the interwebs and thought it sounded good. I noticed that the recipe called for a food processor to mix the dry ingredients together, as well as a dough blender to blend the butter and dry ingredients together – neither of which I had. I never needed to make a crust this way before, and had only ever used Jay’s dough blender to make guacamole (it’s REALLY great for guacamole). Not having that or the food processor didn’t stop me – I figured I could do it all by hand by… furiously stirring a fork. I got the dry ingredients taken care of just fine, but the dough blending became challenging once the butter came into play.

After making the crust for these bars with a fork, acquiring a dough blender is now at the top of my to-buy list. The fork method was tedious to say the least.

I’ll be able to actually have some pretty pictures soon using something better than Microsoft Office Picture Manager! For now, you’ll have to deal with what I got in the gallery here:

Token “Before” Photo – Pretty Simple Ingredients

Crust = Dough + Toasted Coconut + Old-Fashioned Oats

Raspberry Mini Cheesecakes

I somehow managed to get sick AGAIN last week, thus the surge in posts (2 posts within a week is a lot!). It all started on Valentine’s Day – the day I was planning to surprise Kevin with a new cheesecake recipe I came across back in January. However, we miraculously must have channeled the germ gods at the same time because we both ended up feeling fatigued and sniffly by the end of the day. After almost a week straight of feeling congested, unquenchably dehydrated, and tired, I finally regained my energy over President’s Day weekend – enough energy to cook-up a storm.

The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, or so the cliché goes. However, the object of my affection has a bottomless pit for a stomach and peculiar taste preferences, so I’ve really had to change up my game in the last few months. While my food staples are quinoa, fresh produce, and lean proteins, Kevin’s are Party Pizza, Carl’s Jr. western bacon cheeseburgers, chicken nuggets, and hot sauce. While I like to think I’ve always been a decent cook (considering my parents don’t cook so I pretty much figured it out on my own), it’s been a challenge to meet halfway between an “obsessively healthy” cooking style to cuisine that has a lot of flavor additives. The man even said STEAK doesn’t have enough flavor…to which I replied, “That’s because you haven’t had mine yet”. Challenge accepted. I said I was going to make steaks for dinner.

After an hour’s worth of time at Ralphs and Trader Joe’s followed by a 3-hour (yes, THREE HOUR) stint in the kitchen, I’m glad to share with you my well-rounded (albeit not calorie-friendly) dinner featuring a dinner salad, my favorite homemade steak, mac and cheese (Kevin’s pick), and raspberry mini cheesecakes. The raspberry cheesecakes really are the main event to this post, but I was taking tons of photos for the cheesecakes anyway so I figured why not do the same for the meal as a whole.

Who can resist a medium-rare filet mignon rubbed with a little fresh ground pepper and kosher salt? I topped it with some fried garlic and grilled onions on the side. Nom.

Next up, we have baked mac and cheese, utilizing a recipe I borrowed from Alton Brown.

Last but not least, sweets for my sweet. I made a raspberry puree sauce with my “hand-y” food processor. That is, I don’t own a food processor so I mashed a container of raspberries with a fork and separated the seeds from the fruit. I didn’t need the raspberry seeds/guts for this recipe, but it made a nice pseudo-jam for my almond butter sandwich the next morning.

Raspberry Sauce (right) and Seeds (left)

The hardest part about making these guys was dealing with the water bath situation. I drowned one or two mini cheesecakes in water every time I took a batch out of the oven. The other difficult step was drawing the hearts, while taking a photo in one hand and keeping my other hand steady while doing the heart. I didn’t have any toothpicks handy, so I improvised by using an uncooked soba noodle to draw the hearts.

I thoroughly enjoyed this particular recipe… dare I say even better than the Peanut Butter Chocolate Mini Cheesecakes I made for his birthday in August. As fluffy as I thought those were, these were much more delicate and light, but still had a velvety rich taste to them. Voilà!