butter makes everything better

I made a half batch of The Pioneer Woman's Cinnamon Rolls yesterday.
Warning: Extremely butterific and sugar stuffed.

Fridged the dough overnight and it was pretty easy to both roll out and roll up.

That's sugar and the start of the cinnamon on top of a layer of butter- softened instead of melted, so I didn't end up with melted butter all over the floor, just flour all over the floor. Totally worth it.

Loosey goosey ends

Type A rolls

Almost a pound of powdered sugar:

The maple/coffee frosting is obviously SUPER DUPER FREAKING sweet,  next time I'd consider serving with milk instead of cider. Or maybe vanilla ice cream.

I believe that I am successfully doing my part to help my pregnant friend's goal of gaining 35 lb- I hope the rest of you are doing some cardio so you don't die from my treats.

brown butter cookies

I am too lazy and perfectionistic to make beauuuutiful symmetric oval cookies from a spoon, but even lumpy rounds are delicious when they are brown butter cookies. The blurb talks about the texture changing over time-- they go from sandy shortbread to a borderline creamy melt in your mouth kind of thing over a period of two days. Also- my new plan is to not use my oven when it is >80F b/c it heats up my apartment too much.

NYC: two little red hens bakery

Midday on a weekday you can actually sit down at one of the three sunny tables at Two Little Red Hens on the Upper East Side.

Berry crumb pie on special for $2

vanilla/vanilla cupcake

chocolate/chocolate cupcake

rosemary lemon shortbread

There are a zillion recipes for this on the web. I would recommend chopping fresh rosemary as small as possible. Also my recipe involved powdered sugar creamed into the butter-- I suspect that I didn't cream the sugar in as much as I should have because there was a little bit of chewiness that I think resulted from high concentrations of the powdered sugar glomming onto itself.

peach crumble

I made the Smitten Kitchen peach shortbread and I am not all about the light delicateness of lovely flat squares. I think next time I'd pack it all into an 8" by 8" and get more hefty squares of peachy goodness. Maybe apples next time, seeing as how peaches are finished and it is now 100kinds of apples season now.

macarons

from the Sugar Philly dessert food truck, which feels like a total knockoff of NYC's Dessert Truck with dessert truck's prices. The guys who work the truck are very nice though.

Dessert Truck, btw, has both opened a brick&mortar http://www.dt-works.net/ on the Lower East Side and the truck itself is back in action. Hurrah!

Sugarphilly's macaroons: $1/macaron

tarte tatin

Trader Joe's tarte tatin. I like how the pastry crust turns out (a nice short pastry) although the apples were a little mushy.

Buttercream Philly foodtruck

Philadelphia is having a veritable renaissance of dessert/cupcake oriented foodtrucks including http://www.buttercreamphiladelphia.com/ . This truck annoys me slightly due to its inanely enthusiastic twittering and the fact that it is varying its scheduled stops every week right now, forcing me to actually DO SOMETHING to find out where it is. Also $2 for a small cupcake is a mild ripoff. $2 for a variably sized cupcake is also annoying.

The three in front are banana cupcakes frosted w/ Nutella buttercream. They are about 25% smaller than the ones in the back. The bigger cupcakes are chocolate cake w/ peanut butter buttercream and vanilla/vanilla.

carrot cake

Fancypants carrot cake from the steakhouse Butcher and Singer, one of the Stephen Starr group restaurants.

Happy Canada Day!!

In honour of Canada Day, I made butter tarts for the first time. I used the double pie crust recipe out of Bittman's How to Cook Everything, fit rounds into muffin tins, and filled with:
1/2c softened butter
1/2c packed brown sugar
1/2 c light corn syrup
pinch of salt
2 eggs
sploosh of vanilla
400 degrees for 18 min, resulted in a soft center but not too runny. Also, no raisins because I don't believe in raisins. Overfilling the shells results in filling leakage which caramelizes (technically a booboo, but +/- depending on how you feel about the addition of chewy caramel to your tart).

The Canadian expats and the American butter tart virgins at work have expressed approval. Hug your local Canadians today.

In other news, I am getting a new stove! My old one won't hold temperature so hopefully a new one will be installed by tomorrow. Hurrahs.

Trader Joe's

Cheesecake hodgepodge from the frozen section.

Things that I miss that have been discontinued from Trader Joe's:
Toasted sesame potato chips- these were the best of the weird fancy flavours (eg goat cheese+roasted peppers)
White cheddar hawaiian style potato chips in the lime green bag
Any kind of sour cream and onion flavoured potato chip- oh wait, you never stocked any of these
Artichoke tortellini (frozen section)
Wasabi tempura seaweed snacks- so crunchy and nasal clearing

cupcake truck

Some cupcakes from Buttercream, a cupcake food truck in Philly. The cupcakes were reasonably good and not dry/crumbly, but I don't think I need to seek them out.

morimoto

Morimoto
We ordered the chef's choice of sashimi+sushi for ~$150.

chocolate pot de crème: chocolate custard, caramelized banana, whipped cream, chocolate ice cream

black sesame mousse cake: flourless chocolate cake, dark chocolate ganache

truffles

12oz (72% dark chocolate + semi sweet chocolate) + 1c heavy cream warmed

After some experimentation, to shape them it was easiest to use 2 spoons to get a hunk of ganache, drop & roll the funny shape in the cocoa powder to cover before rolling by hand into balls.

buttermilk gingerbread w/ chocolate chips

technically, Molasses-and-buttermilk Gingerbread Squares from Epicurious from Bon Appetit November 2000. I used a cake strip around the outside of the cake pan and it came out nice and flat--- but it isn't really necessary for this kind of cake.