For Taste & Create VIII, Lisa and I were paired with Sathya & Elizabeth from The Baker and The Curry Maker: our second Aussie pairing! After scouring through a bunch of delicious sounding posts, I decided to make this mushroom curry that Sathya made back in October. Lisa and I are huge mushroom fans (wait — does that mean we love huge mushrooms?) so this recipe sounded just right. It went paired well with a mushroom rice pilaf — the more shrooms the better!

Lisa says:

I love mushrooms.

Chris says:

That’s pretty obvious — I was just checking out our tag list, and mushrooms clock in at number 2.

Lisa says:

Seemed like this was pretty easy to make compared to our previous T&C events.

Chris says:

Yes — very easy and really healthy! The only difficult part, if any at all, was converting from grams to ounces.

Lisa says:

I’m glad to see that people around the world share our love for all things mushroom and cilantro…

Mushroom Curry
————–
10 oz button mushrooms, halved
5 oz oyster mushrooms
1 onion, chopped
1 tomato, diced
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 small piece Ginger, grated
1 tsp chili powder
1 tsp ground coriander
Salt
Oil
3 tablespoons yogurt
Fresh cilantro, chopped

Place the ginger, garlic, and onion into a food processor and grind until it makes a smooth paste.
Add a little oil to a pan over high heat and stir-fry the mushrooms for a few minutes until they decrease in size and start to give off their liquid. Set aside.
Turn the heat to low, add some more oil to the pan if needed and stir in the onion paste. Add the yogurt one tablespoon at a time, and cook for two minutes.
Add the tomatoes, ground coriander, chili powder, and salt, and cook for another minute.
Add the mushrooms, along with 1/2 cup of water and stir well. Adjust the heat and let thicken, stirring occasionally.
Garnish with chopped cilantro leaves and serve.

I’m not sure how this happens, butevery single Taste & Create event ends up with me baking. This month I was paired with the truthfully-titled Heaven is Chocolate, Cheese, and Carbs, a relatively new food blog featuring a bunch of baked breads and treats. I was really close to making the awesome-sounding Double Chocolate Caramel Brownie Tart that was featured for Pi(e) Day, but decided instead to make something I’d never attempted, a hot, fresh loaf of bread. This particular loaf is a potato bread, one of two (so far) featured on HICCAC. We had a bunch of wheat flour on hand, so we used that instead of regular bread flour. For a first attempt, this was a homerun — the bread was delicious! The recipe makes enough for two loaves, and for my second I made a long free-form loaf, adding freshly chopped rosemary to the dough and sprinkled sea-salt on the outside before baking. Wonderful!

Lisa says:

Whoa, you made bread!

Chris says:

I know, what’s up with that?

Lisa says:

I’m all for it — wow, this is good. Is there anything better than a freshly baked loaf of bread?

Chris says:

The act of eating said loaf?

Lisa says:

True! I like these T&C events, you make things you never would have tried otherwise.

Chris says:

That’s certainly true — wow, that second loaf with the rosemary is awesome.

Lisa says:

I’m taking the pieces with the most salt on the crust. I love it.

Whole Wheat Potato Bread
————————
2 cups water*
5 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons instant yeast
8 ounces mashed potatoes
2 tablespoons butter
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon salt

*You’ll use the water from boiling the potatoes for this.

Peel and cut potatoes and boil for approximately 30 minutes, or until soft enough to mash. Measure out 8 ounces of potatoes, and two cups of water, plus a little more on the side in case you need it. Mash the potatoes in the potato water and allow to cool until approximately 100F. Add the wheat flour and yeast to the potato/water mixture. Add the butter and mix until well combined. Mix in the salt.
Spread the all-purpose flour onto your work surface and begin to knead the dough, adding more flour and water as needed. Work that dough, baby!
Grease a large bowl and put the dough in, greasing the top of the dough. Cover the bowl and let rest for approximately an hour, or until doubled in size. Punch down, cut the dough in half and let rest for a few minutes. Form two loafs and put them in greased loaf pans. Cover and let rise another hour, or until doubled in size.
Preheat oven to 375F.
Cut two or three slits in the top, lightly flour the tops and bake bread approximately 20 minutes. Turn and bake for another 15 minutes* or until tops are golden brown and a thermometer inserted inside reads 200F.

* Note that the loaf in the breadpan actually took about 10 minutes longer than my freeform loaf. If the top of the loaf starts to get too brown and the inside isn’t done, you can make a foil “tent” to cover the top of your loaf while it cooks through.

Makes 2 Loaves

I realized late last night that time was running out for Taste & Create VI, and with the rest of our week already planned out and our being out of town this weekend, my options for creating a dish from Kelly’s Sounding My Barbaric Gulp were dwindling. Luckily, she recently featured a recipe that sounded quick, delicious, and utilized ingredients that we (for the most part) already had on hand. I did have to make a substitution: fresh raspberries have been hard to come by recently, so I substituted frozen cranberries that I still had on hand from the last T&C event. Huzzah for that miracle of the modern age, the ice-box.

Lisa says:

How is it that you ended up baking again?

Chris says:

I don’t know — at least this time there aren’t any professional bakers around to taste my wares.

Lisa says:

And it looks like this one only took like an hour…

Chris says:

Yes! Very easy, and I’m happy with the results. I like the tartness of the cranberries against the sweet of the cake.

Lisa says:

I like the sweet of the batter when I lick the bowl.

Cranberry Almond Blondies
————————-
9 tbsp unsalted butter, softened, plus more for pan
1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt
1 cup packed light-brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 cup sliced almonds, (3 ounces), toasted
1/2 cup cranberries, sliced
confectioners’ sugar, for dusting

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Line a buttered 8-inch square baking pan with foil, allowing 2 inches to hang over sides. Butter lining (excluding overhang); set pan aside.
Whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl, and set aside.
Put butter and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer; cream on medium speed until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add eggs and vanilla; beat until combined. Add flour mixture, and beat on low speed, scraping down sides of bowl, until well incorporated. Mix 3/4 cup almonds into batter.
Pour oh-so-thick batter into prepared pan; spread with a rubber spatula. Scatter cranberries and remaining 1/4 cup nuts over batter in pan. Bake until a cake tester inserted into blondies (avoid center and edges) comes out with a few crumbs but is not wet, 55 to 60 minutes. Dust with confectioners’ sugar before cutting into squares.

16 small squares

Taste & Create is a food blogging event in which you are randomly paired up with another particpant, and each of you try a recipe from the other’s food blog. For Taste & Create V, We [Heart] Food was paired up with Stephanie from a whisk and a spoon. As soon as the partner list was posted, I rushed to check out what delicious dinner item or side dish I would be preparing for the event. Oops! Turns out Stephanie is big-time into posting delicious looking cakes and sweets, items I’ve never tried making! (I don’t bake.) After perusing the site a bit more, and checking out recipes for both sweet and savory items, I decided to go for broke and chose what I thought was the most delicious-sounding recipe on the site: Cranberry Bliss Cupcakes. The cupcakes are Burnt Butter Brown Sugar, filled with cranberry sauce, and frosted with a white chocolate ganache with dried cranberries and toasted pecans. Sounds delicious, right? With the exception of my overbaking the cupcakes (dry! thank goodness they were filled…) they were very tasty — the frosting was a *big* hit.

I must say that I have a new-found respect for bakers… putting together these cupcakes was a comedy of errors. Here are some things I learned:

Lesson 1: Ingredients really matter in baking! Usually substitute margarine or some other spread for butter? Guess what? “Burnt Butter” needs … butter. Not some oil-based spread. First off, it won’t brown, and secondly, once it melts, it ain’t coming back to a solid any time soon.

Lesson 2: Don’t rush it! I figured I could whip these up before dinner, take the pics, and be done with it. Bzzzzt, wrong. Not only did I have to throw in an extra trip to the store mid-recipe to buy butter (see Lesson 1), my cranberry sauce filling never gelled — why? Instead of letting it cool to room temperature first, I just stuck it right into the fridge after removing it from the pan. Now, this ended up being a happy accident; we just filled the cupcakes with whole cranberries that were soaking in the simple syrup: they made a satisfying liquid explosion when you bit through the cake. Lisa and I both loved that.

Lesson 3: Watch the clock! The yang to the yin of Lesson 2… I left the cupcakes in the oven just a few minutes too long and they ended up pretty dry. I’m used to just being able to eyeball something to check for doneness — in this case I should have just used a timer.

Lesson 4: Essential Baker’s Equipment: A blow-dryer. You read that right! The ganache was nice and fluffy when it only had the cream and white chocolate, but as we added in the soft butter… it broke. In a big way. It turned into what looked like a bowl of cottage cheese — disaster! We tried everything… whipping it more, adding more butter… oy. Nothing worked. We stuck it in the fridge hoping that might firm it up a bit, but when we tried whipping it then, the entire blob ended up stuck INSIDE the whisk, and looked like a frozen block of cottage cheese that was weeping milk. Sad, sad, sad, and ruined… or so I thought. I did some web searches and found others who had the same situation, and someone presented what sounded like a strange fix: Use a blow-dryer to heat both the bowl and the frosting sludge for just a few seconds in each spot while you continue to whisk. Sounded crazy, but we were desperate. I was on whisk duty while Lisa manned the dryer. At first it just seemed to cause the huge glob to separate even more, but after a minute or two… whoa! It’s coming together! And of course, once it reached the right consistency, it stayed that way.

So — in spite of all the “issues” I ran into, I was pretty satisfied with the results, especially with that delicious frosting. The recipe can be found here, for those of you with better baking skills than yours truly.

Lisa says:

Did you tell them you brought these cupcakes to a professional baker?

Chris says:

You just *had* to bring that up… anyway, she was impressed with the frosting, and said that baking is way harder than cooking. Even if it was a lie, it made me feel a little better.

Lisa says:

You’re too hard on yourself. I loved the filling, and she wasn’t lying about the frosting… it ruled! I think if you would have pulled the cupcakes out about 5 minutes sooner they would have been totally fine.

Chris says:

I was wondering what that timer in the kitchen was for…