desserts

How to make your own butter

August 31, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

I have this weird obsession with pioneer days. Like, pioneer times, I mean — basically how the world worked before the Internet, the telephone, refrigeration. I have been known to say things like, “Well, in pioneer times they didn’t have [insert modern convenience here]. And they got by just fine.” I think this is practice for whenever I become a mom someday. That sentence was just made to be said to an eight-year-old child playing video games at the dinner table.

Anyway: last week I came across a blog post on how to make butter. And they made it sound so easy, I thought, why not? Show me my Laura Ingalls Wilder floppy bonnet and long skirt. (If only I had such things.)

So, last Friday, I followed the directions and poured a liter of heavy cream into my standing mixer. I turned it on high. I went to my kitchen table and surfed the Internet for maybe 10 minutes.

Went back to my mixer, and saw the butter had started to separate from the cream. And it had started to slosh around, spraying cream all over my nearby toaster oven, and the kitchen wall. Eeeee! I quickly formed a tent around the mixer with plastic wrap, changed out the whip for a paddle, and went back to my computer. (My Google Reader keeps me endlessly busy.)

Just a few minutes later, I checked on the mixer and found soft yellow butter, floating in a pool of cream.

BUTTER. I HAD MADE MY OWN BUTTER.

I felt like standing on the kitchen table and pounding on my chest. In a matter of minutes, I, your humble kitchen servant, had turned cream into rich, clean-tasting butter. Granted, this was not the best butter I’d ever had. It was nice enough, very similar to Land O Lakes. But still: I had made it.

On a giddy butter high, I decided to make ice cream with the leftover buttermilk. Unfortunately it didn’t have the tang of real buttermilk — it was milky and slightly sweet — but the Internet told me that if I left the bowl in a warm place for two days, I’d have fresh, homemade buttermilk. Maybe I’ll try that next time. Perhaps when I make homemade cultured butter.

My own little butter ball, meanwhile, ended up in a batch of homemade dark chocolate brownies. When I added the butter to my pot of melted chocolate, I almost thought my head would explode.

A certain someone later enjoyed licking the bowl.

Butter recipe below.
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A day trip to UNAM and Café Azul y Oro

June 17, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

Last week, in the spirit of Exploring Mexico Now That I Don’t Have a Full-Time Job, Alice and I took a trip to Ciudad Universitaria to see UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

It’s considered among the largest universities in the Americas, with nearly 200,000 undergrad and grad students enrolled this past school year. Can you imagine? The place is huge.

They’ve also got a lot of really cool murals, and a new contemporary art museum called MUAC. (Which we reached by cab, because we couldn’t figure out how to take the free university shuttle.) It ended up being a neat day trip, though. We saw the famous Central Library mural created by Juan O’Gorman (pic above), and we wandered around and saw kids playing ping-pong and studying outside on bean bag chairs. We stopped at a cafeteria for a snack — a muy rico panela and avocado sandwich — and then hit MUAC, which ended up being this giant, peaceful breath of glass and steel.

We ate our real lunch at Café Azul y Oro, which I’ve been dying to go to. All the local magazines have hailed it as high-quality Mexican cuisine for a fraction of what you’d pay elsewhere. I loved that the place was casual (paper napkins; no AC), and the menu creative — my prehispanic corn-gelatin dessert was officially the highlight of the afternoon — but I’m not sure I’d make a special trip, especially considering it takes me an hour to get down there.

Definitely will eat there again next time I hit UNAM, though. Then hopefully then we can see the murals we missed, and the rogue auditorium that’s been taken over by students.

Lots of photos of UNAM, MUAC and Azul y Oro after the jump.
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Mexican chocolate tofu pudding with homemade churros

June 10, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

I’ve been dreaming about Mexican chocolate tofu pudding since Crayton forwarded me the New York Times recipe a few weeks ago. It was my turn on our recipe exchange, so I ditched my Mexican chocolate ice cream idea and told everyone I was making dairy-free pudding. A few people were like, “Wait…. what?” None of us are vegan.

Last night, we feasted before the pudding-making even started. Alice whipped up a batch of pot stickers. Julie brought sweet bread from a Japanese bakery. Tricia brought mini-weenies in barbecue sauce, Joy H. brought spicy guac, and Jesica and Joy V. brought wine. (Which later resulted in extremely blurry churro pictures.)

Jesica graciously offered to let us use two chocolate bars she’d bought in Tabasco. She crushed them on my molcajete….

… and then we melted them in the microwave. They smelled like fresh-baked brownies.

Everything went into the blender, with a box-and-a-half of tofu and some spices.

The result was luscious. It was a creamy, thick, perfect pudding, that required all of five minutes on the stove.

This means a lot to me, because a few months ago I experienced the great Chocolate Pudding Disaster of 2009. I spent hours melting chocolate and worrying about the scalding the milk, only to end up with chocolate soup. I almost swore off chocolate pudding forever after that. But tofu, that wonderful, square-headed, plain block of soy, has saved me.

The churros weren’t as easy. I used a recipe from my 1944 copy of Elena’s Famous Mexican and Spanish Recipes, which called for a simple flour-and-water dough. Unfortunately, the tip on my cheap pastry bag came off as we were piping the dough into the oil. (Eeee!) We rigged up a Ziploc bag with duct tape, which worked marvelously. But piping dough got old after awhile. I was hot and sweaty. My house has no air conditioning.

Next time I might just buy churros from the dude on the corner.

The combination, when it was all done, was to die for, so it’s really worth having them both together.

Recipes and cooking notes after the jump.
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Homemade mamey frozen yogurt

May 20, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

A lot of my culinary adventures lately have started with a rotting mamey. This one I’d been suckered into buying on Sunday at the tianguis. (Where, it must be remembered, I was hungry.)

I accepted a particularly juicy chunk from a vendor and thought, Well… maybe I can slice this up and have it for dessert. But when I got home, and over the next few days, I noshed instead on some dark chocolate Hershey kisses, a bag of American candy from Alice’s house and leftover banana pudding.

The mamey sat on the bottom shelf of my fridge, in the very back. It began turning brown at the edges.

Not wanting my poor mamey to die, and wanting my jeans to continue to fit me, I tried to think of something light I could whip up with it. Obviously not ice cream. But maybe… fro-yo?

A quick google search turned up a David Lebovitz recipe on 101 Cookbooks. It called for straining yogurt with a cheesecloth. (Ugh. Too lazy.) But that led me to David’s even simpler recipe on his own site, which called for basically dumping yogurt and sugar together, and then churning it in your ice cream maker.

I could do that. I could do that in, like, an hour.

So I cut up my mamey and mashed it with a fork, and added a few healthy squirts of agave nectar. (Did I forget to mention that I didn’t add any processed sugar to this?) I added some Activia yogurt I had in the fridge. I chilled it for an hour, and clumsily poured it into my ice cream maker, getting mamey-agave-yogurt stuff all over the front and sides of my mixer.

Twenty-five minutes later, it was done. And it was good.

Not out-of-this world spectacular — the texture isn’t as smooth and creamy as what you’d get at the store, and next time I think I’d add more yogurt (or lime juice?) to boost the yogurt-y tang. But it’s a fine first start. Definitely something I could snack on after dinner, or outside on our porch on a sunny day.

Plus, this opens up a whole new world of fro-yo. I’ve seen lychees at the market lately…. hmmm…..

Recipe after the jump, if you want it.
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A trip to Tlalpan, “what Coyoacán used to be”

May 17, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

Lately it seems like I’ve been reading everywhere about the hipness of Tlalpan, a suburb south of here. The local city magazines, Chilango and Dónde Ir, always seem to include Tlalpan in their roundups of cool taco shops and cafes. And several of the cafes are mentioned in my very hip DF de Culto guidebook.

I corralled Alice into taking a trip there after reading that Lonely Planet called Tlalpan “what Coyoacan used to be.” Meaning, bohemian and colonial, but less crowded.

Sounds nice, no?

The Metrobus stops pretty close to the square, so we went last Friday. The place was serene and adorable: Narrow streets, cobblestones, bouganvillea blooming over fencetops. The occasional open door — old, weathered, oozing charm — revealed a patio overflowing with plants, or the occasional fonda restaurant.

We bought tacos de canasta from a lady in front of the mercado and drank agua frescas in the cute little square. We gushed over the cute restaurants, but didn’t visit any of them, because we were too full. Stupid extra-creamy horchata con fresa.

We wandered through a few parks, and walked over to the Antigua Hacienda de Tlalpan, a fancy restaurant and popular wedding site. We browsed in a Tlalpan bookstore, where I debated buying a 1970’s “Gelatins for all Seasons” cookbook because I’m fascinated by Mexican milk-with-Jell-O desserts. But then I decided against it because really, how many Jell-O molds am I going to make?

Before we left, we hit El Jalisciense, a cantina off the square. We slurped spicy caldo de camarón from plastic cups, and drank Palomas and Victorias. Mmmm.

I would definitely go back, hopefully next time with Crayton. It seems like the perfect Saturday day trip.

Although next time, I’m bringing an umbrella. Turns out Tlalpan does not have many gutters, so rain = huge puddles. (=soaked shoes on the Metrobus.)

UPDATE: My dear hubby has wondered why would bringing an umbrella would have any effect on me stepping in any puddles. What I meant was: We got SPRAYED by several CARS that drove through the puddles, because drivers in Tlalpan are not very cautious. In case anyone else out there was wondering too.

Apple brown betty and homemade cinnamon ice cream

May 6, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

So, um, those cinnamon rolls…

They didn’t turn out very well. The flavor was fine. (Well, okay, I could have added more butter.) But they didn’t rise. And they were hard. Even with the cream cheese frosting…. it was like biting into a cinna-frisbee. Bleh. Maybe I boasted too much about kicking the dough’s butt?

So. With a bowl of cream cheeese frosting in the fridge, I probably should have made a quick bread or something and used up the leftovers. But no. I needed dessert redemption. I had to make something else, something that was not a bread. Something that had lots of butter and sugar and required little work. Something with the name “Betty” in the title.

Seriously: How cute is the name Apple Brown Betty? Even before the Cinnamon Roll Disaster of 2009, I’ve been wanting to make some. My friend Jesica was entranced, too, so today she came over, we cued up The Pioneer Woman and got to work.

Apple Brown Betty is basically a gooey, buttery, sweet apple casserole, with bread crumbs holding everything together. Pioneer Woman’s recipe called for cubes of wheat bread, but if I make it again, I’d probably use white breadcrumbs. Something about little chunks of wheat bread didn’t sit well with me.

None of that even matters, though, because the best part was the two scoops of love on top: Homemade cinnamon ice cream, y’all. (Insert swoon.) My mom got me the ice-cream-maker attachment for my KitchenAid mixer before I left for Mexico, and I finally unpacked it and put it to use. It was actually amazingly easy: Cook the batter (and ignore the massive amounts of heavy cream); chill it overnight; then pour it into the frozen mixer bowl and watch it churn. Thirty minutes later, done.

And when we stuck our spoons into the ice cream bowl…. man. Oh man. This was creamy, delicate stuff, whispering of cinnamon. Jesica even admitted that she wasn’t even that excited about cinnamon ice cream in the first place, but this stuff — it kind of socked you upside the head, you know? In a good way.

I promise, my dessert spree is over for the next few days. I’m dreaming of mamey ice cream, but I’m going to log 5 hours at the gym before I do it. The gyms re-open tomorrow, yay!

Wrist pain and the joys of high-altitude baking

May 5, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

cinnamon buns

I’ve been dying to make cinnamon rolls for months, since before I even moved to Mexico. They’re kind of tedious, but when the recipe works — when the bread is light and chewy, and the buttery-sweet crumbles dissolve on your tongue — it’s as if the skies had opened up and chubby, fat-footed angels had started singing. God. I still remember the cinnamon rolls I made in seventh grade. The way the smell filled the house…

(Shaking herself out of her cinnamony reverie) Ok. Well. Anyway.

I’ve been drooling over Smiten Kitchen’s cinnamon roll recipe, so I decided to give it a go today. Everything was fine until I started kneading.

There my cute little ball of dough was, waiting for me to whip it into shape. But when I pressed my palms into the dough, but it wouldn’t give. The thing was as hard as a rock. I stopped and stared at it. WTF? Who does this dough think it is? I pushed harder, sweat droplets forming on my temples. The dough gave slightly. I think it smirked at me.

I wiped my hands and rushed to my computer, googling “tough dough to knead hard as a rock,” but mostly what came up was people complaining about kneading. That wasn’t me. I loved kneading. Usually.

Finally, after maybe 10 more minutes of searching (my dough resting, the little wimp), I realized that — even though I’d followed the recipe exactly — I’d added too much flour. High altitudes sometimes call for less flour when baking bread. Muffins, however, usually don’t need adjustments. (Which explains why my mamey muffins were fine.) It’s weird though, because I’ve also read the exact opposite — that high altitudes call for more flour in baking bread.

Really, what it comes down to is trial and error. And so, armed with my new knowledge, I placed the dough back in the mixer bowl, doused it with 1/4 cup of water and proceeded to mash the thing to smithereens. (Trying not to yell, “Ya like that dough?”) Soon its little doughy fibers unlocked, and the water seeped in, and it twirled around the mixer paddle and eventually formed a ball.

Minutes later, I placed the dough ball on the floured countertop and proceeded to knead. Ahhh yes. This was good. Much better. Oh so much better. It was softer. Lighter. Not a dough brick that made my wrists hurt.

And when I lifted up the kitchen towel after the first rise: Oh man. This looked awesome. It felt like silk. Like a smooth, elastic piece of silk waiting to be smudged with butter and sugar.

So. The rolls are on their second rise now. About half of them aren’t rising very well, so I don’t know what’s up. But I’m not panicking. I already know I’ve won.

A cure for your swine flu worries: Orange bread pudding with gooey raisin sauce

April 28, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

With Mexico going to hell in a handbasket — or shall I say a pig-hide canasta — nothing seems more comforting right now than a warm homemade dessert.

I love bread pudding, but it always seems like so much work. And I couldn’t afford another trip to the supermarket with all the flu-hysterical crazies. So yesterday, with three-quarters of a loaf of stale bread and some Clementine oranges, I turned to Elena Zelayeta.

Elena was a blind Mexican immigrant who wrote Elena’s Famous Mexican and Spanish Recipes, a bestselling cookbook that’s now out of print. I found a copy of the first edition, published in 1944, stuffed into a kitchen drawer at my mom’s house. It was my grandmother’s, my mom said. I thumbed through it for a few minutes and fell in love.

Not only is the book full of Mexican basics (chiles en nogada, sopa de fideo, capirotada, etc.), but it was written back when housewives actually spent three hours or more on a single dish, and asked the butcher to do things like “shape their lamb chops.” Her membrillo recipe calls for leaving it out in the sun for two days to prevent mold. How freaking awesome is that?

The dessert section overflows with bread puddings, all of them simple constructions of milk-soaked bread, eggs and sugar. I made the orange version last night and finished the sauce this morning. Tasted a spoonful as it cooled and… mmmmhhhrrrmmm. (Sorry, that was my pleasurable moaning noise.)

With something this good, you gotta bring out the big guns and make homemade whipped cream. And then try not to lick the bowl after.

I swear, this thing really might be able to cure swine flu. Or at least get everyone out from under their porcine cloud.

Recipe after the jump.
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El amor de pineapple pie

March 22, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

Pineapple pie is kind of like my culinary secret weapon. Most people are like, “I’ve never heard of such a thing!” And then they try it and make pleasurable moaning noises. Or at least, pineapple-lovers do.

I made it for Crayton when were first dating. He loved it so much, he ran out and bought another pineapple, so I could make it again. The pineapple ended up rotting on his counter. And that’s how we figured out that overripe pineapple actually makes a pretty good air freshener.

Yesterday was Crayton’s birthday, so I decided to make it for dessert. Plus, since I’m a pie nerd, I was super excited to try Smitten Kitchen’s all-butter crust. It’s the best I’ve ever had — flaky and shatteringly crisp. Mmm. My stomach’s rumbling just thinking about it.

The recipe’s after the jump for folks who want to try it. In the meantime, another photo for you. (I ended up eating that already-cut slice as soon as I was done writing this post.)

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