Tor'Easter

This year, the Easter bunny visited our little seaside apartment with a special gift in tow: my sister from a different mister, all the way from Toronto!


It was wonderful to be reunited with one of my best friends. Though we don't see each other very often, when we do, it's as though not a day has gone by. Oh, the trouble that five of us girls got up to living on Chatham Street... it's a wonder that we all turned out to be so respectable.


M, A and I had an action packed few days, visiting towns and sites around southern Nova Scotia and taking in the splendour  - and chilliness - of Peggy's Cove. We also ate our weight in seafood, which equals a week of detox. So worth it.


Devout worshippers of the baked good, A and I also dove headfirst into the Rebar cookbook to find a delectable recipe that befitted our epic reunion. We settled on these cupcakes, drawn in by the vibrant zests and merry bursts of poppy seed. The golden beauties are a truly sinful delight; buttery rich, sweet and tangy, with bursts of poppy seed and topped with a lovely cream cheese frosting. The original recipe is for a cake, baked in separate pans and assembled in layers; we though that making cupcakes was a clever way to be creative with presentation and control portions.


We failed in achieving the latter.

Note: Thank you A for contributing your photography skills!

Citrus poppy seed cake
From 'Rebar Modern Food Cookbook' by Audrey Alsterberg and Wanda Urbanowicz

Ingredients

Cake:
- 1 1/2 cups unsalted butter, softened
- 2 1/2 cups granulated sugar
- 7 eggs
- 1 1/2 tsp vanilla
- 3 3/4 cups unbleached flour
- 2 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 3/4 tsp salt
- 1 cup milk, room temperature (I used skim)
- 1/2 tsp each zest of orange, lemon, and lime (or more , to taste)
- 1/3 cup poppy seeds

Glaze:
- 3/4 cup icing sugar
- 1/8 cup fresh lemon juice (or more, to taste)

Icing:
- 4 oz cream cheese
- 3 tbsp butter, softened
- 1 1/3 cups granulated sugar

1. Pre-heat oven to 350F and lightly grease or line 2 12-cup muffin trays.

2. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Mix in eggs, 1 at a time, beating each one in well before adding the next. Stir in vanilla.

3. In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, and salt. Add the butter/sugar mixture in three batches, alternating with the milk. Fold in the citrus zest and poppy seeds. Do no over mix!

4. Evenly divide the batter amongst the muffin cups (about a full 1/4 cup per muffin tin). Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Remove from oven and cool completely.

5. In a small bowl, mix together icing sugar and lemon juice to make a glaze. Brush over the cooled cupcakes.

6. To make the icing, beat cream cheese until smooth. Mix in the butter, then the sugar; whip briefly. Spread the icing on top of the cooled cupcakes and chill to set.






Comments

  1. ak27 April 2014 at 07:37

    Still eating this and they taste better everyday!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Scone Witch

Image
There is an amazing little restaurant in the outskirts of downtown Ottawa called The Scone Witch, which makes scones in more varieties than you can imagine.   Savory scones with ingredients such as fragrant rosemary, cheese and scallions; sweet scones in which are embedded bits of candied ginger and tiny, tangy currants. M and I ate there recently, and our exceptional lunch reminded me of how much I love the decadent and infinitely adaptable pillows of butter and cream. I have previously only attempted to make scones once – the effort, thought valiant, was somewhat subpar – but this week I decided to try my hand at it again. In browsing the web, a recipe caught my eye, from my favorite food blog, Smitten Kitchen (featured prominently in many of my posts). The recipe, though not too labor-intensive, took more time than I had anticipated, and M and I ended up indulging quite late in the night. A delicious bedtime snack, no doubt, but also the recipe for a b...
Read more

Birthday torte

Image
M loves chocolate, adores it in fact. He will always make a beeline for the chocolatiest dessert on the menu at dinner, and we always have some iteration of dark chocolate stashed away somewhere in the apartment. So, it seemed appropriate that his birthday cake request was as chocolately as birthday cakes get, in the best way of course. Home for the weekend, we spent a lovely, relaxed evening together, starting with a fantastic dinner at Brooklyn Warehouse, a low-key bistro in Halifax's North End; definitely a culinary gem in the city. Dessert was, of course, M's cake of choice; a luxuriously rich torte made with a sinful amount of dark chocolate and butter, bourbon syrup and just a touch of flour to hold the whole thing together. We paired it with a sweet-tart mixed berry-orange compote, scotch, and 'Blade Runner'. Bayou chocolate torte with bourbon and dark chocolate, with mixed berry-orange compote (recipe to follow) From 'Rebar Modern Food Cookbook...
Read more

Decadence

I am recovering from a weekend of gastronomic hedonism. Too much sushi, wine, 4 am pizza (incidentally, the best ever, even the next morning), poutine, more ethanol, maple syrupy French toast etc etc etc….so good, but 48 hours of indulgence leaves one feeling a bit….heavy. As would be expected, lethargy descended upon us on a cold and rainy spring Sunday night, and all I wanted to was to eat something filling, that was easy to make, and that was light . Because let’s face it, this squid’s diet can only take so much of a beating. So I turned to my old stand-by, Madhur Jaffrey, the queen of vegetarian and Indian, cooking. She hold a special place in my culinarily-inclined heart, ever since I discovered her classic cookbook in my mother’s cupboard a few years ago, “An Introduction to Indian Cooking”, which is unfortunately now out of print. Her’s is one of the only cookbooks that my mom has that is not annotated to death – it’s as though every recipe she writes has been tested to perfe...
Read more