Category: Baking

Japanese plum: sumomo

When one Japanese plum (sumomo – スモモ) tree in the garden suddenly decides to produce dozens or hundreds of fruits… so many that it becomes annoying… the only option is to give away many again to friends around (they’ll start to get annoyed too!!!)… but when it’s still too much the only option for me who is not very good at making jam and preserves is to make nice breakfast clafoutis, tarts and crumbles with plenty of fruits…

For clafoutis and tart, I use very simple basic recipes. Crumbles, I don’t bake often. Too buttery and rich for breakfast usually, so I tried a new version. I replaced the sugar by a mix of flax seeds and dates and added butter little by little until the texture starts being crumbly but rather dry. The result is an amazing crumble perfect for breakfast. Not too sweet, but just enough to compensate the acidity of the cooked fruits. A crunchy soft crumb not oily. Something to make again for sure!

How do you cook your extra fruits???

More Malabar spinach

As I was telling you in my previous post, Malabar spinach go very well with a lot of things, and in particular with salmon. This recipe is very simple to prepare and really delicious. It’s just a quiche with fresh salmon (it’s the season for salmon from Miyagi) and Malabar spinach like one would do a classic spinach and salmon quiche. For the pue crust I used whole-wheat flour and olive oil. I really find it very quick to knead with olive oil rather than butter. For the quiche filling, I did an egg and cow milk base (recently I buy locally produced milk). I grilled the salmon in a pan and then removed fishbones and skin, and cut into large bites. I chopped the washed Malabar spinach and add all to the egg base, stir well and pour into the pie crust. Bake for 30min in the oven at 190.

Enjoy!!!

Almond sables

When there are so many delicious fruits to eat it’s nice to have a few biscuits to go with. Usually with summer fruits I like to prepare simple sablés. This time: almond sablés with a recipe I found browsing some magazines online. The sugar sprinkles really attracted me because I had some I use for frosting some time ago and it needed to be finished before the rainy season makes it unusable. So I went for it… and it was much much better than anything I expected. So here is the recipe.

Almond sablés for 30 bite-size pieces

– 140g of flour

– 100g of butter (at room temperature makes it easier to knead)

– 60g of almond powder

– 30g of sugar

– a bit of icing sugar for the finish

Mix all the ingredients (but the icing sugar) together to obtain a smooth dough. Pull chucks and make small balls that you gently squeeze into a flat and thick coins and arrange on a baking plate greased or with cooking paper. Bake for 15 to 20 min at 160 deg. Sprinkle icing sugar… it’s ready to enjoy!!!

Sweetness for cold afternoon

Not only it’s rainy… which is normal for the rainy season, but it’s super cold. With not more than 15degrees today, we could neither play tennis with that rain, nor go swimming in the ocean with that cold… The arcade and at the batting center kept us active for an hour but then we had to admit that reading at home was the only option… and cooking was obviously a good alternative. I pulled out from the shell my old “fall baking” magazine and was in the rare enough mood for some rich recipes to go with a hot chai. I stopped on a recipe of spicy cake with a coconut and walnut caramel topping. I decided to try, but since I had neither coconut or walnuts I replaced them by almond powder and almond slices. The recipe frightened me a bit with the quantities of sugar and butter so I reduced them a bit (a lot)… and the result was really rich and suited perfectly the chai! So here is the recipe.

Spicy cake with almond caramel

For the cake:

– 1.3 cup of flour

– 2/3 cup of sugar

– 1/4 cup of butter

– 1 tbs of baking powder

– 1 tsp of baking soda

– 1 tbs of nutmeg

– 1 tbs of cardamom

– 1 egg

– a bit of vanilla

For the almond caramel topping:

– 1/2 cup of almond powder

– 2/3 cup of sliced almonds

– 10g of butter

– 1/3 cup milk

– 2 tbs os sugar

First mix all the ingredients for the cake and stir well. Bake in a greased baking pan at 180deg for 30min.

In a small pan mix all the ingredients of the caramel. Cook at medium heat and stir once in a while until bubbling and browning. Top the baked cake with the almond mix. Eat when cool.

Zucchini cake

Somehow this week has been a lot about cooking zucchini. There was a few classic things such as “soupe au pistou” for friends coming for dinner. But also a few new recipes such the salsola quiche. And after seeing a few cakes on IG, I thought it was time to make one with zucchini and rucola. The recipe is very simple and the zucchini bring the moisture often missing in savory cakes. I added rucola for a bit of fresh taste, and served it with a simple herb salad. A perfect dinner, all in one plate.

Zucchini cake:

– 1 zucchini

– a handful of rucola

– 150g of flour

– 1tsp of baking powder

– 3 eggs

– 1/2 cup of olive oil

– salt and pepper

In a bowl mix all the ingredients for the dough. Wash the rucola and the zucchini. Cut them. Add to the mix. In a greased cake dish pour the mix and bake at 160deg for 30min, rise the temperature to 190 for the final 5-10 minutes. Check with a knife if ready.

That’s it!! And it’s Friday, so have a good end of the week!

Cherries

When I was a child, every year for mother day, which in France is at the end of May, we would go to my grandparents country house in Le Castelet to have a family lunch. From those lunches I remember catching tadpoles in the small stream that was running down the garden and picking cherries in the giant cherry trees near that stream. The trees were so old and big that we could spend the whole day in the trees picking and eating cherries, there would still be so many left. For me, cherries are great eaten from the tree, big, ripe and juicy Burlat or from the market stand. I love to keep one seed in my mouth for hours and work it like the sea would work a pebble. Since we’ve been in Japan it’s been quite hard to find cherries, and cherries by kilos like you see them in the south of France or in Italy… the only cherries you can find are from the US, or the local ones are from Yamagata and are sold by the handful, not more. They have different varieties of cherries from dark burgundy to almost white, large or small. I still love them large and almost black! I don’t buy cherry often but when I do I usually prepare them in clafoutis, and when I don’t have enough for one clafoutis I mix them with other seasonal fruits.

I find that clafoutis are the perfect option for breakfast on a rush as they combine both fruits, carbs and protein, and they are easy to eat when not yet really awake when we wake up early. They are also easy to eat on the go because there easy to wrap. Perfect for breakfast on the beach after a morning swim or a bodyboarding session.

I wish you a great week and love to hear how you like your cherries!

Bagels!

Last weekend. I thought it was a real long time I haven’t cook bagel and it’s been a while I wanted to come some… then I checked out my recipe online and realized it was actually 3 years since I cooked any… so it was indeed a really long long time!!! I used the same recipe, and since I was preparing them for breakfast I used very simple toppings: plain, brown sugar, sesame seeds, and mixed seeds. Actually I used half of the ingredients of the recipe and since I didn’t have sourdough I used 7g of yeast; and made 7 bagels, so I guess the recipe makes more 14 than 10 bagels, unless you like giant bagels!!!

Again I was surprised how simple it is and it seems quite impossible not to succeed. I poached them on the evening and baked them in the morning because there’s nothing like eating freshly baked bread in the morning!

It was the perfect start for a Sunday before spending time in the garden cleaning and taking weeds.

Recurring failure

I’m usually pretty confident in what I do, and in cooking more than anything else. I can try new recipes or invent new ones on the fly with quite some easiness and usually I obtain very very good results (it was one if the motivations for me to start this culinary journal, to keep track of my inventions).

That said (a little bit of self flattering never hurts!!!), I am not super human and there are things that I can never manage to master. Croissants are a great fancy for me and I love the idea of freshly baked croissants, buttery and fluffy, with a perfect puff to start a great Sunday. Despite having tried 4 or 5 times, having checked different recipes, watch videos and read books… I failed poorly in reaching my goal every single time. The taste is always great but the result is never a puff pastry croissants, it is a bread-ish, brioche-ish, milk bread-ish thing but never puffed. I don’t know what’s wrong with what I do or use. I’m incriminating the floor, the yeast, the kneading, the rolling and the folding… tried to improve each but didn’t succeed. If you are a successful croissants maker I’ll be more than happy to receive first hand feedbacks and hints to succeed next time. I’m also considering finding a class, if you know any I’ll be happy to learn about it…

Please help me make puffy croissants for Sunday morning breakfast !!!

Yuzu-choco cookies

Sudden rainy and chilly days, after some really warm and sunny weeks call for some sweetness… and since we’ve recently planted a yuzu (and also a lemon) tree in the garden, to broaden our range of homemade citrus fruits, I’ve started to harvest a few yuzu fruits. It’s late for the yuzu season but they are none the less delicious and juicy. That’s how the idea of making yuzu cookies came from. The recipe I used for my cookies is rater simple, and you can add whatever pleases you inside.

So here is my yuzu-cholate cookies recipe. If you cannot find fresh yuzu, you can replace by dry yuzu peels rehydrated, or orange.

Yuzu-chocolate cookies

– 110g of butter (at room temperature)

– 150g of flour

– 40g of sugar

– 1 tea spoon of baking powder

– the juice of 1/2 yuzu and the peel of 1/4 yuzu

– 50g of dark cooking chocolate

– a pinch of salt

Mix the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, add the butter and knead well. Add the yuzu juice, cut the peel in tiny pieces and add. Knead a little more. With a knife cut roughly the chocolate in chunks, add and knead. Keep refrigerated for 20min (or 10min in the freezer). Preheat the oven to 180deg. Make small balls of dough and squeeze them flat on baking paper. Bake until golden or hard enough. Cooking time should ne around 10min but it depends on the actual size and thickness of the cookies.

After baking the cookies until golden at 180 degrees I kept them in a cool dry place before eating them.

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