Smith Family Weblog

I know there are those that believe the only thing that belongs in a martini glass is gin and maybe an olive, but humor me for a moment, please.

We have an overabundance of basil (already!) this summer, and I decided to try it in a cocktail. Food and Wine had recipe for strawberry basil martinis, and I made a few tweaks to arrive at this:

3 basil leaves

3 strawberries

2 oz vodka

1/2 oz simple syrup

1/2 oz lemon juice

Muddle the basil, strawberries and simple syrup in a cocktail shaker. Top with ice, add vodka and lemon juice. Shake and strain into a glass.

This one is quite pink—not because of the strawberries, but because I am completely out of sugar and I had to use pink sanding sugar to make the simple syrup. (I have been out of sugar for two weeks now, but twice in a row, I’ve accidentally bought flour instead. So, I have 15 pounds of flour, and still, no sugar. Perhaps I need to taper back on cocktail hour…)

I bought a set of three 4-inch cake pans for the top tier of Ava’s birthday cake, and I’ve been looking for a reason to make a miniature layer cake with them. Fortunately, our friend Dave’s birthday provided a good opportunity. I was short on time, though, so I used a dark chocolate cake mix, and I added a cup of peanut butter to a tub of vanilla frosting instead of making buttercream. Very easy (and, I think, pretty darn cute, too).

While I was in Madison, I picked up a pound of morel mushrooms. Our friend Tom had never had them, so we lightly breaded fried the first batch in butter, because I think that’s the best way to make them. (Personally, I think that’s the best way to make a lot of things…)

For the main course, I made Braised Chicken with Asparagus and Morel Saute from Bon Appetit, a recipe that starts by marinating the chicken in a mixture of lemon zest and fresh herbs. Then, I browned each side before situating the chicken in a bath of broth, wine, onions and morels.

After baking at a low temperature for 90 minutes, I placed the chicken on a bed of rice and topped it with a reduction of the wine and broth, as well as sauted morels, asparagus and leeks. It was a time-intensive recipe, but it made for a fun Sunday project.

My friends Chuck and Lori found pounds and pounds of morels this spring, and they’ve tried a number of incredible recipes. You can check them out over on Horse Farm Diaries.

I took the long weekend at Mom’s as an opportunity to do a bit of cooking–specifically, batches and batches of barbeque sauce. Seems like a perfect recipe to try in a kitchen other than your own, don’t you think?

I used the recipe and variations from this month’s Martha Stewart Living.

I tripled the recipe for the classic sauce, starting with 10 chopped onions and two heads of garlic.

To that, I added five cans of tomatoes, molasses, sugar and quite a bit of spices.

Once the sauce had cooked for three hours, I pureed it and began work on the variations. The bourbon peach sauce was good, but the roasted garlic and lemon sauce was by far the best.

I ended up with just under 30 half-pint jars and one giant mess. (Sorry, Mom!)

Every once in a while, I come across a recipe that just works perfectly the very first time. This chocolate stout cake recipe from Bon Appétit was wonderful—start to finish.

Of course, luck had quite a bit to do with it. Thankfully, I didn’t have the 8″ pans the recipe called for, so I used three 9″ pans instead. Had I used smaller pans, I would have ended up with about three cups of batter on the bottom of a very hot oven. I also made one and a half times the icing recipe as many of the reviews suggested, and didn’t have a single spoonful left over.

The cake was huge–probably eight inches tall. And, even more impressive was Bryan’s reaction when he came home at 5 pm, saw three empty bottles of Guinness, and assumed I downed them all during the course of the afternoon.

Thanks to Grandma Smith, who was willing to keep my children busy for a couple of hours last weekend, I found a bit of time to use the new cupcake pans and tree my mom gave me for my birthday. As I noted over on the THOH, Laura’s photos more than do them justice.

Ava and I made Barefoot Contessa’s recipe for chocolate cupcakes on Sunday. I decided to forgo the peanut butter icing and instead made peanut butter buttercream, which may be the single greatest thing on this planet.

Many years ago, my grandmother gave me an old recipe box that belong to my grandfather’s aunt. I was glad to receive it, but until recently, I hadn’t given it much thought. I came across it the other day while organizing the kitchen cabinets, and I set it out on the counter.

When I had time to look through it last weekend, I was immediately grateful to have this culinary time capsule. The box belonged to my Great, Great Aunt Marie Lena Rebekah. My grandma, correct in assuming I’d confuse Aunt Marie with my grandpa’s step mother Anna Marie, left me a note in the front of the box. (Never one to be wasteful, she wrote this note on the back of a funeral program. Seeing her handwriting and being reminded again of her quirks made the time all that much more worthwhile.)

I found that most of the recipes were desserts, which immediately endeared me to this woman I’d never met. She had an entire sections devoted to icing alone.

Most of the cards were handwritten with a fountain pen. Aside from some tearing around the edges and smeared ink, they are in remarkable shape. I found several recipes for burnt sugar cake and settled on the one that seemed to be the most used, hoping that it meant it was a favorite.

The recipe starts, as you might expect, with burnt sugar:

The instructions were a bit vague, as though she was familiar with the process and only needed to capture the measurements. The recipe noted two egg whites to be added at the end, for instance, and after sampling the cake, I know she must have intended they be whipped and folded in.

As the cakes baked, Ava and I made a burnt sugar filling, which was incredibly sweet and almost crunchy. The fact that I had a Kitchen-Aid and battery-operated candy thermometer at my disposal didn’t pass unnoticed.

Ava and I finished the cake with a burnt sugar frosting recipe we found online, and topped it with walnuts. The cake was moist (if not a little dense due to my misstep with the egg whites), and the filling and frosting were sweet enough to make a tiny piece satisfying. I will likely make this again with a few adjustments, and I am looking forward to seeing what else I can find in Aunt Marie’s recipe box.