Sunday Morning Scones

Just in time for the weekend, consider trying this super easy recipe! 

I made these for my kids last week - they had requested biscuits but I saw the cream in my fridge and decided to look for a scones recipe instead. I found this recipe on www.food.com and hardly made any adjustments.

You might think scones are dry and crumbly, but the addition of whipping cream makes these moist and delicious. They are even moist the second day, which is rare.

My boys love cinnamon on their toast in the mornings so the addition of the cinnamon sugar topping took these over the top, and the boys forgot all about the biscuits they had asked for.

I served them with organic raspberry jam and creme fraiche. It was to die for.

Here is the recipe, my edits are in brackets.

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups flour (recipe called for white flour, I did half and half white and whole wheat)
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
8 tbsp cold butter, cut into cubes
1/4 cup granulated sugar (recipe says to use 1/3 cup for slightly sweeter scones; I actually cut back on the sugar and used brown sugar instead)
2/3 cup milk (I used whipping cream)

Method:

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Celsius.

Put flour, baking powder, and salt into the bowl of your food processor. (You can do this by hand if you want to but once you add the cold butter, it gets intense with the mixing!)

Next add the butter and sugar. Pulse the food processor or use a pastry cutter to cut in the butter.

Add the cream and pulse until dough forms into a ball.

Turn the food processor over and let the dough fall onto the counter.

Press the dough into a patty that is approximately 6 inches wide. But you don't need to get all Martha Stewart and get the ruler out like I did. I just did it for the photo ;-)

Use a pizza cutter to slice the patty into wedges. If you don't have a pizza cutter, you can just use a knife.

Place wedges on an ungreased cookie sheet (or use a Silpat).

Sprinkle cinnamon sugar on top of the wedges. If you don't like cinnamon sugar you can use sugar alone, or nothing at all.

Bake the scones for about 12 minutes, or until golden brown on top, which can be hard to see if you have cinnamon on there! Don't over bake.

Serve while hot. I like them with jam and creme fraiche. But I am certain they are good with butter too…straight up!

I hope you enjoy!!

Also Not My Mom's Sour Cream Coffee Cake

Today my dear friend Kelly Z came over for lunch. Kelly and I met in 1994 in Montreal when I first moved into the area known as the Plateau (also known as Mile End - I don't really know where the Plateau stops and Mile End ends, but I digress).

Kelly and I weathered snowy and cold Montreal winters together, stomping up and down St Laurent in our Doc Martens, waiting for that slow, slow bus to crawl up the street from the station south of Sherbrooke, to come and save us from runny noses and salty streets, sometimes a hot bagel would be the reward. There were the sticky hot Montreal summers too - going to see plays at the Fringe Festival to support our friends who were aspiring actors writers and directors, eating dry and salty popcorn at Biftek St Laurent while waiting for a turn at the pool table, doing shots at the Double Deuce while listening to my brother DJ. Shopping at Warshaw for bargains and plants, eating cheese pies at Euro Deli, and dancing to the Tam Tams on Sundays at the base of Mont Royal. There is nowhere better than Montreal in the summer, by the way. As intolerable as the heat and humidity can get, there's always a patio chair available for you to kick back and soak up the rays. As long as you don't mind a cloud of cigarette smoke hanging over your head.

Our friendship persevered through all seasons - Kelly always had a seat at the Passover table when we celebrated with 20 to 30 of our closest friends. I even dragged her to Newfoundland a couple of times, where you can have all four seasons in a single day. She loved it, of course.

Kelly now lives in Toronto and as is the case with most of my friends in Toronto, we don't get to see each other enough. Now, when we plan our get togethers, they always involve food - eating it and talking about it. This date today started as brunch and then morphed into something more lunch-like, because of timing and other things we both had to do in the morning. We had planned a date a few weeks ago but then she got sick and Sam got sick and we decided not to gratuitously spread more germs so we rebooked. On the original date I was planning to serve vegetable soup, Danish rye bread, and something sweet to follow. For today, the menu was black bean soup with avocado and sour cream, corn bread, a nice salad with asparagus, toasted almonds and strong cheddar, and coffee cake to follow.

When I decided to make corn bread to go with the black bean soup, I picked up a really old cookbook my Mom had given to me a long time ago. It's called A Taste of Georgia. We have family on my Dad's side who used to live in Savannah, Georgia and I think my Mom bought this book when we took a family vacation there in the 70s. I have not tried very many recipes from it yet, but it is my reliable book for anything having to with corn bread, and it has some very excellent dip recipes in it.

As I was flipping through it today for a new corn bread recipe to try, I came across a recipe for "quick" coffee cake. What the heck - it looked like it would be a fast mix up so I went for it. I did make a couple of adjustments (as usual). One of them was to add sour cream to the mix instead of just using milk. The recipe follows with my adjustments in brackets.

The reason I titled this post "Also Not My Mom's Coffee Cake..." is that I previously posted a recipe for coffee cake (you can find it here: http://richlerrecipes.blogspot.ca/2011/12/not-my-moms-sour-cream-coffee-cake.html), and that recipe was NOT my Mom's recipe because I could not find it at the time. After making this cake today, I have to say, this one turned out even better than that one (but it's still not my Mom's - one day I will post that one, I promise).

Quick Coffee Cake - Adapted from A Taste of Georgia, recipe contributed by Mrs. Benny N. Grant (Diane)

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease an 8"x 12" or  a 9.5" x 9.5" pan. You can use cooking spray if you prefer.

Filling/Topping Ingredients:

*I made this recipe in the quantities as directed, and found that there wasn't enough topping since I left the nuts out. If you are leaving the nuts out, you need to make this recipe larger by 1.5 times. For example, instead of 4 tbsp butter, use 6.

4 tbsp butter, melted
1 cup walnuts, chopped (I left these out so the kids could take the cake to school)
1 cup light brown sugar
4 tbsp flour (I totally forgot this ingredient!!!)
1 tsp cinnamon

Cake Ingredients:

1/4 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar (I cut this back to 1/2 cup)
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
1/2 cup milk (I used half milk and half sour cream)

Method:

Cream together the butter and sugar.

Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat after each addition.

Measure the flour, then remove 1/4 of it. Add the baking powder to the 1/4 cup. Set it aside.

Add the pinch of salt to the larger portion of flour. Mix the sour cream and milk together. 

You are going to add the dry and wet mixes into the butter-sugar-egg mixture alternately, beating between each addition. Start with some flour.

Then add some milk/sour cream.

Carry on until you have emptied the flour and the milk/sour cream mix. Then add the 1/4 cup of flour + baking powder that you put aside earlier and beat that in very quickly. Don't over mix. 

Plop some spoonfuls of batter into the prepared pan.

Use a butter knife to spread it around.

Now you need to mix up your filling/topping. This is what it will look like without the nuts (and without the flour - oops!).

Now take some of the filling mixture and crumble it with your fingers onto this first layer of batter.

Don't bother spreading it around because it will be stuck to the first layer of batter and will make a mess (trust me, I tried). It's also unnecessary because during baking it all kind of melts together in a big pan of awesomeness.

Now spoon the next layer of batter on top of the filling mix.

Use your knife to spread it around like you did for round 1 of the batter.

Now add the final crumble of filling/topping. Again, don't try to spread it around as you will end up with a big mess. The oven will take care of it during baking.

Put your lovely pan of delicious goodness into the oven and bake for 25 - 30 minutes. The recipe said 30, I checked at 25 because I have a hot oven. It was ready. Test for doneness by using a wooden skewer - you want it to come out with a few crumbs on it but no wetness.

It looks kind of weird with pits and dents galore. The beautiful thing is that these pits and dents are usually filled with the topping/filling mixture. I call them sugar tunnels. See photo below.

So I recommend you serve this with a nice cup of strong tea, or coffee. You don't need anything else. It's DELICIOUS, moist, sugary, amazing. And it tastes like home.

P.S. The entire cake was eaten by Kelly Z, me, The King of Soup, and our children in about an hour. So I made another one. And this time I remembered to add the flour to the filling/topping mix. In my opinion, it didn't really make much of a difference.


The recipe for the black bean soup mentioned in the story can be found here:
http://richlerrecipes.blogspot.ca/2014/03/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-ja-x.html

The recipe for the corn bread will be posted today. For your interest, the minestrone recipe is here:
http://richlerrecipes.blogspot.ca/2014/03/really-good-vegetable-soup-with-kick.html

... and the Danish rye bread recipe is here:
http://richlerrecipes.blogspot.ca/2013/06/meretes-danish-rye-bread-from-susan.html

Cheese Strata - Just in time for the weekend...

Everyone wants to be a star. Make this and everyone will think you are one. I promise. This dish is fabulous for many reasons; the first is that you prep it the night before your big brunch so all the work is done ahead of time. The morning of the event, pop it into the oven about an hour before your guests arrive and voila – a gourmet and beautiful dish that looks like you spent hours slaving over a hot stove and/or oven to prepare it.

When you slice into the puffy and golden strata, you see layers of melted cheese and gorgeous, crispy onions. The bread has soaked up all the eggy goodness and has become sort of like a souffle. It's light, savoury, and delicious. The wide-eyed guests at your table will marvel at the good-to-the-last-bite flavours in this dish, and you will leave them begging for more. Tell them to come back in a few weeks for the sweet version of this dish - a baked French toast that involves apples, cinnamon, brown sugar, and cream cheese (I promise to post this one soon).

This recipe was adapted from one of my favourite cookbooks (gifted to me by my sister-in-law Bryony), Cooking Jewish – 532 Great Recipes from the Rabinowitz Family, by Judy Bart Kancigor. The original recipe calls for dried, minced onions (which is silly when you can use fresh, caramelized onions), and whole milk (which can easily be substituted for skim), and also calls for cutting crusts off bread (which is a waste of time in my opinion). So here is the recipe, with my adjustments.

Cheese Strata

Ingredients

12 slices of white bread (I use French bread, not baguette)

8 tbsp butter (1 stick or ¼ cup), melted (more on this later – I omit the butter)

10 ounces Swiss or Cheddar cheese, grated (~2 ½ cups) (Note: I use Emmenthal)

1 bunch (6 to 8) green onions, white and green parts, chopped

1 bunch flat-leafed parsley, chopped (~1/2 cup)

2 large sweet onions, sliced thin and caramelized (more on this later)

6 large eggs

1 tsp salt

1 tsp Dijon mustard

1 cup sour cream (go with full or low fat, but not no fat)

3 cups milk (whatever kind you want – I use skim)

To caramelize the onions, slice them thinly and put them in a frying pan with a few tbsp of grapeseed or vegetable oil. Start the pan on high heat and then lower as soon as they start to sizzle. Cook them on low to medium heat for 20 to 30 minutes until golden brown and irresistible. The photo below shows them about 2/3 of the way cooked.

You can cut the bread in half diagonally, or you can just begin laying the bread in the 13 x 9 inch casserole dish in full pieces. I do not cut them diagonally. 

Place as many full slices in as you can and then use half pieces to fill in the gaps. The recipe calls for the melted butter to be poured into the bottom of the pan before you begin doing this. Since I use caramelized onions, instead of dried onions, the onions come with a bit of oil on them so I omit the butter. Do as you wish. You might want to spray the bottom of the dish with a cooking spray just in case.

Once you have a single layer down, spread half the grated cheese on top, then half the caramelized onions, half the green onions and half the parsley. Repeat this process with the second layer.

Whisk the eggs, salt, and mustard together in a bowl. Beat in the sour cream until smooth.

Then add the milk and stir it up. I like to add a very generous grinding of black pepper to this mix as well.

Pour the egg mixture over the layered bread, cheese, and goodness.

Cover, and refrigerate overnight.

When you are ready to bake the strata, preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Bake 40 minutes until puffed and golden brown. Sometimes I do a little top broil in the oven for the last 5 minutes if it doesn’t look golden enough. Serve immediately, with a nice salad. Be prepared for a round of applause.