Out in the backyard

These series of photos taken about a week ago. When there was sun in Oregon. When the weather was in the upper 80’s and lower 90’s. In other words, perfect and gorgeous days welcoming the summer. Not like this week’s weather, blecchhh…, where the sun hid behind the clouds and the temperature never climbed past lower to mid 60’s. Fortunately, when I’m writing this, the sun decided to come out and the clouds disappeared somewhat.

That day I was thinking of taking some photos for Click! event which the theme for this month is Stacks. I could bake some cookies and stack them, but they’d take my time away, I wasn’t in the mood. I was looking for something simpler, something easier to do with the time on my hands at that moment. I did make some pizza for dinner that day because since I discovered a good recipe for pizza dough, I’m always in the mood for making pizza. And that pizza saved my day. I figured if I stacked pizza slices together, these could make a nice stacks. I spent sweet time in the backyard taking these photos…

I threw some oregano leaves and chive flowers with the slices since I love the color combination of the purple and green. My two chive plants grow big this year along with my oregano and sage, they’re sprouting beautiful purple flowers. I’m somewhat lazy doing any gardening this year, but I’m hoping to get tomato and zucchini plants this week. Hope it’s not too late!

Mocha Cream Puffs with Hood Strawberries

June is here, that means it’s strawberry month in Oregon. If you’ve never tasted Hood strawberries before you missed a whole new meaning to eating really ripe, sweet and juicy strawberries. Their sizes may be small but their taste surpass all those jumbo, too tart California strawberries you’ll find in the market. These are always locally grown and therefore whenever we buy them, we’re supporting sustainable farms.


I almost always can’t wait for those strawberries, the best to get them is to go to a U-pick farm and pick them yourselves. Sure, your knees and back will scream at you for getting them squat and bend, but you’ll be rewarded with summer sweet harvest. Hood strawberries are very tender too so a lot of time your hands will be stained red from just picking them. Last year I did U-pick and made several jars of strawberry jams. My last frozen strawberries were made into homemade soft jellos; my husband even dumped them in the bowl with vanilla ice cream and it’s manna for him
I’m hoping that the weather will be good next weekend because I’ll be going to a U-pick farm to pick strawberries again. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make another batch of jams but we’ll see. This week I managed to make some treats because my husband started to whine that there’s none in the house since his birthday has gone by. I promised him I’d make cream puffs. So here’s the cream puffs that I made, this time I’m making them filled with mocha cream. For a bonus, I sliced some Hood strawberries and layered them in the cream. Oh, so delicious… The strawberries were bought this Sunday from Milwaukie Sunday Farmers Market, which was a fun place to visit. Lots of fresh produce and a variety of other things to find in it, it even has music as the entertainment

Mocha Cream Pufffs with Hood Strawberries

Yield about 16 large puffs

For cream puffs:

7 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 cup water

Pinch of salt

1 cup all-purpose flour

4 large eggs, at room temperature

For mocha cream:

2 cups heavy cream

5 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder

1 teaspoon instant espresso powder

1/2 cup granulated sugar

Small strawberries (Hood strawberries preferred), sliced thinly

Preheat oven to 450 degree F. Line at least two large cookie sheets with parchment paper and set aside.

In a medium saucepan heat butter, water, and salt until it boils. Quickly dump all the flour at once and stir vigorously with a wooden spoon until the dough pulls away from the sides of pan.

Remove pan from heat. Dump the dough into a bowl of a mixer and mix with a paddle attachment with medium speed. Add eggs, one a time, mixing it well after adding each one. Mix well until a smooth and sticky dough is achieved. Transfer dough into a pastry bag or spoon it into the prepared cookie sheets, the size of the puffs will depend on how big you want them to be. A tablespoon of dough will turn into a good size puff. Space them about 1 inch apart in the pan.

Bake for 15 minutes. Reduce the heat to 350 degree F and continue baking for about 30-35 minutes or until the puffs are golden brown. Remove puffs from the oven and let them cool on wire cooling racks.

Combine heavy cream, cocoa, espresso, and sugar in a mixer bowl. Whip with a wire whisk attachment on high speed until soft peaks forms, about 2 minutes; scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl with rubber spatula. Continue mixing until with high speed until stiff. Use this immediately.

Slice the tops of cream puffs with a serrated knife. Using a pastry bag or spoon, fill the puffs with cream, put strawberries slices on top of cream and place tops on puffs. Dust with confectioner’s sugar and serve. Store in refrigerator and always serve chilled.

Source: adapted from Sweet Marias Italian Desserts

Blueberry Jam Cookies or Blueberry Dame Blanche

These are similar to linzer cookies in which the jam is sandwiched between two cookie disks. This recipe is actually called "dame blanche" which translates to white lady, which I guess is because the white color of cookie dough. One reference says that this is a traditional French cookie of vanilla infused butter cookies with raspberry/strawberry jam for the filling. And there’s not much more to find for dame blanche cookie information on the Internet but I found a lot of ice cream recipes called Dame Blanche which consists of vanilla ice cream drizzled with lots of rich chocolate sauce. It’s kind of like hot fudge sundae Belgian style

I made mine with homemade blueberry jam last week and today I’m gonna share the recipe. A simple cookie with lotsa flavors. Be sure to use vanilla bean for the maximum flavor.

Blueberry Jam Cookies or Blueberry Dame Blanche

Makes about 26 sandwich cookies

1 vanilla bean or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

14 tablespoons (1 3/4 sticks) unsalted butter, cold, cubed

1/2 cup almond flour

3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons confectioners’ sugar, plus additional for dusting

2 large eggs

1 cup pastry flour

1 cup all-purpose flour, plus extra for rolling the dough

Pinch of salt

1/2 cup blueberry jam

Split open the vanilla bean lenghtwise and scrape free the seeds; set the pods and seeds aside.

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the butter, almond flour, sugar and eggs and mix on medium speed for 2 minutes. There should be no visible pieces of butter, the mixture will resemble scrambled eggs. Add the vanilla bean seeds, pastry flour, all-purpose flour, and salt and mix on low speed for 1 minute, or just until everything is incorporated. (Overworking the dough will make it tough.)

Gather the dough and form it into a disk. Seal it in plastic and chill for a minimum of 30 minutes or overnight. (Dough that’s chilled overnight should sit at room temperature for 5 to 10 minutes before being rolled.)

Preheat the oven to 350 degree F and line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Place the dough on a lightly floured work surface and roll it into a 1/8-inch-thick rectangle. Lightly flour the rolling pin or the work surface if either gets sticky.

Use a 2-inch-wide cookie cutter, either fluted or plain, to form the cookies. Cut the cookies and place them about 1 inch apart on the prepared pan. Pan together any leftover dough, gently roll it out, and form more cookies.

Use the base of a 1-inch plain decorating tip to cut the centers from half of the cookies on the baking sheet. Place the cookies on the middle rack of the oven and bake for 10 minutes, or until the cookies have turned light brown. Transfer the baking sheet to a wire rack and cool for a few minutes before transferring the cookies directly onto the wire rack to finish cooling.

To assemble the cookies, spread blueberry jam on each whole cookie; leave 1/4 inch of the entire outside edge free of jam. Place the extra confectioners’ sugar in a fine-mesh sieve and liberally sprinkle the cookies with the cutout centers. Sandwich the sugared tops and the jam-covered bottoms together. The cookies will keep up to 5 days in an airtight container at room temperature.

Source: adapted from Baking from the Heart

Blueberry Jam

Makes six 8-ounce jars

Six 8-ounce canning jars

4 cups fresh blueberries

One 1.75-ounce box powdered pectin

About 4 cups of sugar, use less if blueberries are sweet

1 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter

Sterilize the jars and lids by placing thme in a stockpot, cover with cold water, bring to a boil, and heat for 3 minutes. Turn off the heat and leave the jars in water until ready to be filled.

In a large, heavy bottomed pan, crush the berries. Start with 1 cup blueberries, gently crush these, then add each subsequent cup, gently pressing them on top of the previous layers.

Add the pectin and bring the berries to a full boil over high heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon. Add the sugar and butter and stir until the mixture will not resume a full rolling boil after you stir with the spoon. Stirring constantly, boil the mixture for 1 additional minute, then remove from the heat.

Skim and discard any foam or scum that may have formed on the surface. Immediately fill the hot, sterilized jars with the jam, leaving 1/4-inch head room in each jar. Process the jars according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

Cherry-Almond Coffee Cake

Any bake sale you need to tackle this summer? Then I suggest this Cherry-Almond Coffee Cake. This is a pretty simple recipe, the only thing that you have to in advance is the cherry filling. Other than that, the whole cake won’t take you half a day to finish. I don’t know if I made a big boo-boo by using whole wheat pastry flour in the making, but I just realized that while preparing this cake I run out of all-purpose flour. The first thing that popped in my mind was the pastry flour, even though I have cake flour. I decided to use 1 cup of the pastry flour to replace half of the all-purpose flour and worried about the result later. The cake turned out just fine and the crumbs actually are tender and moist. The color is slightly off for the cake, because the pastry flour was whole wheat, but the taste are good. Some people might look down on my mistake, but I didn’t regret it at all It’s all new discovery for me.

The filling in the original recipe called for frozen sour cherries but I still had leftover cherries soaked in kirsch from making Black Forest cake, so I used them in this cake. I wouldn’t know for a million that they would taste good as a filling in coffee cake hadn’t I tried it.

I’m in the mood of baking and writing this week, especially since I’m on summer break. My work finished on Tuesday and altough I’ve been mostly home this week, I’m liking it because I have time to do things I’ve neglected while I’m working. But I’m still not in the mood of working in my yard. If I have to choose hard between yard work and baking, I give my heart 100% to baking! I love pretty flowers and the like but I don’t understand why weeds keep coming back even though I’ve pulled them million times before Hopefully in the coming weeks I have the courage to kill some weeds…

Cherry-Almond Coffee Cake

Yields one 9-inch tube cake

1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for pan

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup whole wheat pastry flour or cake flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup sugar

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 cup sour cream

1 cup Cherries in Kirsch (recipe follows), or 1 cup frozen sour cherries, thawed and drained well

1/3 cup slivered almonds

Milk Glaze (recipe follows)

Preheat the oven to 350 degree F. Butter a 9-inch tube pan; set aside. In a medium bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt; set aside.

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with paddle attachment, beat the butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla on medium speed until light and fluffy, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the flour mixture in three parts, alternating with the sour cream and beginning and ending with the flour. Beat until just combined, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed.

Spoon about half the batter into the prepared pan. Arrange the cherries in a single layer on top of the batter; avoid placing any cherries against the pan’s edge, as they may stick or burn if not fully encased in batter. Top with the remaining batter, making sure it is evenly distributed, and smooth with an offset spatula. Sprinkle the almonds evenly over the top of batter.

Bake until the cake is golden brown and springs back when touched, 40-45 minutes. Transfer the pan to a wire rack set over a rimmed baking sheet, and let the cake cool 10 to 15 minutes. Invert the cake onto the rack, then reinvert (so almond side is up), and let cool completely. Spoon the glaze over the cake, letting it drip down the sides. Let the cake sit until the glaze is set, about 5 minutes, before serving. Cake can be kept at room temperature, wrapped well in plastic, for up to 4 days.