King Cake

My love affair with king cake started about seven years ago. My husband and I had picked one up from a Giant Eagle bakery and we loved it! Sadly, that was also the last year we ever saw one there.

Every year around Mardi Gras, I kept my eyes opened for just the right cake. We've tried several, but none were that good or very memorable. Last year, I went a step further in my search. I contacted several Giant Eagle stores around town hoping to surprise my husband with the real deal. I was so excited when I found one store had the materials to make us one! We were so excited to have our beloved original cake get in our bellies. Only it wasn't our beloved cake. It was completely sub par: dry, bland, mediocre.

This year, I decided enough was enough. It was time to take matters into my own hands. Armed with a delicious sounding (and looking!) recipe from Bunkycooks, I set to work. I had the dough made and rising in about 30 minutes. While the dough rose, I assembled my filling, cleaned up the kitchen, and perused Pinterest, not necessarily in that order.

The dough took about an hour and a half to rise, and was a dream to roll out,  needing very little flour. The entire assembly process for two cakes only took about 15 minutes. After a 45 minute rise, they were ready for the oven. 25 minutes later, they were out of the oven and ready to get fancy. Yea Mardi Gras!

The results were sublime. King cake is a bit of a misnomer as this is definitely a sweet bread, but what a delicious sweet bread it is. The filling which includes brown sugar, raisins, and pecans is so good; the hint of nutmeg in the pastry was just perfect; and the incredibly simple powdered sugar/water icing brought it all together beautifully. I daresay, it was even better than the original king cake we had spent so many years looking for. My good friend Jo declared that making this should become a new tradition and I couldn't agree more.

Even though Mardi Gras is over for this year, do yourself a favor and don't put off making this until next year. Through it together, top it with some pretty pastel icing and call it "Easter Cake." People will thank you. Or throw some green sprinkles on there and it's "Shamrock Cake." Halloween? You know what to do.  

King Cake

Yield: 2 cakes

Ingredients:
Pastry:

• 1 cup milk
• 1/4 cup butter
• 2 (.25 ounce) packages active dry yeast
• 2/3 cup warm water (110° F)
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg
• 5 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

Filling:

• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 1 Tbsp. ground cinnamon
• 2/3 cup chopped pecans
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup raisins
• 1/2 cup melted butter 

Frosting:

• 2 cup confectioners' sugar, divided
• 2- 2½ Tbsp. water, divided

Directions
For pastry:
Scald milk, remove from heat and stir in 1/4 cup of butter. Allow mixture to cool to room temperature. In a large bowl, dissolve yeast in the warm water with 1 tablespoon of the white sugar. Let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes.

When yeast mixture is bubbling, add the cooled milk mixture. Whisk in the eggs. Stir in the remaining white sugar and salt. Combine the flour and the nutmeg. Beat the flour/nutmeg mixture into the milk/egg mixture 1 cup at a time. When the dough has pulled together, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic, about 8 to 10 minutes. Alternatively, if using a stand mixer, switch to the dough hook and mix at medium speed for 6-7 minutes, or until smooth and elastic.

Lightly oil a large bowl, place the dough in the bowl and turn to coat with oil. Cover with a damp cloth or plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place until doubled in volume, about 1.5-2 hours. When risen, punch down and divide dough in half.

Preheat oven to 375°. Grease 2 cookie sheets or line with parchment paper.

For filling:
Combine the brown sugar, ground cinnamon, chopped pecans, 1/2 cup flour and 1/2 cup raisins. Pour 1/2 cup melted butter over the cinnamon mixture and mix until crumbly.

To assemble:
Roll dough halves out into large rectangles (approximately 10x16 inches or so). Sprinkle the filling evenly over the dough and roll up each half tightly like a jelly roll, beginning at the wide side. Bring the ends of each roll together to form 2 oval shaped rings. Place each ring on a prepared cookie sheet. With scissors or a very sharp knife, make cuts 1/3 of the way through the rings at 1 inch intervals. Let rise in a warm spot until doubled in size, about 45 minutes.

Bake in preheated oven for 25-30 minutes. Push the doll or large pecan, if using, into the bottom of the cake. Frost while warm with the confectioners' sugar blended with 1 to 2 tablespoons of water.
 
Note: My cakes took about 25 minutes to bake. I covered them with aluminum foil at about 15 minutes to avoid excessive browning, and rotated the pans top to bottom/left to right halfway through baking.


Note: When you are ready to ice the cakes, you will want to make the icing separate (1 c. powdered sugar and 1 Tbsp. water) for each cake, especially if you are going to sprinkle them with colored sugars. The icing hardens pretty quickly.

Source: Bunkycooks

Apple Pie Cookies

Who doesn't love apple pie? Well, me, for one. It has never been one of my favorites. Give me a peach or cherry pie any day, but apple.... nah. That is, until more recently. It's been growing on me, and has encouraged the purchase of my fair share of Cortland, McIntosh, Granny Smith, and Honey Crisp apples this year.

When I saw these apple pie cookies on Smitten Kitchen, it was love at first sight. Pastry wrapped cinnamon and sugar apple slices, topped with coarse sugar.... Yes, please.

The crust is the star of this show, so I'd encourage you to make your own crust instead of going with store-bought. If you've not had success in the past or are fearful of failure, let me share with you the key to a flaky crust: cold everything. The butter, flour, water, your hands. Everything. You want to see the butter chunks in your crust. Also, having a beloved recipe helps, and I happen to have just that!

Sassafras Bakery's pies are delicious and their crusts are sublime. The owner of Sassafras Bakery, AJ Perry, recently shared her signature apple pie recipe with Food & Wine magazine, so I went with her crust on this instead of the one published on the original recipe. See those flaky layers above. Sweet, sweet, buttery, flaky layers.

Just out of the oven, they tasted just like an apple pie. As they cooled, the apple flavor was less dominate, so I think next time I will slice my apples just a little thicker than the original 1/8" the recipe calls for.

Smitten Kitchen has some great step-by-step photos showing how to put these beauties together. They are a little more complicated than your standard cookie recipe, but it's worth a little extra work for some extra flaky layers. Portable pie yumminess for the win.

Apple Pie Cookies

Yield: Approx. 20-24 cookies

Note from Smitten Kitchen: "Promise me that you won’t mess around with soft pie dough, here or anywhere. The single easiest way to master pie crusts is to decide at the outset that you won’t waste your energy on limp, stretchy dough. As soon as your dough softens, transfer whatever you’re doing to the freezer for two minutes to chill it again. Soft dough is hard to work with. It’s stretchy and doesn’t cut clean shapes, it gets sticky and you compensate by over-flouring it and that stickiness is those tiny bits of butter that will be your layers of flakes later disappearing, melting before they hit the oven and sealing into zillions of buttery pockets. It will also annoy you and make you think that you’re bad at working with pie dough but you’re not. You’re just warm-blooded and you need to put the pie dough back to chill for two minutes."
Ingredients:
Crust:

• 2 1/2 c. all-purpose flour, plus more for rolling
• 1 tsp. salt
• 2 sticks unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch dice and chilled
• 1/4 c. ice water (plus more as needed, added a tablespoon at a time)
• 2 Tbsp. sugar (optional) 

Filling:

• 3 medium apples, whatever you like to bake with (I used Granny Smith)
• Squeeze of lemon juice (optional)
• 1/3 cup granulated sugar
• 1 tsp. ground cinnamon
• Few gratings fresh nutmeg

To finish:

• 1 large egg
• Coarse or granulated sugar for garnish

Other items needed:

• A couple baking sheets covered with parchment paper
• Rolling pin, pastry brush (for egg wash), fork (for crimping and dipping) and sharp knife (to make slits)
• Two round cookie cutters of different sizes. I used 2 1/2-inch and 1 1/2 to 1 3/4-inch rounds. You’ll want to make sure there’s at least a 3/4-inch different in the sizes, as you’ll need the extra margin to crimp your dough. 

For the pie dough:
In a food processor, combine the flour and salt (and sugar, if using). Add the butter and pulse in 1-second bursts until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Drizzle the ice water over the dough and pulse in 1-second bursts until it just comes together. Do not process more than 30 seconds. Test by squeezing a small amount of dough together; if it is still too crumbly, add a bit more water, 1 tablespoon at a time. Turn the dough out onto a work surface, gather any crumbs and pat it into 2 disks. Wrap the disks in plastic and refrigerate until chilled, at least an hour.

Meanwhile, get everything else together: Line up six small dishes. In the first one, pour some water. Leave the second one empty; you’ll use it for your apples in a bit. In the third one, mix the sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and any other spices you like in your pie, such as a pinch of cloves. In the fourth one, place a little bit of flour to dust your surface and dip your fork for crimping. In the fifth one, whisk an egg with one teaspoon of water until smooth. In the last one, or in whatever container you keep it in, add some coarse or regular sugar for decorating the tops of the pies.

On a well-floured counter, roll out your pie dough pretty thin, a little shy of 1/8-inch thick. Lift and rotate your dough as you roll it, to ensure that it rolls out evenly and so you can be sure it’s not sticking in any place. Use the larger of your two cookie cutters [mine was 2 1/2-inch) to cut as many rounds as you can from the dough. Transfer them to parchment-lined baking sheets and keep them in the fridge until you need them. Once you’ve finished the first packet, repeat the process with the second packet of dough.

Prepare your apples: Peel your apples. Cut thin (about 1/8-inch thick) slices from one side of whole apple, stopping when you hit the core. Repeat on opposite side. I got about 10 usable slices from each side of my small-medium-ish apples. Use the smaller of your two cookie cutters (mine was about 1 2/3 inches) to cut the apples into cute little discs that will fit inside your pie cookies. Place them in your second bowl, covering them with a few drops of lemon juice if you find that they’re browning quickly.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

And now, assemble away! Grab your first disc of chilled dough and lightly dampen it on one side with the water. This is to help it seal. Take your first disc of apple and toss it in the cinnamon spice sugar. Place it on the damp side of the bottom disk. Place a second disc of dough on top; I found it easiest to seal it by picking the whole thing up (this is when you’ll be glad that your dough is cold and semi-firm; if it’s soft and getting sticky, chill it until it’s easy to pick up) and press the tops and bottoms around the apple with your fingers.

Back on the floured counter, cut decorative slits in your “pies”. Dip your fork in the flour and use it to create a decorative crimp on the sealed edges. Brush your cookie with egg wash and sprinkle with coarse sugar.
Replace on baking sheet and chill while you prepare the others.

Bake your apple pie cookies for 25 minutes, or until puffed and bronzed and very pie-like. (If this is your first batch, peer in at them at 20 minutes, to make sure your oven doesn’t run hot.) Transfer to a cooling rack to cool before eating them if you have that kind of willpower.

Do ahead: These will keep for a few days at room temperature. You could also make a larger batch of these, doing everything but brushing them with egg and sprinkling them with sugar, and keep them frozen until needed. Bake them directly from the freezer, just adding a couple minutes to the baking time.

Source: Crust slightly adapted from Sassafras Bakery's recipe. Filling and process from Smitten Kitchen.

Simple Cookie Glaze

My youngest daughter just celebrated her fifth birthday. I would love to freeze time and keep her little forever, but since I can't, I'm trying to just enjoy it as much as I possibly can.

Since we've already established I am no good at stopping time, I can at least share with you a recipe for a cookie glaze that stops in it's own tracks. Really. It's nice and thick, spreads incredibly easy, but then stays where it's supposed to. To make it even more wonderful, it hardens into a pretty (and stackable!) finish.

The birthday girl insisted on a pink icing with sprinkles, but you can make it any color your heart desires. The King Arthur Flour site even shows pictures of cookies decorated with several colors, making it a quick fix for your Christmas sugar cookies.

I wanted a little citrus-y flavor in our icing, so I added some Fiori di Sicilia flavoring from King Arthur, but I would imagine that the sugary glaze would be good either by itself, or with a little vanilla/almond/random other flavor extract added. I found it super easy to just dip the cookie in, scrape the excess off, and let the glaze settle into itself on the cookie. The key is to follow the measurements below pretty close to exactly in order to ensure the consistency is thick enough not to run off the cookie, but thin enough to spread cleanly. It's kind of magical to watch, and totally rewarding after going through all the work of making cutouts.

Simple Cookie Glaze

Yield: 2/3 cup

Ingredients:

• 2 ¼ cups confectioners' sugar, sifted
• 2 Tbsp. light corn syrup
• 1 ½ to 2 Tbsp. plus 1 tsp. milk
• Food coloring (optional)
• 1/8 tsp. Fiori di Sicilia extract or other extract (optional)

In a small bowl, whisk together the confectioners' sugar, corn syrup, and 1 1/2 tablespoons of the milk, and optional extract until smooth. Add food coloring, if desired.  

Spread one cookie with glaze, using a table knife or offset spatula. If it doesn't smooth out after 1 minute, dribble in additional milk, 1/2 teaspoon at a time, until the glaze reaches the right

Some notes for KAF:

• Be sure you measure accurately here. Too little milk, and the glaze won't spread nicely. Too much milk, and it will be thin, spotty and develop splotches overnight. 
• Once the glaze has hardened, you can color on it with food-safe markers, or you can pipe another color over the top with Royal Icing. You can sprinkle sugar on top of the wet royal icing for a sparkly effect.

Source: King Arthur Flour