Apricot Jam

Do you like making jam or eating jam? Or do you like both? I love making jam, but I don't eat that much of it. This often leaves me with a surplus, unless I give all of it away. So, I tend to make jam every second year to give me time to use it all up. A friend told me recently that I don't eat it because I am 'suffering a toast shortage'. This is true. I rarely have bread in the house, but if I did, I'd eat nothing else, and cook not at all. Most of my jam ends up in yogurt, and I can eat dozens of jars of rhubarb jam this way. In fact, I hadn't planned to make any jam this year, but I saw a basket of beautiful apricots at the farmers' market a couple of weeks ago and couldn't resist. I actually don't like to eat apricots out of hand, but love them in pastries and in jam, of course. This was a very simple recipe, which made a tangy soft set jam, just the way I like it. I may not be eating it on toast, but I do see a Sachertorte in our future.

Apricot Jam

From the Williams Sonoma Book of Preserving

Makes 5-250 ml jars

3 pounds apricots

2 cups sugar

½ cup fresh lemon juice

1. Pit apricots and slice thinly. Combine with sugar in a large pot and allow to macerate at room temperature for at least 4 hours. You can also refrigerate them overnight.
2. Add lemon juice and bring to a boil, and cook for about 25 minutes, until thickened. Remember that the jam will be firmer when cool, so don't overcook.
3. Ladle into hot, sterilized jars, cap, and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Any jars that do not seal can be kept in the fridge.

The Daring Bakers make doughnuts!

As soon as this challenge, chosen by Lori of Butter Me Up, was announced, many of her fellow Canadian members of the Daring Bakers came out of the woodwork and enthusiastically talked doughnuts. My favourite childhood doughnut memory is of pulling out my mother's deep fryer and making a batch of nutmeg scented cake doughnuts after school with my brother. We would roll and cut out a few, then give up and fling blobs of dough into the fryer. They were usually too big and uncooked in the centre, but we didn't care. We just tried to make and eat as many as possible before my parents got home. I'm sure they had nightmares about us burning the house down.

Ode to Tim Horton's: maple brown butter glazed cruller

Many folks also talked about Tim Horton's, and how they miss it when they're away from Canada. Tim Horton's is ubiquitous here, with outlets from coast to coast (but not coast to coast to coast, like the CBC), selling doughnuts, coffee, soup and sandwiches. You can actually plan your journey across Canada and map out all the Timmy's. Weird. Many people look down on Timmy's, but I have been known to have a cruller and a coffee. In fact, I had done just that the day this challenge was announced. My strangest encounter with this Canadian icon was walking down the road in Belfast a few years ago and seeing a giant Tim Horton's ad. Turns out that some gas stations there sell plastic-wrapped doughnuts and frothy 'cappuccino' out of an automated machine, kind of like what you'd see in a hospital waiting room. Well, not in a Canadian hospital, because they all have Timmy's outlets. :)

That irresistible custardy interior!

I really wanted to make crullers, as they are my favourite kind of doughnut, so I made these on Thanksgiving morning. They are made with the same dough used to make cream puffs, and they came together really quickly and easily. They did not hold their ridged shape when fried, but that was my fault, as I didn't let the dough cool enough. I am famously patient in my family, but not that day! I glazed them with a mixture of brown butter, maple syrup and icing sugar, and they were fantastic. I took a plate to my brother and his family, and my 2-year-old nephew ate 2 and started zooming around, yelling 'YUM!' and rubbing his and everyone else's tummies. Then he refused to have a nap. That's what aunts are for, right? Anyway, the cruller recipe was not one of the challenge ones, so I had another date with the deep fryer.

The amazing spherical doughnut!

I invited a couple of friends over for brunch and made the yeast doughnuts from the challenge. Marcellina had made some gorgeous cardamom doughnuts filled with raspberry jam, and I wanted some, but she lives in Australia, so I made my own half recipe and replaced the nutmeg in the recipe with cardamom. For the filling, I used the plum jam I had made for a Daring Cooks' challenge. Rather than inject the jam in the fried doughnuts, I rolled the dough thinly, cut it with a 2½" cutter, filled with a teaspoon of jam, covered with another round of dough, and cut the filled doughnut with a 2" cutter. I then left them to rise while I prepared the rest of the brunch. They didn't rise that much, but when I put them in the oil they puffed right up, becoming this bobbing ball of energy that was impossible to corral and turn over (kind of like my nephew on doughnuts). Anyway, cooking these was a team effort, and lots of fun. We let them cool while we ate brunch, being a bit wary of eating super-hot jam.

I kept taking bites, looking for the perfect shot. I never got it,
but this one looks kind of happy, and I got to eat 2 more doughnuts.

These were good too! They were a touch warm and not too sweet (mostly because I wasn't running the sugar shaker), and not greasy at all. Being an Ottawan, I really really wanted to make Beavertails, but I just didn't get around to it. I'll try to do one come winter, when I can do a full post on it and show you how to make a perfect Killaloe Sunrise. Check out the Daring Kitchen main page to see a slideshow of everyone's doughnuts. 

Blog-checking lines: The October 2010 Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Lori of Butter Me Up. Lori chose to challenge DBers to make doughnuts. She used several sources for her recipes including Alton Brown, Nancy Silverton, Kate Neumann and Epicurious.

Recipes and full challenge PDF after the jump

Daring Cooks put things in jars!

This month's Daring challenge was to preserve some of summer's bounty, in jars, or by freezing. What a great idea, as I know lots of Daring Cooks had been eager for just such a challenge. The theme was selected by John of Eat4Fun, who is a longtime member of the Daring Kitchen. I have been canning and preserving things since high school, but I loved this challenge! I made 10 things in a 3-day preserving spree, which coincided with a 33℃, high humidity heat wave. I think I may have contributed to that, with all the boiling pots. Above you can see crabapple jelly, the prettiest of the lot, I think. I had never made this before, and it turned out very sweet, but will be perfect for glazing tarts, or just eating on bread...

This is how many crabapples it took to make 5 x 250ml jars:

Next up was plums, of which I had a veritable windfall. My aunt's neighbour's tree was covered in fruit that nobody knew what to do with. I got about 5 kilograms and made 5 small jars of of plum-cardamom butter and 12 small jars of plum jam. 

The plum jam:

The plum-cardamom butter:

The difference between butter and jam is that a butter has less sugar and is cooked longer, to a thicker consistency and darker colour. I think cardamom and plums are perfect together.

I also made a jar of peaches, spiced with rum, tonka beans, mace, sapote and vanilla. The extra syrup from this was great with yogurt:

On to the savoury things. I helped my mother to make pickled beets (5 kg worth) and chili sauce (25 kg of tomatoes). Next, I saw a recipe for a beet and horseradish relish using roasted tomatoes. I don't usually love relish, but I really wanted to try this recipe. It's from The River Cottage Preserving Handbook, and you'll find it after the jump. I got my orange marmalade and rhubarb jam recipes from the same book. This book does not often recommend processing jars in a boiling water bath, but is reliable, I think. There was a lot of discussion on the forum about processing and it seems to US recommendations are much stricter than in other parts of the world. I usually always finish my jars in a boiling water bath, but I was surprised to learn that my mother and all her relatives do not, even when working with low acid foods. To quote her: 'nobody's died yet'. No, but I still boiled my jars. :)

This stuff is fantastic--sweet and tangy. It called for fresh horseradish, which I found growing in my mother's backyard, but you could use prepared. Here's what the fresh looks like:

Here's a fairly bad picture of everything but the plum jam lined up on the windowsill:

Left to right: chili sauce, rum peaches, bread and butter pickles, pickled beets, orange marmalade, beet relish, rhubarb jam, crabapple jelly, plum-cardamom butter, pickled horseradish

The orange marmalade was made this winter, for a Daring Bakers' challenge, and the rhubarb was made this spring.

Blog-checking lines: The September 2010 Daring Cooks’ challenge was hosted by John of Eat4Fun. John chose to challenge The Daring Cooks to learn about food preservation, mainly in the form of canning and freezing. He challenged everyone to make a recipe and preserve it. John’s source for food preservation information was from The National Center for Home Food Preservation.

TWD: Dressy chocolate loaf cake

Some of Dorie's recipes have funny names, don't they? I love loaf cakes, but dressy and chocolate don't really do it for me. I do have some chocolate-loving friends, though, and they were helping me to move yesterday, so dressy chocolate loaf cake it was! What gussies this cake up is that it's cut into 3 layers and  sandwiched with jam. I used sour cherry jam, thinned with Amaretto. The frosting is a simple mixture of melted chocolate and sour cream. I used a mix of milk chocolate and 72% dark chocolate in the interest of using up what was left in my cupboard.

This was a really quick and easy cake to mix, which was a relief after the wedding cake marathon. I added some vanilla and upped the salt, as I find many of the recipes in the book could use a bit more. Some had trouble with this overflowing the pan, so I only filled the pan about ½ to ⅔ full and it rose just to the top. With the extra I filled a couple of ramekins. I think I'm going to have to break down and get a muffin pan one of these days, because I keep ending up with gigantic cupcakes. And eating them.

This is the one I taste-tested inhaled, so I used a different frosting. Chocolate cake I can do, but with chocolate icing too, no. Mixed with sour cream? Nope. So, I had some very sweet white icing in the freezer that was actually leftover Oreo filling, from this fun day. I thinned it with a bit of cream and slathered it on. Yum. Cleaning out the freezer was on my list, so this wasn't just idle procrastination from packing. I think this is why I've been 'almost finished' for 3 days. I'm sure some of you are rolling your eyes, but not only am I not a chocoholic, but I hate sour cream. I won't go into great detail about all the reasons I don't like it, but ick. It does make great cakes, though. I sometimes replace it with yogurt, which I love, love, love, but I wanted the richness here, and I wasn't sure yogurt would work for the frosting. 

I don't have a picture of the finished cake to post because it looked like a big brown blob. Maybe when I slice it and have internet again I'll add one. I'm writing this on Sunday night and the move is tomorrow. Hopefully I'll be sound asleep and all my stuff will be in its new home (storage) when this posts. :)

Thanks a lot to Amy Ruth from Amy Ruth Bakes for choosing this recipe. It was one I definitely would have passed over, and that would have been a shame. Check out the rest of the TWDers here.