Thanks for stopping by! I’m no longer posting on this site, but head on over to Behind the Music, where I write about the texts of choral music. You’ll see all kinds of information available on that topic, but I haven’t lost interest in food. There’s a cookbook in amongst the music materials. Take a look!
Debi Simons
Delightful Little Lemon Cupcakes
This has been a favorite recipe of mine for many years. The sour cream gives the cupcakes a great texture and fits in well with the tang of the lemon flavoring. I especially love the combination of lemon and raspberry, and you’ll see my suggestion for a lemon buttercream and raspberry jam topping. They shout spring!
LEMON CREAM CUPCAKES
Makes 48 small cupcakes. These are very moist and delicious but not terribly lemony. Very good with a topping of a layer of raspberry jam and lemon buttercream. The original recipe is from Taste of Home, but had a yield of only 30. By dividing up the batter to make 48 I've made the recipe yield smaller cupcakes that have room for the jam and a nice layer of buttercream.
Servings 48 cupcakes, wih just 8 grams of sugar per cupcake, but that does not include buttercream and jam.
Ingredients
- 1 cup butter, softened
- 2 cups sugar
- 3 eggs
- 1/8 tsp lemon oil or 1 tsp. grated zest*
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 2 cups sour cream
Instructions
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In a mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Add lemon oil or zest and vanilla; mix well. Combine dry ingredients; add to creamed mixture alternately with sour cream (batter will be thick). Fill foil-lined muffin cups enough batter to fill about 1/3 of the muffin tin. (Yes, only 1/3. You want these to be small. And foil cupcake liners work much better than paper ones, as they are easier to peel off. A quick spritz of baking spray makes them even easier.) Bake at 350 degrees F for 15 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes; remove to wire racks and cool completely.
Recipe Notes
*I keep lemon oil on hand and always use it in place of zest. It is pressed from lemon peel, so it is the substance that gives lemon zest its flavor and is extremely strong. Be very careful not to overdo this ingredient, as you can ruin a whole batch that way. If you taste the batter and feel that it's not lemony enough, add additional oil literally drop by drop. Citrus oils last forever in the fridge.
Chocolate-and-Beer Cupcakes–They Really Are Good!
This recipe is so delicious that it’s worth going to the effort of getting an unusual ingredient. (The photo is pretty bad, I know.I should be making these again in the foreseeable future and will re-take it.)
Children will not like them, as they’re very strongly flavored. The alcohol in the beer bakes out, of course, but you can definitely taste it in the finished product. And I use bittersweet chocolate for the glaze, but you can use semisweet if you want a kinder, gentler version. I got this recipe from the King Arthur Flour catalog several years ago and ended up making it for a reception after a Celtic-themed concert. The Irish like their beer, don’t they? Make sure that you include a menu card telling people what these are. They are seriously, seriously chocolatey and seriously, seriously rich. I have made them much smaller than the original recipe.
Magnificent Mini Quiches
I always tell brides who ask me to do their food that I refuse to include those horrible little pre-made quiches from Costco. This recipe is my own homemade version of the horrible store-bought stuff.
Debi's Mini Quiches
These are a labor-intensive but fully-worth-it homemade version of those quiches you buy at a wholesale club.
Servings 24 individual quiches
Ingredients
Cream Cheese Pastry:
- 1 stick butter
- 4 oz. cream cheese so half of a regular 8-oz. pkg.
- 1 1/4 cups flour
Meat and Cheese:
- 1/2 cup chopped ham or crisply-cooked bacon
- 1/2 cup grated cheese, Swiss or Cheddar, or your preference
Custard:
- 1 whole egg
- 1/4 cup milk
- 1/8 tsp. salt
- 1/8 tsp. pepper
- few gratings of nutmeg
Instructions
For pastry shells:
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Mix in stand mixer or food processor, thoroughly combining the butter and cream cheese before adding the flour and scraping down the sides of the bowl several times. Try not to overmix, but do get everything evenly combined. (A stand mixer is probably best for this.) Divide into 1/2-oz. balls, putting each ball into a mini-muffin tin. I use a small “disher” to portion out the dough, and I do (sigh) weigh each ball on my digital kitchen scale. You should have 24 shells. Refrigerate briefly—maybe half an hour—just so the dough is workable. Squish dough out into shells, with a bit sticking up over the top. I’m afraid there’s no alternative to just using your thumbs—even Martha Stewart does it that way. (I do have a pastry tamper, and for the last few batches I used that first and then went back around with my thumbs, but I’m not sure I saved any time that way. I may try to refine my technique a bit the next time.) Prick bottoms of shells with a fork. Bake at 350 for 15 minutes. The shells will puff up a bit, but that’s okay. You could drive yourself crazy with little squares of parchment in each one with a few pie weights . . . but I refused to do that and the shells worked fine.
For filling:
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Use a food processor to mix custard ingredients. (If you’re just making one batch you can use a mini-processor or the small bowl of your regular processor, or just whisk it in a bowl.) Put a small amount of cheese and ham in each muffin crust. Put a tiny bit—probably a teaspoon—of the milk/egg mixture on top of each, trying not to let any of the mixture drip down the sides. You may need more custard; if so, just mix up another batch. Better to have too little than too much and have to figure out what to do with the extra. Bake for an additional 10 minutes, until cheese is melted and custard is set. Use an instant-read thermometer to test a quiche in the middle of the pan and the center of the quiche, making sure that temp is at least 160 degrees.
Recipe Notes
This recipe can be multiplied exponentially. I made 12x for the wedding, filling up my six 24-cup mini-muffin pans twice, and I could have/should have made at least 96 more, filling up four of the pans for a third time. After pre-baking the shells for the first batch, I let them cool, popped them out using the point of a knife and lined them up on a large paper-towel-lined baking sheet, covered them with plastic wrap and froze them. When I was ready to bake them I used the muffin pans to bake all of them, baking six pans at a time, taking them out after they cooled briefly, then putting a new batch of shells back in the pans and doing them. In theory you could just bake the removed ones on the baking sheets, but I felt that the quiches would cook more evenly in the muffin pans. These were a huge hit; it’s just about impossible to make too many.
These can be served at room temp, although they shouldn’t be left out of the oven too long. They do have eggs, meat and cheese in them, after all. I did put layers of them in chafing dish pans, just so they were at least somewhat warm.
Many-Splendored Buttercream
I’m a little obsessed with this recipe. It’s not something you’re going to make when the chips are down and you need something to take to a potluck (although everyone nowadays just stops by the grocery store and buys something, alas). I like it because it’s so fluffy and smooth and because it tastes much more of butter than of sugar. I will probably never make a wedding cake, but if I did I’d use this recipe. Part of its charm for me is simply being able to conquer it. Once you’ve made it a few times and honed your technique, it really isn’t all that hard. There are many varieties of this recipe, the main ones (if I’m understanding the terminology correctly) being Swiss and Italian. I don’t like the idea of the Swiss version (if that’s what it is), because the egg whites don’t really get cooked, and I don’t think you could make it with egg white powder, which is what I use. So I believe this is Italian buttercream. (There’s also French buttercream, which is made with egg yolks. The yolks aren’t really cooked, and I think powdered egg yolks would be pretty bad. I did see Martha Stewart make a wedding cake and use French buttercream for the frosting on the old “Baking with Julia” TV show, but I’d never try it. It was absolutely beautiful, though. And I just went online to check on whether or not I’ve covered all the buttercream bases and found out that there’s also flour buttercream and German buttercream, which I’m not going to go into. However, I was pleased to see that for the most part Italian buttercream is preferred as it’s the most stable and you do cook the egg whites.)
Special Cranberry-Maple Muffins
I have struggled and struggled with this recipe, as the muffins tasted really good but didn’t rise very well. It seemed to me as if the issue must be with the leavening. If you have acidic ingredients such as buttermilk, as my original recipe did, then you’re supposed to use baking soda instead of baking powder, but the recipe called for baking powder. So I’ve tried a number of different leavening amounts and combinations, but I never was quite satisfied with the results. After one especially disastrous experiment I got a Sally’s Baking Addiction post in my inbox (she’s one of only three cooking websites to which I subscribe) that was basically her version of this recipe, although with different spices. Boy, would it have been helpful if she’d made those muffins a week earlier! The version I had just produced
Strawberry Cheesecake Cupcake Extravaganza
My dear friend Cindy took a picture of the final product under less-than-optimum circumstances in the low light of the wedding reception. Thank you, Cindy! As usual I wasn’t prepared to take pictures and had left my camera in the car.
I made these for the daughter of a dear friend, and I have to say that they were very successful. Every single one of the 96 I made disappeared, and I got lots of compliments. Can’t recommend them highly enough. They’re not very hard and can be made in advance and frozen excluding the strawberries and glaze. The actual filling is a very basic plain cheesecake mixture; the toppings make them special. You can do even more with decorating them if you want to.
World’s Most Versatile Breadsticks
Although I am trying to stay away from most refined carbs, that avoidance doesn’t mean that I can’t eat bread. I just eat good bread! I’ve ranted and raved about the joys of grinding your own wheat in the intro to the cookbook, so I’m not going to repeat myself here.
Smoky Grilled Potato Salad
We have an annual Memorial Day cookout (or at least we always call it a cookout, even though we usually end up eating inside, which was indeed true last evening). It’s a lovely start to the summer, with me in the kitchen all day. Great way to spend a holiday, right? Actually, for me it is. I hadn’t really decided on the menu until late last week when I watched an episode of Cook’s Country, the sister program to America’s Test Kitchen. The episode is titled “Grilled and Smoked,” and involves the above potato salad and also a way to do brisket to get the maximum amount of crust on the meat. I would have to say that the brisket came out more like charcoal than meat, although everyone was very gracious and almost all of it disappeared. I plan a re-do for Father’s Day and will report on it then. But the potato salad! As I write this post I’m thinking about lunch and how I’m going to eat some of the leftovers (pictured above). As you can see, that’s a pretty small item. As with all of the best potato salad recipes, it includes bacon. (If you don’t want to go to the trouble of this recipe, I will share with you another great bacon-including potato salad recipe that has four ingredients: boiled red skin-on potatoes, finely-chopped red onion, crumbled crisp bacon, and ranch dressing, in whatever proportions you prefer. That’s it.)
Anyway, back to this recipe. Two aspects set it apart: the cooking method for the potatoes (grilling) and the dressing. The potato flavor is intensified by the grilling, and the dressing has chiles in it. Do give it a try!
Smoky Grilled Potato Salad
If you think all potato salads are bland and boring, I cannot urge you strongly enough to make this. It is seriously great and very unusual. And it's not any more work than a regular old version with boiled eggs and pickles.
Servings 8 Maybe? Depends on how hungry everyone is and what else you're serving.
Ingredients
- 8 slices bacon
- 4 tablespoons vinegar Red wine or, if you can find it, sherry, which has a sweeter, more complex taste, but which is hard to find at the grocery store.
- 4 tablespoons mayonnaise
- 2 small canned chipotle chiles in adobo sauce with some of the sauce
- Salt and pepper
- 4 tablespoons olive oil
- 5 pounds small red potatoes scrubbed but unpeeled, halved if very small or quartered if larger
- 1-2 large onions sliced into 1/2-inch rounds and anchored with toothpicks pushed through the sides of the slices--use 3-4 toothpicks per slice. I used just one onion this time, but I think I'll use another one the next time, as the grilled onions are truly delicious.
- 4 scallions thinly sliced
- Finely chopped parsley or cilantro for garnish
Instructions
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The Cook's Country recipe gives directions for using both a gas and a charcoal grill, but since I simply used a gas grill that's all I'm going to discuss. So, first fry the bacon until good and crisp, then crumbled or chop. Reserve the fat.
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Turn the grill on to medium high and place a large sheet of foil over the grate or thoroughly scrape and oil the grate. I just use the foil. Close the lid and let the grill heat up while you're prepping the potatoes and onion.
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Toss the potatoes with 3-4 tablespoons of the reserved bacon fat and 1 tsp. of salt. Brush the onion slices with additional fat. Place the onions and potatoes on the foil and cook, covered, for 12-15 minutes. You want the food to be well browned with grill marks. Flip everything over, close the lid again, and cook for another 10 minutes or so. Test the potatoes by piercing with a knife; if they seem to need more time to cook, turn the grill off and close the lid, allowing them to continue to cook with residual heat. You don't want the potatoes to be completely carbonized, so letting the residual heat do the last bit of cooking with help avoid that.
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Meanwhile, make the dressing: Use a stick or small blender to mix the vinegar, mayonnaise, chiles, and olive oil, with 1/2 tsp. salt and pepper to taste. This amount of chiles will give you a fairly spicy but not overwhelmingly hot dressing.
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Let the potatoes and onions cool. Chop the onions fairly small. Mix in the dressing and the scallions, then taste to see if additional salt is needed and sprinkle with the herb garnish.
Recipe Notes
The original recipe says to serve this warm or at room temperature, and I wish I had paid attention to that direction and not refrigerated it. You wouldn't want it to sit out for hours, but it's not very perishable. I felt that the flavor of the freshly-made salad was better than it was after being refrigerated. If you need to make the salad in advance, I'd advise keeping the dressing separate until you're ready to serve. Potato salad recipes often say to mix the dressing with the potatoes while they're still warm so that the dressing will be absorbed, but I don't think that's a good idea. You want your potato salad to be creamy, and if the potatoes have drunk up the dressing then it's going to be dry. Just my opinion, as I'm sure my dear readers will be astonished to hear. You'll have to refrigerate the leftovers, of course, but that's life.
Easy, Elegant, Unusual Salmon
I was making all the food for a women’s tea on Saturday, and we were having the company for Sunday dinner that we should have had the week before, only we were snowed in, so I needed something simple. Fortunately, that was what I had already planned anyway. No multi-step recipes, no fancy dessert. I wanted to make something we’d had before, a salmon dish with some kind of sauce made with cider and cream. But when I went online to look for it I couldn’t find anything that sounded right. At some point I re-stumbled upon the recipe which turned out to be in Molly Wizenberg’s