Bite-Sized #2
A baker's dozen baking prompts, chiffon love, and an easy cobbler
Hello friends! I’m popping in your inbox today with an installment of a new-ish newsletter series: Bite-Sized (see the first one here)! This occasional column is for highlighting an ingredient on my mind, some recipe or reading recommendations, quick kitchen tips — basically, helpful tidbits that maybe don’t fit into my regular recipe posts. Enjoy!
A baker’s dozen baking prompts
I can feel the summer shift coming on — in our house, this means early wake-ups, evening bike rides, and a more fluid, let-down-your-hair schedule. This relaxed approach seeps its way into baking as well, with “summer me” more often in the mood to try something new. When I get into this headspace, sometimes it’s challenging to know where to start — too many unrelated ideas floating around! So I came up with these baking prompts (for humans! Not AI!) to guide my creative process. Maybe they’ll help you too.
Transform: Re-imagine your favourite baked good into a different form. Can you translate lemon meringue pie into ice cream? Tiramisu into a donut? Strawberry shortcake into a cream puff?
Connect with the past: Ask an older member of your family for an heirloom recipe to try at home.
Ingredient deep dive: Choose a seasonal fruit for an ingredient study. Cook or prepare it at least three different ways. Taste it with a few different herbs or spices. Bake something with it as the star ingredient.
Expand your palate: Bake with a spice or flavour combination you don’t normally use. Books like The Flavour Thesaurus or The Flavor Bible can provide guidance.
Something old, something new: Try a new recipe from your favourite cookbook (or baking blog, or newsletter!).
Technique study: Pick a technique you’ve always wanted to learn and practice it once a week for a month. Use the same recipe and take notes each time for what went well/what could improve.
Switcheroo: Usually bake sweet treats? Make something savoury. And vice versa.
Recreate: Think back to the most memorable baked good you’ve enjoyed (that you didn’t make). Try to recreate it at home, or make something inspired by those flavours.
Use what you have: Go shopping in your own house and challenge yourself to create something using only ingredients you have on hand.
Explore: Visit a bakery from a different culture and try some new-to-you items.
Shop your tools: Look through your bakeware collection and make something in a pan you don’t use very often.
Do a mini bake-off: Choose three or four recipes for the same baked good and make them to compare side-by-side. (Don’t forget to recruit some tasters!)
Armchair tourism: Try a recipe for an iconic baked good from your region or a place you’d like to visit.
What new bake do you want to tackle this summer?
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Chiffon love
I was thrilled to see that my cream cheese chiffon cake was the crowd favorite in The Pancake Princess’s recent chiffon cake bake-off! As a life-long chiffon lover, it’s lovely to see this versatile cake having its moment in the sun with this generation of bakers — a trend recently profiled by the New York Times.
For my best chiffon tips (and the cream cheese chiffon recipe), check out my chiffon guide!
Recipe-ish: A versatile fruit cobbler
In preparation for peak fruit picking season, I’ve been clearing out last summer’s frozen fruit stash. On the hunt for a quick and easy dessert, I remembered this strawberry rhubarb cobbler from waaaay back (a decade! Yikes!) in my blog archives and decided to refresh it for my bag of frozen sour cherries and handful of garden rhubarb. Here’s how I did it:
Cream Scone-Topped Fruit Cobbler
Serves 8
Ingredients:
For the cream scone topping:
130g all-purpose flour
50g whole grain flour (I used buckwheat)
30g granulated sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 t kosher salt
110g heavy cream, plus more as needed
50g sour cream
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp almond extract
For the filling:
1130g (2 1/2 lbs) fruit (I used 900g sour cherries and 230g rhubarb)
200g sugar, divided (you can drop this to 120-150g if using sweeter fruit, but for my very tart fruits this was the perfect amount)
1/2 t kosher salt
Juice of a small lime
40g cornstarch
To finish:
Coarse sugar
Method:
Preheat the oven to 375F with a rack in the middle.
Make the topping: In a medium bowl, whisk together the flours, sugar, baking powder, and salt. In a separate cup, whisk together the cream, sour cream, and extracts. Drizzle over the dry ingredients, then stir with a silicone spatula until a shaggy dough forms. Fold the dough over onto itself 5-7 times, just until it’s cohesive. If there are lots of dry bits that won’t incorporate, drizzle in more cream a teaspoon at a time, just enough to bring everything together. Refrigerate topping while you make the filling.
If you’re using fresh fruit, stir together all the filling ingredients in a large bowl. Transfer to a deep-dish pie plate.
My frozen fruit method: I didn’t want to wait for the cherries to thaw, so I heated about 2/3rds of the frozen cherries with 150g of the sugar, salt, and lime juice on the stove until the sugar was dissolved and the juices were steaming. To keep the fruit from breaking down too much, I used a slotted spoon to remove the solids to a separate bowl and brought the juices to a boil. I whisked together the remaining 50g sugar and cornstarch together, then stirred that into the boiling juices and cooked for a minute to cook out the starch. Then I added in all the fruit (including the remaining frozen cherries and rhubarb). That bubbled on the stove for another minute to defrost and coat all the fruit, then I transferred the whole lot to a deep-dish pie plate.
Assemble and bake: Tear the scone topping into quarter-size pieces; scatter evenly over fruit. Sprinkle liberally with coarse sugar.
Baking uncooked fruit filling: Bake cobbler until juices are thick and bubbling and topping is cooked through and golden brown, 45-50 minutes.
Baking precooked fruit filling: Bake cobbler until the topping is cooked through and golden brown, about 30 minutes. Since the filling is already cooked, it doesn’t need to bubble but the juices should look matte and thick.