Baking Extravaganza!

Yesterday I did something quite unusual for me: I spent the day baking. I'm trying to broaden my culinary skills, and this represents a foray into hitherto forbidden territory. Why forbidden? Fats terrify me on one level, I'll admit. To be a good baker, you must be fearless in the face of fats and sugars and to skimp is suicide. But I had just received a half flat of freshly picked organic strawberries from Helsing Junction Farms, my CSA, and was acting on their directive to "eat or process immediately." I made two desserts: Pistachio Meringue Stack with Rose Cream and Strawberries and Strawberry Margarita Frozen Pie.  I also made a Radish Goat Cheese Galette.

The Pistachio Meringue Stack was good, but honestly, it contained too much cream for my taste. The rose water also tasted a bit soapy to me--maybe I bought some that was less than quality, I don't know. The best thing about the recipe was the meringue, which I would make again. If I were to do this dessert over, I would rethink it in terms of small, silver-dollar sized meringues, topped with just a smear of cream (I don't think the marscapone added that much) and fresh, macerated strawberries. Instead of rose water I would add vanilla, as the recipe also suggests. And to really kick it up a notch and make the whole thing truly herbaluscious: mint! Or even shiso would be great with the strawberries. The strawberry margarita pie has yet to be tried, but just tasting it before putting it in the freezer I could tell that, again, there was too much cream. Too much cream really dilutes flavor in my opinion. And it makes me feel vaguely ill afterward. I'll weigh in on this after we've tried it, but I can already imagine this recipe cutting the amount of folded cream into the pie mixture by 2/3 (down to 1/2 a cup) and perhaps amping up the strawberry margarita mix by 1/2. I really liked the margarita flavor of the pie mix before I added the cream.

As for the Radish Goat Cheese Galette, this was absolutely AWESOME! What a surprise, especially for two people (me and the hubble) who don't really like radishes. The crust, a Kalorienbombe, was the highlight. But I do love sour cream, it must be said. Somehow the slightly acidic kick in its sourness seems to amp flavor instead of mask it, like straight cream can do, and this sourness reverberates with the tang of the goat cheese. I mixed the butter and flour together lightly in the food processor, then dumped the mix into a bowl and added the sour cream a little at a time with a fork, as the recipe suggests. There were fairly largish small chunks of butter in the mix, and I ended up adding 4 T of ice water to get the whole thing to stick together. Once it did, it was rather moist. I let the dough sit in the fridge for a couple of hours, then rolled it out. I was able to make a mini galette with the scraps I got from cutting a nice circle from the dough before topping and shaping. For the topping, I cut the radishes really thinly with the mandoline and tossed them with balsamic vinegar and a mint-marjoram-walnut pesto I made with the fading mint from my garden. YUM. (Sidenote: apparently marjoram is in the mint family and the ancient Greeks used it to appease the gods. It is a symbol of happiness--the kind the belly feels when receiving it.) Hubble and I don't really like radishes, but they came in the CSA box so I wanted to use them. We might be converts now. What also amped up (this is apparently the word du jour today) all these flavors  even more was the genius wine pairing of the hubble. He had just procured a half case of the Cristom Willamette Valley Pinot Noir Sommers Reserve 2007 for a ridiculous price (nevertheless expensive) at Pete's yesterday, so naturally we had to try some.

It was nothing less than outstanding with the tang of the sour cream and goat cheese and the creaminess of the buttery crust. Ridiculously good.

Sometimes I feel a pang of guilt that we eat so well when others have nothing to eat or are cursed with a taste for MacDo. Thank you thank you thank you for this yummy life.