Tag Archives: dessert

Gingerbread, the Alternative Febreze

Posted on by under breakfast, recipes, try this

Like most us, I eat not only when I’m hungry, but also when I’m bored, when I’m sad or lonely or drunk, when I’m angry or anxious or feel like I deserve a reward. In almost all of these cases, what I want most is dark, dense, not-too-sweet cake. For that very reason, I almost never make such a cake. One must wear pants, after all, and I am not in a position to buy new ones every other month.

Still, there are times. I recently forgot about a bunch of black lentils I had left boiling away on the stove. All the water evaporated and they had burnt to a crisp by the time the biting stench reached my room. I started over with new lentils and managed to salvage the pot I’d been using, but no matter how many fans I turned on and how many windows I opened, I couldn’t get the bitter, charred smell out of the house. I had a friend coming over for dinner whom I didn’t want to repulse. Acrid lentil fumes begone: I would shoo them out, or at least mask them, with the warm and spicy aroma of fresh gingerbread, the ultimate snacking cake.

I found this recipe, which sounded exactly like what I was looking for–almost. I didn’t have the applesauce it called for, but I figured plain yogurt would do. I also didn’t have whole wheat flour but wanted the same dense, nutty quality it imparts, so I replaced it with a mixture of white and rye flour. I misread the recipe and thought it said only ¼ cup each molasses and maple syrup. That seemed like very little sweetener for a whole batch of muffins, so I dumped in some brown sugar. The other gingerbread recipes I had looked at all called for eggs, but this one didn’t—I cracked one in. I was in too much of a hurry to measure spices, so I tossed in a bit of this and a bit of that and hoped it would taste good.

When I pulled the muffins out of the oven twenty-odd minutes later, no trace of the lentil debacle remained. The muffins were a deep caramel brown, bounced back at the touch, and smelled like Christmas. Unfortunately it turned out that my guest doesn’t like ginger, but I devoured mine with fervor enough for two.

Gingerbread (for the Hungry, the Sad, and the Smelly)
Makes about 16 muffins or 1 8×8 pan

*Note: if you don’t have rye flour, you can use whole wheat flour, buckwheat flour, or another whole-grain flour.

¼ cup molasses (not blackstrap)
¼ cup real maple syrup
½ cup plain yogurt
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted
1 egg, lightly beaten
¼ cup brown sugar, packed down
1 ½ cup rye flour
1 cup all-purpose white flour
1 ½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. kosher salt
2 tsp. ground ginger
2 tsp. cinnamon
¼ tsp. allspice
¼ tsp. cardamom
¼ tsp. nutmeg
1 cup hot water
1 tsp. powdered sugar for dusting, if desired

  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line muffin cups with paper liners or butter and flour an 8×8 in. baking dish.
  2. In a large bowl, combine the molasses, maple syrup, yogurt, butter, egg, and brown sugar. Mix until well blended.
  3. In another bowl, mix the flour, baking soda, salt, and spices. Pour the dry ingredients into the wet ones, stirring until just combined. Stir in the hot water. Pour into prepared muffin cups or pan.
  4. Bake 20-25 minutes for muffins or 35-50 minutes for cake, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Sift powdered sugar over the top if desired. (Jiggling the sugar through a fine-mesh sieve works well for this.) Allow to cool before serving.

Pelamushi Spells Dessert

Posted on by under recipes

Though you wouldn’t know it judging from the procession of cakes, cookies, and starchy delights of all sorts that passed through our digestive systems in the month surrounding Diana’s wedding, Georgian desserts traditionally take their flavor from fruit and nuts rather than butter and eggs. Shushana made one of my favorites the other night out of preserved grape juice from last year’s harvest. It’s fruity,  puddinglike, and vibrant maroon purple. Its name, pelamushi, makes it sound like some sort of psychedelic Asian fusion restaurant or a wonky Japanese puppet. What’s not to love?

The recipe calls for only three ingredients: grape juice, sugar, and flour. Like any spare recipe, the result depends almost entirely on the quality of the raw ingredients. I don’t think I’d bother making this dish out of store-bought grape juice or from the sourish grapes available in most US grocery stores. As it turns out, the not-very-pleasant astringency I’d come to accept as an unfortunate downside to the otherwise crowd-pleasing grape is not intrinsic at all. Even the sweetest grapes I’ve found in the store back at home cannot compare to those I buy at the sidewalk market on my street corner here. They’may be small (marble-sized), may contain seeds, and may not take well to traveling long distances in an 18-wheeler, but darnit, they’re delicious.

Shushana pulled a 2-liter canning jar from one of the many nooks and crannies where these things hide around here. She’d boiled down bunches of the Odessa grapes that hang over her mother-in-law’s home just outside Batumi last year, then strained and sweetened them with extra sugar: this was the last remains of that juice, being used just in time to make space for the fruits of this autumn’s harvest.

She brought the sweetened juice to boil in a cast-iron pot, meanwhile mixing flour (mostly corn flour, but partly wheat, which sets up thicker as it cools) with enough grape juice to make a lumpless pink paste. When the juice in the pot hit a boil, she stirred in the flour paste, then let it boil about 2 minutes more until she could no longer smell the flour. (That’s how she described it. I’m afraid my nose for flour is not yet as highly developed as hers.) Voila! She poured the thickened, glistening “pudding” into dessert cups and onto lunch plates where it gently set in a matter of a minute or two.

We enjoyed the pelamushi still steaming that evening, and out of the refrigerator the next day at breakfast. The grandkids got it joyfully all over their faces, the way American kids do with chocolate cake and spaghetti sauce. I love to suck this stuff off a spoon in a long, slow slurp. And I don’t feel a bit guilty doing it.

Pelamushi

If you happen to have a source for the delectably sweet grapes that this recipe demands, go ahead and boil them down into a thick sauce, then strain it to remove any stems, seeds, and skins. Add sugar to taste. If you try it with store-bought juice or not-so-sweet grapes, let me know how it turns out.

2 L. grape juice (red or white)

sugar to taste

1.5 cups corn flour + 0.5 cups all-purpose white flour

Bring sweetened grape juice to a boil over medium heat. Meanwhile, mix the two flours together in a bowl and stir in enough grape juice from the pot to create a smooth, thick paste. Use the back of a spoon to squelch any lumps.

When the juice boils, add this paste to it and stir to combine. Boil 2 minutes or so, stirring occasionally, until desired thickness is reached and you no longer smell any flour aroma. Pour into individual serving dishes. Serve hot, chilled, or at room temperature.