Tag: Pastries

Weekend Finds 3:22:14: Seattle Favorites

March 22, 2014February 9, 2017

I write about Seattle all of the time, because it’s where I’m from and I go visit my family an awful lot because, you know, I love them. You can find bits and pieces throughout this blog of things I’ve done when I’m there, or things I like to do, but I thought it might be nice to compile them all in one place. Now, you can’t go watch movies at my mom’s or cook dinner at my dad’s, but you can partake in some of my other favorite places. Scroll down to see some of my favorite things to do and eat and drink.

Doing

Art Galleries near Pioneer Square
Pike Place Market
Seattle Great Wheel
Walk along the waterfront and go to Olympic Sculpture Park
Discovery Park
Go get chinese foot massages in the International District!
Chihuly Garden and Glass
Wine tasting in Woodinville

Eating & Drinking

Breakfast:

Crumble and Flake for some amazing pastries. Definitely try the blue cheese scone and cheddar and paprika croissant, if they have them.
St. Cloud for a good down home brunch.
Cafe Besalu for pastries featuring fresh, seasonal fruit.
Honoré
Fat Hen

Lunch:

Il Corvo for an awesome fresh pasta lunch.
Salumi if you’re willing to wait in line for some cured meats by Mario Batali’s father.
Baguette Box
Sitka & Spruce for a beautiful, homey, delicious meal at lunch or dinner.
Café Presse
Paseo

Dinner:

The Blind Pig for a very creative meal. If you can swing it, I recommend doing a tasting menu and trying every dish on the board.
Bar Sajor for another beautiful meal. Definitely try the smoked yogurt!
Joule
Revel
The Whale Wins
Artusi
Delancey for quite possibly the best pizza in town.
The Walrus and the Carpenter for an oyster bar meal. But it has oh so much more – The Walrus and the Carpenter made Bon Appetit’s top restaurants in the country last year.
Rainier BBQ for a crazy good, authentic korean barbeque.
Bake’s Place is in Bellevue, technically, but they always have great bands playing, and the food is pretty darn good too.
La Bête

Drinking:

Canon for an incredible dealer’s choice cocktail.
Liberty for an awesome liquor and cocktail and really unique cocktails. The Seattle Sour is one of my favorites. If you get a chance, sit at the bar so you can watch the bartenders work their magic, and ask them questions. If you get hungry, you can order some sushi.
Knee High Stocking Company for the speakeasy feel – you have to text to make a reservation, and ring a doorbell to get in.
Essex
Rachel’s Ginger Beer for some amazing ginger beer, which they use to make awesome cocktails, including possibly the best hot toddy I’ve ever had.

Earl Grey Madeleines

November 13, 2013February 5, 2017

Elsa has discovered my secret.

My dear friend Elsa and I were hanging out quite a bit when she finally got back from her worldly travels this summer, as she was job hunting, so had her days free, just like I do. She came over one afternoon, and we decided to bake something. I started looking for recipes, and suggested rosemary shortbread, thyme/sea salt/chocolate chunk cookies, or these earl grey madeleines from Baking a Moment. She looked at me and said “Are we only allowed to make things that involve weird flavor combinations?”

She’s right. I like trying new flavor combinations. Why have chocolate chip cookies when you can add thyme? Or plain shortbread when you can add rosemary? Why not spice it up a bit? Plus, combinations like this are becoming rather mainstream. I think I’ve got her on the weird flavor combo train at this point, but she still teases me all the time. Anyway, on that afternoon, I convinced her to make earl grey madeleines with me. And dang, were they good.

For the record, Elsa made me zucchini, jalapeno, lime cookies for my birthday.

Earl Grey Madeleines

Ingredients

6 Tbl unsalted butter
3 bags earl grey tea
2 tsp light brown sugar
2 tsp honey
2 eggs
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp kosher salt

Instructions

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

In a small pot on the stove, melt the butter. While the butter is melting, cut open the tea bags, and then stir the loose tea into the melted butter. Allow to steep over low heat for about 5 minutes, then remove from the heat and allow it to steep for another 5 minutes. Strain the tea butter. I used a mesh sieve that I overlayed with the tea bags (which I had cut to make sheets). If you have cheesecloth, you can use that.

Stir the brown sugar and honey into the tea butter. They may stay kind of separated, and you can slightly reheat to try to combine them better. Ours wouldn’t really combine no matter how much we reheated them, and everything worked out just fine. So don’t stress about it.

Here’s another weird step. In a (preferably metal) mixing bowl, combine the eggs and granulated sugar. Fill another bowl with very hot water, and put the bowl of eggs/sugar into the bowl of hot water. Mix this with your fingers (I know, I know) until the eggs feel slightly warm and the sugar has dissolved and is no longer grainy. When you’ve reached that point, you can remove the bowl from the water and whip the eggs/sugar on high until it has tripled in volume.

In another bowl (I know, it’s a bowl heavy recipe), sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Gently fold the egg mixture in in two additions. Pour a little bit of this batter into the tea butter, stir it up, and then pour the tea butter into the batter. Again, gently fold until thoroughly combined.

Spoon the batter into a buttered and floured madeleine pan. You only need to fill up the molds about 2/3 of the way. Bake for 8-10 minutes, or until they’re golden-brown around the edges. Remove the madeleines from the pan immediately and allow them to cool on a wire rack. Enjoy with a glass of milk, a nice coffee, or tea!

Restaurant Review: The Wandering Goose

January 6, 2013February 4, 2017

Whenever I go home to Seattle, there is a big old question to ask: Where do we eat? See, every member of my family is a foodie just like me, and we want to eat only delicious things. So when Jonah and I were there before New Year’s, my dad took us to this tiny little place on Capitol Hill called The Wandering Goose. The menu is full of biscuit sandwiches and delicious looking pastries, and it’s obviously good, because the place’s 10 or so tables are packed, with a line halfway from the counter to the door.

The fare at The Wandering Goose is all seasonally inspired and very affordable. We started with the special biscuit sandwich, which, on the day we went, was ground wild boar in some kind of tomato-based sauce with cornmeal crusted jalapeno slices and a sunny side up duck egg. The biscuit was lovely: light, flakey, and full of flavor. The filling was nice and spicy, without being too much so for breakfast. The other main dish we ordered was braised beef brisket, vegetables, potatoes, and two poached eggs, served in a mini cast-iron skillet. This was my favorite: the beef fell apart and was so flavorful, and the little bits of potatoes and veggies were nice to have mixed in to lighten the dish up. And of course, who can say no to poached eggs? I loved how the yolk ran over the beef and made everything that little bit richer. Yum.

For our second course, we returned to the counter and got an apple-rosemary hand pie and a slice of the pecan blueberry coffeecake. The coffeecake was good, but paled in comparison to the hand pie. I have been wanting to make hand pies for a while now (I mean, have you seen this recipe?), and this one was definitely in an inspiration. While I wish the rosemary had been chopped into smaller pieces, the amount of rosemary was lovely: more than just a hint, but not overpowering. And the crust was dusted with sugar and perfectly crumbly. I definitely recommend this place for breakfast if you’re in the area, whether for some pastries on the go or any of the breakfast plates or biscuit sandwiches!

Easy Peasy Cranberry Scones

March 20, 2012February 2, 2017

The other morning, before Jonah went to work, I decided to whip up some cranberry scones. There is no better way to start your day than with a fresh, warm, baked good. I found an easy recipe on Martha’s website (marthastewart.com) that didn’t require me to go out and buy anything, so it’s the one I went with in the end. Although, I’ll tell you it did call for fresh cranberries, but I substituted dried because it’s what I had.

Cranberry Scones

Makes 8 scones

Ingredients

2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more rolling out
5 Tbl sugar, plus 1 tablespoon for sprinkling atop
1 Tbl baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
6 Tbl chilled unsalted butter, cut into pieces
2/3 cup, plus 1 tablespoon milk or half-and-half
1/2 cup cranberries (halved if fresh, or dried)

Instructions

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees. I used my food processor, and combine flour, 5 Tbl sugar, baking powder, and salt. Add in the butter and pulse until you’ve got coarse crumbs. Now pour in 2/3 cup milk and pulse again until the dough comes together.

At this point, I dumped my dough out onto a floured surface and folded in the cranberries by hand by throwing them on top in a pile and then kneading the dough a few times. Now pat the dough into a 1-inch-thick disc. Cut the disc into 8 wedges and put the wedges on a baking sheet a couple of inches apart. Brush the tops of the scones with the remaining milk and sprinkle with the remaining sugar. Bake them for 12-15 minutes or golden brown.

After removing the scones from the oven, transfer them to a wire rack to cool. But don’t wait too long to eat them! These are best warm with some butter, jam, and accompanied by a nice mug of tea. Enjoy!