Cardamom Coconut Creamed Spinach

This is more of an idea than a recipe: creamed spinach tastes very good made with coconut milk, seasoned with a little cardamom. In retrospect, I should have added a little lemon, and sauteed fresh onion and garlic, but it was right before Shabbos and I was in kind of a rush. Presumably, it would taste better made with fresh spinach, but I went with the Bodek frozen.

I used coconut milk because I had a carton of coconut milk that I needed to use up and I needed the spinach to be pareve. The cardamon idea came from a friend who used to make pareve creamed spinach with slivered almonds and cardamom pods.

Rose Meringue Cupcake

Here is a way to get an unsmooshable top for your cupcake: piped meringue. Wrap it up and it keeps its swirly good looks.

You can also serve the meringues on their own as cookies.

Make meringue mixture, tint as desired, and pipe using a large star tip. Bake at 225 degrees for an hour (until the meringue easily lifts from the parchment lined baking sheet). I like Maida Heatter’s meringue recipe/method (4 ounces whites, 7.5 ounces sugar, pinch salt, 1 tsp. vanilla).

I reserved a little meringue to tint green and piped it out using a leaf tip.

 

Bundt Cake Barbie

Looking for an easy way to make a Barbie cake without buying a special mold (Wilton’s Wonder Mold) or making and carving lots of layers, I hit upon the idea of topping an extra high bundt cake (this kugelhopf Bundt pan) with cake made in a half dome mold (Wilton’s Sports Ball pan). Okay, I used two specialty pans instead of one, but these were pans I already owned.

The kugelhopf pan tapers sharply, which makes it ideal for a more realistic skirt, plus it has swirls that look like the skirt pleats. The half ball was a little too wide at the base, and I thought of cutting the cake until the diameter of the bottom of the ball matched the top of the bundt. Then I thought of making the top piece like a swirling pouf over the skirt.

So this was my original game plan: carve the top piece to look like an overskirt and then frost the bottom to show of the swirls. Not a good plan! It was very hard to frost the cake this way. In the end, I smoothed out the frosting, hiding the swirls. This looked neater, but it wasn’t a perfectly smooth cover for the swirls–the top edge showed a little bit in places. And the carved part of the overskirt never looked right. In retrospect, fondant might have been the only neat way of covering this cake.

So, I wasn’t completely happy with this cake. On the other hand. It was easy to bake a bundt, and I liked that there was already a hole in it for Barbie to stand in. If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t try to carve the overskirt. I would go with a whipped cream frosting and try to slather a thick layer that covered everything. That would have been easier to get smooth. Alternatively, I could have tried a fondant covering.

Brilliant Lemon Sunshine Hamantaschen

If the Midnight Mint Hamantaschen are as darkly intense as you can go, these lemony cookies are the equivalent of brilliant sunshine. I would call them Light and Joy Lemon, but that sounds like a dish detergent.

Mighnight Mint Hamantaschen–Darth Vader of the Pastry Velt