Crazy Lanea

Knitting, and Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffins

Before the baking, a minor knitting update.  I've tweaked the Lady of the Lake pattern so that the sleeves are knit in the round from the shoulder down, because that's how they should be knit, dammit.  I am also making an absolutely lovely pair of Hedgerow socks* out of Spirit Trail sock yarn in a simply sublime green mostly solid.**  I am a very happy knitter.  And since I'm heading to the Fall Fiber Festival of Virginia with my Mom next weekend, I have a sneaking suspicion that I may be able to secure the yarn needed to finish the blanket.  Who wants to bet that, having spent no money making the blanket so far, I can blow a bajillion dollars just on the edging?  Anyone?

* Thanks Jane.  This is a great pattern!
** Thanks Jen.  You are  the queen of greens.  There were two skeins of this yarn at Maryland sheep and wool, and I grabbed them both and threatened to bite anyone who came too close to me.  I did let Ruadhan buy the other skein, since she taught me to knit, but watching her knit a pair of socks in this yarn before I started mine made me whimper.

Now, to the baking.  I've made several batches of these muffins now, and have tested them on people who have not encountered corporate coffee's version.  These are not identical to corporate coffee's (crack-laced) muffins, but my baking consultant Etaine declared these were just right and demanded that I stop tinkering.  Frankly, I'm relieved.  I can't eat another muffin or I shall perish.

Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffins

Recipe makes 24 muffins

Cheese filling:
8 ounces of cream cheese or Neufchatel (use the Neufchatel—it doesn’t hurt the end product)
¼ cup sugar

Toasted Spiced Pumpkin Seeds
1 cup raw pumpkin seeds (either from a store or from inside a pumpkin)
1 tablespoon white sugar
½ teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
¼ teaspoon cloves
¼ teaspoon ginger
pinch of salt
1 teaspoon water

Muffin batter
1 and ¼ cup melted unsalted butter
1 cup white sugar
1 cup dark brown sugar, packed
4 eggs
2 cups pumpkin
½ cup pumpkin butter
1 ½ teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon freshly ground cloves
1 teaspoon ground ginger
2 teaspoons cinnamon
¼ teaspoon cardamom
3 ½ cups unbleached all purpose flour
3 tablespoons cinnamon sugar, for garnish

Prepare cheese filling:

1. Blend cheese with ¼ cup sugar.

2. Place cheese mixture on foil or plastic wrap (I use the foil the cheese came in), shape into a log, and freeze for an hour or more.

Toast and spice pumpkin seeds: 

1. Toast seeds in a dry pan over medium heat until lightly browned.

2. Toss toasted seeds with sugar and spices. Add water, and continue pan toasting until seeds are dry and spices are clinging to seeds. 

3. Set aside to cool. 

Make the muffins:

1. Preheat oven to 350.

2. Prepare muffin pans with baking spray. Set aside.

3. Combine pumpkin, pumpkin butter, melted butter, and sugars.

4. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing until incorporated.

5. Add salt, baking soda, and spices.

6. Fold in flour one cup at a time until just blended.

7. Check and adjust seasoning. 

8. Evenly fill muffin tins with batter (I use a 2 ounce scoop)

9. Remove cream cheese from freezer, unwrap, and cut into 24 pieces.

10. Place one cream cheese disc in each muffin and press down into batter.

11. Sprinkle toasted pumpkin seeds onto muffin batter.

12. Sprinkle the tops of the muffins with cinnamon sugar.

13. Bake at 350 for 25 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean from the muffin (not the cheese)

14. Cool the muffins in the pans for 5 minutes, then remove the muffins to cooling racks, allow to cool completely.

Note 1; I use organic pumpkin and pumpkin seeds from Trader Joe's. 

Note 2: I made my own pumpkin butter because there was none in my local grocery store.  To make pumpkin butter, put some pumpkin puree, water, sugar or honey if you want, and typical pumpkin spices in a pot and cook it until the mixture is significantly darker and thick er.  Do not leave it alone while cooking--fruit butters are so reduced that they approach a form of candy, and are thus analogous to sweet, delicious lava.  Left unattended, a fruit butter will scorch, then make a huge mess, and possibly burn someone pretty seriously.  Treat fruit butters, caramels, and candy with respect in the kitchen or buy them from someone who does.  If you can't find pumpkin butter and don't want to bother making any, use 1/2 cup more pumpkin and you'll get something almost as good.

Whirlwind weekend

(Before I begin an actual post, I just want to point out that the fact that so many people mistakenly say "worldwind" when they mean "whirlwind" makes veins pop out on my forehead, and may eventually result in my death from aneurysm.  So if I do pop a vessel and kick it, please honestly list my cause of death.  Maybe it will help people learn the word.)

Thursday, the charming and witty Stephanie Pearl-McPhee gave a reading nearby, so a bunch of us met up for some big knitterly fun.  I saw Noreen and Jayme as soon as I showed up, and soon ran into Mapgirl, Elizabeth, Lu, Nicole, Lynn, and a whole bunch of other wonderful folks.  We snaked through the stacks waiting for our line tickets and knitting, and a bunch of wonderful folks asked me about my knitting bag and about the blanket, so I was blushing like mad.  Knitters really are very kind.

And then Stephanie gave her reading, which was really more of an extemporaneous comedy act.   

I don't know if you can get the sense from this little photo how many knitters came out, but there were hundreds. 

Then there was a signing, and I was caught pushing sheep-themed beer on a known Canadian.  I won't bother to deny it.  Jayme, Mapgirl and I ended up going out for some food and hanging out for an hour or two. 

Friday, morning, I needed to be available for a worker to come by and set up our new tv/web/phone cables, so I decided to start experimenting with the pumpkin muffins.  I used this recipe as my jumping-off point.  Take one was passable, but not quite good enough:

Take two got some additional spices, including cinnamon sugar on top and many more spiced pumpkin seeds. 

They're still not ideal, but Etaine suggested something brilliant, so take three will be even better. 

Next, I headed out for the Watermelon Park Festival to meet up with the Celts.  I couldn't swing the whole weekend this year, but I had to make it to the park to see the Carolina Chocolate Drops.  I knew they would be amazing because Brooke and the gang  vouched for them, both as red hot musicians and as wonderful people.   So I could not wait for their show to start.  But I had to wait for their show to start.  So, you know, beer, guffawing, force-feeding muffins and pumpkin seeds to my friends, etc.  Somehow, we got Jer to not only put on Aes's pink cowboy hat but to let me photograph him.

I think banjo-picking makes a young man particularly confident.  When we were young, weren't teen-aged boys jerks?  Because Jeremy is really wonderful, as is another friend's son Dominick.  Maybe their parents won the kid lottery . . . Anyway, you can't really tell from the photo, but there's a river right behind where we set up, so in addition to amazing music, good friends, and lovely weather, we had fishing and swimming right there. 

The Chocolate Drops took the stage at dusk.

My photos are all terrible, but we had a great time.  Most of us were dancing through their whole set, and Nessa, Rona, and Lily learned several new traditional dance steps and moves.  Nessa officially wants to be dipped all of the time.  I personally can only dip even a beanpole of a girl 30 or 40 times before my shoulder attacks me back, so I may need a dipping minion.  We also gave some serious thought to monthly dance classes for several of the Celts who want to learn some clogging steps and figures from me.  Just the thought makes me giddy. 

I had to head home Friday night to retreat from allergens (very bad symptoms right now).  Saturday was taken up primarily by knitting (proof soon), setting up our new DVR, and dinner with Bodwin and Ruadhan.  Sunday, more knitting, some gardening, and roast pork burritos.  All told, I feel like I've had two weekends right in a row. 

Ends, beginnings, and revisions

The last of the ends are woven into the sockyarn blanket.  I spent some time over the weekend discovering that I actually can crochet, sort of, but that crochet doesn't seem to be fixing the curling around the edges.  I'm giving some thought to a seed-stitch border, or perhaps some really burly crochet edgings.  I'd welcome any brilliant ideas you all come up with.   I really don't want to settle for a blanket that's great except for the edge--no good, that.

I also started a new project.  I have crush on Canada, you know, and particularly on Nova Scotia.  I'm not going to Rhinebeck this year, which means I won't be able to wallow in wool on my birthday unless I obtain the wool in advance.  So I bought myself some Fleece Artist loveliness as an (obnoxiously) early birthday present.  It's Lady of the Lake in Arctic Waters.  I think I originally promised myself that I'd save the project until my actual birthday, but that immediately turned into WEARING the sweater on my birthday once the box showed up on Saturday.  I love the color, but am having a hard time both with the huge needles and the mohair boucle.  Also, well, my strong  connection between this color, this texture, and Grover. 

It is a lovely thing to knit though, lemme tell you.  This yarn is gorgeously dyed and the Aran is soft and springy and everything else I ask for in wool. 

When I'm not knitting lately, I'm giving some serious thought to baking recipes.  A kind person on Knitter's Review asked me to share my recipe for Mexican Chocolate Cake.  I've been melding several recipes for a few years, and I'm trying to finalize them into one unified recipe that actually results in the cake I love so much.  Both the cake and the frosting (not shown above, obviously) are a bit unusual in their preparation, which is why it took me almost a decade to recreate the cake.  If other people can make the cake, maybe I'll get to have some one day without dirtying this pan, which otherwise holds small tidbits in our pantry. 

I think I may end up including 'buy an x" by y" Polish ceramic baking dish' in the recipe, and then password protecting the recipe to only allow people who can explain the reactions of chemical leaveners, acids, and bases in cake-baking to access it.  Or maybe the crazy talk just flows out of me faster when I'm thinking about cake.

I'm also giving a lot of thought to those addictive Pumpkin Muffins the evil coffee conglomerate makes.  Which requires roasting pumpkin seeds, and glazing them with spiced honey, and yet not eating them all while prepping a batter.   We'll see how that goes.  I'll either fail or end up making muffins I love so much that evil coffee conglomerate's muffins become like poison to me.   I managed that feat with canoli, and now I bemoan the lack of canoli in my life for a couple of years at a time, because a girl can only make canoli so often, you know? 

Capital Weekend

It's easy to forget what your home town has to offer.  That's particularly true in DC.  The traffic in this area can be so horrid that many of us hole up away from the city as much as we can.   I know it's tough for me to work up the gumption and go back to the city after spending all day surrounded by the federales and lobbyists on K Street.  Thankfully, Scott and I remember to head in to town when folks come to visit.

This time around, Meg got us out of the suburbs.  Well, in to a different suburb, and then into the city proper.  The Uncle Earl show on Friday night was great.  At times, they are a bit too twee for me on CD--their second album, She Waits for Night, was so clean and pretty.  I'm not always a fan of pretty--I scuff things very quickly, and I offer bourbon to kittens--punk rock has stained me.  The Uncle Earl girls grit up well, though, and their tendency to group up around one mic and just play like mad won me over.  (No pictures at the Birchmere, so just believe me when I say that the musicians were lovely and charming and their stage presence is great and Kristen can still dance like a fiddle puppet and and and)  I fell down and ordered a bunch of music--just couldn't help myself.  And and and---talk of Maryland Sheep and Wool and playing tunes and clogging is really heating up.  Woot. 

Sunday, we did what all visitors to DC must do: we ate excellent Ethiopian food.  DC has one of the largest Ethiopian communities outside of Ethiopia, so lots of Washingtonians have serious, incurable  Wat addictions.  When Meg mentioned that they were planning to go out for Ethiopian while she was in town, I'm pretty sure I bounced a bit.  I love the stuff, and the lone Ethiopian place in my neighborhood hasn't met DC's standards yet.  If you've never had Ethiopian food, um, why haven't you had Ethiopian food?   Remedy that, please.  Right. Ethiopian food consists primarily of very flavorful stews eaten from a communal plate using pieces of a spongy, sourdough flatbread called Injera.  It's great fun, and it's a good place to bring people with a wide range of tastes: Injera is made from Tef, a grain few people are allergic to, and most Ethiopian restaurants serve huge amounts of very good vegetarian dishes (says an avowed carnivore who hates beans with the burning white intensity of a thousand suns).

Anyway, we had a great dinner, and Meg and I managed to talk very little about knitting while we were sharing a meal with three non-knitters.  We deserve a medal for that. 

And I'm temporarily knitting in secret . . . I'll find something to photograph. 

Sarafina

I made a couple of cakes for Rhinebeck.  I think I mentioned.  I love them both, but one is particularly important to me in the larger scheme of things, because it comes down to me from a ways off.  Coincidentally, it's also the cake that got the most compliments and recipe requests.  I can't tell you how happy that made me.  A restaurant near our house used to serve a cake almost identical to this one.  The owners' Mom made it.  She was from Naples.  She stopped making the cake because she was getting on in years and her sons wanted her to take it easy, so we basically don't go to the restaurant anymore.  Good Bolognese I can make with a little effort.  Lasagna--I don't want it if someone else makes it.  Chicken Parm--ffffffft, who can't do that?  This cake?  It takes work.  And it tastes best when a Grandma makes it.  It just does. 

My maternal grandmother, Potensia Florence Marcone, was the child of Italian immigrants.  Her mother, Antoinette, was by all accounts an amazing cook and was a restaurateur for a time in Pittsburgh, where she and her husband settled.  Her mother, Sarafina, made this cake, as did Antoinette, according to my Grandmother.  I was apparently supposed to be named after Sarafina, as she had been named after her great-great, but no one told my Mom in time.  Some family traditions are easily lost.  This cake hasn't been, though we came close.  It's apparently very common in Naples, but I've looked over other recipes for this cake, and I'm sure that they are all crap compared to ours.   If you ever tell me otherwise, I will be forced to smack you, or at least take my cake out of your hands. 

My grandmother hated to make this cake, and just talked wistfully about it to me when I was a kid, hoping somehow to conjure one up out of thin air.  She was a good cook, but she didn't like to cook.  She was a kitchen martyr.  No one else could make it, because Antoinette had only left the recipe with her one daughter.  That last sentence--that's a common and heartbreaking sentence in our family.  "Remember that tortellini Antoinette used to make?  In was amazing!  How come you don't make that ever?"  "Because she wouldn't give the recipe to anyone but Flo after Si Anni published that Wedding Soup recipe in the paper.  None of us know what's in it."  Eventually, Grandma found the cake recipe in her mother's things, and about a decade later I got Antoinette and Potensia Florence's cookbooks as a bridal gift.  I cried and cried and cried over them at the shower, as the women in my family knew I would.  And then I started getting gentle, persistent demands for the cake.  They'll forgive me if I never have a child, but if I stop making this cake, I might have to look elsewhere for a family reunion to attend.

Now to business: this cake could easily be made safe for folks with wheat and gluten allergies or for people with dairy allergies--the flour can be replaced with almond flour and the butter with some vegetable spray.  It must never be made sans eggs or almond paste though, so folks with egg or nut allergies and aversions are out of luck.

Also, I am retrospectively terrified of my Great- and Great-great-Grandmothers.  I've made this cake many times, and I consider it to be a fairly demanding recipe.  I use a kitchen-aid, a very good copper bowl and a great whisk, and occasionally a hand-mixer if my arms are messed up.  They did it without any electric gadgets.  They would have been great arm wrestlers, I tell you what.  In other words, be prepared to either get out the small appliances or get in shape, or you're not finishing this recipe.

Sarafina's Almond Cake ( a.k.a Napolitan Almond Cake or Italian Almond sponge cake)

1 tablespoon butter
8 oz. almond paste, cut into small pieces
6 eggs, room temperature, separated
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 to 1 teaspoon almond extract (Omit this if Simone wants to eat some cake.  Use 1/2 teaspoon for regular folks.  Use a full teaspoon if Mary wants to eat the whole cake)
pinch of salt
1/2 cup of sugar
1/2 cup cake flower (substitute almond flour if you have wheat allergies or if you are making the cake for Mary)
1 teaspoon baking powder

Preheat your oven to 350 Fahrenheit.  If your oven is not well-behaved, get an over thermometer and make sure your temperature is true.  This cake is held up by eggs.

Butter a 9-inch spring-form pan.

Beat together the almond paste and the egg yolks, and then add in the extracts.  Edited to add . . .Add the flour in stages, stirring just enough to incorporate.

In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until they reach soft peaks.  Slowly add the sugar to the egg whites, as you continue beating the egg whites.  Beat the whites until they reach stiff peaks, but be careful not to over-beat them (which would leave them dry and horrible, and require you to start over, and possibly cry).

Fold a small amount of the egg whites into the egg yolk and almond mixture to lighten it.  Then fold in the rest of the egg whites.  Fold carefully--you want to maintain the loft of the egg whites, but you want the batter to be thoroughly blended. 

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for about 30 minutes.  The sides of the cake will pull away from the pan when it's almost done, and it should be lovely and golden. 

Cool the cake thoroughly.  The cake will have puffed up in the oven, but will fall a bit as it cools.  Do not be sad--it's supposed to fall a bit as it cools.  You'll know all is right when you cut the cake.  It's a true sponge cake--bouncy and moist and downright wonderful.  I've never had it go wrong. 

Serve with Creme Anglais (my favorite way), with whipped cream, with raspberry sauce, with dark chocolate shavings, or just with a nice coffee or glass of port. 

Samhain

Updatey-goodness: Brigid's Samhain photos rock.  And they provide evidence of ruana-finishing fun. 

Last weekend, while many of the Knitters Review folks were retreating to the not-terribly-far-away Graves Mountain, we assorted nuts went to the wilds near Charlottesville to celebrate Samhain; the Celtic New Year and the original holiday upon which Halloween was founded. 

This was probably our last year at this particular site, which is making me a little teary because it's the locus of so many great memories and it is truly a wonderful place.  But when the owners change their minds about the alcohol policy after you've already signed a contract, paid, and set up an encampment; and then start blathering about running a "family campground" as if we're all baby-eaters because we brought some beer; and then fetch the beleaguered local cops to interrupt us during dinner and demand that we pour out or remove a keg of Guinness because they want something to get into a pissing contest about. . . well.  New Year is a good time to initiate change, right?  John the Farrier has an amazing site waiting for us, and there are already some serious public works projects underway.  The ground is broken, the corner posts have been raised, and I'm thinking about what sort of felt rug a long-hall will need.  And where I'll find all the red sheep.  And if maybe I can convince the Farrier that he really needs to keep sheep there for me. 

Anyway, we had unseasonably warm weather, and the kidlets were in fine form.  You know, the kids in our "anti-family" group.  Rona's dad is a photographer, and she is a natural model. 

Too bad I have this baby-eating habit.  She's too big to be baked up in a pasty now, and I've promised her folks I won't cook and eat her and all, but  . . . but . . .  but look at those cheeks.  Good thing she has a stick.  And that she has that laugh of hers, which erase any evil thoughts in a large radius around her.  Still not eating Rona, Yorkses.  Don't worry.  Even though The Man thinks I will.  And that I have a tail.  And maybe horns.

Skylar and Mia are also safe from the stove, though they too look delicious.   

Mia is offering me the little bit of hiking stick she still has after letting one dog after another chew on it.  I guess our dogs are anti-family too.  Not at all annoyed, me. 

Once the drama was done and done, we had a lovely weekend.  The Bridies went over like gangbusters.  Jeremy promised to research the hybridization of a Bridie tree, after recovering from his shock at learning that Bridies are a rare commodity and that even tall, lanky, starving teenagers were limited to two.  We also had sauerbraten and apple pies and a delicious pork and pumpkin stew and and and.  Not all at once, mind you. 

And of course there was some singing, some stick-fighting, some spinning--even by kidlets!, some creek-swimming, a bit of guffawing, a mess of atlatl throwing, a bunch of hunker-hausen, and maybe a rather large fire.  Ooh, and three of us ganged up on Olwyn and taught her to knit!  Woot!  And I got around to finishing this:

Hanging a bit strangely draped over the curtain rod there is the ruana I've been working on for ages.  It's not actually uneven, I promise.  It's just being uppity.  It's composed almost entirely of leftovers from other projects.  I purchased three balls of yarn in a colorway that seemed to unite most of my scraps and just worked away on it here and there.  I'm still not quite sure whether or not I own it, though it's very warm and pretty darn soft.   I have some fear that if I give it away it won't be cared for properly and will turn into a partially-felted nightmare.  But I also don't think I'd ever wear it.  Which then leads me to question why I'm knitting away on an alpaca lace shawl that I'll also never wear.  Am I the victim of some strange mind-control experiment foisted upon me by a non-knitter who loves shawls? And if I am, how will I ever break free?

Bridies!

So . . . Bridies for Samhain.  Samhain is a Pie Holiday after all.  Practically a campaign slogan, right?  Not that I'm running for anything.  Nor am I volunteering for anything.  I'm like an anti-volunteer over here, trying to shuck tasks as quickly as possible.  Anyway, we're leaving for Samhain tomorrow and . . .

I can't find any puff pastry.  Craptastic.  I love all y'all, but I don't know if I have the strempts to make four pounds of puff pastry by hand tonight.  Anyone know if there's a puff pastry fairy I can call on?

Yay!  Cancel all that scaredy-talk up there.  The Safeway had puff pastry, so, um, Safeway must have employed the Pastry Fairy sometime between last night and this afternoon.  Isn't that good to know!  I may have gone a little overboard, but it was like finding gold.  Six pounds of gold, to be exact.  Now with the math:

     six pounds of pastry
     six pounds of beef
    four medium (pronounced meee-jum, of course) onions
    secret herbs and spices
    real gosh darn seasalt from Anglesey 
    Lanea's Bridie fu (as yet unmeasurable by Science)
+ three hours of hard labor (divided by good new stove and silpats)
___________________________________________________
     108 Bridies
- dinner for Lanea and Skutai
___________________________________________________
     104 Bridies

Friends.  That is a record.  And look at them:

Those aren't even the prettiest--they were just first out of the oven. 

I could claim that my friends like me because I'm nice, or because I am witty.  But looking at my kitchen right now, I'm convinced it's the Bridies.   Mountains of lovely Bridies.  And I think I'm ok with that.  I mean, I'd date me for the Bridies, especially if I brought me some HP sauce to have with the Bridies.  Add some Fraoch Heather Ale and I might even marry myself.