Blackberry Chiffon Pie
This is one of my favorite pies. It’s light and airy, fruity and just the right amount of sweetness. If you’re looking for something to do with all those blackberries you picked, this is the perfect thing to make!
I’ve also made this pie with strawberries instead of blackberries with excellent results. Raspberries would work great too.
Blackberry Chiffon Pie
8 servings
adapted from Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook
2-1/2 cups fresh blackberries, lightly rinsed and dried on paper towels
1/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup sugar
1 envelope unflavored gelatin
2/3 cup water
2 egg whites (I use Just Whites)
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 heavy whipping cream
1 prepared Graham Cracker Crust
whipped cream (optional)
1. In a mixing bowl, crush blackberries with a potato masher, pastry blender or a fork to measure 1-1/4 cups crushed berries. Do not use a food processor or blender to crush the berries. Stir in 1/4 cup sugar and the lemon juice. Set aside.
2. In a small saucepan stir together 1/4 cup sugar and the gelatin. Stir in the water. Cook and stir over low heat until the sugar and gelatin dissolve. Remove from heat and cool.
3. Stir the cooled gelatin mixture into the blackberry mixture. Chill to the consistency of corn syrup, stirring occasionally (about 1 hour). Remove from the refrigerator (gelatin mixture will continue to set).
4. If you are using Just Whites, follow the package instructions for the equivalent of two egg whites. Immediately beat the egg whites with an electric mixer on high speed until soft peaks form (tips curl). Gradually add 1/4 cup sugar, beating until stiff peaks form (tips stand straight).
5. When gelatin berry mixture is partially set, the consistency of unbeaten egg whites, fold in the stiff beaten egg whites.
6. Beat the heavy whipping cream until soft peaks form. Fold whipped cream into the blackberry mixture. Chill until the mixture mounds when spooned (about 1 hour). Pile mixture into a prepared graham cracker crust.
7. Chill pie for 8 hours or until firm. Serve with additional whipped cream, if desired.
Graham Cracker Pie Crust
Graham Cracker Pie Crust
from Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook
1/3 cup butter
1/4 cup sugar
1-1/4 cups finely crushed graham crackers (about 7-1/2 large crackers, ground in a blender)
1. Melt the butter.
2. Stir in the sugar and crushed graham crackers. Toss to mix.
3. Spread mixture into a 9-inch pie pan. Press onto bottom and sides to form a firm, even pie crust.
4. Bake in a 375F oven for 4-5 minutes or until the edge is lightly browned. Cool on a wire rack before filling.
Blackberry Crumb Pie
Last weekend Gabe and I went berry picking at Baggenstos Farm in Sherwood. It was a perfect day for picking berries – partly cloudy and cool in the morning. When we got there we loaded up a little wagon with boxes and headed out to the berry patch.
We walked down to the blackberry vines – I mean – blackberry heaven! Imagine rows and rows of blackberry vines taller than you are and loaded with plump, ripe blackberries. And did I mention at Baggenstos Farm their vines are thornless? Wow, this was going to be easy!
The smell of freshly picked blackberries is intoxicating. And so is the smell of a freshly baked blackberry crumb pie…
Blackberry Crumb Pie
adapted from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
8 servings
5 cups blackberries, picked over, rinsed quickly and lightly dried on paper towels
1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch or 3 tablespoons instant tapioca
Pinch salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Pinch ground nutmeg
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 teaspoon freshly minced lemon zest
1 recipe single pie crust, prepared and lined in a pie pan
1 recipe Crumb Topping
Preheat the oven to 450F. Very gently toss the blackberries with the sugar, cornstarch or tapioca, salt and spices. Stir in the lemon juice and zest. Pile berries into the prepared pie crust. Sprinkle the prepared crumb topping evenly over the berries. Place the pie on a rimmed baking sheet and place in the 450F oven and bake for 10 minutes. Reduce the heat to 350F and bake another 40 minutes until the berries are bubbling and the crust is golden brown. Cool on a rack before serving warm or at room temperature.
Crumb Topping
This is a delicious crumb topping that comes together very quickly. Use this to bake on top of your favorite pie or sprinkle on top of sweetened fruit and bake for a quick dessert.
Crumb Topping
adapted from Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook
makes about 2.5 cups – enough to top a 9″ pie or top about 5 cups of fruit
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg, ginger or cinnamon
1/4 cup butter or margarine, cold
Combine all ingredients except butter in a medium sized bowl. Cut butter or margarine into small chunks and combine with crumb mixture. Cut in butter or margarine until mixture resembles coarse crumbs.
Dreamy Vanilla Cupcakes with Chocolate Frosting
Last week I made the dreamiest cupcakes ever! Moist vanilla cake with melt-in-your-mouth chocolate frosting.
I love baby cupcakes because they are so adorable and because I always tell myself I’ll just eat one baby one and then I’ll be done. But they are so tiny and delicious, I always end up eating more!
I was experimenting with vanilla cake and chocolate frosting because my older son’s birthday is coming up and I’m baking a cake for his party.
I found a great vanilla cake recipe on Kitchen Simplicity that was very moist and had a nice crumb. Then Savory Sweet Life told me that you could whip chocolate ganache into frosting. Oh. Wow. That sounded incredibly chocolately and oooh so bad. I had to try it.
The chocolate frosting is like pure whipped chocolate melting in your mouth. You should make these; your family and friends will thank you.
Dreamy Vanilla Cupcakes with Chocolate Frosting
makes about one tray regular sized cupcakes plus one tray mini cupcakes
Cake
adapted from Kitchen Simplicity
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup butter
2 egg yolks, room temperature
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup sour milk (1 tablespoon vinegar with milk added to 1 cup) or buttermilk, room temperature
3 teaspoons vanilla or other flavoring (almond is nice)
6 egg whites, room temperature
1. Cream butter and sugar (it will be crumbly). Add egg yolks, one at a time (it’s ok if they both fall in the bowl together by accident :)).
2. In a separate bowl, combine flour and baking soda. Add alternately with buttermilk to the butter mixture in three additions, beginning and ending with flour. Mix in vanilla and set aside.
3. In a separate bowl, whip egg whites until stiff peaks form. Fold 1/3 egg whites into cake batter to loosen. Fold in remaining egg whites gently until no white streaks remain.
4. Pour into cupcake tins with liners and bake at350 F 17-10 minutes for regular sized cupcakes or 10-12 minutes for mini cupcakes; or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cakes comes out clean.
6. Cool for 5 minutes. Then remove cupcakes to a cooling rack to cool before frosting.
Chocolate Frosting
adapted from Savory Sweet Life
12 ounces good quality dark chocolate, chopped into small pieces
1 cup heavy cream
1. Place chocolate pieces in a large mixing bowl. Heat cream on medium high until it comes to a boil.
2. Remove cream from heat and immediately pour cream over chocolate.
3. Stir until completely mixed and glossy.
4. Allow the mixture to cool. I put it in the refrigerator to cool for about 20 minutes. It’s good if it’s slightly cold before whipping it.
5. Whip cool mixture until it is the texture of frosting. This can be spread or piped onto the cupcakes after they’ve cooled.
Spooky Cake Pops
Earlier this month I saw a picture of The Flourishing Foodie’s adorable Reddit cake pops on Tastespotting. How cute! I thought these would be a perfect treat for Gabe’s bake sale at his school‘s Halloween party.
Does anyone not know what a cake pop is? For those rare folks who may have just arrived back home from an extended vacation away from food blogs and Starbucks, let me enlighten you…. A cake pop is a ball of sweet deliciousness on a stick: crumbled cake, mixed with frosting and then coated in chocolate, white chocolate, candy coating or fondant. And that’s not all; the decoration options are endless with what you can affix to the coating: sprinkles, candy, frosting, more fondant, etc.
I also had a potluck at work the week before the party so I thought I’d make my coworkers the guinea pigs, ahem, I mean taste testers for the cake pops before the bake sale. This is a time consuming recipe, but the results are really worth it.
My weekdays are pretty busy with work and kids, so this took a bit of planning. It took me 3 evenings to make the cake pops. Evening 1 I baked the cake and crumbled it and mixed the frosting in it and put it in the fridge. On evening 2 I shaped the mixture into balls and put them back in the fridge. And finally the glamorous and fun part…on evening 3 I dipped them in chocolate and decorated them with sprinkles. Of course you can do it all in one go, but then it probably would’ve been an really late night for me.
For decorations, I used an assortment of sprinkles. Halloween is one of my favorite holidays and I have a ton of Halloween sprinkles: Bats, spiders, bones, eyeballs and pumpkins.
Before I started, I did some research on the web. Much of what I learned is from these sites:
cakepoprecipes.org shared an idea about dipping the stick in melted candy coating first before inserting it into the cake pop. It helps the cake pop stay on the stick. More on this later.
Bake at 350 made some lovely pumpkin cake balls; how festive!
And of course, Bakerella has some amazing decoration ideas.
Some things I learned while making cake pops:
There will be some cake pops that want to fall off the sticks when you dip them; it’s ok. Have a plate with parchment on it close by and you can let them fall onto the parchment and you can serve them as cake balls instead. No one will know.
Keeping the cake mixture cold helps the cake pops stay on the sticks. But not too cold. The candy coating on some of the cake pops I made cracked – these were the first ones that came out of the fridge. If you notice the first ones cracking, wait a few minutes until they warm up a tiny bit and then start dipping them again.
If you use a cake mix, do not use one that has chocolate chips in it or if you do, use less frosting. I unwittingly used one with chocolate chips and the full container of frosting and the mixture was a little wet and a larger number of the cake pops fell off the sticks when I was coating them.
When you shape the cake pops, dip the stick into some of the candy melts you are using first before inserting the stick in the cake pop, so it looks like this:
This will help the cake mixture stay attached to the stick. If you find that many of the cake pops are falling off the sticks, your mixture is probably too moist, but not to worry. Before you coat the cake pops, use your fingers to mold some of the cake mixture from the pop around the little blob of candy coating around the stick and then coat.
The chocolate and white candy melts have differing consistencies. When melted, the white candy melts are very runny and coat the pops very easily. The chocolate melts are a lot stiffer. It still works fine but I had to spoon it over the pops to cover them completely.
If you make these, your friends and family will be so impressed. Trust me, I know!
Spooky Cake Pops
makes about 50-60 pops
1 box cake mix (see notes above)
1 container frosting (I used Cream Cheese flavor)
About 3 bags candy melts (I made half with dark chocolate and half with white chocolate)
Assorted sprinkles
Equipment needed:
9×13 baking pan
Lollipop sticks (I found these at the local craft store)
Parchment paper
Rimmed baking pan
A block of styrofoam to put the cake pops in (I found mine in the floral section of the craft store. I covered it with plastic wrap as the foam block shed small bits of foam.)
Plastic wrap
1. Bake the cake in a 9×13 pan. Cool and crumble into a large bowl. Add frosting and mix. Refrigerate until cold.
2. Prepare your workspace to shape the cake balls. Line a rimmed baking sheet with a piece of parchment paper. Take out the lollipop sticks and put them in a container that will make them easy to grab.
3. Melt about a cup of the chocolate/candy melts in a bowl. Take the cake mixture out of the fridge and form into slightly less than walnut-sized balls. Dip the tip of a lollipop stick (about 1/2″) in the melted chocolate/candy melts and insert the stick about 3/4 of the way into the cake ball. Place the cake ball on the parchment-lined baking sheet and repeat until all cake balls are formed. This part can get quite messy so I kept a damp paper towel nearby for my fingers so I didn’t get cake all over the pop sticks. Put the cake balls in the fridge again until they are cold.
4. Take the cake balls out of the fridge and place them in your workspace. To minimize the possibility of cracking you can let them warm up a bit. If you are using sprinkles, put them in bowls within reach. In a microwave safe bowl, melt the chocolate/candy melts, starting with one minute and stirring and then in 30 second intervals with stirring in-between to allow for even melting. All of the websites I visited during my cake pop research warned not to overheat the coating as this would cause it to seize up and they suggested if this happens to add a small amount of shortening to the mixture. Water will also seize it up so keep your equipment that touches the candy melts dry.
5. Take your first cake ball and reshape it with your fingers – they may have gotten a little flattened from being on the baking sheet. (Again I had a damp paper towel nearby for my messy fingers.) Then dip in the candy melts. If it helps, use a spoon to spoon the melted coating over the bottom of the cake pop and then dip. Gently swirl the pop in the melted mixture and lift the pop up as you swirl. Keep swirling gently until the pop is out of the coating. If the coating is thick, you may need to swirl quickly so it doesn’t build up too thickly on the pop.
6. Use your fingers to sprinkle your sprinkles on the still wet candy melt coating. Bigger sprinkles (bats, eyeballs, bones) may need to be strategically placed on the pop. Smaller sprinkles (non-pareils, jimmies) can be sprinkled on.
7. Insert your cake pop, stick down, into the styrofoam block to dry. Repeat these steps for each cake pop.
Cake pops can be kept in the freezer but my fellow cake pop bloggers write that they cannot be refrigerated due to condensation buildup on the pops.