Alpha Bakers: Black and Blueberry Pie

For Christmas, my husband surprised me with several things from Anthropologie home/kitchen section. One of them was the rolling pin in the above photo. When I opened the nicely wrapped rolling pin on Christmas morning, I hold the handle on each hand and made the motion in the air as if I'm rolling a dough. He looked at me and said in a serious tone "I didn't intend for you to use it for baking. I thought you can use it for pictures." Well, he is right, the pin is made from ceramic so I suppose pressing on it is probably not a good idea, :).

I am not very excited about pie but I love Rose's cream cheese pie crust. I think it's the best pie crust. I have made other pie crust (Rose's flaky pie crust and also recipes from other authors). The cream cheese pie crust wins every time. So even though I am not a huge pie fan, I am looking forward to this because of the pie crust. Also, I get to use my new 4 inch ruffled pie pan and take photos of the new for-photography-only rolling pin.

I made 1/4 recipe of this pie. This time I remembered to measure in volume my 9 inch pie pan vs. the 4 inch pie pan. By volume the 4 inch pie pan is 1/4 the 9 inch. So all set to divide everything by 4.

Alpha Bakers: Chocolate Cuddle Cake

I am a little ashamed of posting this cake after seeing how tall other's cakes are and comparing it to how tall the cake in the book is. My cake only measured 1 1/2 inches tall. Sniff. The loss of height is because of my own fault. If you keep reading you'll find out why...

I was really looking forward to this cake. Plus it coincides with my birthday. I planned to bake the day before my birthday, though I didn't sleep well and didn't feel like baking. I started anyway. I should know better. Since I was not in the right mood, of course I messed up. It was bad. I had to make the caramel three times to get it right. My fault because I forgot to order a new instant thermometer so had to make do with the dying thermometer - don't really trust a dying thermometer, it seems to be working okay around 200 degrees but can't go past 250 degrees. So I am doing this by eye-balling, which is a bad sign. My first caramel, I was afraid of the caramel (still remember the caramel burn I got from a couple of years ago) so I didn't wait until the caramel was dark enough. And then I forgot to separate the cream to add to the cocoa powder. So I mix the cocoa powder into the caramel directly while it was still warm.

Alpha Bakers: Frozen Pecan Tart

I am not a tart fan. I think they are really pretty and I like making pretty things because I get to take picture of it (note what motivates me to bake!) but I don't enjoy eating it because they are usually way too sweet. So my motivation to bake this tart are for our bake-a-long (I get to cross one more recipe off the list) and because it looks pretty in the book. I ventured out wanting to make this as perfect as can be. .... and just from that sentence you should already guess that something bad will happen.

My first step on making this was to take a photo of the India Tree Muscovado sugar. In the past, whenever Rose required muscovado sugar I substituted with dark brown sugar. This time, I was buying something from amazon last month and needed 1 more thing to get past the $35 bill that would get me free shipping, so I thought I treat myself and splurged the $9.68 for 1 lb of sugar. Anyway, my husband was next to me washing dishes when he noticed that his wife was taking a photo of a bag of sugar. He looked at me quizzically - wondering what on earth I was doing. So I started explaining to him that this is a special sugar that Rose likes and it comes from Mauritius. He made a comment that it is the farthest place you can get your sugar and we are polluting a lot to get a measly 1 lb over here and then $7 in the price is probably the price of transport which makes it the cheapest sugar in quality. I told him that this is the first time I use this sugar and it was because of curiosity (I didn't tell him it was also partly because of the $35 shipping since that purchase was to buy one of his Christmas presents). I do not intend to use this sugar every time. I also mentioned that our favorite apple is the Fuji apple which comes from New Zealand and that is equally far. So we started then our conversation turned into how sad it is that our food comes from far away and how much we pollute by doing so. And there must be a way to get good eating apples locally but we have not been able to find them. Even in the summer in farmer's market most of the fruits are from California. Funny how conversation started from taking a single photo!

This is a pretty easy recipe. It is not quick and easy because there are multiple steps including some waiting time for the dough to be refrigerated or frozen. But it really should be quick and easy because you can split the steps over a couple of days.