garlicky roasted tomato soup

I'm on a big soup tear. My goal for the fall and winter is to always have soup in the freezer, ready to go for toasty, hearty meals. It's super comforting to know that if I'm too tired to make dinner, I can just thaw out a soup and eat in ten minutes. It also helps me resist the siren call of take out to know that there is something tasty and healthy (or healthyish at least) in the freezer. 

This tomato soup has been in heavy rotation in the soup rota so far. It's perfect with a grilled cheese sandwich or a flaky cheese biscuit, both of which should be dunked into soup for an optimal dining experience. It freezes beautifully, so you can make a double batch and freeze it for your hunger emergencies. Don't worry about that large amount of garlic here, roasting it with the tomatoes makes it mellow, earthy and sweet and not at all sharp. You can cut it down if you really want to, but I wouldn't. I would add more, even. You almost certainly aren't eating enough garlic, unless you have an acute vampire-phobia.

garlicky roasted tomato soup: 

• 2 pounds of the nicest tomatoes you can find, halved or quartered
• one whole bulb of garlic, peeled
• 2 shallots, quartered
• a glug of olive oil for roasting 
• salt and pepper
• 2 cups chicken stock
• 2/3 cup cream
• basil for garnish

Roast the tomatoes, garlic and shallots, tossed in olive oil, salt and pepper,  at 425° until the vegetables are softened and caramelized, about 25 minutes. 

Combine roasted tomatoes and garlic with chicken stock and cream and puré in a food processor or with an immersion blender. Heat in a pan over medium heat. Serve with some finely chopped basil and ideally, some hot cheesy biscuits. Fend off those vamps! 

spicy cheese biscuits

There's nothing better to drive out that creeping fall chill in your bones than a flaky, buttery toasty warm biscuit, ideally dunked into hot soup. Except maybe a flaky, buttery cheesy biscuit, with a little spice to warm you. These have all the carby-and-buttery-goodness of buttermilk biscuits, with extra little puddles of gooey cheese and pops of chili heat. The leftover biscuits, should you have any, are a great base for some breakfast eggs. 

These will go with any soup you like; I ate mine with super garlicky cream of tomato soup, I'll post that recipe here soon! A biscuit or two makes a bowl of soup into a proper meal.  

spicy cheese biscuits:

adapted from Fine Cooking

• 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour, plus a little for rolling the dough

• 1 tbs sugar

• 2 1/4 tsp baking powder

• 3/4 tsp salt

• 1/4 tsp baking soda

• 1/2 cup cold butter

• 3/4 cup cold buttermilk (or milk soured with a squeeze of lemon juice)

• 2 cups grated cheese (I used half sharp cheddar & half montery jack with jalepenos)

• 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

• 2 tbs jalapeno slices, roughly chopped

Preheat the oven to 500° and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Combine  flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and baking soda in a mixing bowl. 

Chop the butter into pea sized cubes. Toss them into the flour mixture and use your fingers to separate them and coat them in flour. Don't smash or handle the butter too much, it should stay in little lumps. Add buttermilk and stir until the milk is absorbed and the dough comes together in a lump. 

Turn out the dough onto a floured work surface and lightly dust with a little more flour. Press or roll the dough into a rectangle about 3/5 " thick. Sprinkle 1/2 cheese, cayenne and jalapeno down the centre of the rectangle and fold the sides over to cover cheese, in the same way you would fold a letter into thirds. Roll dough out again and repeat with remaining cheese.  Roll out again into a rectangle about 1/2 inch thick and cut into squares, I made 8 pretty large biscuits, this could make 12 smaller ones.

Bake for about 12 minutes or until golden, rotating the baking pan halfway through. 

pecan pie

Pumpkin is a vegetable (well technically a fruit, but never mind that) and therefore pumpkin pie is very nearly a salad. That's why Thanksgiving needs another pie, a pie that is definitely not a salad. It needs a sugar pie. Sugar pies are the ones with gooey, caramel-y, custardy filling. They might have nuts, like pecan pie, or raisins like buttertarts, or sometimes they are fairly unadorned, like a chess pie. I love sugar pies, of all types, with and without fillings and topping. They are jiggly and sweet and rich, and just what you need after a huge meal of turkey, stuffing and lots of potatoes. Happy Thanksgiving!

crust: 

adapted from Bon Appetit. Makes twice as much as you need, tightly wrap the unused portion and freeze it for another pie later. 

• ⅓ cup almond flour

• ¼ cup granulated sugar

• 1 big pinch salt

• 2½ cups all-purpose flour

• 1 cup chilled butter, cut into pieces (my butter was not chilled, doesn't seem to matter too much)

• 2 large egg yolks

• 1/4 cup cold water

Combine almond flour, granulated sugar, salt, all-purpose flour and butter in a food processor and pulse until mixture is just combined and has a sandy texture. Combine egg yolks and water and drizzle them over the flour mixture. Pulse until just combined. Add a few drops more water if the dough isn't coming together. 

Dump the dough out onto a large sheet of plastic wrap and squish it into a rectangle. Wrap tightly in plastic wrap and chill for at least two hours.  Roll out chilled dough to about 1/8th inch thick. Transfer to a pie plate and trim excess from around the edges. Crimp edges and put in the freezer until the filling is ready. 

filling: 

adapted from Martha Stewart

• 2 cups pecan halves

• 4 eggs

• 1/4 cup granulated sugar

• 1/4 cup packed dark brown sugar

• 1 cup golden syrup (use dark corn syrup if you like, but golden syrup is nicer)

• 1/2 cup light corn syrup

• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled

• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Combine all filling ingredients and stir well until evenly mixed. Pour into chilled crust and bake at 350 degrees, about 50 minutes, or until the center just slightly wobbles when shaken, but the edges are set.

pumpkin pie with candied pecans

It's nearly Thanksgiving! At least in Canada it is, I know American Thanksgiving is still a ways off. And in most of the rest of the world, it's not really a thing at all. But whether or not this is a tradition for you, I would highly recommend adopting the meal part of Thanksgiving. It's a great meal, one of my favorite meals of the year. For my family, it's always turkey, which is nice enough, but the real greatness of Thanksgiving is the sides. Turkey itself doesn't really inspire any especially fervent passion in me, the best reason to have turkey is that it allows for stuffing (let's not get into the whole stuffing vs dressing issue-dressing is clearly the liquid you put on a salad). Stuffing is one of the best foods there ever was, and is possibly the star of the entire dinner. 

Except maybe the pies. The only possible rivals to the Thanksgiving glory that is stuffing is the pie. We always have pumpkin and pecan (recipe coming soon!) because I'm not into choosing. Obviously pumpkin pie is THE Thanksgiving pie, but pecan pie is a perfect compliment for it. And because you really can't have too many pecans, this pumpkin pie sneaks some spiced and candied pecans into the crust and decorating the top. The graham crumb crust is easy and quick, and you don't have to deal with pastry at all. Other than the graham crust, this is a pretty traditional pumpkin pie, smooth and nicely spicy and tastes like Autumn. It's also excellent the next day for breakfast with a side of leftover stuffing, if you are lucky enough to have any leftovers. 

adapted from Williams Sonoma

candied pecans:

• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• 1 1/2 cups pecan halves

Heat oven to 350°. In a colander, rinse the pecans with cold water. Shake to remove excess water. Toss the nuts in a bowl with sugar and spices. Spread the coated nuts onto a parchment lined baking sheet. Bake for about 20-25 minutes, until the sugar has crystallized. Check on them frequently to check for doneness, they can burn quickly. Cool and store in an airtight container up to 2 days. 

crust:

• 3/4 cup candied pecans
• 1 cup graham
   cracker crumbs
• 1/2 cup melted butter

Combine pecans and crumbs in a food processor, blitz until nuts are finely ground. Add butter and mix until combined. Press the crust into a pie plate. Set aside. 

filling:

• 1 can (15 oz.) pumpkin puree
• 3 eggs
• 3/4 cup heavy/whipping cream
• 2/3 cup  brown sugar
• 1 tbs cornstarch
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp ginger
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp cloves
• 2 tsp vanilla extract 

Heat oven to 325°. Combine all ingredients in a medium mixing bowl and stir until well combined and smooth. Pour into prepared crust and bake 50-60 minutes, until the pie just just the slightest wobble in the center when you jiggle it, but it set around the edges. Cool pie and place candied pecans around the edge. Serve with whipped cream or ice cream. 

Photos: Tyrel Hiebert

hot tip: freeze your extra cake batter

Did you know you can freeze cake batter? I didn't until quite recently. For ages, when I would make a cake that I didn't need all the batter for, I would bake the batter and freeze the cooked batter, and then forget about it and then throw away the sad, freezer burned cake away several months later. It was a sad waste of good cake. But then I tried freezing the batter and found that it didn't impact to the quality of the baked cake. I was pretty sure that I had actually invented this idea, until I took a look around and realized it's everywhere on the internet. Perhaps I'm not the unique genius I briefly imagined...

I like to use glass jars, making sure to leave about an inch of space at the top so the freezing batter has room to expand. Leave the lids off too, until the batter is frozen, them pop them on. Alternately, freeze in ziplock bags, laying flat with the air squeezed out. Let frozen batter thaw overnight and bake as normal. 

I almost always only need about 1/2 of the batter a recipe will make, so it's great to be able to use it up. It's also great for all that surprise company that lifestyle magazines talk about, with tips like "Keep a casserole and a roll of cookie dough in the freezer for unexpected guests." If this sounds like your life, you'll always be close to fresh cupcakes if you have some frozen cake batter. This works well with most types of batter, except those that are leavened with beaten egg whites, like angel food cake. Those will deflate of frozen. 

peach & bourbon cake with brown sugar frosting

Summer's not over for 6 more days! Just because it has started to rain again and the house is actually cold when I get up in the morning and I have started to look for my coats when I go out, it doesn't mean I am accepting fall quite yet. Even if it feels a bit like fall. There are still good peaches at the market and you should quickly turn some of them into this cake. Anytime in the next 6 days.

The end-of-summer peaches are sandwiched between two layers of fluffy, bourbon soaked vanilla cake and slathered with a toasty, not too sweet, brown sugar frosting. The frosting is a little alarming to make. The first step is boiling milk and flour together into a thick goop that looks like wallpaper paste. so appetizing! But frosting magic happens when you whip the cooled paste into creamed butter and sugar. Somehow that wallpaper paste turns impossibly fluffy, toasty and caramelly from the brown sugar, but not too sweet. 

yellow cake: 

adapted from smitten kitchen

• 4 cups plus 2 tablespoons cake flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 cup butter, softened
• 2 cups sugar
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 4 large eggs, at room temperature
• 2 cups buttermilk (or two cups milk soured with a splash of lemon juice)

Heat oven to 350°F. Line the bottom of a 9" cake pan with parchment paper. 

Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a bowl. Cream butter and sugar together until light in colour. Add vanilla and eggs and beat to combine. Scrape the sides of the bowl and eat again until well incorporated. 

On the lowest speed, beat in buttermilk. Add flour mixture in three additions. Hand mix with a spatula to incorporate before turning on the mixer will help prevent flour exploding everywhere. Scrape down bowl to make sure there are no unmixed spots. 

Pour about 1/2 of the batter into the prepared pan. Bake 25-30 minutes, or until cake is golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool cakes and run a knife around the edge so they come out of the pan cleanly. 

Reserve half the batter for another use, it freezes very well in an airtight container. 

peach & bourbon syrup: 

• 2 peaches peeled and chopped
• 3 tbs brown sugar
• 2 tbs bourbon
• 1 tbs lemon 
• 1/2 cup water

Combine everything in a small saucepan on medium heat and stir until sugar dissolves and peaches just start to soften. Strain peaches away, reserving them for the filling, and set syrup aside to cool.

peach filling: 

• 1/2 cup peach jam
• chopped peaches from the syrup recipe
• 1 tbs bourbon

Combine ingredients and chill until ready to assemble.

brown sugar frosting:

adapted from i heart eating

• 7 tbs all purpose flour
• 1 1/4 cup milk
• 1 1/2 cups brown sugar
• 1 1/2 cups butter, room temperature
• 2 tsp vanilla 

Combine milk and flour in a small pot and whisk constantly over medium heat until very thick. It will take around 8-10 minutes and will change quickly from thin and milk-like to a very goopy paste. Set aside to cool. 

When the flour paste is cool, cream butter and sugar for about 3 minutes, until fluffy. Add flour mixture and vanilla and whip until very fluffy, and sugar has dissolved, about 5 minutes. Make sure to scrape the bottom of the bowl well and continue to mix; unincorporated sugar likes to hide out there and make everything go all streaky and separated. 

assembly:

Trim any rounded top off the cake to make it flat and level. Trim off the sides if you wish, so that there is no crust on the outside of the cake. Carefully cut the cake in two layers using a bread knife, place one layer on a cake turntable or stand.

Drizzle the peach syrup evenly over both cake layers. Let it soak in for about 5 minutes. Pipe a thick wall of frosting around the outside on the bottom layer of cake, and spoon the peach filling inside in a thick layer. Carefully place the top layer onto the cake and chill for about 30 minutes to firm up. Quickly frost the chilled cake all over with remaining frosting (you may want to re-whip it for a couple minutes before frosting) and smooth using a bench scraper or offset spatula. 

The cake should be refrigerated if you aren't going to eat it right away, but allow to come to room temperature for at least 2 hours before serving.