Dessert – Mado Food

rhubarb Rhubarb

I first set eyes on rhubarb in my Toronto childhood backyard. I didn’t know it was edible but did notice its big, fat, leafy presence.

My mom, an avid gardener, ignored it. Her passions skewed to flowers. We often shared a loving look at her peonies or roses together, but chives were as far as she’d go in the green department.

Writing about and researching fruits and veggies most of my life, I’ve always been a little dubious of the childhood rhubarb recollections relayed to me by friends. They always shake their greying heads with revelatory passion, recounting how they had dipped freshly grown rhubarb into a jar of sugar. All this, standing alone in the middle of a vegetable patch at the age of five or six. Uh, huh? I tried this sugar dip trick recently and couldn’t spit the rhubarb out fast enough.

Let’s be real folks, rhubarb is one sour mofo. Don’t get me wrong. I can embrace sour but with rhubarb, it’s always begs for more sugar than the rest of the gang.

On the plus side, I adore growing this so-called fruit that’s actually a vegetable. A perennial, rhubarb really grows itself. It’s the first to poke through the soil in early spring, starting with little red bumps and furled, neon green leaves that stretch out dramatically into a monster of a bush in a few weeks. Rhubarb grown in greenhouses is usually pinker (and deceptively sweeter-looking) than my garden’s red-green, tannic stalks.

Alas, the colour of a rhubarb stalk has nothing to do with ripeness.

This veggie calls out in its pretend, fruit voice for our sweetest of attentions. It loves to be buffeted in a blanket of sugar, butter and carbs. That’s all it wants. Maybe you’ll want it too if you give in to the sweetness rhubarb demands.

Strawberry Rhubarb Crisp

Servings: 8
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Crisps are a simple, easy dessert for fruit-filled success that are just as good — if not better — for breakfast the following day. Einkorn and oats are a match made in whole grain heaven. There’s a reason strawberries and rhubarb pair so well. They are seasonal sisters in the garden and sugary strawberries help abate all that rhubarb pucker.

2 1/2 cups sliced strawberries

2 1/2 cups rhubarb, diced into 1/2 inch cubes

1/2 cup white sugar

1 Tbsp corn starch

2 tbsp blanched almond slivers, toasted

3/4 cup whole einkorn

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/2 tsp ground cardamom

1/4 tsp salt

1 stick cold unsalted butter, diced

1 cup oatmeal

In a round 8-cup ceramic or glass dish, toss strawberries and rhubarb chunks with white sugar and corn starch.

In a food processor bowl, blitz toasted almonds, einkorn, brown sugar, cardamom and salt with a few pulses in the food processor. Add butter cubes and pulse until they are pea-sized morsels. Combine with oatmeal and layer over the fruit.

Bake in 375 F oven for 40-45 min or until top is golden brown and fruit is bubbling beneath.

June 21, 2021September 14, 2021

MadoFood3 Comments

Red Fife Ginger Molasses Cookies

My ode to Red Fife comes in the form of a cookie.

This recipe starts like so many of its cookie counterparts with sugar and butter. (Sorry vegans.) Butter not only makes cookies exceptionally rich in flavour but it creates a luxurious mouthfeel, too.

Recipes ask bakers to cream these two foundational pillars of Cookiedom. That won’t happen if your butter is cold. Pull out an unsalted stick or two at least two hours before you plan to bake.

A KitchenAid mixer is a must if you bake as regularly as I do. Drop butter and sugar into the mixing bowl, attach the whisk, press “Go” and watch these two ingredients intermingle and transform into a light, magical creamy mass.

Next, crack an egg into the mix and lightly oil a measuring cup to ensure easy lift-off for the half cup of molasses needed.

That’s a little trick I share with my daughter Krystal as we bake up a batch. She has never baked with molasses before and feels less than patient as it endlessly pours in a feathery stream out of our almost empty Crosby’s Fancy Molasses container. Likewise, she’s wholly unimpressed with this sweetener’s slightly metallic, smoky taste.

But she complies with my teaching suggestions today, knowing I insist on constant tasting, sniffing and touching to learn baking’s alchemy.

She also knows there are white chocolate chips in the mix.

Ah, white chocolate chips. These are forefront on Krystal’s mind as we search the kitchen cupboards and drawers for this cookie’s ingredients. Unlike cloves, which we grind, sniff and sift fresh, or candied ginger, instantly proclaimed “yuck” when sampled, Krystal needs little encouragement to gobble a handful of chips after she measures a very generous half-cup.

It’s the Red Fife that excites this baker. Canada’s heirloom wheat varietal adds incredible flavour to these cookies, especially if it’s locally sourced and freshly milled.

Luckily, that’s what 1847 Stone Milled Flour is all about. They’re very busy filling orders in the midst of this pandemic, but if ever there was an essential ingredient needed for baking security, it’s flour. Check it out.

Red Fife Ginger Molasses Cookies

Servings: 30
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Red Fife Ginger Molasses Cookies

These are thin, saucer shaped cookies with gingery buttery goodness. Makes 30

3 cups Red Fife

1 ½ tsp baking soda

3/4 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

1 tbsp ground ginger

¼ tsp cloves (freshly ground if possible)

¾ cup room temp butter (1½ sticks)

½ cup brown sugar

¼ cup organic white sugar

½ cup molasses

1 large egg

1 cup white chocolate chips

Rolling Mixture

1/3 cup granulated sugar

¼ cup finely chopped candied ginger

Preheat oven to 350 F

In a medium bowl, whisk together flours, baking soda, salt, ginger and cloves.

In mixing bowl cream butter, brown sugar and ¼ cup granulated organic sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in molasses and egg.

In thirds, add in flour mixture and continue mixing until just combined. Sprinkle over with white chocolate chips. It’s a heavy dough that’s not easy to mix.

Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Scoop tablespoons of dough arranging 2 inches apart on baking sheet. Put sugar in small bowl. Form each cookie into a ball and lightly roll in sugar to coat. Place a chopped piece of candied ginger on each sugared ball. Using the bottom of a glass, flatten into 3 inch rounds.

Bake until golden brown 12-14 min

Cool on a wire rack

April 13, 2020September 14, 2021

MadoFood3 Comments

Lemon ginger scones

I avoided scones for most of my life. They were high-fat. Bland. Boring.

But scones magically changed when I savoured my first one with David. They were our courting food.

We used to walk down to the Mercury Coffee Shop in Leslieville hand-in-hand, Kobe in tow. David would ask if I’d like a “bakery item” and I’d laugh and giggle like a star-struck teenager. We both had our hearts set on a certain scone that always sold out first: Lemon Ginger.

Little knobs of spicy-sweet ginger interspersed with lemon zest made for rich mouthfuls, melting our hungry hearts. These scones had just the right amount of heft. They weren’t one of those feather-light imposters that kept you guessing where the flavour was – but a divine elixir of butter, cream and flour.

We were in love.

Kobe, our elderly dog, was not. He hated waiting outside the coffee shop tied to a pole and made sure we knew his misery well with ceaseless barking.

That didn’t bother Sexy Santa one iota. Our favourite barista, his bushy long beard hiding his neck and cascading over his sternum, mindfully worked the espresso machine while we watched and waited, clutching the crinkly, white paper bag containing the last Lemon Ginger scone of the day.

Of course, they carried our favourite scone only three days of the week. It always sold out, leaving us wanting. Its rarity made every bite, every crumb, remarkable.

Like all good things, it didn’t last. Our barista packed up and moved to the west coast. A dreamy look used to cloud his face whenever he said “Vancouver” and “coffee beans” in the same sentence — then he left.

Kobe stopped barking and was laid to rest one cold March evening in our kitchen, his favourite room of the house, near his bowl and on his dog bed, tears streaming down our cheeks and the palliative vet’s as she inserted the needle into his thigh.

Without a Sexy Santa, the lattes just didn’t taste the same. Without Kobe, a leash-less, bark-less walk was unimaginable. The lemon ginger scone was forgotten.

Until one winter morning when I awoke with a craving and started to bake even before coffee. My B.C. kitchen was still new and awkward, the drawers and cupboards still confounding. I searched for oats and flour, smiling when I thought of their providence and mine. The butter and cream was locally produced, too. I figured everything but the dried ginger, lemons and sugar had been tilled, or milked, or churned on Vancouver Island and I was ready to recreate the scone we’d found in downtown Toronto.

Without a food processor, I used a pastry cutter to fragment the butter into tiny, pea size morsels. I didn’t sweat the fat content and poured on the whipping cream. I cribbed a scone recipe from Fanny Farmer and marveled at its low sugar content. I mixed and played and baked, making indelible marks on my nascent kitchen’s unfamiliarity and came out with a bakery item that is almost as good as our courting one.

Lemon Ginger Scones

Servings: 8
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So simple and easy, you can make these first thing in the morning for a decadent and maybe romantic breakfast.

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour

1 cup rolled oats

¼ cup sugar

2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

Zest of one lemon

4 tbsp cold butter, unsalted, diced

½ cup dried ginger, chopped

2 eggs, beaten

1/3 cup cream

2 tbsp lemon juice

Preheat oven 450 F

In a medium bowl or food processor, mix flour, oats, sugar, baking powder, salt and lemon zest.

Cut butter into the flour mixture with a pastry cutter or pulse in food processor until the size of small peas. Add ginger.

In a small bowl beat eggs with cream. Mix in lemon juice.

Fold egg mixture into dry mixture until just combined.

Mound dough in the middle of a baking sheet lined with parchment. Pat into an 8-inch diameter circle. With a large knife, cut the dough into half, quarters and eighths, wedging the knife down to the parchment paper and creating a decorative ¼-inch space between scones slices.

Bake 25-30 minutes or until golden brown on top. Transfer baked scone mound on parchment to a wire rack and allow to cool 5-10 min before serving.

July 31, 2017November 20, 2018

MadoFood4 Comments

Buttery Banana Bread

Oh, the trials and tribulations of banana storage! Buy a big bunch and they all reach the right eating ripeness at the same time. There’s that two-day “perfect banana” window, then black dots start to hit those yummy yellow specimens like a rash. Before you know it, you’ve got some sorry, black and withered bananas languishing in the fruit bowl. Continue reading “Buttery Banana Bread” →

January 21, 2016March 20, 2016

MadoFood4 Comments

I want a cardamom bun!

It wasn’t until Instagram that I came to know a cardamom bun. Not only is this pastry fun to repeat rapidly as a culinary tongue twister but it’s drop dead gorgeous, too. I found myself staring longingly at the photos posted by Bakery 47 in Glasgow, Scotland considering the sweet mystery of it all.

I wanted it.

I needed it.

I would serve it at teatime (the way those Scots must?) in all its cardamom glory. I could smell its perfume wafting through the bun’s heart and soul intoxicating each of its dainty, egg-brushed strands all buried in sugar and butter.

Something about its knots and twists kept me happily delusional until one day I shook myself into action and created my own, using my basic challah recipe as the core.

Cardamom Buns

Servings: 24 buns
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Mado’s Basic Challah Dough

It’s basic because you can use it in various ways, from cardamom to cinnamon to hamburger buns to challah loaves yet it veers from the norm with the addition of whole wheat flour and the development of a sponge starter, first.

Sponge Starter

2 cups warm milk

¼ cup canola oil

¼ cup liquid honey

2 eggs

2 cups organic, unbleached all purpose flour (I like President’s Choice)

1 cup Red Fife whole wheat flour

1 tsp SAF instant yeast

In the bowl of a large KitchenAid mixer, using the whisk attachment, combine milk, oil, honey and eggs until smooth. Add flours and yeast and mix until combined, using the paddle attachment. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and leave at room temperature for two hours until the mixture is bubbly and puffing up about 20 per cent. (With a little imagination, the surface should look like a sponge.) If desired, you can make the sponge ahead and store in the fridge up to one day in advance.

3-4 cups organic, unbleached all purpose flour

1 tbsp kosher salt

Remove wrap and add 3 cups of the flour to the bowl and salt. Using the dough hook, mix the flour for about 6 minutes at med-low speed, gradually adding more flour, tablespoon by tablespoon until the dough no longer pools at the bottom of the bowl and gathers around the dough hook.

Transfer the dough to an oiled, large bowl or dough container, cover and let rise at room temperature for 2 hours or until doubled.

Make the filling

1 stick room temperature unsalted butter

½ cup packed brown sugar

2 tbsp ground cardamom

In a small bowl, mash the butter, sugar and cardamom until smooth.

Once the dough has finished its first, two-hour rise, transfer to a lightly floured surface, shape into a loose ball and leave to rest 5 min. Dust with flour and roll out to a 24 in x 24 in square. Spread the filling evenly over rolled out dough, then fold in half, pulling the far edge toward you to cover the butter mixture.

Cut two thin (1/4 in) slices of the dough, gently twist together and lengthen like a rope then knot. Place on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet and cover with a tea towel. Repeat. Preheat oven to 400F and let rise, covered with a tea towel or oiled plastic wrap for 45 min.

Baste with egg wash and sprinkle with coarse or pearl sugar. Bake for 15-18 min, or until golden brown, turning baking sheets halfway through the bake.