TGIP Field Trip: The Copper Onion

You might notice that I like to go to brunch. I DO! It's one of my favorite things to do. Especially Sunday brunch. Especially here in Salt Lake, where only the SOTE (inside joke that will stay inside, thanks) venture forth to spend money on the sabbath. My people.

And now I have a new favorite place to engage in this brunching activity: The Copper Onion. Everything there was delicious. And the best thing IMO? The toast. What? Yes. They grill it or do some other magical thing to it and it is the most delicious bready thing ever. Don't take my word for it. Just go get it.

In addition to toast I had some fantastic scrambled egg thing with duck. I don't even know what was in it. The waitress said "duck" and it was mine. And then...then...we overdid it on desserts. We ordered one for each person. Overdoing. But, it gave us the opportunity to try 4 different things!

I ordered the Fried Apple Pies. For research. I still plan on making hand pies one of these days. Had to see how they did theirs. They were yummy. Not how I want to do mine, but yummy all the same.


The Tiramisu was also yummy, but *whisper* not as good as mine.


Lemon Tart? Delicious. The kicker, though...the Flourless Chocolate Torte. Holy mother of brunch. Rich, complex, with caramel sauce to put it right over the edge. We all spent so much time mooning over it I didn't get a chance to take a picture of it. I guess I'll have to go back. And while I'm there I'll also have to try the Almond Brown Butter Cake (zoinks!) and the Homemade Cheesecake (just to see how good their bakers really are...).

TGIP Rating--The Copper Onion--Highly Recommended. And for more than just their baked goods. Next time I'm going to find out if they do all their own baking or if they outsource. Also for research. Who's joining me?

Blackberry Pie

Easiest. Pie. Ever.


Also, quite possibly, the most expensive pie ever. (I probably wouldn't say that if I lived in Seattle and made this pie during blackberry season)


Also, quite possibly, the most beautiful pie ever.


Will it also, quite possibly, be the yummiest pie ever? Could be, but we'll all have to wait until I cut into it on Monday to find out (I'm only posting this now so I can meet the BAKED Sunday Mornings posting deadline). I did taste the filling before I put it in the pie shell and it was dee-licious. The brown sugar gives it a little complexity that I really liked and the lemon and lemon zest give it a freshness that counterbalances that complexity perfectly. I used my own pie dough recipe though. Of course.

Stay tuned...

Update as promised...

Please witness the lake of blackberry juice:


Delicious tasting blackberry juice, but still. Seems that lots of other bakers had the same experience. Next time I use this recipe (planning a future visit to Seattle sometime during blackberry season for this very reason) I'll try some other thickening method and/or more thickener. Because other than that, it's a lovely summer pie. Fresh and sweet and perfect.

TGIP Rating--Blackberry Pie--KEEPER. Just needs some help in the thickening department.

Next up: Coconut Cream Pie. I'm going to *gasp* try something different with my pie crust for this one. Wish me luck. The rest will be a recipe mash up of sorts. Using some elements from this recipe and some from discussions I've seen on...yes...the Food Network.

TGIP Field Trip: Utah Shakespeare Festival

Does this count as a Baker's Field Trip? YES!! Because there are all sorts of tasty baked treats to be had at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. You're going, right?

Okay, these pictures are terrible. But just trust me.

So, the Festival has adorable little concessions-sellers in booths or wandering around with baskets selling foods you might find in Shakespeare's time/place (really? I don't know. I wasn't there). There are Meat Pasties (below) and (with a short 'a', as in Daddy, otherwise you might accidentally wind up with one of these), Scottish Pies, cookies, homemade chocolates, etc.


But the hit for all of us was the tarts ("Fresh Fruit and Cream Cheese Tarts!"--if you hang around outside the theatre between 7 and 8, you too will come away with this call stuck in your head). Lemon, Raspberry, Blackberry, Apple, and Cream Cheese. And, okay, they're more like a danish than a tart. Or maybe they're closer to an Olde Tyme-y tart. Who knows, but I just made myself laugh, so that works. We tried all but the Apple and loved them all. Especially the Cream Cheese and Lemon. The dough was flaky and sweet and tender. The filling delicious. Even my anti-cheese Prima loved the Cream Cheese tart. I think they're made by a local (Cedar City) bakery. We drove by a place that had a sign in the window proudly stating "Shakespeare Tarts!" Which we assumed meant they were the bakers of these lovely morsels, but we didn't investigate further. Next time.


There are lots of other delicious sounding/looking treats there, but we loved the tarts so much, we ate them two nights in a row and couldn't bring ourselves to try anything else. Do yourself a favor, go to the Festival, enjoy the beautiful atmosphere, and eat something delicious at intermission. **Just don't rattle your concessions once the second act starts.** For real.

P.S. There's also plenty of tasty theatre to be had there!

P.P.S. Special thanks to my friend SLIM who gave us the heads-up on the tarts, otherwise we might not have tried them at all.

P.P.S.S. (?) On this day in 1613, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre burnt down. Sad day. It was rebuilt the following year. The Adams Theatre in Cedar City is so close in approximation, though, that the BBC filmed some of its Shakespeare series in the theatre in the early 1980's. Cool, right?!

Tres Leches Cake

What a surprise! I don't know who had the idea to make a cake and then pour a mixture of milks over it, but, whoever you are, WELL DONE. I've never tasted Tres Leches Cake, so I really had no idea what to expect. Part of me thought it would turn out soggy. Part of me thought it would be kind of tasteless, you know, like MILK. All of me was wrong.

I used this recipe from The Pioneer Woman Cooks! and it was really, really easy. So easy that I was absolutely astonished at how perfectly sponge-y and golden brown-y the cake was at the end of baking. It rose so perfectly and came out of the pan so smoothly. Look at all those little holes! Beautiful.


I didn't exactly follow the directions about how much of the milk mixture to pour over the top of the cake. Mainly because I didn't want to cut the sides of the cake off, I wanted to try to get them as soaked as the middle of the cake. So, in my attempt, I used almost all of the milk.


The cake wasn't able to soak all of it up and I ended up using paper towels to mop up the extra. Which is okay. It was worth it to get milk all the way to the edges of the cake. I also didn't use the "traditional" maraschino cherries...because...they go in Manhattans, and that's about all maraschino cherries should be used for. And I only used real cherries on half of the cake because mr. isn't really a fan of them. So.


Delicious. Moist. Sweet and yes, milky, but in a good way. Almost caramel-y. A little rum in the milk mixture wouldn't go wrong, would it? It would be a Dulce de Leche Tres Leches Cake, right?

TGIP Rating--Tres Leches Cake--KEEPER. I had absolutely no idea it would turn out to be that delicious.

Next up: I'm going to make Blackberry Pie with the BAKED Sunday Mornings folks (and probably try my hand at Fresh Blueberry Pie as well). I've never made a baked berry pie, so this will be interesting. And, most likely, yummy.

TGIP Field Trip: RubySnap

RubySnap is a local (Salt Lake) gourmet cookie shop that has been in the news a good bit over the past year or so for a run-in with a much bigger corporation that decided to bully them for their previous name. You can google it if you feel the need. Thank goodness they didn't let it beat them and they are still kicking. Hard. Mostly because they make awesome cookies. And they're not just the standard flavors you'd expect, there's always something different, always something unexpected. I'm partial to the Lilly which has lemonheads (!) and the Maris which has a caramel center (good lord, yes), not to mention the Frida which has a spicy chile de arbol ganache center (for real!). There are several cookies on their regular menu that I still haven't tried, and Tami (the genius whose brain I would very much like to pick) is always experimenting with new and seasonal cookies.

Cute polka dotted packaging for fresh cookies.

However, here's the real genius of this operation: the frozen dough.

Super functional ziptop packaging for frozen dough in the background. You can cook as few or as many cookies as you want and they'll be fresh!

The cookies in the shop are delicious, no doubt. But when you can use that same dough and make a fresh cookie in your own home with virtually no trouble (I even popped a panful in the oven while I was down with a cold) and eat it hot out the oven, that is priceless. The frozen cookies bake up tender and delicious and, in all honestly, taste as good as homemade. Maybe better.


TGIP Rating--RubySnap--Very highly recommended, especially for frozen take-home dough. Next time, I'm picking up some dough for the Nina--"Coffee. Toffee. What else is there to say? Well, how about 'brazil nut and chocolate?'" They speak my language. Also, out-of-towners--they ship frozen dough.

P.S. In case you were wondering, this is what my dreams look like. Sweet little shop with bright colors, well-lit display cases, and a shiny industrial kitchen. Except PIE.

Orange Creamsicle Tart

Okay, so I was too late to post as part of the BAKED Sunday Mornings crowd. Sometimes I have a cold and can't bake. I know, what?! But, if you head over there quick-like you'll see the recipe before they take it down.

I have mixed feelings about this one. I'm a lover of Orange Creamsicles like you wouldn't believe. I prefer them to all other frozen treats. ALL OTHER. But maybe that makes me picky about treats that try to mimic that flavor. The flavor is right in this tart. Perfect. But, the consistency doesn't really work for me. Part of that is my fault, I'm sure. My crust was a little tough, at least in part due to overworking it to try to get it in a 9" springform pan when I realized I didn't have a 9" tart pan. And my filling didn't set as solidly as I would have liked. Seems like some of those who posted on Sunday Mornings had a similar problem with the filling not setting up or getting up to the right temperature on the stovetop. I had hoped that, like theirs, mine would set solidly in the fridge, but it didn't quite seem to get there. Almost. But not quite.


But the biggest problem for me was the temperature. That taste goes with frozen. I don't know how else to say it. So, next time (yes, next time), I'll make mini tarts and freeze them to get a really good chill on them before serving. I think that will solve all my problems.

Tiny orange-shaped tart dough cookies.

TGIP Rating--Orange Creamsicle Tart--Good. Very good. But I need to tweak it for my personal tastes.

Next up: I've never baked or tasted a Tres Leches Cake, but it sounds like pretty much the best thing on earth. I've also never tried any of The Pioneer Woman's recipes. So, that's my plan. Unless one of you has a recipe of your own you're willing to share *eyebrow waggle*.

Book Review (?) & Pain Au Levain

Okay, maybe it's a stretch to say that this is a book review. I only made one recipe from it. But, I've discovered a new way to "preview" cookbooks: check them out from the library! It's perfect. I can pour over the recipes, decide on one or two to try and use those experiments as a measure of whether it's a cookbook I want to buy. Of course, so far, of the 5 cookbooks I've checked out from the library, I want them all. Anyway.

This is the book:


I've been hearing and reading a bit about using a cold fermentation process for bread dough. It makes it possible to spread the bread making process over several days rather than setting aside an entire day for rising, etc. (because, who has an entire day anymore?!). There are several books out there that use this method and this is the first I've tried. The thing is, for me, spreading the process over several days means that I spend EVERY HOUR of each of those days obsessing about what I'm supposed to do next. Three days thinking about bread with only working on the dough for (at most) an hour each day...I don't know if that trade-off works for me. Maybe it gets easier once you're used to the method and you can just work it into your weekly routine.

That criticism aside, this bread was unbelievably delicious. And incredibly easy. I used my own sourdough starter (thank you, John Graham for this piece of you that CAN'T move out of state). It's a little more loose than the starter in the book, which meant making small, but simple adjustments in the amount of flour I used. A Pain au Levain is a lot like San Francisco sourdough. I think the only difference is the addition of a small amount of whole wheat or other multigrain flour (I used rye). This gives it a little heartiness, a little color, a little texture. I love it. Not that I don't still have a giant place in my heart for San Francisco sourdough. But this was probably one (2) of the best (and most beautiful) loaves of bread I've ever made. Chewy outside, not too soft inside. Nutty, hearty, sour. We used it for panini sandwiches (filled with herbed turkey breast, thinly sliced apple, avocado, and gouda) and it was so so good. Sometimes homemade food IS actually better than what you can get at a restaurant/deli. Okay, sometimes it's always that way.

TGIP Rating--Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day--Judging on this recipe alone, I will most likely buy this book. There's one other book that uses cold fermentation that I want to try first.

Next up: Oy. Apparently I'm gun-shy of the hand pies. I am. It's the same but different and I feel like I really need to gird up my loins to move forward with making them. I don't want to use any of the recipes I've seen because they're not mine. I want to use my pie dough recipe and my filling recipes, but I think the filling will need to be altered a little. Anyway, it is eluding me right now. I need a little time to work up my courage--maybe I'll do it in June. In the meantime, BAKED Sunday Mornings has the Orange Creamsicle Tart up next on their schedule. I'm all over that.