French Fridays With Dorie - Quatre-Quarts

Sometimes I do wake up in the mornings and feel like I've just had the most incredible dream.

I've just dreamt my life.

~ Richard Branson 

Helleww......I'm back! After several weeks of wedding-related shenanigans, I'm glad to be wiping the mounting dust off my copy of Dorie's Around My French Table cookbook in order to partake in this week's recipe, a classic French pound cake, or Quatre-Quarts. It's a simple recipe with only four main ingredients, flour, butter, eggs and sugar - used in equal amounts (hence "four-fourths") - and flavored only with a hint of vanilla.

This cake is a great one to bake if you're a rookie in the baking department, it's so easy and quite literally is "a piece of cake", if you'll forgive the pun! The eggs are separated and the whipped egg-whites are then folded into the batter, giving a light and airy-textured cake. By Dorie's reckoning, this is a dry cake compared to American pound cakes, but I thought it was just fine. Or I just may have a propensity for dry, crumbly cakes from having lived in Europe for a bit.

I chose not to dress up the cake and instead sprinkled the top with a mixture of black sesame powder and brown sugar prior to baking it. This gave the resulting cake a slight, pleasant crust from the caramelized sugar and a nutty flavor from the sesame. I loved biting through the crisp top layer into the tender inside of the cake, such an understated but elegant cake. So very French!

Instead of using a round cake pan, I used a heart-shaped mold to bake the batter in. Speaking of hearts, I'd like to share with you some images from my sister's wedding last weekend. Nothing to do with a food blog, of course...but there was a lot of food and feasting involved, I assure you!

The groom saying his wedding vows - just one take and he's part of our clan :).

After the wedding vows, or nikah ceremony

My sister's husband hails from Kosovo, a country only independent in 2008. He was one of the millions of displaced individuals resulting from the war in Kosovo in 1999. At the insistence of his ageing father, he escaped through the mountains, leaving all his family members behind and two weeks later arrived in Switzerland, where he has lived and worked since. And that's where he met my sister. It's hugely ironic that someone who'd come from a war-torn region has ended up with someone who comes from one of the most peaceful countries on earth (Brunei a.k.a. Abode of Peace). Maybe they were brought together for a good reason - to show us that Hope, well it's not just a myth, after all. :)

 Bride and groom getting ready for the wedding reception

Have a blessed marriage, Fidah & Ardian!

Back to the quatre-quarts! See how my online cooking group buddies fared with this recipe here. Better still, get yourself a copy of the book and join us, won't you?

Have a beautiful weekend, everyone!

French Fridays With Dorie - Spiced Squash, Fennel and Apple-Pear Soup

Soup is cuisine's kindest course. It breathes reassurance; it steams consolation; after a weary day it promotes sociability, as the five o'clock cup of tea or the cocktail hour.

~ Louis P. De Gouy, ‘The Soup Book’

I've been really atrocious at catching up on everyone else's blogs this past fortnight or so and therefore am surprised (and majorly touched) that people still do come over and leave comments on mine. To all those kind souls who have visited this site and taken the time to let me know you were here, a very big thank you. And apologies that I have been a rude hostess and not acknowledged your visits until now. When I'm mentally "back in the zone", I'll make an effort to come around to yours and give you a big, massive hug :-). 

Until then, you can take some comfort in this soup I made specially for French Fridays with Dorie - Spiced Squash, Fennel and Apple-Pear Soup. It contained everything listed in the title, plus more...and it this case, 'plus more' meant slight improvisations on the original ingredients. For the squash, Dorie recommended we use the Long Island Cheese Squash but I wasn't quite sure whether we could get that variety over here. So I went down to my mom's farm to pick a Kabocha squash to use in this recipe instead.    

Another ingredient I didn't have was fresh fennel, but I had tons of fennel seeds in my spice cupboard so I simply assumed they were interchangeable? Anyway, for the spices part of the recipe, I ground the fennel and cumin seeds together in a grinder and sieved the resulting powder to eliminate any chunky bits. The ginger, nutmeg and black pepper were freshly grated/ground in order to extract their strongest aroma. 

At the time of making this, I didn't have any regular green pears but what I did have was a sole Asian (or Chinese) pear in the fridge that knew it was somehow destined to be part of this soup. A red apple was also tossed in there to keep the pear company, as was a carrot because I had this theory that: 1. it (ie. the carrot) would add a lovely orange hue to the yellowish squash soup and 2. it would make up for the lack of mass due to using fennel seeds instead of the bulb. Of course, the whole theory bombed, as you may already have gathered.

Hearty goodness in 6 easy steps

By the way, ever notice how  I like to list my points down in numerical form just to make things clear (in my head more than anything else)? It's an annoying, slap-worthy habit but I can't always stop myself from running off all these lists in my head...and yes, they invariably come out while I'm typing up my posts ;).

Garnish - the spring onion strips curled up when immersed in iced water

After blending, I found the soup to be the exact texture and consistency I wanted it to be. Not too thick nor too thin, which was absolutely lucky on my part, I suppose. The murky beige color was slightly off-putting though, probably the result of mixing the greens with orange-yellow squash, and not forgetting purple from the big onion!. Nevertheless, when the first spoonful entered my mouth... I found the euphony of flavors to be very pleasant and so comforting that my lips involuntarily turned upright into a big grin :-).

Singapore Airlines must be missing a soup spoon right now.

My online cooking group or Doristas will be rustling up their own variations of this squash soup, so if you would like to hop over here, you can have a look at theirs.

Have a gorgeous weekend!



pumpkin

French Fridays with Dorie - Pissaladière

I made this at the last minute as the thought of pizza or pissaladière, as the French say, didn't quite appeal to me on a Friday when we were supposed to hone in on our French cooking skills. The odds were stacked against this dish coming into being - I had no anchovies in my kitchen, nor did I have black olives (or any olives, for that matter). You know me by now, I wasn't going to go out shopping for any extra ingredients to comply with a recipe....if I could use whatever I had at home, I would. In this case, I did.