Fresh Cranberry Bread

Fresh cranberries aren't in season for a long time, but fortunately their bright red color makes them perfect for holiday baking.  This is my mom's recipe for quick cranberry bread and as kids my sisters and I would beg her to make it as long as fresh cranberries were around.  Over the years I've adjusted it and made it my own, but it will always take me back to childhood and that wonderful feeling of being a kid at Christmas time.

Fresh Cranberry Bread

Makes 2 loaves

114 g (1/2 cup = 1 stick) unsalted sweet cream butter, plus more for greasing pans

2 large eggs

1 1/2 cups fresh orange juice (no pulp)

200 g (2  cups) walnut halves

440 g (about 4 cups) fresh  cranberries

Measure in the bowl of a stand mixer:

480 g (4 cups) unbleached all-purpose flour (King Arthur or 365 brand)

400 g (2 cups) granulated sugar

1tbsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking soda

Heat oven to 350.

Grease 2 loaf pans with butter and set aside.

Melt the stick of butter and remove from heat to cool.

Toast walnut halves on a baking sheet for about 5-8 minutes, shaking the sheet pan a couple of times for even toasting.  When you begin to smell the scent of toasted walnuts in your kitchen, they're usually ready to come out of the oven.  Set aside to cool.

Rinse the cranberries in a colander under cold running water.  Remove any bits of stem and discard any cranberries that are mushy.  If you have to throw out too many mushy berries, you may want to add some more from another bag.  Dry the berries in a clean kitchen towel by rubbing them inside a folded towel with your palms flat, in circular motions.  This will also help you find any mushy berries you may have missed during rinsing.

In a food processor, pulse the cranberries to roughly chop them.  Do this in two batches.  You don't want them finely chopped, so if you have some whole berries this is fine.  Put the chopped cranberries in a bowl.

Next, roughly chop the cooled walnuts using the same machine, no need to rinse it before adding the walnuts.  As with the cranberries, you don't want them finely chopped.  Add the chopped walnuts to the bowl with the berries and set aside.

Crack the two eggs into the orange juice and whisk by hand until blended.  Set aside.

Whisk by hand all of the dry ingredients you've measured in the bowl of a stand mixer.

Using the paddle attachment, run the stand mixer on low and drizzle all the melted butter into the bowl in a steady stream.  Continue to mix on med-low speed until the dough becomes crumbly.  Add the orange juice / egg mixture all at once and beat on medium speed until the dough is evenly moist, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed.  The batter will have lumps in it, this is fine, you'd don't actually want a completely smooth batter.  Fold in the cranberries and walnuts by hand using a large rubber spatula.

Divide the batter evenly between the two loaf pans and level it with the spatula.  Bake for about 1 hour and 10 minutes turning the loaves halfway through baking.  If you have a convection oven, the bread will take less time to bake, and you won't need to turn the loaves.  The bread should be golden brown and firm to the touch, and a tester inserted in the center should show no wet batter—a few crumbs stuck to the tester are fine.

Cool the loaves on a cooling rack for about 2 hours.  After about one hour, you can slide a small metal spatula or paring knife around the edges to loosen the bread from the sides of the pan.

The bread keeps in the loaf pan, covered in aluminum foil (or out of the pan and wrapped entirely in foil), for up to one week, at room temperature.  To remove the bread from the pan when it's completely cooled, slide a knife or small metal spatula around the edges again and turn it upside down on a cutting board.  Tap the pan against the cutting board until the bread slides out (you may need to give it a firm whack, but it'll hold together fine).

The best way to eat this bread is to cut it into ½ inch thick slices, using a serrated bread knife, and toast it in a toaster oven or broiler.  It's a very crumbly bread, so you don't want to slice it thin or put it into a normal toaster, it has to lay flat and be turned with a metal spatula.  If you use a broiler as I do, then place the slices on a metal cooling rack over a jellyroll pan.  With this bread, you actually want to broil it until the corners get slightly charred.  For some mysterious reason, this tiny bit of char on the edges of the bread make it super yummy.  Butter the slices of bread and gobble it up while it's warm!

The Vanilla Bean

Most home cooks experience the flavor of vanilla through the commonly-found vanilla extract. While admittedly fresh vanilla beans aren't cheap, like with quality chocolate, they're worth the cost for better flavor. Having been lucky enough to order fresh, plump vanilla beans through restaurant distributors, I'm nevertheless aware that the vanilla beans you find in your market's spice or baking isle can be dried out and hard. Just shake the little glass bottle containing the vanilla bean and if you hear a clinking sound instead of a thudding sound, then that bean in the bottle has seen better days.

Though I find that Whole Foods 365-brand has consistently good vanilla beans, I appreciate we don't all live near a Whole Foods Market. So you may have to buy that dry bean and bring it home with you. But all hope isn't lost, just about 10 second in the microwave, wrapped in a damp paper towel, can refresh your dry vanilla bean, allowing you to scrape out the insides with ease.

My personal favorite vanilla beans are the rare Tahitians. But ample vanilla is grown in other Rainforest-rich countries like Mexico, Indonesia, Madagascar, and the Philippines. I once got hold of some premium Mexican vanilla beans, and although I still favor Tahitian, when I cut into one of these moist and plump pods, the scent of vanilla filled my entire apartment and the insides were so large and shiny that they resembled caviar.

Adding Vanilla Bean to Any Recipe

Whether your vanilla bean is a bit dry or whether it's sent to you fresh from friends living in Tahiti, it's never a bad idea to wrap the bean in a damp paper towel and pop it in the microwave for 3-5 seconds, up to 10 if your bean is dry.

When you pull your warm, wonderful bean from the microwave, you then slit the bean in two lengthwise with a small paring knife. Once the bean is split, you scrape the insides out with the back of your knife by opening the split bean, pressing your knife down to hold it open, and running the back of your knife all the way down the inside of the bean in one motion. If you had a dry bean to begin with, you can use the cutting-edge of your knife to scrape the insides.

You can add real vanilla bean to any recipe. If you're making a recipe that calls for you to cream the butter and sugar together, add the insides of the vanilla bean to the butter and sugar before creaming. For any recipe that calls for heated milk or cream, add the vanilla to the milk/cream before heating, and also toss in the hollowed out pod and keep it in the milk/cream while you heat it—this will add even more real vanilla flavor to your dessert. You can also add the vanilla to eggs in any recipe, whisking it into the eggs before adding the eggs to the rest of your batter or dough. For obvious reasons, never add vanilla to dry ingredients.

When you're done with your bean, don't throw it out! A scraped vanilla bean can be dried out overnight just by sitting on your counter, and then you can take that shell of a bean and stick it in your sugar jar where it will infuse your sugar with the rich scent and flavor of real vanilla. If you pulled your emptied bean out of heated milk or cream, just rinse it under water before drying it.

Like I said before, I love vanilla—it's my favorite flavor, but it's also an understated and often neglected flavor in its own right. Thing is, if you want to make anything where vanilla is the star, you basically have no option other than the real vanilla bean. With everything from cupcakes, ice cream, pastry cream, and sugar cookies, without those little specs of real vanilla in the mix, you just won't get the flavor of real vanilla in the end product—and that's where you're missing out. The lack of real vanilla beans in stores and the dawn of imitation vanilla extract hasn't helped the humble vanilla bean much, but the truth is there's nothing humble about a product that costs nearly $100 per pound, tastes like heaven, and is born of delicate Orchids.

Fundamental Baking Techniques and Tips

There's no two ways about it, during the holidays I step up the baking in a big way. Pies, cakes, tarts, cookies—baking just about anything feels festive—and is my favorite thing about the holiday season. There's just something special about a pie baked in November or a cookie baked in December that surpasses the pleasure of a pie in July or a cookie in September. I guess it's all that holiday magic.

Thing is, that holiday magic will won't make our goodies turn out as if we had a magic wand, and we don't want to dampen our spirits with fallen cakes or soggy pies. Thankfully, I've learned that baking blunders are easy to avoid with just a few techniques and tips that can be applied to pretty much all my favorite holiday recipes—and yours too. So here's a quick rundown of a few fundamental baking techniques and handy tips just in time for your holiday baking bonanza.

Rolling dough

The first thing to know about rolling is that your dough, and the room in which you're going to roll it, should be cold. So chill the dough in your fridge, turn off your heater and open a window. Then roll when the room feels chilly. You can also chill your work surface by loading ice into a jelly-roll pan and leaving it on your surface.

Now you just need to dust your work surface with flour. I love my little flour shaker for this task because it produces a fine, even layer of flour with no clumps. A fine-mesh shaker is also perfect for dusting finished desserts with confectioners sugar or cocoa powder.

So you're dusted, chilled, and ready to roll, now work fast and keep your dough moving. As you roll, roll from the center outward, and keep turning your dough clockwise to ensure it isn't sticking to your surface. A wonderful aid is a large metal spatula, it slides easily under your disk of dough to release it when it does stick. If it's sticking a lot, flip the dough over, redust the work surface, and continue rapidly rolling and rotating.



Now it's time to transfer your dough. You don't want to stretch or accidentally rip it in transit, so roll the dough up onto your rolling pin, then unroll it onto your baking tray or dish. It's also good to give the dough one last chill in the fridge before filling and baking, as butter-laden doughs should go into the oven cold.



Folding batters

The first time I ever folded two parts of a batter together for a soufflé, it didn't go too well. Then I learned a trick that's never failed me since: lightening the heavy batter by stirring in a small portion of the egg whites before folding the two batters together. Stirring some of the egg whites into the heavy batter lightens it up a lot, which means your two batters are now closer in consistency and much easier combine without over-folding. Over-folding can result in a batter that won't rise enough, or will collapse during cooling.

The whole idea behind folding is to combine batters in a delicate way that adds air instead of releasing it. So you want to fold using a large rubber spatula, cutting in around the edge and center of your bowl, and reaching down to scrape the bottom. When you lift your spatula, you want to fold the batter up and over the top, which allows more air into the batter by trapping it between folds. Just be sure you're really getting underneath your batter and lifting everything up from the bottom, and keep folding—without pause—until you've got one homogenous batter. When your batter goes into your prepared cake pan, spread it rather than banging the pan to even out the batter, literally knocking the air out of it. An off-set metal spatula is perfect for this.

Preparing baking pans

Regardless of what any recipe tells me, I always butter and flour my cake pans. It's a quick extra step that'll ensure your cakes always come out with ease. I just put a pat of butter in my pan first thing, then get to doing my mise-en-place. By the time I've weighed all my ingredients, the butter is soft enough to spread. Then I just put some flour in the pan and, holding it over the sink, I tap and tilt the pan to distribute the flour evenly on the bottom and sides, then I turn it upside-down and tap it a few times to remove the excess flour. When making a chocolate cake, always use cocoa powder instead of flour!

Even when butter-flouring a pan, a circle (or square) of parchment in the bottom is an extra layer of security—with it, you know nothing can stick. Butter your pan first, and then lay the parchment so it sticks in place. Then either just flip the parchment over so there's butter on both sides, or spread a bit more butter on top of the parchment, and then flour the pan.

Although these techniques don't cover every handy thing to know, they're holiday-centric stand-bys that virtually guarantee your festive treats will be consistently good if you follow them. These tips and techniques can ensure your rolled doughs don't rip or go soggy, your cakes and tarts won't stick to the pan, and your Chiffons always stand tall and proud for having so much air in them. So when your guests are oohing and aahing over your holiday desserts, you can stand tall and proud too, and not just because you're full of hot air.