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Cinco de Mayo Derby Day
Saturday was a double food holiday. Obviously, it was Cinco de Mayo, but, this year, May 5th also fell on the first Saturday of May, Kentucky Derby Day.
I always serve up margaritas and some Mexican fare on the day. This year, I made a simple sauté of shrimp in a tomatillo sauce to serve over rice.
The piece de resistance was the Kentucky Derby portion of the meal: dessert. A couple of years ago, I unsuccessfully tried making Mint Juleps. They were probably fine, but the unsuccessful part was that neither of us cared for them at all. They were much too strong and alcoholic for us. I think that mint juleps are probably an acquired taste.
For a backup plan, in my recipe box was a recipe for Kentucky Derby Pie from my friend Lauren. This pie resembles a chocolate chip cookie with some bourbon mixed in for good measure baked in a pastry crust. I didn’t feel like making pastry crust so I tried this in a graham cracker crust instead. I loved the way it came out. The buttery crust melded with the buttery filling, and the result was sweet confection. Derby pie was the perfect way to round out the eventful day. I’ll Have Another won the race, and I’ll have another slice of pie, please!
Lauren’s Kentucky Derby Pie
Makes 1 9-inch pie
Graham Cracker Crust:
1¼ cup graham cracker crumbs, about 9 crackers (I use the low-fat crackers)
2 Tbsp sugar
1/3 cup butter, melted
Preheat the oven to 350F.
Combine the crumbs and sugar in a small bowl. Add the melted butter, and stir together with a fork until it is mixed well.
Press the mixture evenly over the bottom and sides of a 9-inch pie plate. Bake for 8 minutes.
Derby Pie Filling:
½ cup brown sugar
½ cup white sugar
½ cup butter
½ cup chocolate chips
½ cup chopped pecans
¼ cup flour
1 egg
2 Tbsp bourbon
Preheat the oven to 400F.
Blend sugars and butter (I used the KitchenAid) until mixture is fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add remaining ingredients and mix well. Pour filling into pie pan with baked graham cracker crust. Bake for 10 minutes. Reduce the heat to 350F and bake for 20 minutes, until surface of the pie is lightly browned.
tuesdays with dorie / baking with julia: hungarian shortbread
Have I mentioned how much I love my cake dome? Along with that comes the enjoyment of making anything that I can store, prettily, on my counter, in the cake dome. This week’s selection for Tuesdays with Dorie / Baking with Julia, the new bi-weekly baking group I’m taking part in, fit that bill. Enter, the lovely Hungarian Shortbread.
I’m a huge fan of the more traditional Scottish shortbread, simple yet rich, tasting purely of its short list of ingredients. I wasn’t sure how this recipe would stack up.
Hungarian shortbread was a completely different animal than what I’ve had before. In addition to the usual butter, flour, and sugar, the recipe called for egg yolks and baking powder. This changed the texture completely. It was more like a dense cake than a cookie.
The technique was unusual as well. The dough was frozen briefly to firm it up. Then you grate it into the pan. This makes for a fluffier crumb.
Two layers of dough sandwich a tart jam in the middle. The recipe in the book included instructions for a homemade rhubarb spread, but I found a jar of rhubarb-raspberry fruit spread in the pantry, from Austria, no less. That seemed perfect to fill my Hungarian shortbread.
I’ll mention that I had a mental block to making a single pan of something that used a full pound of butter. I compromised by making a half recipe in an 8-inch square pan. No less rich, but less of it to eat. Surprisingly, I still needed to bake the smaller pan for the full 40 minutes to bring to golden brown.
I loved the look of the oodles of powdered sugar on top. Some melted, which gave it the look of a crumb cake, and I added an extra dose for fun when the cake cooled.
The suggested size for the finished cookies was 3 inch squares, which, besides not working out evenly for an 8-inch pan, seemed huge to me. I started with 2-inch squares, which I served when my friend April came over for tea. I ended up cutting the rest diagonally into triangles, which seemed like the perfect-size to me.
While these won’t take the place of Scottish shortbread in my heart, but I did like this fancy treat. I’ll definitely make it again. As an added bonus, it’s the right sort of recipe for using up the assorted jars of jam and jelly on my pantry shelves.
If you’d like the recipe, please visit this week’s hosts: the multi-talented and very funny Cher (a fellow Dorista from the Friday group) at The not so excited adventures of a dabbler… and Lynette at 1smallkitchen.
A Plateful of Happiness 