I had a cup of buttermilk that resulted from making homemade butter, and my mom brought these beautiful blueberries. Thus, it was time to make Deb’s Buttermilk Cake. The batter was really creamy and smooth, and have cake was really soft and tangy. The only thing I did differently was to put brown sugar on top instead of white sugar. My blueberries sunk to the bottom, but it was still perfect.

Both of these were on my list. My “Cook This Successfully At Least Once But Hopefully Twice” list.

Other things on this list include:
- Butter chicken
- Beef korma
- Shakriya (first time was good, second time was horrid)
- Roast beef
- Tuille cookies

What’s on your list?

Baking bread is so easy. Really. Trust me. You don’t even need a bread machine – if you’ve got a stand mixer or pair of strong arms, you can have homemade sandwich bread in an afternoon.

The best part about this is not even the flavor and texture of the bread – just a little sweet, toasted to a light crunch. The best part is not even the smoothness of the butter as it spreads across hot bread, melting into the nooks and crannies.

The best part….is the smell.

The smell is so rich, that your whole house smells like a fancy French bakery.

The smell is so fulfilling, that I stood in the kitchen to do dishes *just* so I could be closer to the aroma.

The smell is so luscious, that on Natasha’s birthday, instead of bringing her a loaf already made, I brought the dough to her apartment and baked it in her apartment. The smell was part of the gift.

And it’s easy. You can do it, I promise.

I’ll tell you about the butter first. The butter was easier than I thought it would be. I took full fat cream and put it in my stand mixer on medium. When it started to thicken, I turned it up to high. The cream goes from soft peaks to hard peaks, breaks, and then starts splitting into butter and buttermilk. You can hear the change in texture when it’s getting close to being ready – bits of butter begin to thwap against the side of the mixer. When you see large chunks of yellow butter floating in a white milky liquid, pour the stuff through a fine mesh sieve. Run your hands under cold water until they’re chilled enough to not melt the butter, then press the butter gently against the sieve or between your hands to extract more buttermilk. At this stage, it’s relatively soft and spreadable. You can put it back in and extract more buttermilk if you want. From one pint of cream, I got almost 1 cup of buttermilk and probably almost 3/4 of a stick of butter.

Okay, the bread. This is from my Good Housekeeping cookbook that Rabea gave me.

White Bread (or wheat, if you want)
1/2 cup warm water
2 pkgs active dry yeast
1/4 cup + 1 teaspoon white sugar
2 1/4 cups warm milk
4 tablespoons softened butter
1 tablespoon salt
about 7 – 7 1/2 cups all purpose flour (or bread flour).

[this recipe is for two loaves, and it's super easy to half it]

A note about “warm” – warm is considered about 105F to 115F. This temperature is really important – too hot, and you’ll kill the yeast; too cold, and it won’t activate. Do yourself a favor – do not try to do this by touch. Everyone feels heat differently, and the container you warm in could be warmer than the actual liquid.

A note about flour - I’ve only ever made this with white all-purpose flour, or a mixture of wheat and white. I would not make this all wheat, because it gets a little too tough – maybe a 60% white, 40% wheat would be the maximum I’d use. If I’m using both, I mix the flours together in a bowl first so the dough is getting a mixture of flours all through the process.

If anyone knows me, Sara, or Ayesha, you know that we’re each obsessed with food. If you put any two of us together, the effect is compounded. If you put ALL THREE of us together – there is an exponential explosion of food.

That’s what happened when Ayesha came down to a Raleigh for a friend’s wedding. We had been planning what to make for weeks beforehand and finally settled on a high tea so we could make a lot of different little things. We spent all day cooking up a storm.

Also, our cameras got to visit each other. All pictures in this post are taken by me, Ayesha, or Sara, on one of our cameras. Whoever was the closest to a camera and had the least flour on their hands took the picture.

The menu was as follows:

Savories
Chipotle Grilled Shrimp and Mango Kabobs
Roasted Vegetable and Fontina Paninis with Chipotle Mayo
Mini quiches – bacon and cheese, spinach and cheese
Fruit and nut salad with homemade candied walnuts and raspberry-balsamic vinaigrette.

Sweets
Scones with lemon curd and cream
Mini tarts with vanilla custard and strawberries
Jam thumbprint cookies, assorted flavors
Chocolate truffles

Awwwww yeah baby. And the insanity behind making all this food….let’s get started.

Firstly, the salad. I saw the recipe for making homemade candied walnuts on the Tiny Kitchen and we wanted to try them. The process seemed simple enough – melt sugar until it turns brown, add butter, mix in walnuts. Easy, right? Simple raspberry vinaigrette – easy peasy!

Deception. Lies and slander.

Thus also began the trek of Sara running back and forth from her house (across the street) because we kept forgetting ingredients. We almost wrote an epic poem. Thankfully, it all turned out well after multiple tries!

Well. Let’s let the pictures tell the story. Click the first on the left for the lightbox gallery. Make sure to read the captions.

Then, there were the phenomenal chipotle grilled shrimp and mango kabobs. Sara wanted to try a tropical fruit with the shrimp, and mango seemed perfect. I’ve also now gotten Sara and Ayesha hooked on the wonders of chipotle-in-adobo. We mirrored the chipotle in the kabobs with chipotle mayo in the roasted veggie sandwiches. We roasted eggplant, zuchinni, red bell pepper, and red onions (the latter with balsamic vinegar) and then made them into paninis with fontina cheese.

We made two types of quiche – one with a really delicious halal bacon that Ayesha brought from Maryland, and the other with spinach and cheese. Ayesha put little tart dough circles into my mini muffin pan, filled with the different flavors and egg (dough still raw), and baked.

These were relatively low stress after the spinach-caramel and exploding vinaigrette fiascos.

I had made Ina Garten’s Jam Thumbprint cookie dough the night before. It’s a cross between a sugar cookie and a shortbread – more like the latter….i.e. it’s phenomenal. Sara and I filled the cookies with strawberry jam, dulce de leche, and chocolate chips (because Musa wanted chocolate ones). The strawberry were the best. The dulce were good, but the dulce got a little too brown while they were in the oven.

The little vanilla custard tarts were just cute. Ayesha cut out the pie crust for the tarts and baked them in the mini muffin pan. We let them cool and filled them with the cream and topped with a slice of strawberry.

Ayesha made her phenomenal scones again (how does she do it? she just throws stuff in a bowl and scones emerge from the oven. BOOM. BOOM. FIYAPOWAAAA) (You have to be super cool to know where that comes from). I made lemon curd and Ayesha made clotted cream.

Ayesha also made really yummy chocolate truffles. We though they would be too soft, but after a trip to the fridge, they were fine.

Awesome, right? Yeah. That’s what I thought.

Of course, we only remembered to make the “tea” part of the high tea when we sat down to eat. We ate with Uncle Wahaj and Auntie Sarwat (Ayesha’s parents) and my parents. My dad summed it up nicely – “See, this is why we had daughters. If we had sons and we asked for some tea, they’d say….okay let’s go to Starbucks.”

yay!