Cranberry, White Chocolate and Rosemary Pound Cake with Cream Cheese Bourbon Frosting

When cranberries are in season, I can't help but buy as many as I can. What I don't use (or eat) immediately gets stacked in the freezer. I must confess that I sleep peacefully at night knowing that I have cranberries on standby in my kitchen!

Cranberries are quite popular in this festive season as they feature in many savory dishes and desserts. They definitely add an extra flavor that cannot be replaced by any other ingredient.

With that said, I wanted to try  a recipe that is very easy to make and is packed full of flavor. Now as you can tell from the title of the post, the ingredients used will certainly deliver a complex, fragrant, rich and tangy flavor. The frosting, with its creamy texture and Bourbon flavor adds another layer of complexity making this humble pound cake an absolute winner.

For the cake you need (23 x 10 cm pan)

• 3 eggs at room temperature
• 100 g soft butter
• 50 g creme fraiche 
• 100 g white sugar plus 50 g brown sugar
• 150 g flour
• 5 g baking powder
• dash of salt
• 1 tsp mixed spices (cloves, cinnamon, star anise, cardamom)
• 80 g fresh cranberries (frozen is fine too)
• 100 g chopped white chocolate
• 1 tsp finely chopped rosemary
• 1 tsp bourbon

For the frosting you need:

• 100 g cream cheese at room temperature
• 75 g powdered sugar
• 1 tsp of bourbon (or 2 if you like a stronger flavor) 
• 1 tbsp or 2 of milk

To make the cake, start by combining the flour, baking powder, mixed spices and salt.
In a bowl, whisk the butter and sugar until pale and creamy. Add the eggs one by one and whisk  to combine.  Add the flour mixture and mix well. 

Lastly combine the cranberries and the white chocolate.

Pour the mixture in a greased and floured pan and bake in a preheated oven for 35 to 40 min or until a skewer placed in the center of the cake comes out clean.

Once done, take out of the oven and let the cake cool down for 5 min in the pan and then remove and continue cooling it on a wire rack.

While the cake is cooling tackle the frosting.

With a whisk, cream the cheese for a minute or two. Add the sugar and whisk again. Mix in the milk then the bourbon. If the mixture is too thick, thin it down with milk, adding one teaspoon at a time until the desired consistency is reached.

Once the cake has cooled completely, pour the frosting over and let it drip on the sides. You can microwave the frosting for just a few seconds in order to become just a tiny bit runnier.

Decorate to your liking. I added a few sprigs of rosemary and sugared cranberries!
If you want to make sugared cranberries,  all you need to do is to whisk an egg white until frothy. Drop in the cranberries and coat them with the egg white. Remove them from the egg white and roll them into sugar. Leave them to dry for a couple of hours! The sugared cranberries look like frozen ones, a tribute to the winter season and the holiday spirit.

Make this cake during the holidays. It is the perfect accompaniment  with your afternoon tea or coffee or as part of your breakfast. Eaten alone or with family and friends, the cake is delicious, but as always sharing food with beloved ones just reinforces our ties with them. And what better time to do so then during the holidays?

Happy Holidays!

For other cranberry recipes click here, here and here

Super Easy Sweet Canapés!

Each month the Google plus community foodiesplus selects a special theme and for August canapés were featured. Canapés are ideal if you are entertaining a small group of friends or a large crowd during special occasions.
In addition to being elegant, they are extremely versatile and can be either savory or sweet. Canapés are fun to make and can be miniaturized versions of main dishes.
Personally, I decided to make sweet canapés featuring delicious summer fruits in addition to being a snap to make.

The ingredients I used are pretty common and easy to find. Additionally, the combinations you can make are quite flexible and you can alter ingredients according to your liking.

So to make these little beauties you need:

• mini toasts
• cream cheese
• strawberries, blackberries and flat peach
• honey and maple syrup
• rosemary, lavender and pecans for garnish
• chocolate spread

Prepare the fruits by cutting the peaches and the strawberries into thin slices; of course the blackberries are left whole.
The cream cheese should be removed a bit ahead of time from the fridge to make it more spreadable. You can mix the cheese with the maple syrup or honey or you can drizzle them later on the canapés. 

To assemble, spread the cream cheese or chocolate spread in reasonable amounts and layer the fruits on top. Drizzle the maple syrup or honey on top, if you haven't mixed them into the cream cheese.

I used the following combinations:

• Chocolate spread, strawberries and garnished with rosemary leaves
• Cream cheese, blackberries, maple syrup and garnished with a bit of crushed pecans.
• Cream cheese, peaches, honey and garnished with a bit of lavender flowers.

You can play with these combinations as you want, but I do feel these flavors work best together. 

Next time you have friends coming over and you're short on time, these canapés will be a life saver. Enjoy!

Ricotta, Lemon and Rosemary Cake; Three Years and Counting!

Another year has gone by and my blogging adventure now turns three. It´s impressive how time flies by, but it's even more impressive how I learned from sharing recipes with like-minded foodies myself, trying their recipes and taking note of their tips and advices.

I started thinking about a cake for this occasion a while ago. I had many ideas on my mind, but I finally went with an inspiration I had during my visit to Rome back in Easter. It wasn't my first time in this enchanting city, but as usual, it still managed to amaze me especially when I ventured out of the usual touristic hotspots.

It's needless to say what a festival for the sight and the palate Italy can be. I have been always a huge fan of Italian cuisine with all it has to offer! When I was in Rome I couldn't have enough of the usual Italian delicacies, but most importantly, I couldn't have enough gelato. Check with the locals for the best gelaterias and do pay at least one a visit. You will have a really hard time deciding which flavors to pick as there are so many on offer! My cousin recommended a gelateria located behind the famous Piazza Navona not too far from the St. Angelo bridge. As usual, the flavors on offer were just too many to sample in one visit, so I picked three scoops, one of which had yogurt, honey, rosemary and lemons. This combination just worked and I immediately knew I had to make something featuring these flavors all together. 

Therefore, for my blog's third year anniversary, I decided to use this Italian flavor combination in the celebration cake. Now, as usual I like to tweak things based on what I see works best but sometimes based on more mundane issues. Since I had three packets of ricotta in the fridge I decided to substitute the yogurt with ricotta which is after all a quintessentially Italian ingredient. Ricotta like yogurt does wonders in cakes, affecting both the flavor by making it richer and creamier and the texture by making lighter and  moist. Do try to incorporate ricotta in your baking and I am sure you will use it again and again. You can even make ricotta at home, I hope I will share with you this particular how-to soon.

Now, enough talking and let´s start baking.
For the cake you need: (3x15 cm cake pan)

• 4 eggs, separated and at room temperature
• 240 g cake flour
• 200 g fresh ricotta
• 100 g soft butter
• 110 g white sugar
• 110 honey (I used rosemary honey)
• 1 or 2 tbsp of lemon zest (adjust to your taste)
• 1 or 2 tbsp of finely chopped rosemary (again adjust to your taste)
• 1 tsp of baking soda
• 1/2 tsp of salt
• 20 ml of lemon juice (4 tsp)

First combine the flour, salt and baking soda and sift.

In a mixing bowl, combine butter, sugar, honey, lemon zest and rosemary, and beat until creamy and well combined. Add the ricotta and beat again until combined, then the egg yolks and again you need to whisk! To that mix, fold in the flour mixture with a spatula and then add the lemon juice.

Add a dash of salt and few drops of lemon juice to the egg whites and beat them till stiff peaks are formed.

Fold the egg whites with the ricotta mixture gently so you don't lose all the air from the whites.

Once everything is well combined, divide the batter into 3 pans, previously greased and covered with parchment paper, and bake between 25 to 30 min in a preheated oven (170C). I usually check on my cakes after 20-22 min, by inserting a skewer in the middle of the cake, if it comes clean then it's time to take the cake out of the oven, if not, leave it for few more minutes.
If you don´t want to use three 15 cm in diameter pans, you can use two ones of 20 cm in diameter. 

Let the cakes rest in the pan for 5 min, then let them cool down completely on a cooling rack.

For the frosting you will need:

• 200 g soft butter
• 200 g powdered sugar
• 80 g cream cheese or ricotta
• 1 tsp lemon zest
• 1 tsp lemon juice

Combine all ingredients but the lemon juice, beat until creamy and almost white in color. Add the lemon juice and beat again until combined.

Now the assembling is up to you. I opted for a naked cake i.e. a cake that's not completely frosted. I put a really generous layer of filling between the stacked cakes and then did a thin crumb coat to the outer edges covering only parts of the cakes and keeping the rest mostly visible.
In keeping with the Italian, and specifically Roman, theme of the cake, I decorated with a few branches of rosemary assembled to look like a Roman crown.

This cake is beyond delicious. It fits the bill on some many levels. It is rich, lemony, creamy, crumbly and refreshing; it does  have it all!