tomato_kumato

I know that most people celebrate Halloween with candy… so how in the world did I end up spending my holiday with pasta, cupcakes and Britney Spears? I suppose I should begin at the beginning.

After a “tiring” shopping trip (tiring to the Canadian… I like wandering down the Champs Elysées), we headed back home. I went straight to the kitchen, where I had planned to bake some Belgian Brownies (love this recipe!) and some Chocolate Orange Muffins with Orange Cream Cheese Frosting, from slashfood. I had just started melting the chocolate over the double boiler when the Canadian called out, “You hungry?”

Of course, this doesn’t mean, “are you hungry,” but rather, “I’m hungry. Please feed me.” Because we were drinking that night (and also a little bit because I was already devoting all of my energy to melting chocolate), I suggested pasta. Directly after this, I remembered that a) we had finished all of the jarred pesto, b) I hadn’t replaced the parmesan cheese and c) the vat of tomato sauce I froze was frozen into the fridge and would need to be removed on a rainy day when I had a hammer and chisel. I did, however, have some tomato paste, tomatoes, and a recipe for Quick Tomato-Cream Sauce that was also on my list of things to try from Under the Tuscan Sun. Bingo.

This was one of the best tomato sauces I’ve ever tried, and it was really easy. My only qualm, as you can probably tell from the pictures, is that I made too much pasta and not enough sauce.

Once we ate the pasta, I still had cupcakes to bake. I made the Belgian Brownies no problem: this is one of the easiest recipes in the world and one of my favorites… and I don’t even like chocolate! But I had also wanted to make the Chocolate Orange Cupcakes… seeing as it was Halloween. One problem: no cream cheese. I decided to sub mascarpone, but in the end, the frosting was looking a little funny. I put it in the fridge, hoping that chilling it would help, and continued getting ready for our Halloween party. When my friends got there, I hadn’t had time to frost them, so I left them in the kitchen and just brought out the Belgian Brownies. However, they disappeared rather fast, and my friend Emese found and delivered the Orange-Chocolate Cupcake stash. And you know what? They were good even without the frosting. The mix of chocolate and orange is delicious, as always, and the crumb was dense. They were sweet without being cloying, and basically, just good. Sure, it looked very pretty on the slashfood site, but sometimes you just can’t make everything look pretty.

(The flatter ones are Belgian Brownies, the kind of bulbous ones are the cupcakes.)

Oh… and Britney? That was Emese:

Quick-Tomato Cream Sauce from Under the Tuscan Sun

Cook 4 or 5 slices of pancetta, drain on paper towels, then crumble and set aside. Chop 2 medium onions and 2 or 3 cloves of garlic and sauté in the pork fat for 5 minutes. Chop and add 1 large red pepper and 4 or 5 whole tomatoes from a can. Season with salt and pepper and cook 5 minutes more. Stir in 1/2 cup of creme fraîche and another 3/4 cup of canned tomatoes with juice. Add a spoonful or so of the pasta water to the sauce. Stir the pancetta into the sauce at the last minute to retain crispness. Cook and drain enough pasta for 4. Mix the pasta with half the sauce; serve the rest of the sauce over the pasta.

I stumbled across The Wednesday Chef very recently, and I immediately became obsessed with Luisa’s recipes. She gets them from the New York and LA Times’ food sections, which appear on Wednesdays. I love that she even posts recipes that didn’t work out… sometimes I feel as though my fellow food bloggers prepare perfect and effortless food every day, but Luisa reminds me (not often, mind you) that not every recipe turns out exactly the way you planned.
Yesterday, I decided, like her, to try my hand at one of the recipes piling up in my recipe box, and what I tried were these: le Pain Quotidien’s Belgian Brownies. The recipe was perfect as-is, so I won’t post it here, but it’s over at her site if you want to copy it so get over there and copy it. Now. I brought a box of them in to the newspaper office while we did layout yesterday afternoon. There are none left. I only got half of one, but what I got was tender and delicious. The chocolate power is intense, and seeing as these cakes are near flourless, they are very light and moist.

On top of everything, the recipe was ridiculously easy. It’s going into my top five for desserts… I think I’ll get to taste a whole Belgian Brownie yet.

As promised… the cupcakes. I made two dozen, but after my friends came over last night, I think I have about six left. These are that good.

I got the recipe from epicurious, and even though some of the reviews said that they were more like muffins than cupcakes, I wanted to try the recipe… one that is probably going to be my last berry recipe of the season *sigh* because of the exorbitant prices that people are trying to get me to pay for berries now.

These were worth it though. Dense and full of blueberries that exploded with every bite and turned the inside of each cupcake a pleasing purple, these cupcakes were a lot of fun to make and to eat. (Plus, I made my own measuring cups! Yep! I don’t have any in France, so I measured out 8 ounces of water to find out how much a cup was. I know it’s approximate, I know I can’t bake bread this way, but the cupcakes turned out fine, and I don’t hear any complaints about the peach muffins from yesterday!)

It’s getting tiring to say “because I’m in France” every time I have to explain why I had to change a recipe, but it’s the truth. We have maple syrup in specialty import stores, but no maple sugar, so I used vanilla sugar. I also used more blueberries than were recommended. Here’s my version of the recipe, but you can get epicurious’ version over there. If anyone tries the real version, let me know how it turns out! Now, I believe I have some cupcakes to finish…