February Paper Chef: Warm baby shortcakes with spicy caramelized blood oranges and cinnamon vanilla cream

Of course, when I read the list of ingredients on Tomatilla.com, my first instinct was to make a panacotta. That just seems to be my default recipe these days. I decided it was time to get the panacotta monkey off my back and go somewhere else with February's paper chef ingredients: oranges, cinnamon, wheat flour and creme fraiche.

Generally, I'd be inclined to make my own creme fraiche, as I have a little stash of assorted bacteria in my freezer for making things like camembert and blue cheese, and a few of these do nicely for creme fraiche. Unfortunately my employers had other ideas as to how I ought to be spending my weekend and I was not even able to start thinking seriously about preparing to cook until a couple of hours ago. I was forced to use my old stand-in for creme fraiche: a half and half mix of heavy cream and sour cream. This ratio works for me as I find the sour cream available in Canada too sour and too low in fat to be a perfect substitute for creme fraiche. It might not work in your locale. If you can make your own or get good commercial creme fraiche, more power to you.

On my way home from the grocery store, where I'd purchased a bag of oranges, some cream, both sweet and sour, and a few other goodies, I realised I'd forgotten to replenish my stock of vanilla. I headed over to the Italian Centre Shop to procure some. And what should I behold but blood oranges! I seriously never expected to find blood oranges in this northern outpost, but there they were. I bought some, dreading all the way home that I'd get here and cut one open only to find it was pale and watery looking like those I found at the French Market in New Orleans a few weeks age. Nope. They were big and gorgeous and juicy. So much so that I immediately ate 2 of them. Which meant I had not quite enough to do the whole recipe. So, juice dribbling down my chin, I proceded to cook, but with 1/2 navel oranges and 1/2 blood oranges.

Ingredients:

For the cream:

• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 cup sour cream
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp good vanilla (or 1/2 a pod split and scraped)

For the caramelized oranges:

• 10 blood oranges (or navel, or both)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup water
• 4 x 1inch squares of orange peel, pith completely removed
• 2 x 3 inch pieces of good quality cinnamon bark (preferably dark, thick bark from an Indian foods shop, not that sad, curled up thin stuff that you get in a spice jar at Safeway)
• 8 green cardamon pods

For the shortcakes:

• 1 cup plus 1 Tbsp flour
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 3 Tbsp cold butter, in small cubes
• 1/2 tsp good quality ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp fresh ground cardamon
• 1/3 cup sour cream (or creme fraiche)
• 1/3 cup milk

For the cream

Gently combine sour cream, suagr, vanilla and spices. Set aside. Force your husband to whip the cream until stiff and heavy while you talk on the phone to your mother. Make husband wipe cream spatters from wall. Fold sour cream into whipped cream. Chill while preparing the remaining items.

For the caramelised oranges:

Juice 4 of the oranges. You should end up with about a cup of juice. Enlist the help of your long suffering husband to peel the remaining oranges and remove all traces of pith. When he asks whether he's removed enough pith, send him back to the table, paring knife in hand for one last go. Slice de-pithed oranges thickly (5 slices per orange) and set aside.

Simmer orange rind, cinnamon bark and cardamom in water 10 mintues, add sugar and 1/2 cup of orange juice and simmer 10 minutes more. Stir in the remainder of the orange juice, strain mixture and return to pot. Simmer to reduce liquid slightly and thicken syrup enough so it coats a spoon thickly.

Melt some butter in a very hot, large frying pan. Fry orange slices, no more than 2 minutes per side. Remove pan from heat and pour orange syrup into pan.  Set aside.

For the shortcakes:

Combine dry ingredients well and force your husband to sit at the kitchen table rubbing the dry ingredients and butter through his fingers until it resembles fine, sandy crumbs. If you do not have a husband, or yours won't do this, you're on your own. Luckily, mine is now an expert in rubbing butter into flour. He does it un-grudgingly (most of the time) as he knows he'll get to eat any left over raw dough. And he's super sweet, even if insane: he has been known to eat a surprising amount of raw shortcrust pastry. Oh well.

Mix in the sour cream and milk and drop from a tablespoon onto a greased cookie sheet. This should make 8 small or six medium-sized blobs. Make sure your batter blobs are higher than they are wide as they will settle a bit during baking and they must be fat enough when done to be sliced in half. Bake for 12 -14 minutes at 375 Farenheit, or until tops are browned. When you remove them, if you poke them gently, you will think they are far too soft and yeilding to be done correctly, but trust me, they are done. If you really need to, uinsert a toothpick to check for doneness. Remove to counter and cool 5 mintues before assembling shortcakes.

To assemble:

Slice shortcakes in half. Place bottom half on plate and top with a dollop  of cream. Gently place several orange slices on top and layer with a bit more cream. Perch top of shortcake jauntily on top of cream. Spoon over some of the spiced orange syrup from the bottom of the pan. Decorate with shards of cinnamon bark and sprinkle a little ground cinnamon on the plate.

If I had to do this recipe over again and had enough time to do it properly I'd track down some orange flower water for the syrup (replacing about a tablespoon of the water called for with orange flower water), which I wanted, but couldn't find at the stores I went to and didn't have time to go elsewhere. I'd consider Grand Marnier as well, but would add that later in the piece, probably at the time I pour the finished syrup over the sauteeed orange slices.

I'd also do orange segments instead of slices as I think the membrane adds a slight bitterness and chewiness I'd rather do without.

Extra-special thanks to Sam at Becks'n'Posh for the super looking, no longer yellow photo as well as some swell advice on photoshopping!

Comments

[Sam]

sounds delicious.
I can give you some yellow cast hints.
Does your camera have a white balance? If so - that should be your first place of adjustment.

If you don't get the pic right when you take it, then you can so some little post magic on it instead..
do you have photoshop or acdc or picassa?
I can't do it from work but will try tonight at home, bettering your photo with each of those 3 softwares and then let you know which method worked best. Photoshop will definitely work and the other two probably will.
In the meantime you can check out this post I wrote a while back:
http://becksposhnosh.blogspot.com/2004/12/digital-photography-colour-correction.html

and also look at kitchen conference:
http://kitchenconference.blogspot.com/
where you'll find quite a few posts on the subject.

good luck!

Sam

[Moira]

Your dessert sounds so good! I think it's so funny how most of us started our posts with, "My first instinct/thought when I heard what the ingredients were for Paper Chef #3 was...", and that we all had such different interests!

I'm glad you branched out from your panacotta and gave us this wonderful entry.

Cheers,

[Jennifer]

Lyn, these look and sound absolutely scrumptious! And your husband sounds a lot like my own...he has been known to eat all types of raw dough: pasta, bread, cookie, pastry..you name it! I don't know what happens to them but I could never stomach raw dough..other than cookie dough, I guess.

[Cinnamon Toothpicks]

Try using real Cinnamon in your recipes and reduce on the sugar.The Cinnamon that we buy in the US is actually Cassia.

Cassia has a chemical called coumarin which could be toxic. Please click the below link to read more.

http://www.bfr.bund.de/cd/8487