Cinnaholic Gourmet Vegan Cinnamon Rolls in Berkeley

Growing up, I used to love the smell of fresh cinnamon rolls. I didn’t always eat them because all that frosting was way too sweet for me, but you can’t escape that aroma.

So even though I’m not a cinnamon roll connoisseur, I had to check out Cinnaholic in Berkeley after my friend David told me they had the best cinnamon rolls – and they’re vegan!

I’m not vegetarian or vegan, but I’m always curious that if I ever gave up meat or dairy, would there be anything worth eating?

Cinnaholic is a bakery west of the entrance to the University of California, Berkeley campus. It sells primarily cinnamon rolls, but in the glass case the rolls are pimped out with special toppings and creations like Smores or Oreo Surprise.

Can you believe this is vegan cream cheese? It looks so creamy.

David ended up getting the regular cinnamon roll, called the “Old School” ($4.25). And yes, it’s pretty huge.

But not as huge as the specialty rolls, like the Oreo Surprise ($5) that I got. What’s nice about the rolls is that they’re nice and soft, and quite airy. It definitely tastes good warm, but you can probably guess that it is definitely on the sweet side. (BTW, those are faux Oreo cookies, some kind of vegan version, but they did the trick.)

So I guess Cinnaholic answers the question that you can give up dairy, but you definitely don’t have to worry about giving up sweets.

Cinnaholic, 2132 Oxford St., Berkeley. PH: 510.647.8684. Open Tuesday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.; weekends, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.,; closed Monday. www.cinnaholic.com

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Tell Tale Preserve Co. at the Ferry Building -- (CLOSED)

Update (8/26/11): Chef William Werner announced that he was ending his agreement with his financial partners and leaving behind Tell Tale Preserve. He plans to open something else under a different name.

This morning at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, I noticed the booth for the Tell Tale Preserve Co.

If you haven't heard about Tell Tale, it's the baby of former Quince pastry chef William Werner, who dreams of opening up his own business some time this spring, selling preserves and a lot more. He's been giving previews of his products through pop-ups and now at the Saturday farmers market.

Not just selling preserves like the name says, Werner creates all types of goodies, including home-made marshmallows and decadent-looking brownies with a caramel (not jam like I thought) center.

But one of Tell Tales' more interesting items was the perfect morning bite for me. It's called the "Rebel Within" ($6) and it's a savory breakfast muffin. The savory parts come from the bits of sausage in the tasty muffin, and the rebel within is the perfect hard boiled egg inside. This was an amazing breakfast in the hand, with all the engaging tidbits of salty and gooey and fluffy soft.

I can't wait for Werner's permanent store to open to see what else he'll create for lunch and dinner.

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Confessions of an Ad Hoc Brownies Recipe Tester

Bless me almighty Chef Thomas Keller, god of precision and all-things culinary, but I have sinned. I have tried your brownies recipe from your “Ad Hoc at Home” cookbook — a James Beard award winner, thank you very much — and I cheated. Please do not strike me down.

I know that you’re all about being organized and sourcing the right ingredients, and believe me I get that by flipping through the pages of your beautiful book (well, actually mine since I paid for it), but I am only human.

I started by shifting the dry ingredients: ¾ cup all-purpose flour, 1 cup of unsweetened cocoa powder (I did use the E.Guittard brand you recommended), and 1 teaspoon kosher salt. But I confess, I do not have a shifter so I basically just shifted these ingredients through a hand strainer.

Then I melted half the butter in a small saucepan. And even though my cholesterol shuddered at the thought of using three sticks of butter (which I’ve learned from you equates to ¾ of a pound), I followed your instructions to melt the butter slowly and then pour it into a bowl containing the remainder of the butter.

But the warm butter didn’t really melt the remaining butter. So I basically had to mush it up with the back of my wooden spoon in my attempts to get the creamy texture you described.

Then I mixed the three large eggs and 1 ¾ cups granulated sugar, but I have an old hand mixer with metal blades and not the fancy stand mixer fitted with a paddle that you requested. I forged ahead, though, and added the ½ teaspoon vanilla extract (I wasn’t about to pay $10 for a small bottle of vanilla paste), and then on low speed blended in the dry ingredients and melted butter, alternating as I went.

Then I threw in the chocolate chips. I think they were 6 ounces. I didn’t use E.Guittard’s 61 to 64 percent chocolate because they didn’t have that at my local Safeway, so I resorted to using Ghiradelli’s bitter chocolate, which was only 60 percent. And I don’t have a kitchen scale but the bag said 11.9 ounces, so I threw in half the bag, which I figured was close to 6 ounces.

When my batter was ready, I poured it into my pan. But I confess that I don’t have the fancy 9-inch square silicon mold that you wrote in the recipe and had to just use what I did have: an 8-inch square non-stick metal pan.

I cooked the batter for 45 minutes (at 350 degrees) like you said, and sure enough, the edges were overcooked or slightly burnt, like how you warned in your recipe (because I didn't use the silicon mold). But I allowed it to cool and when ready, flipped the pan over to release the big dark cake and sliced them to resemble the photo in your lovely cookbook.

I did, however, dust the top with powdered sugar per your instructions.

So here’s my end result. Despite all the shortcuts or lack of proper ingredients or equipment, they didn’t turn out half bad. The brownies were darker than what I imagined, but I guess that’s your way to make chic brownies, and they were more cake-like than chewy. Still, they were good, especially when cold as the chocolate flavor was more pronounced and the goo of the chocolate chips created a nice surprise.

Chef Keller, I hope you can forgive me that I didn’t follow your recipe precisely. I did 10 Hail Marys, and offered my brownies to the needy (aka my co-workers), so I hope that makes up for my transgressions.

Past brownie recipes:
Espresso-Shortbread Brownie Recipe
Peanut Butter Brownies Recipe

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Dad’s Refrigerator Cookies

My Dad’s cooking repertoire was classic for his generation — bachelor’s survival skills. Most of the things he knew how to cook came from classic American cookbooks, serving up beef stew, spaghetti or pot roast.

And even though he grew up in a Chinese-American family on Maui, he still tended to look up recipes for American dishes. I guess it was his way of assimilating.

Of course, when he married my Mom, he left the cooking up to her and she (also a new cook) learned to make dishes from her childhood in Hong Kong.

While my Dad rarely cooked, on the occasions that he did he would often like to bake. When it came to snacks, my Mom was all savory and my Dad was all sweets. So that’s why he’d often spend a Sunday afternoon making custard pies that were so piping hot we’d burn the roof of our mouths trying to gobble down the fresh light custard filling.

And other times, he’d make what was known as “refrigerator cookies.” Anyone else remember those?

The cookies, which are pretty much like butter cookies, get their name from the fact that after you mix the cookie dough, you roll it up in wax paper and place them in the refrigerator for a few hours. As a child, this was torture because it just meant hours before the cookies would go into the oven.

Looking back, I realize refrigerator cookies are genius for today’s busy parents. The ingredients are often really simple (usually involves a cup of butter or lard, vanilla and flour), and you can bring out the dough from the refrigerator and slice as many cookies you want to bake at that time, then place the remainder of the roll back in the frig for another time.

My Dad’s refrigerator cookies were always the best because he seemed to slice each one exactly the same thickness — about a quarter inch so that it’ll have a nice snap when it comes out of the oven golden brown.

My one regret after my Dad died more than 10 years ago is that I didn’t look for his box of recipes so that I would know the proper proportions he used for his sweet custard pies and crunchy refrigerator cookies.

I recently felt nostalgic for my Dad’s refrigerator cookies, so I looked online for a recipe and ended up using a really simple one I found. I figured, my Dad hardly broke a sweat making the cookies, so he probably also used a really simple recipe. I tried to fancy-up my modern-day version of his cookies by adding pine nuts.

Rolling up the dough in wax paper and placing them in my refrigerator brought a flood of memories of how my siblings and I would gather around to watch my Dad slice each cookie as we helped to line them perfectly on the baking sheet. The recipe I used actually turned out softer than I remembered, and it didn’t have as strong a vanilla flavor.

So I guess I’ll never be able to make refrigerator cookies as well as my Dad. And sometimes I think, why should I when the memory of his is still so vivid?

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there, and go bake some cookies for your kids!

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Test Kitchen: Espresso-Shortbread Brownie Bars

My apologies that I’m a bit late with my monthly Test Kitchen since last month I was away in Chicago. But I’m excited because for May I’m testing a dessert for the first time!

I admit I may have skewed last month’s poll toward these espresso-shortbread brownie bars by offering up two boring alternatives. More than 42 percent of you voted for the brownies, closely followed by the smoky paella (41 percent) and far in the distance was poor curried cauliflower green bean salad (16 percent).

This recipe is from Food and Wine Magazine’s senior recipe developer (how can I get her job?) Grace Parisi, and like most of the magazine’s recipes it promised to be simple and easy. Let’s see how it all went down in my kitchen. (As always, you can get the full recipe at the magazine’s website.)

This brownie is taken up a notch by adding an espresso shortbread as the base. So I started off by making the shortbread. First I got some espresso beans from my local Peet’s Coffee. Thankfully, the bean people are pretty nice about letting you buy as much or as little of the beans that you want. And since I’m not a coffee drinker, I really only needed half a cup, which is what I bought.

I got home and grounded 1 tablespoons of the espresso beans in my spice grinder. Then I was ready to assemble the shortbread ingredients of butter, flour and sugar. Again, I ran into the problem of not reading the recipe before putting it up for the poll because it said I should pulse the ingredients in a food processor, which I don’t have. So I improvised and just used my hand mixer and turned it on and off, imitating the pulsating action of the food processor. Hey, a guy’s got to do what a guy’s got to do.

I then pressed the shortbread dough onto a pan. Again, the recipe called for a 9X13 inch pan and I had an 8X12 inch pan. So you know what I did? I just used enough dough to make a thin layer and just tossed out the rest. (It was only a little bit leftover.) In the end, because the dough had the espresso beans, the color looked odd and reminded me of cardboard. Not very appetizing. Here’s how it looked after I baked it for about 30 minutes until golden brown (or as golden as cardboard can get).

Then I worked on the brownie batter. So you guessed it, I didn’t really read the recipe carefully and it says to use unsweetened chocolate and I only had semi-sweet. So I was worried my brownies would be too sweet, which I hate. I improvised again and to compensate for the sugar in the chocolate, I only put 1¼ cup of sugar when the recipe called for 2 cups. I poured my batter over the crust and then placed it in the oven to bake for another 30 minutes.



So that was it! Pretty easy steps. After taking it out of the oven, I let it cool and then cut it up into little squares. Here’s hot they turned out. Food and Wine Magazine didn’t have a photo of the brownies in its magazine, so there’s no shot for comparison. I’m just going to have to imagine that my brownie turned out how it should be.

My tips and warnings about this recipe:

1. The brownie batter turns out to be like chocolate cake, but I like my brownie a bit more gooey. So next time I might do the trick of mixing in chunks of chocolate that will then turn to ooze when baked (instead of melting all the chocolate ahead of time).
2. The brownies actually didn’t taste too sweet. In fact, I think they were under-sweetened. So maybe you might want to use semi-sweet chocolate with the full 2 cups of sugar and not unsweetened chocolate.
3. The recipe says you can make these ahead and keep them in an air-tight container for five days. I really doubt that. After a day, they started to lose color (looking like blondies instead of brownies) even though I had them in a plastic container. I think they’re good for maybe 2 or 3 days, max.

Ease of cooking: Another really simple recipe that didn’t take too long to prepare. The only part that was hard for me was the shortbread, and only because I didn’t have a food processor. Otherwise, really easy.

Taste: Like I briefly mentioned above, they didn’t taste as sweet for a brownie. Also, the batter was more cake like. The shortbread was an odd addition, giving the brownie a tough edge to it. I definitely tasted the espresso flavor in the cookie portion, but I don’t know if it added or detracted to the brownie. It was just different.

Overall grade: C+ because even though it was easy to make, I don’t think the brownie portion of it was that outstanding. It really tasted average. I brought a bunch to my office and people didn’t rave over them, mostly because I think it wasn’t as sweet and didn’t have a texture of brownies as much as cake.

Don’t forget to vote in my poll on the upper right column. It’s the grilling season and Food and Wine’s June edition has lots of grilling recipes, which sucks for me because I don’t have a grill or backyard. So I had to look for non-grilling recipes to test.

Previous test kitchens:
Basil-Crusted Leg of Lamb
Pork Tonkatsu
Winter Vegetable Chili
Penne Rigate with Spicy Braised Swordfish

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Bonus Test Kitchen: Cranberry-Maple Pudding Cake

So you might remember in last week’s test kitchen, I had to buy cranberries for garnish in my Maple Sugar-Ginger Roast Pork. While it made the dish pretty and festive, I had a whole bag of cranberries in my refrigerator.

Not wanting to let the cranberries go to waste, I looked for a recipe that featured cranberries. That’s when I found this Cranberry Pudding Cake recipe that I clipped out from an old Bon Appétit magazine. I remembered the photograph of the bright red cranberries against the yellow cornmeal-like pudding that really made this dish look enticing. So I thought I’d make that as a bonus test kitchen.

The recipe makes 6 to 8 servings, but I wasn’t about to eat all that myself since I had to use heavy cream. (And I’ve pretty much pushed the limits on my cholesterol during this holiday season.) So I cut back the recipe and instead of making a whole baking dish of cake, I used two soufflé cups for individual servings.

You can find the recipe on the epicurious.com Web site. And this is how it went in my kitchen.

I started off by cooking the cranberries along with maple syrup, heavy cream, and grated orange peel. This pretty much sounds like the beginnings of a classic cranberry sauce, but it’s going to be a filler for the pudding/cake. I only had to simmer the cranberries for about a minute (I guess because it’ll cook more in the oven).

After whisking together the dry ingredients like flour and cornmeal, I whisked one large egg with the sugar.

Once that was done, I slowly added the dry ingredients to the egg mixture and got something close to cake batter.

Now I assembled my cranberry pudding/soufflés by putting some of the cranberry mixture into each of the soufflé cups. Then I topped them off with the cake batter. I placed them on a baking sheet and put the whole thing in a 400° oven to cook for about 28 minutes, or until golden brown.

Here it is piping hot out of the oven. It was a little bit more than golden brown but it still looked pretty appetizing. You can see that the cranberry underneath had bubbled up and made much mess along the sides. Afterwards, I thought it probably would have looked nicer for the presentation if I had dropped the cake batter in clumps so that some of the cranberry juices could bubble up in between from the center. Something to consider for the next time, I guess.

The recipe calls for topping the pudding cake with either whipping cream, crème fraîche, or vanilla ice cream. I had whipping cream in the refrigerator so that’s what I used, and you can see the warm cranberry pudding cake was melting the whipped cream as I tried to quickly take the picture.

Just from looking at the cake, you can’t really tell its cranberries other than the hint of red along the edges. So here’s a picture of a spoonful of the bottom of the cake that’s supposed to be the pudding part.

In the end, the cranberry pudding cake was a nice, warm dessert. Except I thought the cranberry portion tasted a bit tart. It probably would’ve been better to add some sugar when cooking the cranberries and not just rely on the maple syrup. I couldn’t even taste any maple syrup flavor. I’m not sure why they call this recipe a pudding when it really is just a cake with a gooey center.

Still, it was pretty easy to make and can be a very quick dessert or sweet breakfast dish the morning after Christmas. Enjoy!

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When The Single Guy Bakes

I’m obsessed with the Flavor King pluot (a cross between a plum and apricot) ever since I first tasted one at the farmers market in 2007. So every year in the summer when they’re in season, I buy them and snack on their sweet fragrant flesh that’s also quite beautiful in color.

I feel like we’re nearing the end of the Flavor King season because the fruit seems to be a bit more off-shaped when I looked over a batch at the Sunday farmers market near my home. So I wanted to do something other than just snack on them.

I recalled this post from Food Gal, who made a tea cake with peaches. But the recipe was called “Stone Fruit Tea Cake” from the “Rustic Fruit Desserts” cookbook. The Flavor King is a stone fruit, so in it went.

What’s interesting about this recipe, which looked super easy, was that the cake looks more like a tart. (It really reminded me of a “buckle” that I learned to make recently at Two restaurant.)

Food Gal’s version looked so pretty I was really excited about making this, even though I have to say I’m not a big baker. Food Gal is a big baker. I’m not. Mostly because The Single Guy can only eat so much and baking typically means tons and tons of finished baked goods.

Since I don’t bake often, I also don’t have a lot of fancy kitchen equipment for baking. And that is probably why this recipe, which I made on a Monday night after work, turned out to be so stressful despite its simplicity.

As I worked on the dough, one of the frustrations was creaming the butter with the sugar. The butter constantly clumped up in the blades of my hand mixer that I would then have to stop and push it out with a spatula. Anyone have any tips on how to avoid this? Granted, I probably wouldn’t have to worry about this if I had those fancy mixer with the plastic dough attachment, but I just had a hand mixer with the metal blades.

For some reason I thought the dough would look more like bread dough or pie dough because I kept thinking in my mind that I was making a tart. I forgot it was a cake, so the dough was really just cake batter. So I was a bit worried because it was so wet, which made it an ordeal pouring it into some plastic wrap because the recipe calls for freezing the dough for 30 minutes.

I got out my cute little tart pan, which — again because I’m the Single Guy — is only about 8 inches because that’s the perfect size for me. (But the recipe called for a 10-inch pan.) After 30 minutes, I brought out the dough from the freezer and patted it into my tart pan, leaving out a bunch because of my smaller pan.

I felt like I probably needed to leave the dough in the freezer a bit longer because it was still sticky, which made it hard to handle with my fingers because it kept sticking to me. It was really hard spreading it over the pan, and I worried whether I even got the right consistency in the dough. (It was such a mess in the kitchen I didn’t bother taking pictures of the process because my hands were a mess and in my mind I was thinking … this is not going to turn out good. Yes, me of little faith.)

After I placed my cut Flavor King fruit pieces and the remaining dough on top (I still have leftover dough in the freezer), I placed my tart pan into the oven and hoped for the best.

Little more than 30 minutes later, I checked on my tart and I was so surprised. It was so beautiful. The messy dough had risen and filled in all the open spaces, creating this intricate and evenly formed crust on top that was the lattice over the fruit. Bits of the Flavor King fruit popped out in a rich ruby color. I couldn’t believe how perfect it looked!

And when I took a bite, it was so good. The cake wasn’t anything fancy, it was just a nice fresh cake with baked fruit. But it was something I made from scratch! (I have to say, though, that the Flavor King did lose some of its delicate sweetness when baked and instead gave off a more rich plum flavor like jam, but still this was something that was easy to do.) Despite the tortuous and messy process, the reward was so fulfilling. Maybe I can bake after all!

Click here to see Food Gal’s post and get the complete recipe.

Related baking posts:
Non-melting Creamsicle Cupcakes
Peanut Butter Brownies
Father’s Day Grilling Class at Two

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Non-melting Creamsicle Cupcakes

Remember when I was in Hawaii earlier this year and I blogged about this great cupcake shop and its Orange Creamsicle cupcakes? I liked them but thought they would have been better with a cream filling inside that orange cake to really be a Creamsicle cupcake.

Lately I’ve been stressed at work, and one of the things they suggest to help relax is to meditate by visualizing something peaceful and calm. All I kept picturing was a Creamsicle cupcake. Mmmm.

I searched the Web for some recipes (I’m not a big bake kitchen tester) and couldn’t find anything exactly like what I wanted. So I just borrowed recipes from a couple of sites to create this Creamsicle Cupcake.

I started with the orange cupcake. A lot of sites had recipes for old-style orange cake, which I learned is a real Southern thing. But I wanted something fluffy and less dense. I found this recipe at CupcakeRecipes.com. I’ve never seen this site before, but a lot of their recipes look really easy. Here’s the orange cupcake recipe, but for your convenience I’ve also typed it out below. The only thing annoying about CupcakeRecipes.com is they don’t say how many cupcakes the recipe makes.

From CupcakeRecipes.com
Orange Cupcake Recipe

Ingredients
1 ¾ cup cake flour
1 cup sugar
½ teaspoons salt
2 ½ teaspoons baking powder
2 large eggs, separated and whites beaten until stiff
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ cup orange juice
1 stick of butter, softened

I started by combining the butter, sugar, egg yolks, and vanilla in a mixing bowl. Cream these ingredients together thoroughly.

Mix flour, salt, and baking powder together in a separate mixing bowl. Add dry ingredients to creamed ingredients one-third at a time, alternating with adding portions of the orange juice to the creamed mixture.
Then you fold in the beaten egg whites. Here’s my egg whites beaten until you get those stiff peaks they always talk about. See how they stay up stiffly?

Here’s the batter spooned into my cupcake-lined baking tray. The recipe says to just fill it half-way. I baked it in a preheated 350-degree oven for about 15 minutes and tested it by inserting a toothpick in the center. It’s ready when it comes out clean. You can also tell it’s about ready when you start smelling the orange scent in your kitchen. Sigh.

Here are the cupcakes all baked and golden brown. Like I said, the recipe didn’t say how many cupcakes the recipe makes, but it turned out to be 18, which is an odd number considering most cupcake bake trays are 12 holed. Odd, but whatevs.

Now I wanted to make this a real Creamsicle-like cupcake, so that meant orange on the outside and white cream in the center. So I read on this blog called Baking Bites about how she made her own hostess cupcakes—you know, those chocolate cupcakes with the cream filling. I borrowed her recipe for vanilla cream filling and also her technique of inserting the filling into the cupcake.

I initially thought I could just squeeze the filling in through the bottom of the cupcake after maybe piercing a small hole. But the Baking Bites gal’s suggestion made a lot more sense (and is less messy) by using a small knife and cutting out a cone on the top. I angled my knife and just started cutting away the top. Then I scraped off some of the filling cake from the cover (yeah, I got to taste the cupcake leftovers and they were good) and placed the top back on so I wouldn’t get confused about which cupcake top went with which.

Then I made the vanilla cream filling and placed it in a plastic bag and snipped off the corner and just started squeezing them into each cupcake hole. It didn’t matter that I cut off the top of the cupcakes because once I placed the top back on, I would be covering it up with icing so all signs of any cutting would be covered up. Ingenious huh? Anywho, here’s the recipe for the vanilla cream filling here, but as always, I’m helping you out by just printing it below.

From Baking Bites:
Vanilla Cream Filling

Ingredients
3 T all-purpose flour
½ cup milk (low-fat is fine)
½ cup butter (or trans fat-free shortening)
½ cup granulated sugar
½ scraped vanilla bean or 1 tsp vanilla extract (I just used the extract, vanilla bean is expensive!)

Whisk together the flour and milk and cook in a small saucepan over medium heat until thick. This will only take a few minutes. Stir continuously to prevent the mixture from clumping and do not bring all the way to a boil. When thickened (consistency will be that of a thin pudding or custard), strain with a mesh strainer into a small bowl, cover with plastic wrap and let cool completely to room temperature.

When the milk mixture is cool, cream the butter (or shortening) and sugar together in a medium bowl until light. Add in the milk/flour mixture and the scraped vanilla bean seeds (or vanilla extract) and beat at high speed with an electric mixer for 7 minutes, until light and fluffy. Scrape into a pastry bag fitted with a plain tip, or a large Ziplock bag with the corner cut off, and set aside until ready to fill your cupcakes.

So once I filled all 18 cupcakes and placed the tops back on, I just spread on the orange icing that I made, again using the recipe from CupcakeRecipes.com. Here’s the recipe below:

From CupcakeRecipes.com
Orange Icing

Ingredients
1 ½ cups powdered sugar (or confectioner’s sugar)
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon grated orange rind (orange zest)
3 tablespoons soft butter
2-3 tablespoons orange juice

Mix all ingredients together starting with only 2 tablespoons of the orange juice. If frosting is too thick then add the additional tablespoon of orange juice.

And finally, here’s the cupcake with the filling. I took a bite so you could see the insides. I have to thank Baking Bites and CupcakeRecipes.com for the recipes because they were super easy to make (although a bit time consuming, and I stressed out because I had to rush to meet a friend for lunch after baking all morning). The cupcake was light and fluffy (I think the cake flour makes the difference) and the cream filling was sweet. I think if I were to perfect this, I might want to find an orange icing recipe that looks more orange like a Creamsicle’s exterior. Maybe an orange ganauche with food coloring? Mmm, next time. Enjoy!

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