Vegetables in your sweets

As the summers fresh harvest is drawing to a close, you might find that if your plants survived the heat, you are overloaded with vegetables like zucchini.  Zucchini is one of those vegetables that's very versatile, but let's face it, we get sick of eating it all the time.

Thankfully, some creative mother ages ago (back in the medieval times to be exact) came up with a great way to disguise vegetables in layers of sugar and spice.  The real story is that during medieval times, sweeteners were expensive and scarce, so in order to make a sweet bread, they used carrots, which is the vegetable with the highest amount of natural sugar after sugar beets.  This is how carrot cake was born.

Although it's called carrot cake, it's actually a misnomer. Carrot cake, like zucchini bread, is a quick bread, which means it's a bread made with a chemical leavener, such as baking powder or baking soda, instead of yeast. In making quick breads, you mix all your wet ingredients together and then all your dry ingredients together. You add the wet to the dry and allow it to mix for several minutes.

Beyond carrot cake, zucchini cake, zucchini bread, muffins, and scones are just a few ways to blend the wholesome goodness of summer vegetables into the folds of deliciously sweet goodies made for early fall eating.  In August's Bon Appetit magazine, you can find a great recipe for a zucchini pecan cake to get you ready for fall flavors like cinnamon and nutmeg.

Here are some other great recipes for some vegetables-masquerading-as-sweets concoctions:

Carrot Cake with Maple Cream Cheese Icing:  I would add 1 cup of raisins or crushed pineapple to this recipe to make it a little bit more moist.
Sweet Potato & Zucchini Bread:  A slightly more interesting version of plain old zucchini bread.
Carrot Muffins:  Made with a little bit of whole wheat flour!
Carrot Ginger Scones:  My recipe- a little bit of a twist on a popular ginger scone.

Around Pittsburgh, there are some amazing choices for carrot cake.  Nearly every bakery in town has carrot cake or a carrot cake cupcake.  The Pie Place, Bethel Bakery, Priory Not-So-Fine Pastries, Vanilla Pastry Studio, Oakmont Bakery, etc.  Carrot cake has a nice place that sits between a traditional german style bakery and a newer, specialty bakery, so you are apt to find it many places.  My favorite so far is the Whole Foods Market carrot cake, with the Pie Place's coming in close second.

Summer is coming to a fast close, with that 60 degree weather right around the corner, so get your veggies now, just hide them in a cake!

Whole Foods Market Carrot Cake on the Sugar Love Scale:
Taste ♥♥♥♥
Texture ♥♥♥♥
Appearance ♥♥♥
Overall ♥♥♥.75

Old Post 21: Priory Fine Pastries on the North Shore, not so fine

Priory Fine Pastries is located in a historical sweets manufacturing site.  The building they operate out of is the original manufacturing site for the Clark Candy Company, producer of Clark Bars.  Sadly, the history of that building isn't bolstering the quality of the pastry. 

The shop itself is inviting and friendly and the staff is attentive.  You also have a great selection to work from- breakfast danishes, doughnuts, biscotti, cakes, cupcakes, cobbler, mini-pies, whole pies, breads, etc.  The Priory also has a decent web presence for a small business.  They write a blog, have a facebook page, a twitter account, a you tube channel, and maintain a nice, informative website. 

They manage to do so many things right, but miss one key element of a pastry shop- consistent taste!  Sugar Love ordered a mini-cheesecake, a peach raspberry cobbler, a cookies and cream cupcake, a carrot cake cupcake, an orange scone, a mini coconut cream pie, and a white chocolate lemon biscotti,  After just one bite of each item, all but the scone, biscotti and cobbler were thrown away. 

The cheesecake was beautiful, but very sour tasting for cheesecake.  There seemed to be a disproportionate amount of sour cream to cream cheese in this recipe.  The carrot cupcake was ok, just unremarkable.  It didn't seem to have either raisins or pineapple, which is customary for most carrot cakes, so it lacked that little extra bit of fruity sweetness.  The cookies and cream cupcake was decorated as a sunflower with a cute little lady bug on top, but had no cream in it!  It was just chocolate filled chocolate cake with chocolate icing and a cookie.  Cookies and cream should have a vanilla cream filling, right?  The worst was the mini coconut cream pie.  They used neither a meringue or a whipped cream topping.  It seemed to be a flavorless buttercream atop the custard, which was also lacking flavor.  Overall, the coconut cream pie was the most disappointing.

The light at the end of the tunnel was that the biscotti was very tasty.  White chocolate and lemon permeated the dry, crumbly cookie and would have been extra delicious with a coffee.  The scone was also very good, although it definitely ranged on the sweet side of the scone spectrum.  The peach raspberry cobbler was good, but the raspberry was almost an afterthought.  Heavy on peach, light on raspberry. 

That said, none of the pastries were tasty enough to keep around.  While the Breton Cake from Jean Marcs is still be snacked upon, the Priory Pastries sat for a few days untouched after the first few bites.

With a little bit of recipe tweaking, the Priory could be a really great little shop.  For now, you'll just need to be careful about what you order to satisfy that Sugar Loving craving you might have.  

Priory Fine Pastries Peach Raspberry Cobbler on the Sugar Love Scale

Taste ♥♥♥
Texture ♥♥.5
Appearance ♥♥.5
Overall ♥♥♥