Here our Bourbon Basil Choco Cake is made up into cupcakes for a street food stand we ran for Blanchardville's Music on Main event last night. They were delicious because the proportion of bourbon fudge icing was so high! Each cupcake weighed about a half a pound:)

BOURBON BASIL CHOCO CAKE

1 cup sugar
1 cup packed fresh basil leaves
5 T. unsalted butter, melted
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
2 large eggs
1/2 tsp. baking soda
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1/4 tsp. salt
3/4 cup flour
1/2 cup hot water (or short it and add bourbon to your liking...)

Frosting
1½ cup powdered sugar
5 T. unsweetened cocoa powder
3 T. sour cream or Greek yogurt or marscapone
1 T. butter, melted
2 T. bourbon
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
splash heavy cream or milk (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Oil 9-inch-round cake pan, and dust with flour. Place sugar and basil in food processor, and pulse until basil is finely chopped and uniformly green in color. It will look slightly wet. In large bowl, whisk melted butter, cocoa powder and basil-sugar mixture until well blended. Whisk in eggs, one at a time, until blended and smooth. Stir in the baking soda, vanilla and salt. Gradually add flour to bowl, stirring just until blended. Add hot water and stir until just combined. Pour batter into prepared pan. Bake 22 to 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Cool and brush with bourbon before frosting.

In a medium bowl, whisk together powdered sugar and cocoa. Set aside. In separate medium bowl, beat sour cream and melted butter with an electric mixer on low until blended. Gradually add sugar mixture to sour-cream mixture, beating at low until well blended. Add vanilla and whisky, and beat will for 1 minute until smooth and creamy. If mixture becomes too thick and beat, add splash of heavy cream or milk. Spread over cake, and garnish with extra basil leaves.


MINT MOJITOS
The perfect close to a hot summer day is a cool sweet minty Mojito and a slice of boozy Basil Cake. Then, truly, it's off to bed! This is a basic recipe, but a quick survey on pinterest reveals a host of fun variations. Start here and have fun. BTW, these are just as wonderful as a family-friendly virgin drink if you skip the rum and just add bubbly water.

1 bunch fresh mint, cleaned
1 cup sugar
4 lemons
4 limes
Ice cubes
1 (750 ml bottle) dark rum
1 liter club soda

Take 3/4 of the mint and add it to a saucepot with the sugar. Cover just barely with water and heat on medium, stirring occasionally until the sugar dissolves. Allow to cool completely, even overnight to absorb the mint flavor. Strain into a large pitcher. Juice 4 lemons and 4 limes and add the juice AND as many skins as will fit nicely into the pitcher. Add the remaining sprigs of mint to the pitcher and pour over the rum, as much as you like of the bottle. When ready to serve, add club soda and pour over ice into glasses.


BASIC PESTO RECIPE
Find a nice basic template here, but feel free to add or subtract as you wish. Great additions are sorrel, oregano, lemon zest, goat cheese, kale and parsley.

QUICK SPANISH TORTILLA

4-5 medium potatoes, sliced in rounds
1 small onion, roughly chopped
1⁄2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 tsp salt
6 eggs, whisked
1 TBSP snipped chives
Pepper and/or paprika

Preheat oven to 375F. In an ovenproof skillet or cast iron pan, gently bring to heat a 1⁄2 cup of olive oil on the stovetop. Once the oil has been brought to heat, add the sliced potatoes and onion. Stir until mixed. Cover and sweat the vegetables for 10 minutes. You'll want the potatoes and onions to be softened and not too browned.  Once softened, turn off the heat. In a large bowl, whisk together the 6 large eggs. Pour the eggs over the potato and onion mixture, and mix through.  Sprinkle with chives. Place the skillet or cast iron pan into the oven and bake for 15 minutes or until cooked through. Season with freshly ground pepper and paprika. Serve in pizza-shaped slices.


STUFFED SQUASH BLOSSOMS

Morning-picked squash blossoms, with petals wide open
Soft cheese for stuffing (goat chevre, ricotta, cream cheese, marscapone)
Fresh leaves of basil, chives, oregano, thyme, savory or parsley
Shredded mozzarella
Fresh parmesan
Flour and/or corn meal and/or breadcrumbs
Egg
Salt and pepper

Extra Virgin Olive Oil for sauteéing

Shake out the flowers, being sure to pick out bugs. (Or frogs! We found baby peepers in one flower this morning.) Don’t wash. They should be very clean coming in from the field and water will wilt them. Mix softened goat (or other) cheese with several tablespoons of shredded mozzarella. The proportions should be about 3 soft to 1 mozzarella. Snip fresh herb leaves into the cheese mix. Garlic is also great in there. Use a teaspoon to stuff the flower to the point where you can still pinch the petals around the cheese. Holding by stem, dredge in beaten egg mixed with a tablespoon of water. Salt and pepper flour/cornmeal/breadcrumbs, and dredge eggy flowers in that. Carefully place in skillet with olive oil pre-heated to medium-high. Flowers should bubble and spit. Flip after a minute or so. Coating should be golden, cheese should be melted.  Remove with a slotted spoon, garnish with freshly ground parmesan and pepper. Enjoy! Viva local food!

This past weekend our neighbor town, Hollandale, had it's fireworks display and a first ever Apple Pie Contest to raise money for the community fund. I took first place with this recipe AND the pie brought in a $100 bid at the auction. It was my first ever entry in a baking contest of any sort and it was quite fun! So here's the recipe for you to try. If you made the Fruit of the Fields Cheesecake last week, you'll notice it is very much the same, and I did indeed base the recipe off of it. But I worked on the crust and improved it a bit, and changed it to a pie form, which is more appropriate for some situations. The great thing about the recipe is that it can be used with just about any seasonally available fruit you have coming into your kitchen, since the cream filling holds everything together. For the Apple Pie Contest we needed to use 75 percent apple, but you could also use rhubarb as the main tart flavor.

This is a multi-step recipe, but it’s nice because you can use your food processor to prepare the crust and all the fillings!  Our crust has a mix of white whole wheat flour and buckwheat, because we love the combo of buckwheat’s nutty flavor with fruit –  as in French galettes or Russian blini – but you can simply  use all white flour, if you prefer.  Enjoy!

For the Crust
1/2 cup white whole wheat flour
1/2 cup buckwheat flour
1/3 cup wheat germ
¼ cup chopped or halved walnuts
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, chilled, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
2 tablespoons lard (or vegetable shortening) chilled, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
3 tablespoons ice water (or more)

Using the blade in the food processor, whirl flours, wheat germ, walnuts, sugar and salt until finely ground. Add cold butter and lard and whirl just until combined into pea sized crumbs. Add water, a tsp at a time, and pulse until the dough clumps to one side of the bowl. Don’t over-process. Flatten into a disk and chill in fridge for 1 hour.  Remove and allow to soften very slightly and roll to fit a 9-inch pie pan. (Flour table generously.) Crimp or otherwise embellish edge of crust. Bake at 375 degrees for about 10 minutes until fragrant and slightly golden. Go ahead and prepare the fruit filling while the pie is baking because you don’t need the crust to cool to continue on.

For The Fruit Filling
4 cups of fruit, including something tart like apples or rhubarb
(For the contest, we used 3 cups of apples, sliced with their skin on, and 1 cup of mixed blackcap raspberries, mulberries and gooseberries. This week, I'll be making the pie for a potluck with peaches, rhubarb and blackcaps.)
1/3 cup sugar (or a little more if you are using a lot of rhubarb)
2 TBSP flour

Replace the chopping blade in the food processor with the slicing disc. Send cored apples or rhubarb slices through the processor until you have 3 cups or so.  Remove to a separate bowl and add berries, if you are using them, and toss with sugar and flour. Spread in the bottom of the cooked crust and return to oven for 7 minutes to slightly roast fruit.

For the Cheesecake Filling
8 oz cream cheese or goat cheese or ricotta cheese, softened (I used goat cheese, since that’s what I have the most of here on the farm)
¼ cup sugar, mounded slightly
1 large egg
Zest of one lemon

Replace chopping blade in food processor and process all ingredients until smooth. Pour over roasted fruit in crust. Do not over-fill crust. Leave ¼ inch to add icing. Cover crimped edge with foil and return to oven for 10 to 20 minutes or until filling is appears set when jiggled.

For the Glaze
2/3 cup marscapone, sour cream or Greek yogurt
1 ½ TBSP sugar
1 tsp vanilla

Rinse and dry bowl and blade of food processor. Add all ingredients and process until smooth. Pour over hot cream filling  immediately after pie is removed from oven. Allow to cool 15 minutes at room temperature, then refrigerate. Serve cool. Better yet, freeze and allow to thaw for ½ hour before serving.

STUFFED SQUASH BLOSSOMS

Morning-picked squash blossoms, with petals wide open
Soft cheese for stuffing (goat chevre, ricotta, cream cheese, marscapone)
Shredded mozzarella
Fresh parmesan
Flour and/or corn meal and/or breadcrumbs
Egg
Salt and pepper
Fresh leaves of basil, chives, oregano or parsley
Extra Virgin Olive Oil for sautéing

Shake out the flowers, being sure to pick out bugs. (Or frogs! We found baby peepers in one flower this morning.) Don’t wash. They should be very clean coming in from the field and water will wilt them. Mix softened goat (or other) cheese with several tablespoons of shredded mozzarella. The proportions should be about 3 soft to 1 mozzarella. Snip fresh herb leaves into the cheese mix. Garlic is also great in there. Use a teaspoon to stuff the flower to the point where you can still pinch the petals around the cheese. Holding by stem, dredge in beaten egg mixed with a tablespoon of water. Salt and pepper flour/cornmeal/breadcrumbs, and dredge eggy flowers in that. Carefully place in skillet with olive oil pre-heated to medium-high. Flowers should bubble and spit. Flip after a minute or so. Coating should be golden, cheese should be melted.  Remove with a slotted spoon, garnish with freshly ground parmesan and pepper. Enjoy! Viva local food!

WHITE CHOCOLATE MINT MOUSSE (do you still have mint from box 2?)

1 3/4 cups heavy cream
2 cups mint, stems and leaves, chopped in 2-inch pieces (save pretty tips and leaves to garnish at serving)
6 oz. white chocolate chips

Ina small sauce pan, combine heavy cream with mint and heat to just below a simmer. Set aside, covered, for 30 minutes. Place chocolate chips in a heatproof bowl. Strain milk to remove mint, discard leaves. Bring cream back to a simmer and pour over the chocolate. Let sit for one minute, then stir until the chocolate is melted an the mixture is smooth. Cover and refrigerate overnight. Up to 8 hours before serving, using an electric mixer, beat the white chocolate cream until stiff peaks form. Serve in small bowls garnished with mint leaves and shortbreads. Also great served on pieces of pound cake. Should serve about 10.

THAI PEANUT SAUCE TEMPLATE
I’m calling this a template, because it’s really just a starting point for a dip or pasta sauce. We use this mostly as a dip for peas right now, but it’s also nice with carrots, or chips or celery. Also great as a sauce for noodles or stir-fry veggies. Have fun and experiment!

1 TBSP peanut butter
½ tsp sesame oil
2 cloves smashed garlic
1 TBSP miso paste (if you don’t have it, you can use more peanut butter to thicken)
1 TBSP soy sauce or shoyu
2 TBSP rice wine vinegar
1 TBSP chopped cilantro or basil or mint or all
¼ cup goat cheese, sour cream, mayo or yogurt
Siracha sauce or red pepper flakes to taste

So basically, you are going to do your best to mash this together. A whisk works if your peanut butter isn’t too thick. A blender is always a great idea, but add the cilantro in afterwards. This is how we tend to start this sauce, but depending on my mood, we add horseradish, wasabi, mustard, white wine, sherry, chopped scallions, diced red peppers, finely chopped jalapenos or parsley. If you want more heat, add Tabasco or more Siracha. If you want more sour, add Ume Plum vinegar. If you want sweet, add molasses or honey. If you want more mild, add white vinegar. If it gets too thin, add mayo or peanut butter. Too thick, add soy sauce.

SHRIMP AND PEA POD CURRY
Our farm crew absolutely loves curry. We go through a lot of spices and coconut milk here on the farm as we make our way through the veggie year! Our curries start with spring garlic and peas, continue through summer eggplants and zucchini and finish with fall pumpkin and potato. We make everything we have a lot of into a curry! And you can, too. Consider this a template, just like the peanut dip above, and have a hot lot of fun! For vegetarian curry, tofu or chickpeas are a great option for protein.

1 large yellow onion, chopped
4 garlic cloves, smashed
1/4 cup butter, ghee, coconut oil or olive oil, depending on your diet of choice (we always use coconut in curry)
4 TBSP curry powder, or paste (we get various curry powders from Penzys and pastes from the Asian markets in Madison)
3 large slivers of fresh ginger, cut big enough that no one eats it by mistake (we learned this from experience)
1/2 tsp chili flakes or several shakes of Siracha (we just have Siracha on the table and make the curry mild)
1 TBSP flour
1/2 cup yogurt or heavy cream
1 can coconut milk
2 cups stock: chicken or veggie
1 lime, zested and juiced
1 lb shrimp, peeled and deveined
3 cups snow and/or snap peas, zipped of strings and cut into 1-inch pieces
2 TSBP chives, minced
Parsley, basil and/or cilantro
Chopped peanuts


Cook onion and garlic in the fat of choice in a heavy stockpot until onion is softened. Add spices and flour and cook, stirring constantly, for one minute. Whisk in cream, milk, broth and lime zest and juice. Bring just to a boil and simmer until it begins to thicken, about 2 minutes. Add shrimp and peas , stirring, until shrimp is pink and cooked and peas have darkened slightly. Add chives and salt and pepper to taste. To serve, pass with bowls of chopped parsley, basil and/or cilantro and chopped peanuts to put on top.

Scroll down to the two previous recipe posts for two sweet treats to make with your fruit!

Sometimes using up the bounty of amazing ingredients that comes off your homestead can be a challenge. Certain months bring a deluge of gorgeous fresh ingredients. You've got to just go ahead, throw dietary caution to the wind, and enjoy what is so generously given by the animals, gardens and wild meadows . Gotta fry those elderberry blossoms once a year! Here is cake that takes advantage of having too much goat milk, lots of eggs, mounds of berries and rafts of rhubarb stalks. It's sweet, but not overly so, and really highlights the nuances of fresh goat cheese and sunny free-range eggs. If you don't have available such extravagances, I've put alternatives that you can get at the grocer. My mother learned to make a tart very much like this in Italy called "Frutti di Bosco" or Fruit of the Woods and it's a pie version of this cake with a shortcrust bottom, marigold cream middle and the fruits arranged on top with a currant glaze. I generally make that at this time of year, but I had so much cheese on my hands I created this instead by adapting a rhubarb bar recipe recommended by a CSA Member . The tart is certainly a recipe worth making, however, and you can find a nice version here.

FOR THE CRUST
1/2 cup white whole wheat flour
1/2 cup buckwheat flour
1/2 cup almond meal/flour
3/4 cup butter, softened

FOR THE FRUIT LAYER
5 cups mixed berries and thinly chopped rhubarb (I like mulberries, currants, gooseberries and blackcaps since they all overlap for a riotous week or two in July while the rhubarb is still nice)
1/2 to 3/4 sugar depending on the sweetness of the berries (use more as the proportion of rhubarb goes up)
3 TBSP flour

FOR THE FILLING
1 lb goat chevre, ricotta, strained kefir or other thick goat cheese (two 8-oz packages of cream cheese will also work great, but you'll need to beat it with a mixer to get the lumps smooth)
1/2 cup sugar
2 large eggs (best quality you can get)

FOR THE GLAZE
2/3 cup marscapone, sour cream or creme fraiche (whatever you've made that is similar in texture to a commercial sour cream will work)
2 TBSP sugar
1 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 375. Generously butter a 9 by 13 pan, getting up the sides well. Mix crust ingredients in bowl of food processor with blade. Press with fingers firmly into bottom of pan and bake for 10 minutes. Using thickest cutting disk, chop rhubarb into slices, add berries, sugar and flour. Set aside to soften slightly while crust bakes. Remove crust from oven and immediately spread berries over top, being careful not to pull the crust up from the pan. Roast berry mixture in oven for 10 minutes. Whisk filling ingredients together until fluffy. Pour over roasted fruit and return to oven for 25 minutes. Clean out bowl of food processor and whirl glaze ingredients together with blade. Pour over hot cheesecake when it comes out of the oven and the glaze will cook just slightly. Cool completely before eating. This is a great summer dish served chilled, if you can make yourself wait. Better yet, freeze it and take it out just an hour or so before serving. It is quite tart and cooling on a hot day.

The first two recipes I could make independently as a child in the 70s were Bisquick Hamburger Pie and a Pound Cake that featured a container of lemon yogurt and little can of crushed pineapple.  I made them often after school from elementary into adolescence but shed the Bisquick pie in my vegetarian college years. The Pound Cake recipe, torn from a tiny little cookbook put together by the Spring Garden Elementary School PTA, went with me into adulthood but got lost some years ago in a recipe-file purge. These purges occur every decade or so when the optimistic chaos of the file makes it unusable. The file still grows fat with papers in spite of the advent of Pinterest, and occasionally I find I've tossed a recipe that I meant to keep, or I suddenly desire a recipe I thought I'd never again make. I'm not sure which crack the Pound Cake fell into, but this past week I found myself craving it mounded with mulberries.

The mulberry thing originated with one prolific tree in the hedgerow closest to our house. For three weeks, we've been picking mulberries and combining them with other berries that have come ripe here on the farm: first strawberries, then currants, then gooseberries and now blackcaps. I've served the bounty with one creamy cultured dairy concoction after another, thanks to our milking goats: yogurt, maple syrup kefir, creme fraiche, labneh and finally frozen vanilla custard.  But it seemed to me the fourth week of mulberry harvest required a substantial (and moist and tart and somewhat sweet) base on which to be adequately elevated, and celebrated. That old Pound Cake would do the trick nicely, but the recipe was gone and a Pinterest search turned up nothing that seemed to approximate what I was remembering.

Then one humid afternoon,  I took a cool bath and read a chapter of Molly Wizenberg's delightful food memoir "A Homemade Life."  And there it was! The recipe I was looking for -- my childhood pound cake, all grown up and pleasantly more sophisticated than the original. I slightly adapted her "French-Style Yogurt Cake with Lemon" to accommodate the lemon balm I've got growing in the gardens and made it a tad thinner so I could put generous yellow wedges under my dark purple mulberries. The highlight of the original Pound Cake was always the tart, thin lemon-juice-powdered-sugar glaze drizzled over the top, but baking in a loaf pan allowed for just a tiny sliver of the glaze with each slice. Wizenberg's genius cake shape AND double glaze gives more of that tart punch. For more of her wonderful recipes (and stories) see her blog, Orangette.

FOR CAKE
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 cup almond meal or flour
2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
2 tsp grated lemon zest
2 tsp finely minced lemon balm leaves
1/2 cup whole-milk plain yogurt, well stirred
1 cup sugar
3 large eggs
1/2 cup fruity olive oil, or pure

FOR SYRUP
1/4 cup powdered sugar, sifted
1/4 cup lemon juice

FOR GLAZE
1/2 cup powdered sugar, sifted
1 TBSP lemon juice
1/2 TBSP yogurt or heavy cream

Preheat oven to 350. Grease a 9-inch cake pan (I used a 10-inch springform to get a thinner cake) with butter or olive oil. Line the bottom of the pan with a round of parchment paper, and grease it too. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Add lemon zest and whisk to mix thoroughly.  In a large bowl, combine the yogurt, sugar and eggs, stirring to mix well. Add flour mixture, stirring just to combine. Add oil and stir well. Pour into prepared pan.

Bake 20 to 30 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Don't overbake! Cool the cake in the pan on a wire rack for 15 minutes. Run a thin knife around the edge of the pan, and carefully invert the cake onto a wide, flat plate or pan. Discard parchment. Flip cake carefully back onto the rack so that the shiny domed side is facing up. Set rack over a baking sheet.

In a small bowl, whisk the syrup ingredients until lumps disappear. Spoon syrup over the cake, allowing it to drizzle down the sides. Cool completely on rack. In a small bowl, combine the glaze ingredients. Whisk well to remove lumps. Spoon and spread OR drizzle the glaze over the cake in ribbons. Serve immediately with soft icing, or allow the icing to firm up for about an hour. Serve plain or with fruits.