Miscellaneous, etc.

My continuing obsession with both baking and baking difficult things from my childhood carried forward this week, with two key items.

First off were date squares, whose actual recipe isn’t that hard, but whose preparation is a bit of a pain in the ass. Dates themselves, for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, are gooey, sticky, giant raisins. When the recipe calls for you to dice dates, I would recommend a food processor, an assistant, or suicide. Nothing short of these options will make the process go more smoothly.

Everything else about these squares were dead easy, from the rolled oats to the softened butter to the brown sugar — the sweet, delicious, smells-so-frigging-good-when-it’s-baking brown sugar — to reducing the dates in a sauce pan. Once you get a handle on the sticky awesomeness of the feature fruit, well, you’ve got everything well in-hand.

I remember that date squares were an item my mother would make around Christmas-time, and that I avoided them because of several important reasons. These included:

1. They didn’t include chocolate,
2. the dates looked like tar, and seemed suspiciously non-sweet,
3. the tops had oats and shit in them, which was definitely questionable,
4. and my parents and grandparents loved them, so they had to suck.

Many years later, I appreciate the complexities of cookies whose flavors are hidden behind subtle disguises, and that anything can have visible oats and also two cups of sugar baked right in.

I feel like I’m progressing as a person.

I wish I could have gotten a really super picture of the squares all cut and stacked together, but they were still warm when I took the shot I did manage to get, and now they’re living at my parents’ house. This is another one of those recipes that I gave away before I could actually try it, so I’m awaiting feedback to see whether the taste lives up to the appearance.

On the other hand, I had absolutely no compunctions against digging straight into my peach pie before it had even cooled off.

Very much the same recipe as the raspberry pie, except with peaches, this turned out amazingly well, considering just how incompetently I prepared it. I’m definitely getting the hang of whacking out a good pastry crust in no time flat, which is both good and bad — my freezer is so full of god damned pastry dough that I’m going to start baking people who stand outside my door for too long.

But! I’m getting good at pastry, and that’s the important thing.

Peaches, for those of you who aren’t familiar with them, are dirty whores. Blanching is apparently a painless process whereby you take a peach, drop it into boiling water for about a minute, and then take it out and throw it into ice water. If you’ve done it correctly, then the skin will be kind of loose on the fruit, and you can just slide it right off: No messy peeling, and you save as much of the flesh as you can.

On the other hand, if you do it like me, you end up with wet, boiled peaches that you end up peeling anyway.

The upside to this is that the peaches ended up being sweeter for having been cooked in advance, and when I got fed up with failing at blanching, I just used un-accidentally-boiled peaches to the mix also, which gives it a nice mixed texture. I made a couple of little five-inch pies for quickie desserts, and when I got tired of that, a 7-inch pie helped mostly use up the rest of the filling.

What didn’t go in the pies ended up on vanilla ice cream, served next to a piping hot, single-serve mini-peach pie. A warm, sweet taste of summer on a rainy night.