blog — molly yeh

spring

fresh mint olive oil cake with labneh and honey

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This color is real!!! And, no, Kermit was not harmed in the making of this. This is really just a basic olive oil cake that simply has a bunch of fresh mint purée mixed in to give it the most delightfully fresh herbal flavor and of course this bright natural color. It’s inspired by a dessert that Lily, Alana, and I had at The Exchange Restaurant last month that was basically a bowl of crumbled bright green cake topped with yogurt sorbet, a lemony drizzle, and baklava crumble. We ordered it expecting a regular yellow olive oil cake but when it arrived and we saw the color we were like omgomgomg and immediately did that thing where all three of us suddenly block out everything that’s going on around us in order to decipher what’s happening in our mouths and in front of our eyes. We poked at it, snooped around its every nook and cranny, and took very deliberate tastes in order to figure it all out. It’s so good eating with them. The only thing that could have improved such a moment is if one of us had raised up a monocle or magnifying glass. We figured it must have been a few different herbs in there, basil maybe, or parsley even, and then we got on the subject of spinach cupcakes (ew?), and finally had a chat with the server about what all was happening. And it turned out that it was just mint! Which is wild because it didn’t taste specifically minty, the most minty thing about it was that it had a faint version of that fresh feeling you have after brushing your teeth. Past that it was sort of generically herbal, which was cool because it allowed the yogurt sorbet and pistachio baklava crumble to shine through. And above all it was delicious. One of the best most inspiring desserts I’ve ever had. I turned around faster than I’ve ever turned around in my life and flew home and started experimenting with olive oil mint cakes. 

And I came up with this one! It’s a riff on the grapefruit olive oil cake from Yogurt book and it is really fun to make. You might think that the mint purée color would fade in the oven but it stays so bright. Sorry I am like one month late for St. Patrick’s Day, but actually I’m just 11 months early. 

I originally intended to slather this in a classic sweet cream cheese frosting but at the last minute before bringing it to Mackenzie’s birthday party I decided to go deeper into my nod to The Exchange dessert and just use labneh with a honey drizzle and pistachios. I loved it because it was so aggressively not sweet. It was definitely not your typical happy birthday sugary cake though so because of this I was trying really hard to figure out what all of my friends thought of it. The thing about being surrounded by so many nice Midwest people however is that they will not tell you if your cake is bad!! Emily said it tasted *fancy* so there is that?? I’ll leave you with this: when it comes to assembling this cake, choose your own adventure. If you’re hankering for a classic sweet frosting use a standard cream cheese frosting. But if you’re celebrating a sophisticated 30-year-old birthday party then try out the labneh option (as written below)! You can always add more honey drizzles. If you can’t decide, use some of the cake scraps as test bites and concoct your frosting accordingly.  

Fresh Mint Olive Oil Cake with Labneh and Honey

Makes one 2-layer 6” cake

Ingredients

Cake:

1 c (50g) firmly packed fresh mint leaves

1/2 c (118g) whole milk or unsweetened almond milk

1 1/2 c (190g) all-purpose flour

1/2 c (56g) almond meal

1 tsp kosher salt

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp baking soda

Zest of 1 lemon

3/4 c (150g) extra virgin olive oil

1 1/4 c (250g) sugar

2 large eggs

1/2 tsp vanilla

 

Assembly:

About 1 1/2 c (338g) labneh

crushed pistachios

honey and/or turbinado sugar

lemon zest

sliced kumquats, optional

Clues

Preheat the oven to 350ºf. Grease and line the bottoms of two 6” pans with parchment and set aside.

Rinse the mint leaves and then ring them out very well. In a high powered blender like a vitamix, blend the mint and milk together until very smooth. Set aside. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, almond meal, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and lemon zest. In a large bowl, whisk together the olive oil and sugar until combined.  Add the eggs, one at a time, whisking very well after each, and then add the vanilla. Add the dry ingredients and mint mixture in three alternating additions, whisking after each until just combined. Pour into the pans and bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean; begin checking for doneness at 25 minutes. Let cool in the pans for 10 minutes and then transfer it to a wire rack to cool completely. Level off the tops.

Spread half of the labneh on one of the layers and top with pistachios, honey or turbinado, and a little bit of lemon zest, and then place the other cake layer on top and spread on remaining labneh. Decorate as desired with pistachios, honey or turbinado, lemon zest, and sliced kumquats, if using. Enjoy! 

-yeh!

ramp malawach

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This weekend totally nailed it. Nothing was too strongly out of the ordinary (except that brunch club member emeritus Abby came back to town for a visit with her new special man friend and it was sooo great and, ugh, we’ve gotta find a way to convince them to move back to grand forks you guys), I just did some simple errands, cooked fun things for family and friends, and engaged in my favorite saturday mid-morning ritual of going to the gym and then getting a turkey tom with onions on 7-grain at jimmy john's. “gym and jimmy john's” is its official name and it’s basically a way for the chill of pizza friday to take a victory lap. I don’t have to make any real decisions, I can sleep in and then cruise around town, ideally with a met opera broadcast la-la-la-ing over the radio, and then have a big mayo-y sandwich at the end. 

This particular saturday morning was extra good because in my first internet check of the day I came across this video of my friend matt playing the mozart sinfonia concertante with the minnesota orchestra. It is pure joy!! Is his mozart face not the best?? (The eyebrows! The delight!) So that set the jolliest, most civilized tone for the weekend and inspired me to listen to more mozart and then some mahler during my jimmy john's eating and new cookbook studying. At 5 o’clock, A Prairie Home Companion came on and I watched the video broadcast as I chopped cabbage. I really really love Chris Thile’s PHC. Even though he’s not from the Midwest, I’ve always associated his voice and music with the midwest since I listened to so much Nickel Creek on road trips to Michigan growing up, so I’m extremely happy and proud that we’ve adopted him. Being able to hear him play new songs live over the radio on the regular is such a gift. 

Yesterday I harvested our first bit of rhubarb!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I used it to make a sauce for mother’s day blintzes. We had a nice big mother’s day brunch of blintz soufflé, zucchini quiche, challah, butter with chives from the garden, this rose rose cake which I finally defrosted, and some salady things. The quiche and blintz soufflé were made from recipes that I was testing for Leah’s forthcoming book and they were delicious, I can’t wait for her next book. 

Today I’m flying to Philadelphia for this panel tomorrow! (It is sold out but it will be live-streamed on facebook I think.) I am also planning to eat at all of Mike Solomonov’s restaurants in a pokémon-style gotta-catch-em-all early birthday present to myself. I am so excited. Wish me and my waistline luck. 

Here is a recipe that helped me get through all of the many bunches of ramps that eggboy bought the other day! At first I was going to make scallion pancakes with ramp greens instead of scallions but then I dug a bit further and learned that making malawach (a flaky yemeni flatbread) is a very similar process except that it uses butter instead of sesame oil and the dough gets stretched way thinner so you get more flakiness. I was in a buttery flaky mood, and I had just almost died over the amazing malawach at kismet in l.a., so I went with ramp malawach. 

Malawach is like a rustic flat hot croissant that’s way easier to make than a croissant. There truly is life before your first malawach and life after because there is no more perfect bite than a piece of malawach, hot out of the pan, topped with grated tomato, a plop of labneh, and a splatter of spicy zhoug. Grated tomato is traditional with yemeni buttery breads and it delivers just the right amount of freshness to balance everything out.

The dough here is pretty much the same as the scallion pancake dough in my book, but I read here that the kismet ladies use some pastry flour in theirs so I tried that and loved the extra bit of lightness that it added. The process of shaping malawach and getting the dough to be paper thin requires massaging it with a shit ton of butter. It's a lil messy, but it doesn't need to be perfect, and bonus: you'll moisturize your hands and butcher block countertops (if that's what you're using) in the process. 

Obviously if you're not up to your eyeballs in ramps, or maybe you're sick of them by now, you can use scallion greens, chives, or nix the idea of green things altogether. I threw the white parts of the ramps into some zhoug in the place of garlic which was a thing I'd do again. 

Happy Malawach-ing!!! 

ramp malawach

makes 6

ingredients

1 1/2 c all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting

3/4 c pastry flour

2 tsp sugar

1 1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

3/4 c water

3/4 c butter, very soft

10 ramps (green parts, finely chopped, add the white parts to zhoug or reserve for another use)

 

for serving

zhoug

labneh

2 large tomatoes, grated

3 or 4 seven-minute eggs

clues

in a large bowl, combine the flour, pastry flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder. create a well in the center and add the water. mix the dough until you have a shaggy dough. 

turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead dough for 5-7 minutes, adding additional flour as needed, until smooth.

transfer the dough to an oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap and rest for 30 minutes.

turn the dough out onto a work surface and divide into 6 balls. Keep them covered with plastic wrap when you're not working with them. Using your hands, spread 1 tablespoon butter on a large work surface, top one of the balls of dough with another tablespoon butter and pat the dough and butter out into a flat circle.

Using a flat hand, gently massage it in circular motions (kind of as if you’re washing a window) to flatten it out into a very large translucent circle. It’s ok if it’s tears, it doesn’t need to be perfect, just try to get it as thin as possible! 

Top with a sprinkling of the ramp greens and then roll it up into one long, skinny log. roll the log into a coil and set it on a plate. repeat with the remaining dough.

roll out the coils into 7" circles by placing them between two pieces of wax paper and rolling with a rolling pin. the dough will probably want to stick to the wax paper, but it's ok if it tears while you're peeling it off. (alternatively, you can stick the coils in the fridge for about 30 minutes, which will make them slightly easier to handle.)

Heat a skillet over medium heat and cook fora few minutes on both sides until golden brown. 

Serve hot with zhoug, labneh, grated tomatoes, and 7-minute eggs. Enjoy!

-yeh!

hazelnut + almond flour chocolate chip cookie cake (gluten free & kosher for passover)

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we are in full blown passover mode up in here. this past week i’ve tested three briskets, batch after batch of baked matzo brei, and millions of millennial pink coconut macaroons that i am so gosh darn excited to share with you. and of course one dozen iterations of this cookie cake (we’ll get to that!). alas there is no carp in our bath tub, as i’m pretty sure sven cat would get to him before we would, but that’s a dumb excuse, we should have at least tried, right? next year, with a carp!

i’m having three seders + easter next week! seder one will be in chicago with mum and stoop and marshy’s famous gefilte fish, seder two will be in fargo with a city wide afikoman after (i don’t actually know about the afikoman thing but i feel like if any town were to do this first around here, fargo would be the one, right?), and matzo pizza night seder with eggboy, rugrats passover, and the hogwarts haggadah. the jdate haggadah has been good to us but we’re moving onto the hogwarts one because you can only laugh at pharoah’s dating profile so many times.

after all that i’m going to help eggmom with easter! let’s do harissa carrots. and minty potato salad. and some beet pickled eggs! and what would be fun to hide in an easter egg hunt for the family egg to search for and find? a pet baby goat? a mozart kugel? 

it’s going to be a great spring holiday season. 

i want to sing from the rooftops about this cookie cake!!!! it is the descendant of three things: a really gooey tasty vegan gluten free cookie bar from the town co-op that was essentially almond flour and agave, the baked marzipan center of my sprinkletaschen, and the massive cookie cakes that all of my campers got during parents weekend back when i was a camp counselor in 2011. After two days, the counselors were instructed to take away any uneaten cookie cakes and the story was that they had to be thrown away so they didn’t attract bugs but the truth was we ate them all over the course of the following week when we sat on late night duty reading gossip magazines. Aside from the spray can cheese, those cookie cakes were the most delightful things that summer, so chewy and satisfying. 

My recipe testing journey with this cookie cake began when I baked some of the leftover sprinkletaschen filling on its own and realized that it had a great chewy texture. I wanted this cake to be a chocolate chip cookie though, and not a big hunk of baked marzipan (although that wouldn’t be so bad), so I added some brown sugar, chocolate chips, a huge splash of vanilla, and subbed half of the almond flour for hazelnut flour, which gave the whole thing this awesome darker toastier flavor. I’m using Bob’s Red Mill’s Hazelnut Flour and Almond Flour here which both taste amazing and are fluffy and eliminate the step of grinding your own nut flours, so I got the whole dough mixing process down to about three minutes. There's no need to cream any butter, you just need one big bowl, one smaller bowl, and a spoon. It’s really stupidly easy, and really stupidly good. Not just Kosher for Passover good, but good good. 

Two kosher for passover notes: 

-the baking soda can be omitted if you avoid it on Passover. The texture will be slightly denser and more gooey, but it will still be great! 

-the frosting in the photo is a basic butter + powdered sugar buttercream but for a dairy free dessert, you have many options: use this great dairy free frosting, serve it hot with a scoop of dairy free ice cream, drizzle on melted chocolate or a simple powdered sugar glaze, or serve it with just a light dusting of powdered sugar. 

hazelnut + almond flour chocolate chip cookie cake

makes one 8-inch cookie cake

ingredients

1 c bob’s red mill almond flour
1 c bob’s red mill hazelnut flour (or 1 more c almond flour)
1/2 c lightly packed light brown sugar
1/2 c sugar
3/4 tsp kosher salt
1/4 tsp baking soda (can omit if you don’t have it on passover, it’ll be denser but still super tasty!)
1 large egg
1 tb vanilla extract
1/2 tsp almond extract
1/2 c chocolate chips

to decorate:
buttercream
or for a dairy-free alternative: dairy free ice cream, coconut whip, or glaze made with powdered sugar and dairy-free milk

clues

preheat the oven to 350ºf. grease an 8" cake pan and line it with parchment. set aside.

in a large bowl, combine the flours, sugars, salt, and baking soda. in a small separate bowl, combine the egg, vanilla, and almond extracts.

add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, add the chocolate chips, and stir to combine. it may seem dry at first but keep on stirring. pat the dough out evenly in your prepared cake pan.

bake until golden brown on top, begin checking for doneness at 22 minutes.

remove the cake from the oven and let it cool fully in the pan- or serve it warm! wait for it to cool fully if you're decorating it with frosting though.

the cookie cake can be baked a day in advance. once cooled, wrap tightly in plastic wrap and store at room temperature. 

-yeh!

Thanks to bob's red mill for sponsoring this post!

springtime oreos

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ok as soon as i posted monday’s hotdish, it started to actually warm up outside and morph into spring, signified by the fact that nobody who came over this week needed assistance in the can i take your coat realm. which is a great relief because despite the fact that we’ve lived in our house for almost three years now, we’ve yet to nail down this choreography and half of the time the coats go directly from our guests’ bodies to eggboy’s arms to a hopeful pile on the couch. or a random closet on the other side of the house, or on the homemade hooks halfway down the cave to our basement if it’s not completely filled up with parkas and coveralls. there’s just a lack of space in our welcome area (or maybe an overabundance of shoes?) and the routine is that guests come in, they see this whale drawing, and in a single file they filter through a tunnel to the light and smell of the kitchen at which point eggboy shimmies in to take the coats but then that's the furthest we've rehearsed and it's nearly impossible to predict where the coats go from there.

(apologies in advance for the wrinkles on your coats.)

but the point is i know it's spring because we've gone a week without going through that mishegas. 

spring also showed itself this week at night when we sat down to finally finish the last episode of this is us and it was still broad daylight. ughghgggggh. on the plus side (!), longer days mean that macaroni’s egg production is through the roof and i’ve got matzo, so i’ve been jumping the gun on matzo brei and it feels gr8. 

other than observing spring, this week has included a great big mashup of things: cake baking, cake photographing, brisket over-salting, yogurt testing, meeting for the new town food truck logo, shooting with chantell and brett, planning fargo passover (you’re all invited!! details tbd) and preparing for the cherry bombe jubilee (you’re also all invited!! tickets are still available for their marketplace where i'll be signing motr!). and tomorrow morning i’m driving to fargo to make springtime desserts on north dakota today! i’m excited! i’ll be demoing the little rosemary planter cakes from motr, toasted coconut bird’s nest cupcakes, and these here oreos with pretty pastel fillings that are all naturally colored! here are the colorings that i used:

green: matcha powder, easy peasy. (if you don’t like matcha, you can pull a lily and add a dash of spirulina.)

pink: ground freeze dried berries. berry purée would also work (directions here), but i had fun this time experimenting with freeze dried berries because they make the frosting a little speckled and also the flavor comes through a bit stronger. you could also use a bit of beet juice! 

yellow: orange juice and zest + the tiiiiiiiniest bit of turmeric. too much turmeric makes it taste like turmeric, which isn’t good for buttercream, and the color gets kind of neon-y yellow. so when adding your turmeric, add the smallest amount possible and then increase from there if you want more color.

springtime oreos

makes 18 cookies

Ingredients

for the cookies:

2 c flour

1 c unsweetened cocoa powder, plus more for dusting

1 tsp kosher salt

1/4 tsp baking soda

1 1/4 c unsalted butter, at room temperature

3/4 c sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

 

for the filling:

1 c unsalted butter, at room temperature

2 c powdered sugar

a pinch of kosher salt

1/2 tsp matcha powder

2 tsp finely crushed freeze dried raspberries or strawberries

zest and juice of an orange

a tiny pinch of turmeric

 

clues

to make the cookies: preheat the oven to 325ºf. line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

in a small bowl, whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, salt, and baking soda. in a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. mix in the vanilla extract. with the mixer running on low speed, add the flour mixture and beat until just combined. it will still be a bit crumbly. pour the mixture onto a work surface and give it a few kneads to bring it all together. divide in half, shape into flat discs, wrap in plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator for an hour (or up to two days).

lightly dust your surface and the top of the dough with cocoa powder. roll out the dough to 1/2 inch thickness and cut out 2 1/2 inch rounds. transfer them to the baking sheets, 1 inch apart (using a small offset spatula helps with this step). re-roll the scraps and cut out more rounds. 

bake the cookies until the tops are no longer shiny, about 20 minutes. cool on the pan for 5 minutes, then remove to a wire rack to cool completely.

to make the filling: with a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, beat together the butter, sugar, and salt until combined.

divide the frosting equally into three small bowls. add the matcha to one, the berries to another, and the orange and turmeric to the other and stir to combine. 

fill piping bags with each of the three frostings. place half of the cookies on a plate or work surface. pipe a blob of filling onto the tops of each of these cookies and then place another cookie on top, pressing slightly.

refrigerate for a few minutes to allow the filling to firm up. enjoy! store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to a week.

-yeh!