Desserts
Desserts are a great place to begin experimenting with a uiTzi. Because, honestly, if you mix together some (but not, of course, all) of the following ingredients: butter, honey, maple syrup, fruit, chocolate, eggs, flour, cream, yogurt, vanilla and nuts - then add the concentrated energy of the sun - really, how bad could it be?
Cakes
There are two secrets to making great cakes in a uiTzi. You need to rely on eggs to make your cakes rise more than baking powder or baking soda, which require the higher heats of traditional baking. And you also need to use much less flour than in traditional recipes.
Here's how you'd go about making a rosemary walnut cake, or a honey pumpkin seed cake: cream a cup of softened butter (two sticks' worth) with about a cup of honey until light and fluffy, then add 6 medium-size eggs, one at a time, wisking well to incorporate each. In a separate bowl mix 2 cups of all-purpose flour with 3/4 teaspoon of baking powder, 1 teaspoon of sea salt, 1 cup of finely chopped walnuts, and about a tablespoon of finely chopped fresh rosemary leaves. Fold the dry ingredients into the wet ones, then pour the batter into a well buttered Pyrex baking dish and bake in a midday uiTzi (preheated to 250-300 degrees) until the cake has risen, cracked, and turned a beautiful golden color.
The advantage of the Pyrex baking dish is it allows you to check that your cake has cooked right through. Remember, the sun cooks things from the top down, so sometimes a cake will look done before it really is.
Chocolate
A uiTzi is God's answer to all cooks who've ever labored over a hot stove melting chocolate in a bain marie. In a uiTzi it's so much earlier. You start pretty much any chocolate dessert by melting butter (or cream) and chunks of 80% or 90% organic chocolate in a mixing bowl or Pyrex baking dish. Twenty minutes later you have pefectly melted chocolate. Then you whisk in some eggs, add a little flour, some honey, some crushed walnuts, a pinch of salt and a spoonful of vanilla, and you're done. Put it out in the afternoon sun about 4 o'clock and in a hour or so you have the lightest, most delicious chocolatey desert ever.
Of course, you can always just melt the chocolate on its own and pour it over ice cream or stewed pears.
Cobblers and Bettys
Another super-simple, scrumptious dessert to make in a uiTzi is a fruit betty or a fruit cobbler. Unlike the cobbler, which requires a biscuit dough topping, bettys need only a crumble topping - oatmeal or breadcrumbs, tossed with butter bits, sugar, and nuts, sprinkled over the cut-up fruit in a Pyrex dish. The best bettys and cobblers are made with northern fruits that are tart and sweet at the same time, like apples, peaches, blackberries and cherries. Tropical fruit like mangoes, papayas and bananas don't work as well. Simply cut up the fruit and spread the topping on with your hands. They bake in a couple of hours on a clear day. Or they can cook more slowly, in three to five hours, on a hazier day. Regardless, the result will be delicious.
Cookies
Cookies are simple, easy and bake quickly even in a uiTzi. Most cookie doughs will cook up deliciously in about half an hour in a hot sun. Many cookbook authors insist that 1/4 vs 1/8 of a teaspoon of baking soda makes the difference between deliciousness and lumpen rocks when it comes to cookies. This is completely untrue. Cookies are simply small cakes, and don't require precision combinations of butter, eggs, honey, flour, nuts, oats, seeds... Really, if you mix up a nice dough with those ingredients, it can hardly go wrong. I usually begin by softening some butter and creaming it with honey or piloncillo syrup, which I make by melting piloncillo in a little water in the uiTzi. Then I add a couple eggs and some vanilla. Then I mix the dry ingredients in a separate bowl - flour, oats, sesame seeds, shredded coconut, chia seeds, ground cinnamon, pinch of salt, a pinch of baking soda - for example, and then add them to the wet ingredients. When the mixture feels like cookie dough - ie. something you can roll into a ball, or drop from a spoon, or roll into a log, chill, and then slice - then bake it! For an added flourish, put a chunk of chocolate on top, a pecan, or a small spoonful of black raspberry jam.
Stewed Fruit
The simplest uiTzi-made dessert is comprised of just fruit and honey. Here's a favorite recipe: fill a baking dish with ripe peaches. Our local peaches in Mexico are small and rather hard; their skin is thin, fuzzy, and difficult to peel; their stones are tough to remove; and their flavor is tart. So just wash them well, dribble honey on them, and put them in the uiTzi in the morning, uncovered. Focus the uiTzi periodically. At midday give the dish a good stir. After a couple of hours the peaches will begin collapsing into puddles of runny juices, the pits will start falling out, and the honey will completely melt into the juices. They're done just when they begin to brown. Sever warm with vanilla ice cream or thick yogurt, or just by themselves, with a spoon.
