Crostata Time DB'ers!

The 2010 November Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Simona of briciole. She chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ to make pasta frolla for a crostata. She used her own experience as a source, as well as information from Pellegrino Artusi’s Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well.

Things just always seem to work out.  Simona announced that the Daring Bakers would be doing crostata this month and what was my mother doing for her book club this month and needed to bring a dessert?  Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert giving me the perfect excuse to foist an Italian dessert off on my mother.  Another of her book clubbers is married to an Italian so we were kind of worried she would do something Italian as well, so I went with the more savory crostata.  Pear, walnut, and blue cheese were the winning combo. 

The basic crostata recipe consists of a short crust pastry sweet or savory, with your choice of filling; the most often being jams, fruit, custards, or more savory things such as cheese.  Whenever I have to work with chilled butter for crusts or scones or what have you I use my food processor, pull the dough together with a little liquid, then throw it in the fridge or freezer as soon as I can.  Everything is cold, cold, cold and works out perfectly.  Like others mentioned, pasta frolla was fairly forgiving to work with, although a little crumbly.  Having made shortbread I knew to persevere.   I found that it wasn't as tender as a regular pie crust, but it was still very good.  Two words of caution though is not to use too much blue cheese.  The pears don't have a huge pear taste, so the cheese could overpower it easily.  The other being that it probably would have been better to blind bake the crust.  Although it wasn't terrible, it would have been better if I had blind baked it. 

It went over very well (her friend having made tiramisu) and my mother only brought back two pieces which are being frozen for a later tea date.   I will be posting photos to accompany my post, but the camera and laptop they are on is in Maui at the moment.  It always seems to be the case...

UPDATE: I have added a photo of the final product.  Mmmm tasty business!

There's something about the smell of fried sugar.

The October 2010 Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Lori of Butter Me Up. Lori chose to challenge DBers to make doughnuts. She used several sources for her recipes including Alton Brown, Nancy Silverton, Kate Neumann and Epicurious.

Growing up in Canada it's pretty much a given that you've eaten your far share of doughnuts and timbits from Tim Hortons. You've probably been through that inevitable showdown of elementary school children who fight over who gets the chocolate timbits whenever someone brought a snack pack to school. You know the flavors, the glazes, the fillings, the sprinkles, and the seasonal flavours off by heart and you know which kinds you like best and those you won't let within licking room of your large double double.

As it is, my family is more of the yeast doughnuts kind of people (if your my father, the more sprinkles you have that you can drop throughout your car the better). So for this months challenge I made yeast doughnuts and topped them with glaze and sprinkles or rolled them in cinnamon sugar.

Making doughnuts is a fairly easy process. The dough was nice to work with (although I did halve the recipe and like others suggested, I did end up adding about 1 cup more of flour to get the right consistency). I fried them in vegetable oil and let them cool slightly before adding some sugary sweetness. That being said, the doughnuts themselves are not really sweet so if you are going to make them, be sure to add some finishing touches via glazes or sugar.

My mother, led by the siren song of fried yeasty sugar goodness, came and watched me while I fried them them promptly suggested that she should try one while they were still warm. So she ate a doughnut with cinnamon sugar and said "oh my god" then continued by eating a couple more timbits and I'm pretty sure another doughnut. And just to let you know, while my mother does enjoy her sweet treats, she does not typically mow down in such a way. She then took a bunch over to our neighbour who called back a couple minutes later to say they were amazing and that she couldn't stop eating them. (She and her husband finished them off later that day.)  Needless to say, the doughnuts were a success. They're best eaten when just fried and went south fairly quickly after a day or two, but they were well worth it.

Since Halloween was just around the corner and my family was in need of cookies since SOMEONE ACTUALLY BOUGHT OREOS (WTH, seriously) I wanted to make something a little festive, but I didn't have time to go all out as I got a new job which I'm training to be the manager of a new cupcake store.  I had seen these cookies in one of my bakebooks and thought they were cute.  Behold Candy Corn Cookies!

Cute non?  They're just sugar cookies that you divide the batter in half, dye one half yellow.  Then divide the other half in an uneven half and dye the larger half of that orange, leaving the last bit plain.  Roll them into long strips, stack them and press them into a pyramid shape before wrapping them and putting them in the fridge to firm up for a couple hours.  From there it's just a case of slicing and baking then you're on your way to candy heaven.

A windfall of sugar cookies.

The September 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mandy of “What the Fruitcake?!” Mandy challenged everyone to make Decorated Sugar Cookies based on recipes from Peggy Porschen and The Joy of Baking.

Rarely do I use cookie cutters and even more rare do I use ones I see in stores and dream beautiful baked dreams, but never use. This time I put to use small pie pastry cutters and some forest animal cookie cutters I picked up from IKEA (which were meant for cottage fun, but never made it there).

The cookie recipe worked out great. The dough was extremely easy to work with. I ended up freezing half of it and used it a couple of weeks later for thumb print cookies which were quite tasty.

I always like the looks of an iced sugar cookie and was quite inspired by the posts of others. What I forgot was that I hated doing it, but was quickly reminded at 11pm as I stood at my kitchen counter with my head proped up by one hand, icing bag in the other, diligently piping . Maybe it's because it was so late and I was tired, maybe because I forgot what a process it all was. Either way, although my family loved them and my mother shared them proudly with friends over a cuppa, they made me hate life briefly.  They were quite cute...

Ice cream petit fours.

So I know I haven't posted my July Daring Bakers challenge yet and seemed to have bypassed it for August, but I swear I did it. There was quite the production for making the ice cream cake- I will explain at the end.

The August 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Elissa of 17 and Baking. For the first time, The Daring Bakers partnered with Sugar High Fridays for a co-event and Elissa was the gracious hostess of both. Using the theme of beurre noisette, or browned butter, Elissa chose to challenge Daring Bakers to make a pound cake to be used in either a Baked Alaska or in Ice Cream Petit Fours. The sources for Elissa’s challenge were Gourmet magazine and David Lebovitz’s “The Perfect Scoop”.

If you haven't tried using brown butter in any baked goods you should. Everyone who had a piece loved the nutty flavour it had and kept suggesting different ice cream and glaze combinations (some actually got pretty excited about it). I used the recipe provided for the cake, some leftover maple ice cream from the July challenge and glazed it with a maple butter glaze. The snapdragons are from our garden-we have every colour you could ever want in a flower and then a few more. And they're growing all crazy.

I honestly hate the smell of brown butter. It makes me feel nauseous however it has a huge impact on the colour, taste, and texture of the cake. It looked so moist that at first I wasn't sure that it was done baking until I toothpicked it. Everything was super easy to put together (it's always nice to use up past DB challenge components) and it looks rather impressive when sharing.

As for my July challenge I haven't posted because I don't have pictures. It was done up at my cottage and the pictures are on my mother's camera which she has with her and has been up at the cottage since then. She did come home at one point and uploaded the pictures on the laptop, told me she did, then proceeded to take the laptop back up to the cottage. I don't get it. It's my mother-go figure. I should have it in the next couple days as she's coming home to help my sister move so check back soon!

Cupcakes les Deux

Because Canada Day was on a Thursday this year, work was fairly slow today. The solution to boredom? That would be baking cupcakes. The flavors that won out were chocolate mayonnaise from How to Eat a Cupcake and Key Lime.

The chocolate ones are never a let down and stay super moist and chocolatey (I did add extra melted chocolate and some cocoa) and I made chocolate buttercream icing rather than the chocolate glaze as suggested on Cassie's site.

As for the key lime, we had mass amounts of limes for beer. The icing is a lime cream cheese almost glaze rather than icing in consistancy and I topped it with some candied lime zest. I was told that they were quite possibly the best cupcakes someone's ever had. There was one woman who came in to buy some of the lemon drop cupcakes I made earlier in the week because she thought they were amazing but we were out, so she bought a bunch of these ones instead and seemed quite happy about it.

I'll be taking some to a barbecue tomorrow to test them out so we'll see what the verdict is.

The whole wheat maple banana bread is my go-to for banana breads. There's no story for it, I just needed something for my Dad's morning snack at work and it does look rather tasty non? I always sprinkly sugar in the raw on top for a little bit of extra crunch.

Chocolate Pavlovas with Chocolate Marscapone Mousse

I'm just getting this posted with less than two hours to go on our posting day as I just got back from a great weekend at a friend's cottage and the past couple weeks have been crazy at work. Let's just say I'm glad that the June Daring Bakers' challenge could be made in steps a couple of days in advance so I could get it all done or I would be SOL.

The June 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Dawn of Doable and Delicious. Dawn challenged the Daring Bakers’ to make Chocolate Pavlovas and Chocolate Mascarpone Mousse. The challenge recipe is based on a recipe from the book Chocolate Epiphany by Francois Payard.

All in all it worked out fantastically well. As I mentioned before, I was very busy at work-either working 7 days a week or leaving for work at 7am and coming home after 11pm so there was little time (and motivation) to get things done. The recipes were fairly easy to do as we just made some creme anglaise for the previous challenge so I was familiar with making that. The pavlovas and mousse were simple, yet they're impressive to look at.

My mother was hosting her year-end bookclub bbq so I made these and some coal cookies and ended up saving the day as no one else brought dessert.  Afterwards I received messages and letters saying how amazing they were from a number of women. 
My lesson through all of this:
I need to get myself another frigging piping bag.

Pate choux.

The May 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Cat of Little Miss Cupcake. Cat challenged everyone to make a piece montée, or croquembouche, based on recipes from Peter Kump’s Baking School in Manhattan and Nick Malgieri.

I've never worked with pate choux before (at least not that I can remember) and I've never had a reason to as no one in my family likes eclairs, cream puffs, etc. but it was the May 24 long weekend and I had a barbecue to go to and my friends eat anything.

I made my pate choux and creme a day in advance which worked very well time-wise. My choux came out beautifully and I was quite proud (things did get a little hairy as I didn't have a non-stick pan to judge the dough's humidity). The creme was very easy to make and work with. I used caramel glaze for my piece montee. Everything was fine until I was almost all the way through and I burned myself on the caramel causing me to flinch, hit my piece, and kill 3/4 of what I had done. By the time I had rearranged everything, the caramel I had already applied had cooled and broken off and the stuff still left in the pot had cooled to the point where it was just ridiculous to try and put it all together.

Basically I had no time as I was already late for the party to make more sauce, so I did what I could and monteed that sucker, got it in the car, and my friends rejoiced. It may look ugly, but it tasted goood. I can't wait for the next DB challenge!

It's like autumn in your mouth in the spring.

It was my friend's birthday on Mother's Day, but since we all have mothers he decided to celebrate a week later with a lovely barbecue. Since I am the baker of us all and that I wouldn't be eating the meat that would be provided, I decided to bring a dessert. I had some leftover pumpkin puree from making cinnamon buns and my friend loves pumpkin pie, but I knew he had pie the previous week . I also know my friends love cheesecake as they bought me one for my birthday even though I don't eat sweet stuff just so they could eat it.

I decided upon pumpkin cheesecake swirl brownies, the recipe for which I found on Perry's Plate. It worked out fairly well although the brownie batter was a bit thick, so swirling wasn't so swirly, but the brownies were soo good. The whole plate was devoured rather quickly. They're even better on the second or third day as the pumpkin cheesecake makes the lower brownie turn almost fudgy.

There's another close-up photo of these things on my flickr account which also shows the colour and interior a bit better (minus the blurry bits because apparently I can't see what I'm doing with the digital. One day...).

A backlog of baked goods.

A bunch of my friends have birthdays in December, so to celebrate and please both the chocolate and vanilla lovers I made marble cupcakes. I used my go to recipe for marble cakes (more like a pound cake). They were tender and moist and even better on the second day.

I was also cleaning out my digital camera and came across these lovely pictures. Aparantly I forgot to import them which is a shame really. I'm pretty sure these are my infamous pumpkin cinnamon buns aka the best cinnamon buns I have ever made. I only make them in the fall because it seems weird to do something that has pumpkin in it outside of harvest season. It' like making a buche de noel in the middle of summer, but they're lovely! They proofed perfectly, the pumpkin gave it a nice golden brown colour and they were nice and tender even after a couple days (which you know can get shifty when it comes to yeasted breads) Check out flickr to see a picture of them with icing.

Lastly I made some apricot date squares for work for a party. We didn't have enough dates for a complete recipe of my usual date squares, so I pulled out my Taste of Home Cookies since I knew there was a recipe for some apricoty bars. They were fairly easy to put together, not quite as much oats as your typical date square-a little more on the shortbread side if you will. They topping is a little messy while eating, but only really tasty things are.

It's all in the cocoa.

We ran out of cookies once again, so my family requested brownies. I usually use my go-to recipe where I mix premium cocoa with Ghiradelli unsweetened Cocoa, a little coffee, and some cayenne which turns out some pretty dirty (and by dirty I mean good) brownies. They're extremely fudgey, moist, and melt in your mouth and are even better if you nuke them in the microwave before you eat them.

This time around I ran out of both of my usual cocoas as I made a bunch of my infamous coal cookies for my family and sister's boss so instead I used the only stuff we had left-generic store brand cocoa powder. I'm not saying that all store brand or no name products are horrible as I do enjoy President's Choice products these days, but this time the crapy cocoa made a difference. I had a bit of the old cocoas left and even just looking at the two I had my "Really? I'm not impressed?" grossed out face on. I even mixed in some truffle-filled chocolate bar chunks my sister brought back from Europe, but you could see and taste the difference.

See how light it is? Normally it's the rich, deep, dark colour of fertile earth or a flourless cake whereas instead it's a chalky brown. They still tasted like a good brownie, but they didn't taste like my best brownies. I'm going grocery shopping today and will be getting some new cocoa. Anybody want some partially used cocoa powder?...

Spoon bakes somes spoons.

I haven't baked in a while at home as things have been a little hairy the past week and a bit. My Grandma died so I have been busy helping my family as well as juggling work. That being said we also got cookies and sqaures from sympathetic friends as well as I baked a big batch of muffins that I kept in the freezer so I had no reason to bake. Today after three hours of ridiculous shenans I made some mock sticky buns and cracker spoons.

The sticky bun recipe called Cream Cheese-Topped Mock Sticky Buns came from The New Best of BetterBaking.com again and really resembles the Sticky Chewy Cinnamon Sticks I made before non? These ones as the book describe though are more of a scone in texture and they're shaped like a muffin. After lifting one of them up to see if they filled the cups or not, I found that the bottoms were all sticky like a sticky bun (and thanks to crap muffin liners from the dollar store) and they had leaked/overflowed.

I put in some candied cherries for colour as well as the raisins and as we do not have cream cheese I will make a quick brown sugar glaze and call it a day. If they taste anything like they smell, I'll be in business. These have serious potential.

As my title states "Spoon bakes some spoons" you're probably wondering how can a spoon bake a spoon? I have some pretty quirky nicknames one from my father being Spoon which he commented on while I was rolling and cutting them out. Why am I making cracker spoons? Because for work my boss was wondering if we could make them for catering so I went lurking about and used the recipe Crisp Semolina Flatbread from Wild Yeast.

I made four different kinds: sesame, plain with seasalt and cracked pepper, roasted tomato and olive, and fig and almond. I rolled the dough then using a couple of different shape and size spoons (one being an Asian soup spoon) cut them out with a knife, put them on their respective spoons, brushed them with a little oil, a little salt, into the oven and out comes the spoons.

I have to admit, my first couple were so ugly that you can't help but love them and want to eat with them because you pity their apearance. The verdict-while they look cool and would be neat to use if you were having a party or something they're labour intensive. I need a pasta machine to roll them out even thinner and more quickly. Do they make spoon shaped cookie cutters because that would help me not wanting to cry.

Don't worry, it's me. I know I smell like bacon...

I haven't updated in a few days and I've gotten a little behind on posting what I've made. Because of work I get to try new things which is why I can make multiple things and my family will not get overloaded with scones and the like (although they do love getting any treats).

Two of the recipes I tried came from BetterBaking.com's book once again, which seems to be a growing trend. I am really enjoying the book although I would like there to be more pictures of the product just to either compare or know what exactly she's talking about when it comes to putting it all together. I am a very visual learner.

The first sconey feature is the Double Cheddar Scones from BB. It's finally become cold this winter, so what better way to get warm than a bowl of soup and a tender cheesy scone straight from the oven? The batter for these ended up being really moist so I ended up adding quite a bit more flour and it did take a little longer in the oven to bake, but then again our oven is a little unpredictible so maybe it was just fine.  The cheese that you sprinkle on at the end reached that almost crispy, chewy point like what you get at the edges of lasagna. "It's like what you get at Tim Horton's only deadlier," says my mother and we all know how horribly good those sinful things are.

In staying with the cheese theme the next in line is Quick Cornbread from an old New York Time's cookbook.  It's pretty much our go-to recipe for a basic cornbread, but then we add things to it like our housesmoked bacon (I smelled like smokey-goodness so much that I got a weird look and a sniff from a woman when I went to the gym. Before I got changed. This is too awkward.) cheese, buttermilk, and chilis. I used drippings from the smoked bacon in place of butter to give it a really smokey flavour. They were easy to put together and make the perfect addition to a big bowl of Superbowl chili.

Finally are the Cinnamon Bun Scones.  Who doesn't like a nice sweet scone or a cinnamon bun? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? We generally always have a scones at the store and I have made cinnamon buns for it too, but the problem is you can already tell the difference if you were to leave a piece of bread out on the counter for an hour (same goes for the cinnamon bun). It's not inedible or anything, they still lip smacking good, it's just not the same a straight from the oven. Scones tend to fair well through the day so I combined the two ideas. 

My recipe came from here.  Coming out of the oven, I'm not going to lie, they looked a little questionable.  They didn't seem to have the moistness that other scone recipes I have done have had (the oatmeal made me question it a bit) nor did they have great oven spring.  But I always try to try a recipe as it is first then try it again tweaking it my own way, so I added the glaze, put them in some tupperware for a bit, and low and behold they absorbed a little moisture from the glaze and looked like something you could eat three of. They look damn fine, smell just like a cinnamon bun, and are tender despite my earlier reservations. Give 'er a go if you feel like a cinnamon bun, but can't wait for the dough to rise.

Very Berry Muffin

Note to self-"I can't believe it's not butter" does not work like butter when you make it into a streusel even though you would love for it to because you ran out of butter. Trust me-I believe that it's not butter.

Todays muffin is a wholewheat buttermilk muffin with blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries based on BB's Lawsuit Buttermilk Muffins. It's a recipe I have used numerous times in the past with different fruit combinations and each time it has proven to be tasty. As you can see, the top isn't so struesel-y as the pseudo butter did not hold out. It just melted all over and made a crunchy layer of brown sugar goodness omg. The muffin is so moist you can't hold it too firmly as you dig into it with wanton pleasure.

I seriously need to get a better camera as this one does not like to focus, so my apologies for the continuous poor picture quality. It won't be horrible much longer.

Jane Austen's Scones

I have had my The New Best of Betterbaking.com for only a week now and already I have made about four things out of it and all of them have been a success. We seemed to have a plethora of whipping cream and buttermilk in the fridge, but no eggs, so muffins it wasn't and scones it was. I made a half batch of Jane Austen's Rolled Oat and Golden Raisin Scones, substituting buttermilk for the light cream. They came together quite quickly and puffed nicely in the oven. Although the only sugar in them is brushed on top at the end the result was a moist, tender, and wholesome treat that would be perfect with tea and some Sense and Sensibility. Now that we actually have eggs I will be baking some muffins and cookies next.

Sticky, chewy cinnamon "not quite a stick"

I recently received Betterbakings' The New Best of Betterbaking.com: 175 Classic Recipes from the Beloved Baker's Website from my wonderful bosses for my birthday so of course I had to try out some recipes. That night I tried her Sticky Chewy Cinnamon Sticks recipe, but while reading it I couldn't figure out how it would be a stick as the process seemed the same as when you make cinnamon buns. However, I went ahead and this is what I came up with-to me a somwhat cinnamon bun. The dough isn't quite as bread-like as your traditional bun, more dense almost like a cross between a cinnamon bun and a scone? For the filling I did a mix of raisins and candied cherries with white sugar, then brushed them all with whipping cream. A rather tasty piece of business, but you must eat them warm (or sliced in half and made into a sandwich with butter and honey if you're my father).

My mother ate one that night (it was 11 o'clock when I finished them) and said they were the best thing she has ever eaten in terms of the cinnamon buns I have made. Go figure. I'm going to try and change some things until I'm a little happier with the outcome. Bottom line: It's a good recipe-just not what I expected.