Bits ‘n Bites

Been a while since I had a chance to post here. The month of May was particularly nutty, so I had to skip the Opera Cake challenge. I was excited when I saw the June Challenge. The Danish braid was another opportunity to try my hand at flaky dough. We had done it once in cooking school and I was looking forward to trying it again. I read the recipe a couple of times, a little too quickly, I might add. It was not until last Sunday, the day I had set aside to make this recipe, that I realized the amount of time needed. I kinda missed the “5 hours, or overnight”, final resting period. So, I ended up doing it over two days.

The recipe, from Sherry Yard’s The Secrets of Baking, was relatively straight forward.  I used a mixed fruit filling instead of the apple one suggested. We had a choice, luckily, and I had these frozen berries I wanted to use. I did a simple jam, based on the recipe presented in the video, included as a reference by our hosts for the challenge, Kelly of Sass & Veracity, and Ben of What’s Cookin’? The video also included a demonstration by Beatrice Ojakangas of the braiding techniques. Despite that, and the fact that I carefully counted slats on each side, I think I came out short somehow. There was a bit of last minute tucking and hiding (grin). The smell that emanated during baking was just incredible. The combination of orange and cardamom is to die for.  I could barely wait long enough for it to cool before cutting a slice off. Turned out quite nicely. Another wonderful recipe added to the repertoire. Thanks again Daring Bakers for this opportunity!

BTW, Daring Bakers has moved to a new site and now offers a forum for non-members who wish to hang out with other bakers. The new site is here.  Of course, new members are always welcome. Details on how to join are available here

Jennifer (The Domestic Goddess) is hosting this year the Mmm…Canada - The Sweet Edition. In 2005 she asked Canadian bloggers and non-bloggers to talk about their favorite meal, the one that really said Canada to them. This year she decided to up the ante:

This year let’s make our proverbial pot a little bigger; a little sweeter, if you will. Let’s get together as many bloggers as we can to share their favourite Canadian confection, indulgence, dessert, sweet…anything really! As long as says Canada to you and you can get some sort of Sugar High from it, we want to know about it.

As mentioned below in the Savoury Edition, I am Québec-born and bred. Quebecers are renowned for their sweet tooth. The dessert that most typifies this for me is Sugar Pie (with a name like that, how can you go wrong?). Tarte au sucre is one of those recipes that offers a lot of variations: maple sugar, brown sugar, flour, no flour, butter or not, cream, etc. Some families guard their version and pass it down generation to generation. I blogged on this last year. The full post can be found here.This entry is the most popular on my site, thanks to an incoming link from Wipedia. I never realized how many people were interested in this dessert…

Here’s the recipe I usually use. It’s foolproof and quick to prepare.

Quick Sugar Pie
(Recipe: courtesy of Mme Paquin, Trois-Rivières)
1 cup of brown sugar, packed
1/2 cup whipping cream
1 tablespoon flour

Mix ingredients in bowl until smooth. Throw in a frozen pie crust and bake at 400F for 30 minutes. Serve with vanilla ice cream. It tastes even better cold, the day after.

Now, living on the West Coast, my other favorite sugar high is provided by the Nanaimo Bar.  You can’t beat it for a quick pick-me-up in the afternoon (followed by the inevitable crash). Here’s a recipe from The City of Nanaimo’s website:

Nanaimo Bar Recipe
Bottom Layer

• ½ cup unsalted butter (European style cultured)
• ¼ cup sugar
• 5 tbsp. cocoa
  1 egg beaten
• 1 ¼ cups graham wafer crumbs
• ½ c. finely chopped almonds
• 1 cup coconut

Melt first 3 ingredients in top of double boiler. Add egg and stir to cook and thicken. Remove from heat. Stir in crumbs, coconut, and nuts. Press firmly into an ungreased 8″ x 8″ pan.
Second Layer

• ½ cup unsalted butter
• 2 Tbsp. and 2 Tsp. cream
• 2 Tbsp. vanilla custard powder
• 2 cups icing sugar

Cream butter, cream, custard powder, and icing sugar together well. Beat until light. Spread over bottom layer.
Third Layer

• 4 squares semi-sweet chocolate (1 oz. each)
• 2 Tbsp. unsalted butter

Melt chocolate and butter overlow heat. Cool. Once cool, but still liquid, pour over second layer and chill in refrigerator.

Note: This dessert/snack also comes in prepackaged mixes for the time-pressed.

(Photo: Stephanie Spencer, Wikipedia Commons)

Where has the month gone!… Back to working fulltime, my food blogging has come to a veritable stop, though I’ve been cooking and baking more than ever.

This month’s challenge was hosted by Elle – Feeding My Enthusiasms and Deborah – Taste and Tell.
The recipe involved making cheesecake and turning it into lollipops coated with chocolate. I decided to do half the recipe – the original calling for five (5) 8 oz bricks of cream cheese – way too much cheesecake to have around the house. Everything turned out fine. My baking time was more 1h15 hours than the 35 minutes called in the recipe. The consistency was really nice and silky, and a snap to do in the mixer, meaning this is a recipe I’ll definitely be turning to again. Though the process was simple, there was a lot of time involved in letting things cool, then freeze. I tried to form the balls using an ice cream scooper, which sort of worked. The resulting shapes weren’t the most delicate (or lollipop-like), but looked a bit better once coated with the chocolate. In retrospect, I should have slightly frozen the cheesecake before scooping.

Thanks for the challenge, ladies!

BTW, Daring Bakers now has a new website/Forum with a section open to anyone interested in baking and meeting DBers. More details here.There are now over 1,000 registered Daring Bakers!

This month’s Daring Bakers Challenge, hosted by Morven (Food Art and Random Thoughts), was the “Perfect Party Cake”, taken from  Dorie Greenspan’s book Baking from my Home to Yours. This recipe called for plenty of lemons for the cake part, and enough butter all around to make Paula Dean proud. My mouth was watering just reading the instructions.

On a quiet Friday morning, I printed the recipe and jumped right in. My KitchenAid made the whole process pretty painless. Like pretty much every DB recipe, this one seemed more daunting than the actual process turned out to be. My cakes came out moist and light, despite not rising much (a step involving whisking the egg whites and the buttermilk had been left out inadvertedly in the instructions) and the buttercream was just divine. Give me a recipe I can just beat the living daylights out of, any day. The preserve used between the layers was left to us. I decided to make the Strawberry Preserves with Black Pepper and Balsamic Vinegar, found on the Food Network site. Turned out lovely and balanced well with the lemon flavour of the cake. Big success all around. Bonus: 8 egg yolks to make ice cream (chocolate and vanilla).

Can’t wait to see the April challenge!

One of the exhilarating aspects of being part of the bakerhood that is Daring Bakers, is knowing that you become a better baker after each new challenge. There is always a trick or two to pick up, a new way of looking at a process, a new direction to stretch your skills and comfort zone. This challenge proved this once more.

Hosted by  Breadchick Mary (The Sour Dough), and Sara (I like to cook), we were dared to bake French Bread, the Julia Child way. Well, I’ve baked a lot of bread from scratch, but I have to admit my jaw dropped when I read the instructions. How could a recipe with four (4) basic ingredients take so long!? Eight ( to nine (9) hours?! Whoa! The bread I usually bake entails one proof/rise, shaping and a second shorter rise. Total time from kneading to fragrant bread out of the oven: 2.5 hours. My curiosity was piqued. We had been warned so many times in cooking school not to let the bread over-rise, that I was a bit skeptical. Nonetheless, on a quiet Sunday, I got up early and plunged in.

I’ve always made bread the old fashion way, kneading by hand. Since the option to use an electric mixer was offered with this challenge, I decided to try it that way. Improvement #1: It’s a lot more efficient to make bread this way. The mixer bowl is ideal for the first proofing. A keeper. Next up? Using the oven, with the light on, as the rising chamber. Brilliant! Even better, wrapping the bowl in a towel. That’s how I’ll be rising bread from now on.

The whole process was pretty straightforward, just time consuming. I may have gotten a bit impatient at the end. My shaped bread (three ficelles) could have risen a little longer. Still, I was really happy with the final results. I’m not sure I’ll be repeating the whole process in the future, but I’m sure the tricks learned will make my regular method even tastier. Thanks for the challenge, Breadchick Mary and Sara!

The full recipe is available here.

Barilla does it again, this time in support of Second Harvest in the US. The free downloadable pdf includes recipes from Mario Batali, David Tutera, Debra Messing, Stanley Tucci, Natalie Portman, Chris Daughtry and Marisa Tomei.

So, if Penne in a Spicy Sauce with Capers and Olives, Autumn Vegetables with Goat Cheese and Pumpkinseed Oil and Saffron Panna Cotta sound like your type of Italian delectables, head over to this site to download the book. If you’re from the USA, you can actually specify which Second Harvest you wish Barilla to send its contribution.

Offer ends February 29th has been extended to March 31st!

Stumbled upon another cooking video site today, called I’m Cooked. It looks even more homespun than Active Cooks, except for one dash of stardust: Christopher Walken showing how to roast a chicken.

(The clip above is from YouTube, but I saw the original on I’m Cooked). I haven’t seen much of Walken’s work. I know of his roles in Deer Hunter and Pulp Fiction, among others, but first saw him last Summer in Hairspray. So much for the tough guy image, I thought watching him, as Wilbur Turnblad, hoofing it with John Travolta as his wife. The next film I saw him in was Mousehunt with Nathan Lane and Lee Evans. He played a nutty pest exterminator, vanquished by the mouse of the house. Now, here he is, roasting a chicken… Nice bit of trivia: Walken’s parents were both bakers, and he grew up working in the family bakery in Queens, Walken’s Bakery.

Came across a couple of cooking video sites today, courtesy of Ohio.com. The first one is called The Food Channel, part of the larger AnswersTV lifestyle network. Nice series of recipes and tips and tricks free videos. There is also an extensive series with Chefs and restaurants. Quite nice. In addition, you can pair these videos with the Wine Channel, and its  “Wine School”, another free series of videos on wine.

The second one is Active Cooks. Think of it as the YouTube for aspiring tv chefs. Always wanted to have your own cooking show? Here’s your platform! There’s a mixture of slick and homespun videos. The site has a little over 170 members and membership is free.

Take out your pots and pans, get your “mise” ready and let the cameras roll…

My baking activities abruptly fell off after the holidays. I realized that I simply can’t eat everything I bake, and so a lot of it goes to waste. As much as a lot of the challenges out there are enticing, I just can’t afford to address most of them. However, one I will never miss is the Daring Bakers challenge. This month’s recipe was a particularly refreshing one: Lemon Meringue Pie.

Our  January hostess was Jen, from The Canadian Baker. I was thrilled I was going to get a chance to make a custard once more. After my Bostini massacre, I needed that boost in confidence, even though the recipe was quite different for this custard.

As most DB recipes, this one was a multi-step process. To break it up, I prepared the pastry the night before and let it rest in the fridge overnight. We had done pâte brisée a few times in cooking school. The process of gently kneading the flour and butter together brings fond memories of Chef Tony reminding us the importance of safekeeping these pockets of butter amidst the flour. That’s what creates the flakiness of the crust. There is a particular expression used to describe this process: fraisage. I was happy with the resulting crust.

The custard process was straightforward and reminded me of the freshness of lemon. I especially appreciated that this recipe did not leave any unused egg whites – they ended up in the meringue. Thanks to my mother’s gift of a gorgeous KitchenAid mixer, that was done in a snap. I had never sealed a pie with meringue before, but I just love the look of it.That’s a technique I’ll definitely use again.

Another winner of a recipe!

Sometime in early December, as I was perusing the Daring Bakers website, I noticed an ad on the site for a chocolate competition hosted by Hotel Chocolat, a UK-based purveyor of fine chocolates. The deal was simple: Submit your favorite chocolate-based recipe and their panel would pick a winner.

My all-time favorite and most acclaimed recipe is for Santa Fe Brownies, an unctuous concoction of 12 ounces of chocolate (bittersweet and semi-sweet) and cream cheese. I can’t quite recall how I got hold of this recipe. I believe my mom gave it to me, but she can’t remember where she got it from. It took me all of 2 minutes to copy my recipe onto the site’s registration and to submit it. Needless to say, I was dumbfounded when I received an email, from the marketing company behind the contest, telling me I had won! :0

Shortly after Christmas, I received my prizes: a box of Pink Champagne Truffles and a copy of the 101 Best Loved  Chocolate Recipes Book. The truffles are to die for, and the book is chock-full of scrumptious recipes (chocolate pasta anyone?…). Thank you Hotel Chocolat! It was a very nice after-Christmas present.

I baked Santa Fe Brownies while at my mother’s over the holidays. Our guests at Christmas all got to take a slab home. That recipe is definitely a winner in everyone’s book. Here’s the recipe. It’s a little-time consuming, but well worth the effort.

Santa Fe Brownies
1 cup plus 1 teaspoon butter
6 squares (6 ounces) unsweetened chocolate coarsely chopped
6 squares (6 ounces) semisweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
1 _ cups all-purpose flour
1 _ teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
5 large eggs
1 _ cups firmly packed brown sugar
1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 _ cups walnuts, broken into large pieces

Cream Cheese Mixture
12 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
6 tablespoons butter, softened (no substitutions)
1 _ teaspoons vanilla extract
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3 large eggs

Instructions :
1.Preheat oven to 350 F. Line a 13x 9 inch baking pan with foil.   Melt 1 teaspoon of the
butter and brush the bottom and sides of the pan with it.  Melt the unsweetened
chocolate, semisweet chocolate, and the remaining 1 cup of butter in top of a double
boiler over simmering water.  Set mixture aside and cool slightly.

2.  Stir together the flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl.  Beat the eggs in a
large mixing bowl at medium speed until just blended.  Add the brown sugar, granulated
sugar, and vanilla: beat just until smooth.  Beat in the chocolate mixture, then flour
mixture, at low speed just until combined.  Reserve 2 1/4 cups batter.  Stir the walnuts
into remaining batter in the mixing bowl.  Spread the batter in the prepared pan.

3.  For Cream Cheese Mixture, beat the cream cheese and butter in a clean mixing bowl
at medium speed until smooth.  Gradually beat in the vanilla and sugar until light and
fluffy.  Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition and beat just until
smooth.  Spoon the mixture over the chocolate batter in prepared pan, spreading to
edges to the pan.

4.Stir reserved chocolate batter to soften.  Spoon the batter over the cream cheese
layer.  With a knife, cut through batters in a zigzag pattern to marbleize slightly.  Bake 1
hour 15 minutes , until toothpick inserted in center comes out barely clean.  (If the top
browns too quickly during baking, cover the pan loosely with foil.)  Cool completely in the
pan on a wire rack.  Invert onto a cookie sheet; gently lift off pan and remove foil.  Invert
again, cover tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

5.  With a long, sharp knife, cut brownies into squares, then cut each quarter into 8
squares.  (Can also be cut into slabs and frozen.) Makes 32.

Enjoy!