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

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.

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!

As much as the Potato Bread challenge made my heart sing, this one made my heart sink. Don’t get me wrong. I’m fine with intricate and elaborate instructions, but having to reproduce anything realistically is just not my cup of tea. Mushrooms out of meringue or marzipan? Oy!

Our hostesses this month were none other than Daring Bakers’ founders Lisa and Ivonne. I printed the six-page recipe and read it a few times, visualizing all of its steps. As with other Daring Bakers challenges, I found the recipe more daunting in its written form than in its execution. The genoise took no time to put together, thanks to my mom’s birthday gift of a very nifty Kitchen Aid mixer.

Earlier in the month I caught an episode of Iron Chef America where Chef Tyler Florence tried to make a yule log and ended up with Yule planks when his genoise broke when he rolled it. Well, needless to say I had nightmares about this procedure after I saw this. If this Iron chef couldn’t do it right, how could I?…I stared at my pan for a long time before attempting the roll-over. I finally took a deep breath and just went for it. It worked. Kind of. My log is more oblong than round, but at least it didin’t break into planks. I was stoked.

The mocha buttercream went a long way in camouflaging the unevenness of this log. I had a small slice of each end, and it tasted great. It’s now been frozen and will be flown to Toronto for the holidays. The test will be on Christmas day when it will be served at a small dinner. A picture of the final result will be posted at that time.

Thanks again for a great challenge for the opportunity to stretch my sticky spatula even further…

*******
Update: In the end I did not have thee space in my luggage to bring the log to Toronto. Here’s the final result, created when I returned home after the holidays.

My heart lept with joy when I read this month’s recipe challenge. I can’t think of anything more therapeutic than kneading bread. I knew it was going to be a good day in cooking school when the first task found on the board at the front of the classroom was “Baguette”, or any other type of bread. The smell of fresh yeast and the feel of dough on my fingers was a nice way to get the day underway. It also meant fresh bread with lunch…

This month’s challenge was hosted by Tanna of My Kitchen In Half Cups. The recipe was taken from: Home Baking: The Artful Mix of Flour & Tradition Around the World, by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. The key ingredient to this challenge was potatoes. Mashed, to be exact. Again, I followed the directions, using 12 grams of mashed potatoes – 8 grams were suggested for beginners and I figured I could handle a stickier dough. Ah! Well..sticky it certainly was. I titled my early post on the DB website as: The Blob!

One of my personal goals with this challenge was to learn to work with less flour. I knew I was usually using to much flour when making bread and wanted to get out of that habit. So, with the memory of Chef Tony’s voice still ringing in my ears, blasting us wussy culinary students who whined about sticky dough and fingers, I went easy on the flour and used approximately 7 cups of the 8-1/2 cups top recommended. The results were quite comical. My pastry scraper worked overtime with this recipe. The dough kept sticking to my hands and pulling into long strands when I tried to knead and turn it on the board (It’s alive! It’s alive!). But the results were well worth it: a tender, surprisingly light and slightly chewy bread.

We had to produce a loaf and had a choice between rolls or a foccacia. I chose the rolls. Luckily, my mother was visiting that week and we finished the bread while it was still fresh. It made great toasts and even better French toasts. I’m looking forward to making this recipe again…though perhaps with a bit more flour?…(Sorry, Chef…)

Tender Potato Bread Recipe (Courtesy of Tanna’s site)