Bread&Cake&More

BBA #39: Stollen

2011-12-23T23:31:00.001-05:00

I mostly worked half days this pre-holiday week, using up some of my excess annual leave. This let me tackle the relatively quick stollen during the week instead of waiting for a weekend opportunity. My stollen, like my panettone, has no candied fruit, though I did use some candied orange and lemon peel. (First time I'd ever tried the candied peels, and I won't repeat the experiment--they really are bitter despite being candied, and many times have an unpleasant texture.) My fruit mix was dried tart cherries, chopped dried apricots, and golden raisins. I decided not to add crystallized ginger, though maybe on some other occasion that would be interesting. All that plus another 1/2 cup of mixed fruit went into a plastic container with the brandy and orange extract 4 days before starting the bread. I shook the container regularly to re-distribute the liquid.

Not counting the fruit-soaking, stollen is a one-day bread. The process starts with a yeasty sponge with flour and whole milk, and that sits for an hour until very foamy. The main dough is more flour, a little sugar, cinnamon, salt, then the wet ingredients of butter, the sponge, and an egg. Or half an egg, in my case--I halved the recipe as usual. That dough is mixed, sits for 10 minutes, then the fruit is added. I added very little water to the dough process, maybe a half-ounce, but the fruit was very moist and tipped the balance the other way and I added more than a quarter cup more flour to get a dough that wasn't too sticky to handle. In the process (I machine-knead) the dough got worked enough for the fruits to color the dough.

First rise was very slow--I can't see how I could have killed the yeast, so I attribute it to the heavy load of sweet fruit inhibiting the yeast activity. After 2 hours with only a little bit of puffy area showing, I gave up and formed the loaf. The instructions for folding the stollen were pretty baffling even with several photos to illustrate them, but I made some reasonable attempt at the double fold shown. As a lover of almond paste the option to include marzipan or almond paste instead of sliced almonds was the way to go, though that may have complicated my attempts to follow the shaping method--I was using the tube-form marzipan (Odense), that being what was on hand, so I cut the tube in half lengthwise, and rolled half out to the length of my dough. That got tucked into the first fold along with a little additional soaked fruit. For the second fold, I cut a strip off the remaining marzipan, again rolled it to flatten, and tucked it in. My loaf didn't have the fruit spilling out of the folds, but the thing was more or less shaped like the picture.

The second rise was again slow--I gave it an hour and a half, and saw very little increase in size. Finally with the hour getting late, I went ahead and baked it, and the results seem OK to me. The loaf is a little dense with the various fruits, and the marzipan didn't give me the effect I wanted--the larger piece folded as I shaped the loaf and is a thick C-shaped piece in each slice. What I wanted was for the marzipan to meld a little with the bread so I wouldn't get a separate "marzipan bite" in each slice. Maybe almond paste would be softer and integrate better, maybe a superior type of marzipan would, or maybe this just isn't the nature of the beast. If I repeat the stollen, I think I'll go with sliced almonds. <g> Actually, I'll probably go back to the panettone--I liked it better than what I got with the stollen recipe.

BBA #38: Potato, Cheddar, and Chive Torpedo

2011-12-23T22:34:00.001-05:00

My other BBA bread from last weekend was the Potato, Cheddar, and Chive Torpedo from the Grace Note chapter at the back of the book, a recipe from Tim Decker,one of Reinhart's bread apprentices. The potato part of the name is from mashed potatoes and water from cooking the potatos in the dough, making it a very soft, tender bread. The chives also go in the dough, but the cheddar is sliced thinly and rolled up in the dough to get a spiral, and the loaf is slashed so that the cheese can also bubble out during baking.

A barm is used but there's added yeast as well, making the barm a flavoring agent. The most confusing part of the recipe was another of those "dough should be tacky but not sticky" instructions for the kneading process, this time saying "very tacky". I maintain that tacky means sticky in this context, so finding the line for these breads is tough. The other note on the recipe is that I don't see how the weight and volume measures for the chives can both be correct--for my half recipe I should have used 1/2 ounce or 2 tablespoons of chives per the directions. I started with the weight and realized I'd have well over 1/4 cup of chives if I included all I'd weighed out. I ended up putting in about 3 tablespoons or so.

The dough rose enthusiastically on both rises--the barm plus the yeast gave it plenty of lift. I nearly burned the loaf--it got to nearly black on the first interval of the hearth baking, though the internal temp was still low. I covered it with foil to keep it from further darkening, and the finished bread was just very dark brown.

Taste results: it's a bread with that ultra soft potato-bread texture, not a favorite of mine. It had nice crumb, and a very crisp crust from the hearth baking--almost too much with the very soft interior.

BBA #37: Swedish Rye (Limpa)

2011-12-21T21:35:00.002-05:00

Last weekend was my first back from my vacation (I came home the previous Sunday night, so no weekend at home), and I spent it in my classic nesting activity: cooking. Three different breads, two soups, and other stuff. Oh, and prep for the stollen I plan to bake this week. First bread up, after the weekly challah, was this last rye bread from The Bread Baker's Apprentice, the aniseed-, fennel seed, orange-, and cardamon-flavored Swedish rye. When a search of my many herb and spice bottles failed to find aniseed, I substituted star anise--it was difficult to get it ground with my old blade coffee grinder, but any larger fibrous bits weren't noticeable in the finished bread.

I made my usual half recipe, and went with a loaf pan instead of a free-standing loaf. The bread starts out with a sponge, and an odd-looking one--the flavorings are brought to a boil with molasses and water, that gets cooled, then added to a barm (rye, in my case) and additional rye flour. The molasses/spice mixture looked evil (dark brown liquid with...stuff floating in it) but smelled great. The sponge sits out for 4 hours or until foamy, then is refrigerated overnight to build flavor. The next day the rye sponge gets additions of bread flour, yeast, salt, brown sugar, and a little melted shortening to complete the dough.

The dough was slow to rise for both first and second rises, even when I gave up on "room temperature" and moved it to the warming drawer on 'proof'. I gave up on the second rise after 2-1/2 hours when it had crested the pan at 1/2 inch (not the called-for 1 inch). As a result, the loaf was a little short.

Tasting report: a lovely light rye, not overwhelmed by the spices but nicely flavored by them. Texture was great, with a nice 'chew' and even holes. Should I want to bake rye bread, this recipe will be a top candidate.

Turkey Chowder

2011-12-18T18:39:00.001-05:00

I thought for sure I had posted this recipe somewhere, but haven't turned it up searching here, my LJ (where food posts went pre-Blogspot), or various email list archives. Time to fix that.

This soup was a Thanksgiving staple of my mother's--she was a soup-maker par excellence, usually without recipes, and I don't know if she evolved this one on her own or if it started with a clipping way back when. By the time I remember her making it there was no recipe around. I (being a recipe-reliant type even when doing my own variations) worked out this set of proportions that make a reasonable facsimile of Mother's turkey chowder.

Turkey Chowder

1-2 T. olive oil or butter or turkey fat skimmed from the stock*
2 small onions, chopped
2 stalks of celery, trimmed and chopped
1 c. raw rice (Mother used white, brown is fine but adjust the cooking time)
2 qts. hot turkey stock*
2-3 cups 2% or skim milk
1 cup chopped turkey meat (optional)
1-1/2 tsp salt or to taste
8-10 grinds of pepper or to taste

Saute onions and celery in the oil until onions are translucent. Add the raw rice and stir to coat with the oil. Add the hot turkey broth, bring to a boil, then cover and reduce the heat to a simmer. Simmer about 20 minutes or until the rice is tender. Add milk and chopped turkey, if using, and season to taste. Bring back to serving temperature over low heat.

Notes: I generally have skim milk on hand, and like the consistency I get with about 3 cups of milk. If I have whole or 2%, I use less milk--I don't like this as a very rich soup. If you like a richer soup, go for the whole milk and more of it.
I like my turkey chowder peppery, so that 8-10 grinds is just a starting point.

*Turkey stock

The way the Thanksgiving ritual went, at least in years featuring roast turkey, was that my father dissected the bird in the kitchen with a serving platter on one side to receive the sliced meat, and a crockpot on the other where all the bones, skin, fat, and other scraps, including any aromatics from the turkey roasting, went. When the turkey was completely dissembled, generally the crockpot was full. Mother would add water almost to the top, turn it on, and let it cook overnight. (Wonderful smell in the house the next morning...) Then the stock was drained from the skin and bones (which was all discarded--any meat in there would be tasteless after 14+ hours of cooking) and strained into a container to go into the fridge to cool. That afternoon or the next day the stock would have solidified, and the fat layer on top, also solidified, could be easily removed to leave an almost completely fat-free and very flavorful stock. Smoked turkey? Even better.

BBA #36: Sunflower Seed Rye (Sourdough)

2011-11-20T20:58:00.001-05:00

The Tuscan bread was actually last weekend's project, before I left for Denver last Sunday. This weekend I backed up to the last of the sourdough breads, the Sunflower-Seed Rye. This one uses a soaker and a firm starter, which I made from my rye starter. However, I forgot to move the starter to the fridge overnight--perhaps that gives a little more sourdough tang to the bread, but as it's a yeast-assisted recipe I suspect the sourdough will be fairly muted.

Not much to say about the process on this one: it didn't need much additional water and kneaded easily in the KitchenAid. I added maybe half again the called for sunflower seeds for extra crunch, and to use them up from the freezer. I didn't use a room-temperature rise, instead using the proof setting on my warming drawer to move things along. The loaf is shaped as a couronne or crown by making a boule, then working a hole in the middle to get a doughnut shape, then pressing down on that with a dowel (chopstick for me) in 4 places to get a very un-crown-like flattened circle-square, um, thing. Supposedly the dusting of flour over the dowel traces will prevent them from closing up during the rise, but just as when I tried this shape on the Pain de Campagne, the grooves mostly disappear. I tried a shallow slash down each of them before baking this time, which perhaps helped retain the shape a little, though nothing like the picture in BBA.

The loaf got the hearth-baking technique with the oven temp dropped after the spritzing, then again after 10 minutes and the loaf rotation. Rather like my loaf of Tuscan bread, this loaf had more breadth than height, and was done after 10 minutes at the last temperature setting instead of 15. Results: nice texture, good chewy crust, and a mild rye/sourdough flavor.

BBA #35: Tuscan Bread

2011-11-20T17:37:00.005-05:00

I jumped ahead to the Tuscan Bread, avoiding two rye breads in a row and also skipping the stollen, better suited for Christmas. The Tuscan bread is distinguished by being salt-free, and having tasted it all I can say is "why?". Reinhart calls it "dull and flat tasting", and I agree. Trying to eat it with intensely flavored things just couldn't overcome the basic blah in this bread.

Another distinction of the Tuscan brea is that it starts with a flour and water paste, made by pouring boiling water over some of the flour the night before baking the bread. I was expecting a thinner mixture than I got--it was really stiff. However, from that point it was much like working with a soaker or a barm: the mix goes in with flour, a little olive oil, yeast, and water. Make a dough, knead it (by machine for me), let it rise, make the loaf, rise again, and bake using the hearth-baking setup.

My loaf was rather flat (in shape as well as taste), which I'll attribute to still not doing well in the "create a taut skin when shaping the loaf" task, but the resulting texture was fine. It's just that without salt, the bread is not worth eating. IMHO.

BBA #34: Sourdough Pumpernickel Bread

2011-11-09T22:49:00.003-05:00

Next up in the BBA Challenge list is another sourdough rye--the third with one more to come (and one more non-sourdough rye as well). As the group 2011 Challenge seems to have fallen apart, I may re-arrange these last breads to an order more to my liking, avoiding 2 rye breads in a row, for example, and tackling the stollen over Christmas week. It's looking like I won't quite finish within 2011, but I do hope to have baked my way through the BBA by early 2012. I have 10 breads to go counting this one and 7 weeks in the year, but in there are the holidays, a business trip, and my annual Disney vacation week+ that eliminates 2 weekends of baking time. Yep, it'll be 2012 before I'm done, for sure.

The sourdough pumpernickel is an instant-yeast-assisted bread, using the sourdough starter for flavor. There's an option for pure sourdough, but I went for the faster and more reliable combination method. The bread is also not a 100% rye, using 2:1 bread flour to pumpernickel plus the flour in the starter, which in my case is probably mostly rye. The procedure is the familiar-by-now multi-day procedure: refresh the starter one day, make a rye starter with that, pumpernickel flour, and water and let it work for several hours before refrigerating it, then make the dough and bake the next day. For the dough, it's a mixture of the starter, bread flour, brown sugar, coloring to get the dark pumpernickel color--I had liquid caramel coloring, though coffee or cocoa powder are options, salt, instant yeast, fresh bread crumbs, oil, and water. All that is mixed quickly to not turn the rye flour gummy, then it rises for 2 hours. I decided to bake this one in a bread pan instead of using the hearth baking method--Reinhart gives directions for both.

The first rise went fine, if a little slow--I moved the dough into my warming drawer on "Proof" after an hour and a half and very liitle rise. (I've been adhering to Reinhart's instructions for long, slow, room temp rises most of the time.) I shaped the loaf and put it in a pan for the second rise, supposedly for 90 minutes or so. This time it went straight to the proofing drawer, but even after 2 hours the dough had barely crested the loaf pan. I went ahead and baked it after another 30 minutes, hoping for some oven spring, but alas, there was none and the loaf is a little flat.

Texture-wise, the bread is fine, with a nice crumb. It's not dense, rather belying what I think pumpernickel should be, but consider this a grocery store pumpernickel and it's perfectly OK: a little rye flavor, light textured, the right dark color (well, I see pumpernickels a lot darker, but this is in the range), but not a dense or chewy loaf. I ate one piece as a taster, part solo and part with herbs and oil, and had a little more as a wrapper for my Italian sausage at dinner. Having had that much, I don't think this bread warrants any more calories spent on it, so I'll see if the folks next door will take the rest of the loaf.

BBA #33: Poilâne-Style Miche

2011-10-16T22:10:00.003-04:00

Next up in the BBA Challenge list was another entry in the sourdough section, the Poilâne-Style Miche. This bread is in the cover photo--a huge round of very dark-brown bread. I did my usual half-recipe, so my round loaf was merely large, not huge. After seeing the size of my loaf, I don't think my baking stone could handle the full-sized miche. To deconstruct the recipe title: Poilâne is Lionel Poilâne, a famed French baker. Miche, according to wikipedia, is the word for a large round loaf. The recipe uses a sourdough starter and long fermentation times to build flavor in the bread, and calls for a sifted medium-grind whole-wheat flour to replicate Poilâne's flour. I went with the suggested substitution of half whole-wheat, half bread flour.

The mixing of the miche was much like other sourdoughs: it started with making a firm starter the night before using a refreshed barm, and letting that rise for 6 hours. The day of, the starter came out of the fridge to warm up, then was mixed with flour, salt, and water to make the dough. Reinhart warns that this bread is too large for machine mixing, but my half recipe worked well in the KitchenAid. I added the maximum amount of water (11 ounces), then added almost another ounce during the kneading--that was almost too much, and my dough was probably beyond 'tacky' to 'sticky'. With generous coatings of Pam, I was able to keep it from sticking too much.

The first rise was in a plastic dough bucket, and I let it go for a full 4 hours. Then I shaped the dough into a boule, trying hard to get a good taut skin without degassing the dough more than necessary. The boule then went into a mixing bowl (a rather shallow one) lined with a heavy pastry cloth, and rose another 2-1/2 hours. I got the risen loaf turned out onto my peel without too much difficulty, but found my pastry cloth had stuck some despite the spray of Pam and a dusting of flour--I got a few little folds in the top of the loaf while removing the cloth. Then it was on to the slashing of the loaf, where again my lame snagged and produced an irregular cut, then I slid the loaf onto my baking stone, poured the 2 cups of hot water into my steam pan, and closed the oven. Unlike other hearth loafs, this one doesn't call for spraying water on the sides of the oven in the first few minutes, so the loaf bakes undisturbed until it is rotated for an even baking.

I should haver reduced the first oven period from the 25 minutes for the full-sized miche, as mine was quite dark when I rotated the loaf and turned the oven down. I covered the loaf with foil and gave it another 10 minutes (the full loaf goes for 30-40), and the internal temperature was at 203.

The bread got sliced while still a little warm (both nieces wanted some for dinner), but wasn't gummy. It has a nice even and chewy texture, maybe a little dense, and a good crust. I had some with herbs and oil, and a little more with butter, both of which complemented it well. The bread is supposed to keep well, too, so I look forward to trying it on day 2 or 3.

BBA #32: 100% Sourdough Rye Bread

2011-10-09T23:06:00.001-04:00

And I'm up to date on the bread blogging--I baked this bread this weekend. The seven weeks between baking the NY Deli Rye and this one allowed for recovery from Too Much Bread and Too Much Sourdough Baking (I love sourdough, but it does create more hassles in the bread-baking process), and for ordering white rye and pumpernickel flours from King Arthur to use for BBA challenge breads coming up. Other baking occurred (to be blogged later) and there were two business trips to Denver in there, too, for other distractions. Now the weather has gotten cooler, I've got a gap in my work and personal travel, and bread baking has picked up.

I refreshed my rye starter early in the week, then made the firm starter for my usual half recipe of bread on Friday morning. It took 5-6 hours to double, then I moved it into the fridge for an overnight stay. Friday evening I mixed up the soaker of pumpernickel flour and water, and left that out overnight.

Saturday morning started the real bread making. The firm starter came out of the fridge and warmed up, then I mixed in the soaker and the rest of the ingredients, including fennel seeds as a switch from the usual caraway. I was trying to mix and knead it in the KitchenAid, but sort of messed that up--I didn't add much of the water at first, had the dough go to a pretty firm ball on the dough hook instead of Reinhart's "very tacky ball", then tried to add more water. That never works well (much easier to add more flour than more water after the dough has started to come together), so I ended up mixing more than I wanted then having to hand-knead anyway. In the end I didn't have as hydrated a dough as I wanted.

It rose well, doubling in 4 hours. I then made my second error in the shaping--while trying to form a batard without degassing the dough, I didn't get a good skin on the dough. When it rose, the loaf had lots of open holes against the covering plastic wrap. I decided to try to fix this and turned over the mostly risen loaf, brushed off as much of the flour-and-semolina dusting as I could, then let it rise a while longer. That got a better surface on my loaf (though it did crack and open up a little in that last rise), but I lost some height on the final bread in the process. Baking went smoothly using the hearth baking setup, and the somewhat flat loaf was browned and at 200°+ degrees in 20 minutes.

The crumb was denser than I'd hoped given how well the dough rose initially, but it had a nice flavor with the fennel seeds and the rye flour. We ate most of the loaf with the now standard herbs-and-oil dip purported to be the blend used by Carrabba's Restaurants, despite competition from a whole-wheat-and-dried-cherry challah still warm from the oven. I do have to attribute part of the gobbling of the rye bread to the herbs and oil, and another part to older niece breaking her Yom Kippur fast in serious carb-loading mode. I think the bread goes in the "good, but won't try it again" pile.

BBA #31: New York Deli Rye

2011-10-09T22:25:00.001-04:00

Catchup, catchup, baked this bread on August 20. It's the second bread in the sourdough section, a New York Deli Rye, or onion rye. A hefty quantity of sauteed onions go into the rye sponge starter to give the finished bread a definite oniony character.

I made a rye starter from my old sourdough starter, just refreshing it with rye flour earlier in the week before baking. It was therefore about a 50/50 rye/white starter for this one--if I keep it around and keep feeding it rye flour only, the wheat component will keep shrinking. I used a generic organic rye flour, as I couldn't find white rye flour locally.

The bread is a blend of rye and wheat flour, with a little brown sugar, some oil, buttermilk, and the usual salt and water. As usual I made a half recipe to get one 1-pound loaf, and did bake it in a loaf pan instead of as a batard. I left out the caraway seeds, as I think someone next door dislikes them.

Memory has faded on this one, but from the photos it rose well (despite being a sourdough bread with no extra yeast), and I seem to recall it had a nice flavor and did well as a sandwich loaf. Should I ever go back to fixing sandwich lunches, this would be a good bread for them.

BBA #30: Basic Sourdough Bread with Asiago and Walnuts

2011-10-09T22:07:00.001-04:00

Still catching up--this one was baked August 14. It's the first bread up in the sourdough section. I skimmed over the "make your own sourdough starter" section, choosing instead to use my years-old sourdough starter, originally from King Arthur Flour but by now probably all local yeasts. That starter, like the one Reinhart develops, is made of equal weights of flour and water, which works out to about double the volume of flour to water. Weighing is easiest!

I made the firm starter the first day, a mix of the refreshed starter and more flour and water--but less water, to end up with a kneadable dough. The firm starter took perhaps 6 hours to double, slower than Reinhart's base estimate of 4 hours. After an overnight refrigeration, the final dough was made from it plus more flour and water, plus salt. I got it a touch too wet, maybe, and had to dust the counter with flour while moving it to my rising container. I also went with Reinhart's suggestion to try some variations, and added walnuts to get the lovely purplish color to the bread, and a dry asiago cheese in about 1/4" dice, spread on the dough and rolled in. I put in about 1.5 oz walnuts and 2.5 oz. cheese to my half-recipe of bread--about 10 oz. of flour so that's the 40% of the final flour weight in addtions that he recommends.

The dough tose slowly, so I eventually put it in the warm garage to speed up (August, Atlanta...the garage was probably 85 degrees) and it had almost doubled in maybe 5 hours. I decided to shape it as a batard. I'm still working on shaping-without-deflating: I didn't deflate my dough, but as my loaf ended up pretty flat but not dense, I think I didn't manage to get enough surface tension during the shaping.

I baked it using the hearth baking method on a stone with steam in the first few minutes, yanking the parchment out from under the loaf when I rotated the bread after 10 minutes. Results: very tasty bread. It had a nice sourdough flavor. The asiago cheese was crusty on top and crunched nicely with the good bread crust, and formed little pockets of melted cheese inside the loaf. The walnuts did give a lovely purplish cast to the bread, and added another crunchy element.

It's a keeper. There are lots of other interesting variations listed, but I'll be coming back to this one, I'm sure.

BBA #29: Pugliese

2011-10-09T19:20:00.001-04:00

A pugliese, Reinhart says, is a rustic bread similar to ciabatta but baked in rounds instead of slipper shapes, and using durum flour. It should be a very wet dough when baking with U.S. flours, to get the characteristic large open holes. I couldn't find any variety of durum flour (besides the coarser-grained semolina), so for me this bread was another chance to practice handling very wet dough. I'm still doing catch-up blogging: I baked the pugliese July 31.

The pugliese starts with a biga--flour, water, and yeast mixed to a firm dough, let rise, then refrigerated for at least overnight. Come to think of it, so did the potato rosemary bread, and what I did was make a full recipe of biga, then split it to make half recipes of that one and this. I also used leftover mashed potato from the potato-rosemary bread, learning from that loaf to press the potato through a sieve to get out the lumps.
Don't remember much of this one, except that I think I deflated it when trying to slash the loaf despite my new and therefore supposedly sharp lame. I must be lacking in the proper technique. The bread had a nice flavor (we ate most of it dipped in olive oil and herbs), but it was flat and didn't have the larger holes shown in the book. Technique again--if I made high-hydration breads every week for a while, I might get this down.

BBA #28: Potato Rosemary Bread

2011-10-09T14:21:00.003-04:00

Another bread with few notes, but the iPhoto pictures have survived to tell me I baked it on July 24. It's a white bread with added mashed potatoes to make the dough more tender, flavored with chopped rosemary and roasted garlic. I did leave a note to run the cooked potato through a ricer or a sieve as I had some small lumps in the dough that didn't bake out--my usual mashed potatoes are on the rustic side. Those lumps just show the mashed potatoes are not from a box, right?

I used a jarred chopped roasted garlic, I think, certainly not as flavorful as if I'd roasted some fresh. The rosemary was fresh from my abundant rosemary bush--the stuff grows like a weed in my herb garden. Overall, the bread didn't make much of an impression, so that may be the judgement there. I'd hoped for a more open, "holey" texture, but only had a few larger holes.

BBA #27: Portuguese Sweet Bread

2011-10-09T14:21:00.001-04:00

I've been away...in a couple of senses. I'm in the travel-heavy part of my work year, so had fallen behind on posting and somewhat on baking. Then...my computer drive failed. Or maybe it was a problem with the system software, but no matter what I had a business trip, came back and almost immediately had the computer failure, took it off to the shop for a new drive (bless you, AppleCare), and left on another trip before the repair was done. Once the computer was back up and the drive restored from Time Machine, I discovered that iPhoto had longer-standing problems than the drive failure, and I have lost the originals of all of my photos back to May or earlier. On some of those I still have the thumbnail version iPhoto produces, on others I just had an album thumbnail which I never could dig out of the iPhoto file structure that was visible in the damaged iPhoto library--just enough to remind me that I had various sets of photos that are now lost. Since all that there have been 2 more business trips, further delaying blogging and baking.

Moral: save and backup digital photos multiple ways. They cannot be replaced. On a few of these sets I made Flickr uploads, just not enough of 'em.

So anyway, last bread post was July 4. I baked the Portuguese Sweet Bread July 16, which tells you how behind I am between computer messes and not-baking due to travel. And since I didn't blog these as I baked them and didn't always make notes, things may be....brief, this one in particular. I have very little memory of this bread, but as I'm not fond of Hawaiian/Portuguese sweet bread that's perhaps not completely due to the several months' lag in the writeup. It's an egg bread with enough sugar to make it taste sweet but not to put it in the sweet-roll category, and is flavored with lemon, orange, and vanilla extracts. My photos (uploaded before the computer crash and iPhoto losses) show that I made a single loaf, braided and baked in a loaf pan instead of the suggested boule. It had a nice even crumb, but with the sweetness and flavorings, not much got eaten as a loaf bread. The remainder did make very nice French toast, though.

BBA #13a: Poolish Focaccia, Pizza-Style

2011-07-04T22:01:00.001-04:00

The leftover poolish from the poolish baguettes did end up in focaccia, pizza-style. I had enough poolish for a half-recipe of focaccia, which made 2 nice thick-crust (focaccia, after all) pizzas of about 9" diameter. The dough was mixed up yesterday (it took about 3 tablespoons of added flour to get the dough to clean the bowl), then came the stretch-and-fold, rise, stretch-and-fold bits before I split my dough in two, shaped the pieces into rounds, and put them in the fridge.

Today the rounds came out of the fridge onto the counter, and got pulled into circles for pizza crusts. The directions say to do this with your fingertips, not your palm, and that's what I did, though I must say the result still looked pretty deflated. I spread a generaous tablespoon of herb oil (basil, rosemary, marjoram, thyme, and parsley, all from the garden) on top, then added walnuts and kalamata olives to one and jarred minced roasted garlic to both as "pre-proof" toppings. Let me interject that the garlic was a poor choice as pre-proof, as the little pieces stayed on the surface and burned in the oven. Better go for whole rasted cloves of garlic if you want to add 'em up front. After a couple of hours of rising I added feta with sundried tomatoes and basil to the walnut/olive pizza, and torn prosciutto to the other. They baked on parchment on a stone at 550 degrees, and were done in about 12 minutes. The prosciutto pizza got removed at the 6 minute mark and had a mix of grated asiago and parmesan added to it. I overdid the cheese a little, making it a little weighted down plus definitely beyond the "I don't like cheese" younger niece's tolerance level--but very much to the taste of the cheese-loving older niece. (Nephew is away at summer camp.) YOunger niece made do with the other pizza, after picking off all the identifiable chunks of feta.

Good pizza, or rather a thin focaccia, and it had better texture than my first round of focaccia. Lots more open holes, good and chewy, etc. For true pizza I like a thin crust, generally, but as a pizza-alternative, this focaccia with extra toppings made a very nice meal.

A Tale of Two (or Three) Strawberry Cakes

2011-07-04T21:06:00.001-04:00

For a number of years I made a strawberry cake collected off a flour ad--Martha White, according to my note, back when they were trying to market packages of 2 cups of flour (that being the most common amount needed for recipes, at least according to their market research). The recipe is an oil cake and calls for strawberry Jello and a bag of frozen strawberries, and came out lovely and moist and, pink. I used to think, very pink, until last week. <g>

So, the birthday was coming up, and I had flashbacks to that strawberry cake, but wanted something different. I started out thinking "get away from the Jello" but somehow ended up with an even more artificial look: a strawberry cake I found on Lottie+Doof. It used strawberry jam in the batter, added enough red food coloring to be Red Velvet Cake, then made a cream cheese frosting with more red food coloring and artificial strawberry flavoring. I really don't know why this ended up intriguing me enough to tackle it for my birthday cake, but both the violent color and a desire to use up strawberry jam from my fridge played into it.

My version of the cake was just as on Lottie+Doof, but the frosting called for cups of powdered sugar. I've gone off on that type of frosting, and used Rose's Dreamy Creamy White Chocolate Frosting instead, which is cream cheese, a little butter, a touch of sour cream, and melted white chocolate. I had very high cacao white chocolate from Trader Joe's, and used that. I couldn't find artificial strawberry flavoring and used natural. <g> And red food coloring. Lots of it.

Results: it's a good cake, moist like most oil cakes, but doesn't have much strawberry flavor. Same for the frosting, which of course I experimented with--could be both less punch from the natural flavoring, plus the white chocolate asserting itself in competition. The color was....striking, but all in all this one won't be repeated.

I still had a strawberry cake fixation, though, and so turned to Smitten Kitchen's Strawberry Summer Cake. It's a simple butter cake batter that is poured into a pie or cake pan (I used a 9" cake pan: a pie plate would have been much easier to serve from), then the top is covered with halved strawberries, sprinkled with sugar, and baked. Simple, lots of strawberry flavor....decidedly not Pink. I did cut back the sugar to 7/8 cup in the batter as Deb mentioned. Most of my strawberries sank, unlike Deb's, and I'm wondering if that's another advantage to the pie plate over the cake pan. It can't be called a pretty cake, but I served it with whipped cream with a little strawberry puree mixed in, and it was very good.

I may still pull out the "Simple Strawberry Cake" with Jello recipe and give it another try--I don't recall it being artificial-tasting, and it was certainly moist and good. Be interesting to see how it seems after the RHC bake-through and other incidents in the evolution of my tastebuds.

Lots-of-Ways Banana Cake

2011-07-03T12:16:00.001-04:00

(Made this a week or so ago and found the half-done blog post in my editing program...)

Bananas browning in the fridge (after aging on the counter first)...must be time to bake. I don't have a standard banana bread recipe and need to dig through my and my mother's recipe files in search of one, so for this occasion I went browsing in the cookbook collection. I ended up with Lots-of-Ways Banana Cake from Dorie Greenspan's Baking From My Home to Yours, a banana cake with options for the liquid and the mix-ins. Mine ended up with dark rum, sour cream, and coconut, and I made a half recipe to get a 9" round snacking cake--no frosting or other embellishments. In fact, baked in a loaf pan, this could easily be "banana bread".

It's good, nice texture, moist, banana flavor present but not overwhelming. The coconut doesn't lend much flavor, and the shreds (I used the grocery standard Baker's Sweetened Flakes this time) are something of an aggravation as they pull when you try to slice the cake with a less-than-sharp knife. That little problem would be greatly improved by pre-toasting the coconut as the recipe suggests, but which I forgot to do. This isn't a cake where I want dried fruit, but I might try adding toasted pecans next time.

BBA #26: Poolish Baguettes

2011-07-03T12:12:00.001-04:00

The poolish baguettes are another of the several recipes for "French bread" variations, this one made with a poolish (another variation on a mix of flour, water, and yeast made ahead, to add flavor) and part whole wheat flour. I made all of the poolish amount, then noticed how little of it was needed for the baguette recipe. What to do? The only other thing in the book calling for a poolish is a variation on foccacia--perhaps I'll try a half recipe of it this weekend, as pizza. The tail end of the poolish is (hopefully) fermenting on the counter to become sourdough pancakes.

I debated making a half recipe of the baguettes. I probably should have not only for cutting down on the amount of carbs in the house, but also because my baking stone is small for three baguettes which have to be somewhat fat to fit on the short stone. But I went ahead with the full recipe and managed in one baking, though the longest baguette hung off the edge (but surprisingly didn't burn) .

Another interesting direction in this recipe is to sift the whole-wheat flour through a fine sieve to reduce the amount of bran. I got a good bit of bran from my whole-wheat flour (the bran went into the prospective pancake batter). This is about a half-whole-wheat recipe, all to the good for my family, as we tend to eat more whole wheat and multigrain than white breads.

That done, the recipe proceeded more or less as usual, mixing flour, salt, yeast, water and the poolish, and machine kneading. I added the full 10 ounces of water then a little more to get an almost-sticky dough as specified. The dough rose rapidly--the first "2-hour rise" took about an hour and a half, the second an hour and 15 minutes.

I cut the dough into thirds and proceeded to shaping. I'm still working on the baguette shaping technique--the video Chris found helped, though I only folded mine twice and didn't elongate the loaves much due to the short baking stone issue. The loaves baked up very prettily. They got a little curved in the rush to slide them onto the hot stone from awkward angles as the oven rack doesn't pull very far out of the oven, my peel is too short for baguettes, and of course I wanted to minimize the heat loss from the open oven. 'Sall right, the shape didn't hurt the taste.

What about that taste? Trust is more chewy than crackly--I think I'd like it crisper, and don't know if that is inherent to this recipe or if it is more an issue with the baking technique. Partly both, I suspect. The bread has a nice texture, but not many large holes, and a good flavor. The wholewheat definitely improves things in my book flavor-wise. We ate it with herbs and olive oil, making a great accompaniment to the dinner of grilled shrimp and sausages my sister-in-law fixed.

BBA #25: Pizza Napoletano

2011-06-29T22:40:00.002-04:00

The BBA Challenge 2011 arrived at the "real" pizza recipe last week, labeled Pizza Napoletano. I'd also taken the suggestion earlier and made pizza from part of my pain à l'ancienne dough, and liked that version a lot--very chewy, flavorful crust. The pizza napoletano was not as good to my tastes, but part of that might be that I played with the recipe a bit.

I made a half recipe, aiming for 3 9-12" pizzas, and decided to replace half the flour with whole-wheat and used bread flour (the options were bread or unbleached AP) for the rest. I put one-third of the dough in the fridge for its overnight (well, a couple of days) rest, and froze the rest. Then it occurred to me that sister-in-law, younger niece, and the nephew would be back from their visit to grandparents in Arizona and could share the pizza, so the other two-thirds came back out of the freezer and went in the fridge as well.

Day of pizza making, the dough came out to the counter to warm up and rise, then was easy to stretch into pizza rounds. Almost too easy--my crusts got a little too thin in places in the middle and I had a cracker crust there. (Which was quite good, really, as it didn't quite burn and thus was toasty cheese and toppings on a crispbread.)

Toppings were: tomato sauce, "Italian shredded cheese mix" (mozzarella, asiago, parmesan, provolone, and romano), and pepperoni
tomato sauce, caramelized onions, mushrooms, cheese mix, pepperoni on about a quarter of it
olive oil, caramelized onions, mushrooms, cheese mix, prosciutto

The pepperoni pizza suffered a serious accident after gluing itself to the pizza peel, requiring scraper-surgery to remove it, and ended up rather misshapen and uneven, alas. I have learned to be more generous with the semolina, or to just play it safe and use parchment paper...

There were no complaints from the niece and nephew on the crust (nephew got some bits of mushroom on one piece, requiring careful removal before the rest could be eaten), but no great kudos either. We all like the whole-wheat flavor, so I'm thinking I may try the pain à l'ancienne with half whole-wheat next time I'm making pizza and have the lead time to do that recipe.

BBA #24: Panettone

2011-06-20T00:57:00.003-04:00

Wrong season and all that, but I like fruit-in-bread (as the usual weekly whole-wheat challah with dried cherries) and I really want to get caught up with the BBA Challenge, so I baked panettone this weekend despite the high 90's temperatures of a summer day in Georgia. Regardless of the season I don't do candied cherries any more, so I went with the base golden raisins, then added a few dried apricots, a dried peach, and dried tart cherries to my fruit mix, doused it in dark rum with lemon extract and Fiori di Sicilia, and let that sit overnight.

I again wanted a half recipe, and this time I worked with the amounts written on a sticky note covering the recipe amounts to try to forestall the problems that plagued my Pane Siciliano. This panettone recipe calls for a wild-yeast sponge starting with a barm, and as I did the last time we used barm, I grabbed for my standard sourdough starter, refreshed it one day, then made the sponge with barm/starter, milk, and unbleached flour the next. That sat out to bubble then got refrigerated overnight.

All the preparatory mixes made and aged as needed, it was on to the actual bread today. Flour, salt, yeast, and sugar got blended with the sponge, and an egg and a yolk. For my half recipe, I just took one egg and removed some white until I had the correct weight of egg+yolk. All that got mixed to form a "supple ball". It took almost no water after that--the directions were less than clear, anyway, as when the ingredients form into a supple ball, I for one would feel that was "a dough". Apparently not, so I added a tablespoon or so of water to get a dough that machine-kneaded with just the bottom of the dough sticking to the bowl, a criterion given for some earlier breads. The dough then rests for 20 minutes, then the butter and the dried fruit plumped in rum are added, and the dough is ready for kneading.

I stuck with my KitchenAid kneading, just using a lower speed to keep from beating up the dried fruit. I was rather surprised when the dough really did pass the windowpane test at the end of the kneading period, though I held the dough out from the dough hook to do the test because it was quite tacky. The dough is sweet and rich and so is slow to rise--it did take two hours for each rise. I found small baking papers and made 8 small panettones (4 ounces of dough each) with my half recipe.

My little breads baked in about 30 minutes. I missed the note about spraying the baking papers with oil, and so the bottoms seem to leave a thin layer in the paper. The texture is even and smooth, and it's a soft bread--not as rich as the brioche, but definitely a bread for special occasions.

BBA #23: Pane Siciliano

2011-06-20T00:35:00.000-04:00

Let's just say I made a mess of the pane siciliano. In trying to halve the recipe (and doing three or four other things at the same time), I halved everything but the water, and only noticed this when I had added almost all of the amount and had thick pancake batter instead of dough. Starting over would have meant a new pâte fermentée and a delay of a couple of days, so I added more flour and semolina, threw in a little more salt and yeast, and hoped for the best.

I decided I had enough dough for 2 loaves, and would bake them separately as I had them on separate pans. Then my baking distractions continued and I failed to turn down the oven temperature from 500 to 450 after the steam spritzing for the first loaf. It was very dark brown--not a burned taste, but well beyond where you want your bread to be. I managed the right temperatures for the second loaf but it was still a little too brown when I first checked it and then covered it.

Taste results? It's not really fair to say, I think. My crust was certainly not really crackly, and the texture didn't have as many open holes as I wanted. I didn't get any character from the semolina--maybe overwhelmed by my unmeasured additions of flour. I'd say I'd try the pane siciliano again someday, but I think there are breads I like better out there.

BBA #22: Pain de Campagne

2011-06-20T00:33:00.001-04:00

Catch-up time again--I'm now on schedule for the BBA Challenge baking, and if I get three blog posts done I'll be completely caught up. On the Challenge, that is...let's not discuss other aspects of my world that are behind schedule or just out of control.

Next up after the pain à l’ancienne was pain de campagne, "country bread". It is made with a light sourdough starter (pâte fermentée), and has a little whole-wheat flour in addition to the unbleached bread flour. I did a half recipe of the pain de campagne, but looking ahead I made a full recipe of pâte fermentée and froze half for the pane siciliano coming up. Thanks to a weekend out of town, the pâte fermentée for the country bread spent a couple of extra days in the fridge and acquired a little extra sourdough character before I made the bread.

No issues with making the dough or kneading it (by machine, as always). The dough rose very quickly, and I just shaped the dough when it had doubled. Short on time, I didn't follow the instructions to degas it and let it rise again if it doubled in under two hours, I moved on to the shaping. This dough is supposed to lend itself to a variety of shapes. I divided my dough in half and started with one auvergnat (a cap) and a fendu (split bread), then converted the fendu to a couronne (crown) on second thought. My cap manage to remain rather cap-like after rising with it's sesame-seeded topknot, but my crown ended up as a rather featureless oversized doughnut shape.

The recipe calls for hearth baking with the bread directly on the baking stone. However, I grabbed polenta instead of cornmeal or semolina to dust my parchment paper, which was too gritty and I then couldn't get loaves off the paper they proofed on. Oh, well, so the bread baked on paper. I did manage a good blast of steam, and the resulting loaf was nicely crusty.

Tasting results: Lovely browned crackly crust and a very chewy texture like the pain à l’ancienne. Without side-by-side comparison the only distinct difference I get is the flavor from the small amount of whole-wheat flour, and perhaps a little from the long pre-ferment. Not really strong, though. Still and all, a very nice bread.

BBA #21: Pain à l’Ancienne

2011-06-07T08:13:00.001-04:00

We move out of a stretch of sandwich breads and back to the chewy, crusty, open-textured breads....at least if they come out right. I was more than a little surprised at my success with the Pain à l’Ancienne on my first shot. The method is the thing here--the bread is one of those most basic ones, with just flour, water, yeast, and salt. But the water is ice water, and the bread goes immediately into the fridge so that the yeast won't start working. The goal is to retard the yeast action to let the bread develop more flavor. After a night in the fridge the bread comes out for a sit at room temperature to let the yeast get going, until the dough doubles. You then move it from fridge to oven with as little disturbance as possible, for the baguettes anyway.

My loaf proceeded a little differently than the above plan, but the results were still great. My dough almost tripled in the fridge. Yes, the fridge is at the recommended temperature and no, the door wasn't opened very much over the rising period--I think I've just got enthusiastic yeast. I did let it come to room temperature, then gently eased the dough out of my rising bucket onto a pile of flour (the dough was very soft), and it was already a good bit larger than the size suggested. I cut it in half, cut three strips from one half, moved them to a piece of parchment paper with no stretching needed (they were already as long as my baking stone), snipped them with a pair of scissors, and popped them into the oven on the baking stone and poured hot water into my steam pan. After the couple of sprays of water at the sides of the oven, all I had to do then was take the lovely browned loaves out when done. The whole procedure seemed like a snap, which might be a combination of true "relatively easy recipe" and "I'm getting better at these skills".

The other half of the dough got split into 4 pieces for pizzas, and went back into the fridge. I had a carb day--I ate most of a baguette for lunch with a little Jarlsburg cheese and some herbs in oil for dipping, then made pizzas with the folks next door in the evening.

Pizza: I went with 4 pizzas, knowing that we generally end up with a variety of opinions on what the toppings should be. I wanted thin crust pizza and as crisp as possible, so we fired up sister-in-law's oven to 500 degrees and put in her baking stone. The dough was quite soft, too soft to consider trying to toss it as even draping it over the backs of my hands had it almost putting apart. With a combination of stretching and rolling (and a little patching) we got 4 pizzas roughly 12" in diameter. Toppings were:
tomato sauce, mozzarella, pepperoni
olive oil, roasted garlic, mozzarella, chicken, spinach, and parmesan
tomato sauce, mozzarella, chicken, and bacon
and
margherita--olive oil, buffalo mozzarella, fresh tomatoes, and basil from the garden (tomatoes were not from the garden, as I just got the plants in a week or so ago...much later than I'd intended)

The bread makes for a sturdy, chewy pizza crust, very much to my taste. Sister-in-law would prefer part whole-wheat the way I've been doing pizza crusts lately, so perhaps I'll try the pain à l'ancienne again with 1/3 or so whole wheat flour. The kids didn't find the crust to be notably different from the last homemade pizza we had, but found the overall results very satisfactory. Our first experiment with pizza margherita was not a complete success, as we overdid the toppings and things got soupy in the middle. We will also apply the basil after the pizza comes out of the oven next time.

BBA #20: Multigrain Bread Extraordinaire, as Hotdog Buns

2011-06-06T22:17:00.001-04:00

As I'm baking lots of bread in catch-up mode and don't eat that much loaf bread anyway, some sort of alternative use for the multigrain bread seemed appropriate. I had picked up some Riverview Farms bratwurst at the startup weekend farmer's market at Oak Grove near my house, and decided that I could turn the multigrain into buns suitable to hold the brats. Sister-in-law grilled a few beef and pork ribs, and with all that we put together a Memorial Day mixed grill.

For my multigrains, I used polenta and rolled oats--I had quinoa but wanted the smaller grained polenta, and didn't have any of the suggested alternatives to the rolled oats. My cooked brown rice was from a Trader Joe's frozen packet, and then there was the bread flour and wheat bran for 5 grains total. This is a bread with more sweetening than usual, both brown sugar and honey.

The procedure is to make a soaker with the polenta, rolled oat, and wheat bran, just barely moistened with water. That sits overnight "to initiate enzyme action". The next day ti all gets mixed in with the remaining ingredients, kneaded, has one rise, then is shaped, rises again, and bakes.

For my hot dog buns, I divided the dough into 8 pieces which I believe worked out to about 3 oz. each. Following the advice on a couple of different web pages I shaped them into 5" long rolls and put 6 of them about an inch apart on a baking sheet, looking for the rolls to merge as they rose for soft-sided buns. (The other 2 were to the side, where they got crusty on all sides.) After the rise I brushed the buns with egg white thinned with water for better stick on the poppy seeds, and did a few plain in case there were poppy-seed averse among the tasters.

Results: Buns with a nice chew, but a little sweet. Younger niece found the honey flavor struck an odd note with the bratwurst, but would have found it OK for breakfast toast. I think I'll leave out the honey on a repeat and let the brown sugar carry the sweetness profile if I'm after a sandwich loaf or hot dog buns again. I might also substitute a little whole-wheat flour for the bread flour, for a more wheaty taste. If I'm making hotdog buns again, I think I'll line up all 8 down my baking pan so the rolls will be confined and rise higher, for a more round cross-section.

For the completed dish, I used a Cooks Illustrated recipe for grilling the sausages with onions and thyme, which I'll use again. The brats had good flavor, and if I hadn't been in a hurry to get my contribution toward dinner done the onions would have finished browning and been really pretty in addition to to their very nice flavor. The buns were lightly toasted on the grill before adding the wurst.

More pics:

BBA #19: Marble Rye

2011-06-05T22:17:00.001-04:00

The most difficult part of making the marbled rye bread was finding caramel color to make the dark rye dark. As in a pumpernickel bread you can also use unsweetened chocolate or coffee, but as this bread is quite light in flavor, I suspect those are a little more likely to come through in the taste profile. After googling turned up a hint in posts for the first-round BBA Challenge ("try Asian groceries"), I made one pass at the DeKalb Farmer's Market before trying the high-percentage shot of the Buford Highway Farmer's Market. Sure enough, after writing out my question for the Eastern European woman at Customer Service when her English comprehension couldn't figure out how to search the database (her spoken English was quite good, though), she determined that I could find caramel coloring in the Korean grocery section. The Vietnamese CS person directed me to, well, not the right aisle, but close, and after several passes through 3 different nationalities' grocery, soft drink, and other foodstuffs I finally spotted the bottle labelled "caramel coloring". Ingredients: molasses, water. I am a little leery of the translated ingredients stickers on these small-scale imports, and I must say it didn't taste exactly like molasses. It worked for the dark rye, though!

That hurdle over, the marbled rye was basically 2 batches of light rye bread, one with caramel coloring added. I made a half-recipe, and added the optional caraway seeds. I went with the "four slab" method of getting a marbled pattern with pretty good success--one end was more bull's eye than swirl, but in the middle of the loaf I got a nice swirl pattern. I think if I flattened my slabs a little more and worked on a tighter roll (trying to get a full rotation of the doughs) I could get a consistent swirl end-to-end. The bread nicely filled my bigger loaf pan.

Tasting results: it's a light-textured rye with a pretty light rye flavor, too. I prefer a rye with a little more chew and a little stronger rye character, but this is certainly a very acceptable rye sandwich loaf. It made for very nice grilled cheese sandwiches with some leftover asiago and aged provolone cheese last weekend.

BBA #18: Light Wheat Bread

2011-06-05T22:11:00.001-04:00

I almost forgot about the light wheat bread as I started draft blog posts for baked-but-not-blogged BBA Challenge breads--it made very little impression on me, clearly, for either baking or taste. It was just what was advertised: a soft wheat bread like the basic supermarket bread--texture close to a soft white sandwich loaf and not a big wheat flavor. It was easy to mix up and shape, baked up into a pretty loaf, and made for nice sandwiches. It's not the sort of bread I have a lot of call for especially with our weekly whole-wheat challah filling the craving for freshly baked wheat bread, so I don't think I'll be repeating this one.

BBA #17: Lavash crackers

2011-06-05T21:55:00.001-04:00

I'm behind on my BBA challenge baking, and further behind on blogging about it. Blame it on lots of busy weekends and a real crunch to finish the challenge of the Rose's Heavenly Cakes Bake-through, and my summary post of all the cakes. If I can get caught up on the blogging part for BBA Challenge 2011 I'll only be a week behind on the baking. Or maybe 2. The next few posts may be brief, especially if I don't remember much about the baking process.

The lavash crackers presented no problems in the mixing or kneading, just in my attempts to roll the crackers very thin. I wanted that look of the ones in the book--almost shatteringly crisp. What tripped me up was going by the size of the finished dough (though the recipe did say you might need to trim the dough to fit your sheet pan), not the "paper thin" description, which I took as hyperbole. Well, it might have been somewhat hyperbolic, but nonetheless I should have rolled my dough thinner. The crackers I got were almost Ritz cracker thick and not being as rich as Ritz crackers, they felt rather, shall we say, solid. They worked fine as a base for spreadable cheese, but weren't really what I was after. File this one in the "try again someday with a better idea of what I'm doing" pile.

Roses's Heavenly Cakes: all of 'em!

2011-05-16T00:52:00.008-04:00

Listed as in the Table of Contents except for the frosting entries in the Baby Cakes chapter.

Butter and Oil Cakes

Sponge Cakes

Mostly Flourless Cakes and Cheesecakes

Baby Cakes

Wedding Cakes

RHC: Zach's La Bomba

2011-05-15T23:44:00.003-04:00

And here it is, the last cake (barring the wedding cakes) from Rose's Heavenly Cakes: Zach's La Bomba. It's a pretty fitting finale to my 84 weeks of "cake-of-the-week" and sometimes "cakes-of-the-week", as it's one on the complicated end of the scale for Rose's cakes. Or un-cakes, because there's not much cake in this delectable dessert.

One part that seemed to be giving several HCB'ers difficulty was a snap for me: finding the black currant or blackberry tea. I've been drinking a lot of hot tea the last couple of years and always have at least 4 or 5 varieties around, and among the current collection is some Twinings Blackcurrant Breeze. If I'd thought of it earlier, I'd have been glad to send a bag to those who were searching everywhere for the stuff, as I'm not that fond of it as a drinking tea.

The La Bomba has three parts: a very thin flourless chocolate cake base, a chocolate and blackberry mousse filling, and the chocolate "lacquer glaze" that produces a mirror finish...if it comes out. The lacquer glaze is used 4 times in RHC, though I skipped it on the Bernachon Palet d'Or and used the leftover from the Chocolate ~~Apricot~~ Ginger Roll with Lacquer Glaze to do the Designer Chocolate Baby Grands. If you were counting, that means this was only my second attempt at the glaze.

First up was the cake, which was pretty straightforward after all these weeks of developing skills like beating egg yolks and sugar until the mixture falls in ribbons, making a meringue, and folding it all together with melted chocolate. My cake did look bumpy on top and had several domes as it came out of the oven--rather like a lunar landscape effect, actually--which subsided as it cooled. It also seems like it should have been possible to cut the recipe down and bake in a smaller pan, for you only need about a 6- or 7-inch circle of cake from the half-sheet pan. As I do have extra, I'll take Rose's advice and use the trimmings for a quick trifle with some fresh berries. It has a very nice chocolate flavor.

I got the cake baked, trimmed and into the freezer a week or so early, and that's about all you can do in advance unless you choose to make the glaze early and re-heat it when needed. All the mousse components must be done in one run, one which took me 3-1/2 hours from when I started measuring ingredients to when the bombe went into the freezer. And as Marie said, you can use up most of your bowls and your counter space in the process.

The mousse has five components itself: a tea sabayon, two ganaches, blackberry puree, and whipped cream. (You can combine these in various ways and say it was only three components or even just two, but I think of "things that got stirred up in their own mixing bowl", and come up with five.) The sabayon is a mixture of egg yolks, sugar, and the blackcurrant tea whisked together over simmering water until it reaches 170 degrees. Rose says "5 minutes", but just like all the custards and such in this book, my sabayon took much longer than the recipe said--more like 20 or 25 minutes. Ganache #1 went into the sabayon when it was at temperature, then that blend went into an ice-water bath to cool down (count another large bowl for the ice-water).

Then came the blackberry puree, quickly produced by the Cuisinart food processor, then strained. I made the straining easier on myself by using more blackberries than called for, so I got the needed 1/2 cup of strained blackberries without a lot of scraping and pushing through the sieve. Gelatin was incorporated into the puree and that was then set aside. Then came ganache #2 which broke on me--but I dipped into the remaining cream to pull it back together. Then the ganache had to cool to room temperature.

At this point I had a sink full of dirty utensils, and three bowls of good stuff: the sabayon+ganache, the blackberry puree with the gelatin, and the second ganache. Time to put it all together: whip the remaining cream, add ganache #2, fold in the blackberry puree, and fold in the sabayon. Put it all in the silicon bombe mold I bought a few years ago, pop the cake circle on top, and....I discovered the cake circle was too large. I had cut it to fit the top of my mold, but the mousse was an inch or so below the rim. After a hurried trimming I was able to get the cake circle pressed onto the surface of the mousse and get the whole thing into the freezer. After that? An hour or so cleaning up the mess I'd made of my kitchen.

A day or so later the mousse was solidly frozen and I was ready to finish off the La Bomba. Making the laquer glaze went smoother than my first attempt, but it took a lot longer to cool to the ideal 80 degrees for coating the bombe than I expected. OK, I gave up at 83 degrees, as I needed to defrost this thing so I could slice it the same evening--I left town Friday morning and came back Sunday night, not leaving time for cake preparation before the Monday posting date. I think I had the glaze too cool the first time I used it back on the cake roll, and from my results this time a little too warm is better than too cool.

While waiting for the glaze to cool I unmolded the bombe. The silicon mold behaved fairly well...or maybe I should say that I managed fairly well with the unmolding, this being the sort of skill I don't do well with in general. I pulled away at the edges a bit to loosen, then ended up with a double-handed, thumbs on the bottom, gentle push to get it out. That operation left one sort of dimple in the side of the bombe, easily smoothed out with a spatula. I poured over the glaze and it went on like a dream. I moved the bombe over to a serving platter, then found the bottom (formerly the top) wasn't flat--apparently my trimming of the cake round didn't get it quite flat, and so my beautiful glazing job was held a little in the air above the serving plate on one side. I didn't take pictures of that side. :)

On serving I found that my cake round also didn't adhere to the mousse, as it popped off each slice as I turned them onto individual plates. Perhaps that will improved as the bombe sits in the fridge...or not. When I served a second round to the nieces this evening the base was still falling off at every opportunity.

Tasting comments: The bombe is a very light chocolate mousse, the melt away in your mouth sort. I get very little contribution from the blackberry and black current additions, perhaps overwhelmed by the chocolate in the mousse, the chocolate glaze, and the chocolate cake base. The very thin cake base really doesn't do much for me at all--it's too thin to contribute much to the taste, and mostly functions to make it easier to handle the bombe. I think I'd skip it on a repeat and serve the mousse by itself, maybe with the glaze or another dark chocolate sauce as an accent.

Overall I primarily taste chocolate, with maybe a hint of berry. The nieces and my older brother agreed--mostly chocolate, maybe a little bit of berry flavor. Everyone liked it, though younger niece would prefer hers frozen--when I cut it Thursday for our first tasting it hadn't completely defrosted. She put her second piece into the freezer tonight.

So, that's it: 95 or so cakes, depending on how you count 'em. 20 months. I'll post a summary in a bit, and may poll the family and the folks at work for their 'best' cakes now that I'm done.

RHC: White Velvet Butter Cupcakes with Lemon-Flavored Golden Neoclassic Buttercream

2011-05-09T09:12:00.001-04:00

Next to the last cake of the RHC bake through! It's sort of a repeat--we made the white velvet butter cake with a milk chocolate ganache in January, and I made the Golden Neoclassic Buttercream way back in November 2009, when I substituted it for the more complicated Burnt Orange Silk Meringue Buttercream on the Pumpkin Cake. I didn't have good luck with the buttercream then, so I was glad to take another crack at it.

The cake is on the quick-and-easy list in the back of the book and deserves it. I even volunteered to make a second round for my sister-in-law's end-of-the-year party for her students--I'd promised her the first batch anyway, and she needed one more recipe's worth. I then prepared the buttercream as one doubled batch, and which I can't call it "quick and easy", things went much smoother than that first attempt early in the bake-through. This cake and frosting is a nice pairing, too, because the cake needs 3 egg whites and the buttercream takes the 3 yolks.

For the buttercream: I dug out my Lyle's golden syrup which gives a nice flavor and a faint yellow-gold tint to the finished frosting,enhancing the faint cream color of the butter. I added lemon oil which is one of the suggested variation, and it's a nice level of lemon flavor--not overwhelming, but definitely there.

I took the advice of other HCB'ers and reduced my batter-per-cupcake amount, though I should have gone a little further with it. I ended up with most cupcates at 45+ grams in the first batch, and got mushroom tops again if smaller than the last time. Some were lopsided as if the batter rose then had a small collapse to one side. The second batch was 42-43 grams each, and those came out flat topped, level with the tops of the cupcake papers. Incidentally, these pretty cupcake papers have a problem: they peel themselves off the cupcakes about a third of the time. I may not use the rest of them. Maybe that's why they were on sale....

I frosted the first few trying to spread with an offset spatula, but found it was very easy to pull the browned crust off the top of the cupcake when spreading even though the buttercream was very soft. I then went to a hurried splat from a pastry bag, and younger niece added an assortment of sprinkles for the middle-school party. Oh, plus one left-over purchased rose from the Miette's Tomboy.

Tasting: I like this better than either component in my first attempt at them. The cake was light and not dry, and the buttercream, eaten when freshly made, was soft and lightly lemony and didn't have the "I'm just eating butter on a cake" taste I objected to before, when I'd had trouble getting all of my sugar syrup into the frosting and got the butter out of proportion.

It's not a good cupcake for the school party circuit, because the frosting notes say to not have it out at room temperature more than 4 hours. But this is a good combination to remember when cupcakes are needed in a hurry.

RHC: Chocolate Raspberry Trifle

2011-05-04T22:43:00.001-04:00

Well, geez. I tried to post an "in progress" message about my cake-of-the week but it went to my LJ, not the food blog. And now I can do a full writeup, so I guess I'll let the mistake stand as it is. I was wondering why a comment came in through LJ's notification service....and look how ugly the formatting is. Fix it later...

Part of my distraction and delay is that I have a group of co-workers in town for a database test which I'm also participating in. That means full days that start earlier than my usual, so I'm also way behind on my blog reading. I had the group over for dinner tonight and decided the chance at a new group of tasters for cake-of-the-week was not to be missed, so I scheduled my baking to have the cake for dessert.

My last of the "cakes Marie has baked" is the Chocolate Raspberry Trifle, which she baked in June 2009. Lots of familiar components here, and it was pretty easy to spread the work over a number of days. The chocolate genoise is the recipe we baked this March. I made a half recipe in two 6" cake pans about 10 days ago, and froze the cakes. Monday I made the vanilla-bean rich crème anglaise (familiar from the pineapple pudding cakes and the silk meringue buttercream) and a raspberry syrup for brushing on the cake. Last night I stirred up the raspberry preserves, and started the assembly. Oh, on the search for a half-sized trifle dish: there are such things, but the only one I spotted was one with sides that curved out and in. Very pretty...but not ideal when you want to layer chocolate cake layers that fit tightly against the sides, so the trifle stays in fairly coherent zones. I ended up with a plastic canister that was slightly larger at the top than at the bottom, and the top was just barely bigger than my finished 6" cake layers. Perfect, if not so elegant as glass.

Assembly starts with scraping the crust off the cakes so the syrup will be absorbed, splitting them into 4 layers, and trimming to get that tight fit in the trifle dish. Then one side is spread with thinned raspberry preserves, and the first one goes into the dish, preserves-side down. (Messy, that. Actually, with my level of coordination, much of this was messy.) Then the top side of the cake is brushed with the syrup, and on goes a third of the crème anglaise. My crème anglaise was thin despite using the full amount of cornstarch in the recipe, and required no spreading with a spoon--it pooled evenly on its own. Next is a layer of raspberries, then the sequence repeats twice. The trifle then is ready for overnight in the fridge so all the flavors and components meld a little.

This morning before leaving for the office I whipped the cream, adding in the other lot of thinned raspberry preserves to get light pink whipped cream. I might have made it to the office on time if I hadn't dragged out the piping bad for a swirly topping...nah, traffic would have prevented that anyway, and the piped swirls were pretty. Another handful of raspberries on top, and then the whole thing went back in the fridge ready for the evening.

Tasting results: I didn't get many specific comments, though "this is really good" got repeated several times. Kim said the best part was the raspberry whipped cream topping--not a negative on the cake, I think, but a big thumbs up for the flavorful whipped cream. I sent a sample off next door to younger niece but will have to collect that comment later. For me, I like the dessert, and it was less trouble than I thought to put it all together. I'll keep it in mind for another party occasion.

RHC: Deep Chocolate Rosebuds

2011-04-24T23:21:00.001-04:00

No, no, I didn't bake two cakes this week--the Red Fruit Shortcake is my real cake-of-the-week. This one is another of the recipes Marie baked before the bake-along started, back in August 2009, and I baked it back in December 2009. (The group bake-along started in October 2009.) I forgot to blog this one for a couple of weeks, and then kept it out as a sort of reserve in case I couldn't bake one week. Now that I'm almost done with the bake-through, I'd better get it posted. As the memory has faded, this will be brief.

The Dark Chocolate Rosebuds are from the baby cakes chapter, and call for a miniature rose pan. I don't have one, so mine baked in miniature muffin tins. You make a chocolate batter, then a small dollop of ganache is placed on each cup before baking. When I turned out my mini cupcakes and swiped some of the cake that had stuck to the pan, I was thinking "this is perfectly acceptable, but nothing special". But when I bit into the ganache area of a full cupcake--oh, that was special!

I overfilled my cupcake pan and had flattened mushroom tops--these should be a lot prettier without that. And I think I would try pushing the ganache down into the batter a little so it is more in the middle of the cakelet. You want every bite of the cakelet to have some of the ganache area.

My memory says that these were terrific when still a little warm, but not so special after they cooled. The ganache melded with the cake and while it was still a nice chocolate cupcake, that rich moistness of the warm ganache was gone.

BBA #16 Kaiser Rolls

2011-04-24T23:01:00.001-04:00

Kaiser rolls aren't one of the bread-baking experiences on my bucket list (not that I have one), but this BBA Challenge was fun anyway. The only challenge is in the shaping, and that turned out to be much easier than I'd thought.

This is a recipe that needs some planning because it uses a pâte fermentée that is mixed up the day before (at least), let rise for a while, then refrigerated to gain flavor. On baking day that dough is brought to room temperature and mixed in with the rest of the ingredients, which included an egg to make this a lightly enriched dough. I used half whole-wheat flour for the main dough, though the pâte fermentée was made with all bread flour. I also added in a little gluten after my dough had trouble with the windowpane test after an initial kneading.

After the first rise came the shaping. I reviewed the section in BBA, plus looked at the site Chris had used, but really I think the BBA was clear enough on its own for me. Roll a rope of dough (longer than either set of instructions suggested--maybe 12" for my smaller rolls), make an overhand knot, then let each end make one more wrap around the loop in the same direction it had been going. You should end up with a little nub sticking up in the middle of the roll from the end that was coming up through the middle on that pass, and when the roll is flipped halfway through the second rise there should be another nub on that side. Well, most of mine had that--a few sort of melded into a vaguely pleated roll.

I did find the instructions to flip the rolls over halfway through the rise odd, and wish there was reason given. Does it keep the roll a little flatter?

My 9 smaller-sized rolls were done in 20 minutes total, nicely brown and at temperature. They've got a nice flavor and good texture, and I like the whole-wheat in there--these should be great for sandwiches. As soon as Passover ends I'll be handing most of these off to the folks next door. I suspect these would be popular even without the "I'm sick of matzoh" effect.

Crumb shot.

RHC: Red Fruit Shortcake

2011-04-24T22:50:00.001-04:00

In the home stretch of cake-of-the-week, up this time is a génoise-based shortcake covered in red fruit that Marie baked back in August 2009. My cake had strawberries and raspberries, lacking the red currants Rose included and that Marie also managed to find. I've still never seen a red currant in the flesh, but even if someone in Atlanta did carry them I gather they are not yet in season. That's OK, the strawberries and raspberries were good by themselves.

The recipe calls for a Maryann pan, a fluted pan with a recess on top, in either an 8-cup or 10-cup size. Knowing this recipe would come up eventually, I bought a silicone Maryann pan a while back. When I pulled it out and checked, it turned out to hold 5 cups, perfect for a half-recipe of the larger version. That sent me to the recipe for the Génoise Rose for the cake--beurre noisette, beaten eggs, sugar, and a cake flour/cornstarch mix for the dry ingredients. The cake released fairly well from the silicone, losing only a small piece of edge crust and a bit on the bottom that would have been removed anyway before syruping.

My berries did not produce much juice despite a nice long maceration period, so my syrup was a little on the light side for taste. I used a light hand with the Chambord liqueur even so, as it has proved too much in some earlier recipes. The syrup still had a nice color and gave the cake a pale pink tinge after it was brushed on. Once you pile on the berry mixture, though, the bright reds are what you focus on. I ate my piece with a dollop of whipped crème fraîche, lightly sweetened and with just a couple of drops of vanilla added.

Taste results: génoise is never going to be my favorite cake, but this is the way to eat it. The cake is a light vehicle to hold the pile of berries, and the tang of the crème fraîche is a good counterpoint to the sweet.

I'm without my usual "carb sink" next door as it's Passover, and so no leavened foods are allowed over there. (Well, my brother might have had some, but he's dieting.) Younger niece feels quite cheated, as this cake is right down her alley with the pile of fruit--she'd have taken a pass on the crème fraîche, though, I bet. We'll see how the cake survives overnight to be taken to the office tomorrow for other opinions. With the berries piled on the cake, it's really one that should be eaten immediately.

BBA #15: Italian Bread

2011-04-24T14:24:00.001-04:00

I don't have a strong internal concept of "Italian bread", associating it with loaves grabbed at the grocery store for making garlic bread when you don't want much chew. And that's almost what I got here, just a little better crust and texture. It's a basic white bread with a nice crust, in between an artisan style with interesting texture and a fluffy-texture bread bought for kids' sandwiches...if the kids weren't raised on more interesting bread than that.

Baking notes: I was halving the recipe, as usual, but forgot to halve the liquid until a lot of it had gone in. I compensated with more flour but kept it more hydrated than called for.

I decided to shape the dough as 4 torpedo rolls plus a batch of breadsticks, soft ones. My breadsticks weren't pretty (how do you transfer thinly rolled breadstick dough to a cooking surface without it stretching irregularly, anyway?), but the concept was clear.

I baked on a sheet pan on top of the baking stone. The torpedo rolls were almost burned on the bottom, like the French baguettes baked directly on the stone the week before. That was with my heaviest sheet pan. Either I've got an unusually heat-retentive baking stone (generic thin 'pizza stone' from somewhere-or-other, nah), the oven is running too hot (not by other evidence, but I'm going to dig out a thermometer), or this is another place where thie results just don't come out quite the way the book says it should.

Results: The breadsticks were good. I suspect any of the other recipes Reinhart says could be used would be interchangeable, as the character of the dough is mostly lost in the thinly rolled, seeded, etc. As for the torpedo rolls, see above: nice even texture, but not a bread I see much reason to repeat. I made a sandwich with one roll, but the rest I think will be used for toasted garlic bread, where the bread itself is secondary.

RHC: Southern (Manhattan) Coconut Cake with Silk Meringue Buttercream

2011-04-18T21:36:00.001-04:00

We're winding down with the Heavenly Cakes bake-along, with only 4 weeks, and cakes, after this one. That includes 2 free choice weeks to bake things Marie has done but we haven't, and that will get me caught up completely if I dig out my notes on the one baked-but-not-blogged cake on my list. That is, unless I decide to make one or more of the wedding cake recipes in greatly cut-down form. After a break from weekly cakes.

This week it's another coconut cake. The base is a white butter cake using coconut milk mixed with egg whites for the liquid, and with coconut extract added to the batter to intensify the flavor. I actually found the elusive natural coconut extract this time, too, and I do think it was more potent than that ancient bottle of the artificial stuff in my pantry. (I found it at Rainbow Natural Foods, which apparently also sometimes has the marionberries I couldn't find.) I did another half recipe of the cake and decided to go with cupcakes this time. No special notes about the baking of the cupcakes except that I still have not figured out how much batter is "2/3 full" and my cupcakes had mushroom tops. Again. Maybe I'll do better with the upcoming cupcakes where Rose supplies the weight in grams for each.

It's the frosting that is the killer on this recipe, another multi-stage production including (shudder) Italian meringue. First came a thin crème anglaise (a custard sauce, basically) made with more coconut milk. That had to chill. Then the Italian meringue--for my half-recipe it was one egg white's worth, so I used a hand-held mixer and didn't get too much of the sugar syrup on the sides of the bowl. Or left in the measuring cup. Or spread on me or the kitchen counter. The last stage is to beat butter (it is a buttercream...) and add in the crème anglaise until smooth. Smooth. Right. Mine was curdled looking for a while, and I kept working to get the temperature up to the target 70 degrees. Finally got there and the mix got smoother, though it watered out a little bit. In went the Italian meringue, and perhaps because of the earlier temperature adjustment that didn't look curdled. Then it was time for my frozen unsweetened coconut, which the directions say to defrost and towel dry. Mine didn't need a towel--it was very finely shredded and almost desiccated, though not labelled as such. Committed at that point, I just dumped it in instead of reverting to the sweetened Baker's stuff. I made some feeble attempts to color the additional coconut that was sprinkled or pressed into the buttercream for a spring pastels concept, with not very even results.

Tasting results: This one goes in my "perfectly OK, not a standout" group. For other opinions...do you realize how many people have an aversion to coconut? I've only recently realized this, being one who always liked the stuff. So, sister-in-law and brother passed because it was coconut, as did one of my usual tasters at work and several other people I asked. Older niece passed, maybe influenced by the presence of leftover brownie puddle. Younger niece thought the buttercream too buttery but the cake was fine. Nephew thought the buttercream was great. One co-worker loved the buttercream but thought the cake was uninteresting, another loved the buttercream and said the cake was good, and a third preferred the cake to the buttercream. Let's just call it a mixed reaction.

Brownie Puddle

2011-04-17T12:11:00.001-04:00

I paused in the middle of making cake-of-the-week on Friday to bake a brownie puddle from Beranbaum's Pie and Pastry Bible. I've made it before, and for the same occasion, I think--my sister-in-law's birthday. As cake-of-the-week involves coconut and she doesn't like that, the brownie puddle was a much better choice.

It's the same recipe as the Barcelona Brownie Bars in Rose's Heavenly Cakes but I think better, as the bar shape was prone to overbaking. As a 9-1/2" tart the brownie stays fudgy. The "puddle" part is a dark chocolate ganache spooned into holes punched into the brownie while hot--you keep spooning in ganache as long as the hot brownie absorbs it. (Or maybe a bit longer as my overfilled holes show...)

Lots of pecans, fudgy brownie, ganache, some whipped cream to set off the chocolate intensity...you can't lose making this for a chocoholic. I also grilled herbed barbecue turkey thighs for the entree for Friday dinner, handed over the latest Nora Roberts, just checked out of the library, and let s-i-l escape with the book for some quiet time instead of being dragged into the game of Settlers of Catan I played with my nephew after dinner. Happy Birthday!

BBA #14: French Bread

2011-04-12T21:45:00.001-04:00

The BBA Challenge 2011 is up to "F", and so French Bread. I'm not a huge French bread fan so I am not one to get infected with the compulsion to perfect the crusty loaf. That's probably a good thing, as I've read blogs by those who got obsesses with that goal, and there are many other breads I'd rather keep repeating in order to reach my ideal loaf.

I kept the dough for my French bread fairly wet, and after the first rise had to add a little more flour to be able to handle it--it sort of crept over my hand until I did. It then doubled in less than 2 hours, so it got a deflation and another rise. I made a half recipe, then split the dough into 2 baguettes when shaping. It was hard to keep from deflating the dough as I folded it, but the texture did come out fairly 'holey'.

I let the baguettes rise on a floured cloth in a "french bread pan", but baked directly on a stone along with all the ritual for trying to get steam in the oven to benefit the crust. Baked the 10 minutes then turned the loaves, and the internal temp was >205 after another ten minutes and the bottoms were getting quite dark brown. However, the tops stayed pale, barely golden. Maybe I need to skip the stone and use a perforated pan to be able to bake these to golden brown all over. Or maybe some surface flour hindered the browning. Or...I see in the Cooks illustrated that arrived yesterday that temperature is not a good indicator of bread doneness alone, as they found bread can reach 210 degrees a good 15 minutes before the loaf is done, and that if removed early the bread had "a pale soft crust and a gummy interior". Well, mine was not gummy and was fairly crusty, but I had the pale part down. CI now tells me "...stick to the recommended baking time and make sure the crust has achieved the appropriate color before removing the loaf from the oven." Will do from now on...

Results, besides the pale crust? The texture was good. The crust was definitely shy of the classic crisp French bread crust, but was nicely crunchy for all that. The bread texture was quite chewy and it had a very nice flavor.

RHC: Miette's Tomboy

2011-04-10T22:44:00.002-04:00

Cake of the week is "Miette's Tomboy", a small (6") chocolate cake with raspberry mousseline (I went with the raspberry variation instead of vanilla). It all came together pretty quickly--good, because I was out of town last week on a mini-vacation, touring the Biltmore Estate with 3 friends.

The cake is an oil cake with buttermilk, and uses both some 70% cacao chocolate and cocoa powder. My only note is that the recipe says the batter will be thick, but mine was not--not as thin as the batter for the Chocolate Almond-Butter Cake, but far thinner than the usual butter cake. "Smoothing the top" with a spatula mostly managed to pop some of the bubbles in the batter instead of removing any surface irregularities, as the batter was too thin to have held any peaks. The cake baked up well, filling the odd 6"x3" cake pan and ending up with a rather gnarled looking top. Once turned out, the cake sat with a little plastic-wrap hat to keep the crust soft--I guess it helped to some degree, but I still had a fairly firm top crust.

The more complicated part was the mousseline, which involved my nemesis: beating sugar syrup into egg whites. How many of the short list of remaining cakes are going to include this step which I still find so challenging? (Answer: 2 out of 5, I think.) And the additional challenge of my Southern kitchen in the warmer parts of the year is back--with a high yesterday in the upper 80's, I had to turn on the A/C and move the thermostat down to keep my mousseline components from quickly warming past the critical 70 degree point. However, despite all that I managed an extremely fluffy mousseline--a texture it's supposed to get on standing but that seems to be the natural state of mine, not reducible to the "silky" texture that might have been easier to apply to the cake. Never mind, I opted out of trying to replicate the very elegant ruffled-edge presentation shown in RHC and slathered my fluffy raspberry-pink mousseline on my dome-topped cake with a spatula (no piping bag for me this week) until it was sort of smooth on top and peeking out between the layers on the sides. A purchased red rose and a couple of leaves for the top, and it was done.

Tasting results: the cake is a big hit--lovely chocolate flavor, very moist, no criticisms there. The mousseline was less popular. The raspberry flavor was good and (of course) nicely accented the chocolate cake, but the marshmallow-like fluffiness got thumbs down.

RHC: Karmel Cake

2011-04-03T22:13:00.001-04:00

Just a handful of cakes left to go for the Heavenly Cakes bake-along! This week it's Karmel Cake, which uses a caramel made with brown sugar for flavor.

The caramel process is straightforward: boil brown sugar, milk, and a little butter to soft ball stage, remove from heat, and whisk in more milk. That gets cooled before moving on to the rest of the cake.

Then the recipe proceeds as a usual butter cake, mixing the dry ingredients, adding the butter and the caramel, beating for structure, then adding eggs and vanilla in 2 additions. It's baked as a single layer.

Mine took about 30 minutes, and dipped in the center during the last 10 minutes or so of baking. The texture seemed fine, maybe a thin denser layer at the bottom--I don't really know why my center decided to sag there at the end.

The suggestion was to serve it plain, or with coffee cream. I went with coffee cream, or really just coffee-flavored whipped cream as I skipped the gelatin stabilizer and just softly whipped the cream, coffee extract, and sugar.

Taste results: sister-in-law: not sure I can taste the cake for the coffee cream. It is nice and moist. Nephew: really excellent cake: nice texture, really like the crisp crust, very moist. Young niece: good cake. Older niece declined cake as she wanted power carbs--she's in crew, and there was a regatta the next day.

I enjoyed the cake, but agree with the general opinion that it doesn't have much character. I don't get any caramel taste, for instance, even carefully eating only cake and no coffee cream. Nice texture, moist, yes, but not a standout. It would indeed do fine without accompaniment, but it's sort of a plain 'snack cake'. A couple of days later as I distributed pieces around the office, I tasted the crumbs and got some brown sugar/caramel flavor, but it was faint. The office cake-testers agreed.

So: did the coffee cream overwhelm the delicate caramel taste? Did I need to go buy the recommended muscovado sugar (which I'd used before and been unable to tell from regular brown sugar)? I would have liked to love this cake, as a big caramel fan, but it just underwhelmed me.

BBA #13: Foccacia

2011-04-03T21:53:00.001-04:00

Foccacia, the condensed writeup...

I made a full recipe of the standard, non-poolish, foccacia, and used half whole-wheat flour, half bread flour, with a little added vital wheat gluten to try to compensate for the lower-gluten whole wheat.

Gads that's a lot of olive oil--and I only made 1 cup of the herbed oil using a 'roasted garlic' flavored oil and mixing in dried herbs, not the warm/steep method. Too lazy that night. I still left maybe 1/4 cup of the oil, either never applied or spooned out of the corner where it tended to collect. I can't imagine what *2* cups would look like.

Mine rose energetically between stretches. Still not sure I'm doing this stretch and fold correctly--Chris's blog just gave me a few more pointers to try next time around.

The dough retarded in the fridge overnight. I saw no significant absorption of oil during this period, so I really didn't feel the need to pour on more when it came back to room temperature.

Put walnuts on half as a pre-proof and added grated asiago as a during-bake to the same side. The other side was plain but for the herb oil, to better taste the bread itself. (And to placate younger niece who dislikes cheese and prefers pecans to walnuts for all things.)

Results: good, but not quite the texture I expect in foccacia--not enough holes, mostly. I'd better work on that stretch-and-fold technique. No complaints from anyone on the taste, probably because it's pretty lovely after swimming in all that herbed oil.

There are pics of various stages of unbaked foccacia on Flickr if you click through.

RHC: Orange Glow Chiffon Layer Cake

2011-03-27T20:38:00.001-04:00

Chiffon cakes are usually baked in a tube pan like an angel food cake, to support the egg-foam cake as it bakes keeping the center from falling. To bake this one as a layer cake, Rose switched to unbleached all-purpose flour, then adds a rose nail to the center of the pan to help with the heat distribution there. Except I forgot about using the AP flour and just turned back to the recipe for the Bostini, and made it with all cake flour.

I was probably saved by having done a half-recipe, so my cake was only 6 inches across and seemed to hold up fine during baking. I did add the rose nail, too, in the center of the little pan. The center of the cake rose just above the level of the 6" x 3" pan I used (purchased for the upcoming Miette's Tomboy cake)--I have a 6" springform, but it's not as tall as the 3" high cake pan. What did happen was not any dipping of the cake during baking--it had a nice dome. There was some sinking during cooling which, because the cake cools upside down in its pan, showed up as a concave bottom to the cake. Maybe the AP flour would have helped after all.

I also should have waited to see if my cake would sink a little to drop the top of the cake below the pan before upending it for cooling. I did think about it, but decided the cake wasn't that high...but was wrong. So a little of the top crust stuck to my greased cake rack, and the top of my cake looked patchy. I might have just served it upside down but for the concave bottom.

My other mistake with this cake was using the Seville orange marmalade that was already on hand to make orange marmalade whipped cream, when Rose specifies sweet orange marmalade. My cake testers (except for sister-in-law, who really likes less-sweet stuff) panned the cream, calling it "weird" or just saying they didn't like it. Personally I thought it was fine, but there was a different taste balance in there. I added a little sugar to the leftovers and found that improved things.

Overall, the cake was good. I enjoyed it, finding it nicely flavored and well balanced with the orange whipped cream, and I'd make this again as a light dessert to a party. My other tasters thought the cake was OK but not something they particularly enjoyed.

BBA #12 English Muffins

2011-03-26T15:44:00.001-04:00

I thought my English muffins were going so well: I kept adding more buttermilk until I'd used all but a tablespoon of the full amount. The dough passed the windowpane test, but upon reflection perhaps it wasn't "tacky but not sticky", but was too smooth. Maybe the fact that it was easy to handle was a bad sign. At any rate, when I pulled my big fat Englsh muffins apart after cooking on the griddle and finishing in the oven, I had a lovely bread texture. Not the full of holes, ready to catch butter, English muffin texture. The taste was fine, but without that texture you can't say you've achieved English muffins. On the other hand, the process was pretty fast and easy, so I'll try to make another attempt when I'm not baking a new bread every week as part of the BBA Challenge.

Some notes: my griddle cooked rather fast (perhaps that could also have kept the signature English muffin holes from developing, though the recipe doesn't talk about that as a problem), so I gave them a little more time in the oven to compensate. About 3-4 minutes on each side on the griddle got to the edge of brown/black. The oven didn't increase the browning level.

Tasting: Split and toasted the muffin did fine as a breakfast sandwich substrate, but I don't think I'll try one just toasted and buttered. There won't be enough holes for the butter to run into!

The crumb shot. Not what you want.

RHC: No-Bake Whipped Cream Cheesecake

2011-03-20T21:03:00.003-04:00

It's another free choice week for the Heavenly Cake Bake-along, and I'm getting down to a very short list of unbaked options. I went with the one remaining cheesecake, the perhaps deceptively named No-Bake Whipped Cream Cheesecake with Cherry Coulis. If this brings to mind the "no-bake cheesecake" in a box, you're not in the right universe for either taste or effort. I think I last ate the Jello variety on a camping trip with my older brother about, oh, 30 years ago, when he assured me it would taste great because we were, you know, camping. (He was wrong.) And in terms of effort, the "no bake" part just means you don't have to turn on the oven: there are still 4 components and 4 pages of instructions before you end up with Rose's no-bake cheesecake. And don't get fooled by the phrase "whipped cream cheesecake"--there's no "whipped cream" in it, it's "whipped cream cheese". I was a little dubious about the use of a tub of whipped cream cheese, but the results were marvelous.

I am finding these multi-component cakes more of a struggle to tackle, probably in some combination of cake-of-the-week fatigue and a higher stress level from other stuff than usual. After the bake-along winds up (well, after Marie finishes, because I understand that the Heavenly Cakes baking group will continue) I'll need a long break from recipes that need more than a couple of components, especially if one of them involves beating sugar syrup into egg whites (see below).

I again did a half recipe this week, digging out my little 6" springform pan for the occasion. First up was the graham cracker crust: just crumbs, sugar, salt and butter, mixed and pressed on the bottom and sides of the pan. Then came a custard with gelatin, which means there's no breaks allowed in the rest of the filling preparation, because if you refrigerate the custard it will set up. Two egg yolks of the smaller size I always seem to get made for half the recipe amount (the full recipe needs 3 eggs, so I should have only needed 1-1/2 yolks here). I used vanilla bean paste instead of an actual bean. The custard came together as it should, and then cooled very quickly because of the small amount. It already had a skin when I stirred inthe vanilla, which might have been the start of my later problems.

The next step was beating the whipped cream cheese with the sour cream, then beating in the custard. It wasn't apparent when I had the mixer running, but giving the finished stuff a stir turned up lots of custard-lumps. I got out my small drum sieve and pressed all the cream cheese mixture though it, then gave it all another stir to, I hope, distribute the custard.

Then came my unfavorite part: an Italian meringue. I haven't counted how many of these we've done, but my technique is not improving very fast. I had only a little better success in keeping the sugar syrup off the beaters and sides of the bowl this time. I used a handheld mixer because of the small volume--the stand mixer didn't seem like a good option. However, in the end I had a fluffy meringue, just maybe a little less sweet than it was designed due to sugar syrup left stuck to the sides of the bowl.

After the meringue cooled some, it was folded into the custard mixture, poured into the chilled graham cracker crust, and popped into the fridge with a small plate over the top for protection without marring the top the way plastic wrap would. My batter fit just about perfectly in the 6" springform.

For the cherry coulis, I used part of a jar of Trader Joe's Morello cherries, it being the season for cherry blossoms, not fruit. I had to estimate the amount of cherries and juice as the recipe was written to macerate fresh cherries and use the juice that generated. I added a little more thickening at the end because the liquid seemed so thin. My final consistency was still quite runny, so I don't think I overshot that at all. Maybe we're fruit lovers compared to some mythical norm, but I thought the amount was pretty scanty and would up it by half again to get the amount I'd like to serve with each cheesecake piece.

Tasting results: I only managed a small sampling in the family. Older niece, hyper from a big win at the high school regional robotics competition, hardly paused from telling her father about the event to eat part of a serving and pronounce it good. Sister-in-law had a bite and loved the extremely light texture. Younger niece, the anti-cheese person, did take a small taste of the cheesecake without the cherry coulis, said "I like it and I don't like it", declined any more, and ate a cherry. (That she liked...) Personally I loved it--it's extremely light textured, not too sweet, and nicely set off by the crust and the coulis. In fact I don't think the cheesecake would do well without the coulis or some other sweet accompaniment. It's probably too much effort unless I someday get the hang of making Italian meringue into an effortless process, but it certainly was good.

The remains of the cheesecake went to the office Monday, and got rave reviews. CW: I think you should be able to eat a whole bowl of this stuff and have it not count--it's so light! BT: This is lovely stuff. CL: It's incredibly light--not heavy and way rich like so many cheesecakes.

BBA #11 Cranberry-Walnut Celebration Bread

2011-03-20T15:21:00.001-04:00

The Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge this week is very similar idea to my weekly whole-wheat challah with dried cherries: an enriched braided bread with dried fruit (cranberries), but with the addition of walnuts. Reinhart sees this as a great Thanksgiving bread, picking up the flavors of cranberry relish. It's not close to Thanksgiving, but it's still a nice bread.

Baking notes: I made a half recipe, and with the smaller amount of dough I switched from an (even division) 6-strand braid to a 4-strand after a few tries, and then just braided fast and tried to tuck in the exposed fruit and nuts to keep them from burning during baking. This recipe has *lots* of cranberries to the amount of dough which made it very hard to work with. The pockets of fruit and nuts created thin areas of dough as I tried to get braidable lengths, and my strands would pull apart.

The amount of water I used was right in the middle of Reinhart's given range, though I kept it a little extra sticky to help hydrate the dried fruit.

For my half-sized loaf, I baked it 15 minutes, rotated the pan, and gave it 15 minutes more. The internal temperature was right on the money at that point.

Nice crumb, pretty bread, and good flavor. It's a winner all 'round.

RHC: Devil's Food Cake with Midnight Ganache

2011-03-14T22:14:00.001-04:00

I learned from my experiences with last week's cake-of the week: I read the recipe carefully and in advance this time! I made the cognac cherries (sans the extra corn syrup) the night before. I made the ganache at about 9 in the morning--tackling caramel sauce while still working on the morning coffee is a challenge, as is not just spooning up the caramel sauce instead of making ganache with it. Then in the afternoon I baked the cakes, let them cool, then was ready to put it all together except...the ganache was still very soft. It had been 7 hours sitting at room temperature but was still gloopy, to use a technical term. I gave it a few sessions in the fridge which helped some, but it was still really too soft when I decided I had to frost the cake.

That perhaps explains why this was the most uncooperative cake I'd ever seen for frosting. The layers were fairly level, I decided not to put the cognac cherries in the middle because it looked like a recipe for instability and serving difficulties to me, and still the top layer wanted to slide to the side. Three times I just shoved the frosted layer back into place, and once I took a long spatula and lifted it, frosting and all, to a new position. When all the repeated passes on frosting was starting to lift sections of cake, I quit. All the efforts didn't matter, and the result was a rather bulgy cake with vague swirls--all I could do without tearing up the cake.

But that's OK, it tasted good. The cognac cherries, served on the side, really added a punch. Younger niece felt the cherries should have been in the cake to relieve the chocolate intensity. Everyone else just said "really good". Once again I thought the cake was too dry for my tastes, but the pile of intensely dark-chocolate ganache was well able to provide the lacking moistness of the cake.

BBA #10: Cornbread

2011-03-14T09:03:00.002-04:00

I'd run across this recipe before I bought a copy of BBA. As one raised on Southern cornbread made without any sweetening at all I was appalled at the amount of sugar in the recipe, tried leaving it out, and was not pleased with the results. After some mental debate I made the recipe as written this time.

Notes: I made a half recipe, and used my well-seasoned 8-wedge cornbread pan (inherited) and my 6" skillet (purchased myself years ago), both cast iron and never washed in a dishwasher (what *were* you thinking, Chris!?), only rarely washed at all in fact. The half-recipe was just about right for those together, though the 6" round bread could have been a little thicker. The cornbread took just about 30 minutes to bake--a 10" skillet with no dividers would have added a considerable amount of time.

I did use polenta, not my standard coarse cornmeal. I cut back a little on the corn kernels (also not generally a feature of Southern cornbread). Super-thick sliced bacon gave some extra bite.

Results: nice browning on the bread, but not really a good crust despite a long pre-heat for the pan. I took the wedges out of the pan immediately, that being the way I was taught (so the bread doesn't steam in the pan and soften the crust), and when that didn't result in very crusty cornbread I followed the recipe for the 6" round and left it in the pan for 10 minutes. Nope, also not very crisp. Neither was soggy, but they lacked the good crunch I expect in cornbread.

Taste: not as bad as I'd thought. :) Certainly it's sweeter than I prefer, but perhaps because I ate it with a spicy sun-dried tomato soup (ButterYum's variation) that might have swamped my sweet tastebuds, it wasn't too bad. The bacon is a nice touch (what doesn't bacon improve?). I prefer a bread without the corn kernels, though it's not a strong negative--I could see deciding to use them for specific meals, just not as my standard.

In summary: I've made it, I've eaten some, and I'm moving on. I'll go back to Southern cornbread, maybe with bacon, next time.

RHC: Moist Chocolate Raspberry Génoise

2011-03-06T22:57:00.002-05:00

Ah, a génoise that actually got some height for me! Maybe it was the chocolate, maybe I'm finally learning some of the tricks for these egg-foam leavened cakes, who knows. Maybe it was making a half-recipe and using 6" pans, when half of a 9" pan is 6.4". Whatever...my génoise were nice and tall this week.

My biggest problems with this cake were ones of timing. Yes, yes, I should read the entire recipe carefully in advance. I should probably force myself to take notes for these multi-component cakes, too. For example, I thought I could make the raspberry sauce one evening early in the week, but failed to notice that the frozen raspberries should defrost slowly at room temperature for several hours. (I put the sealed bag in the fridge overnight after hitting this obstacle, which speeded up the draining the next day.) I'm used to the ganache needing several hours to reach the correct frosting consistency (after one makes the raspberry sauce that goes into it), so I did get that one timed correctly. The cocoa syrup should be applied warm, so that can't be made too far in advance of composing the cake. And finally are those cake crumbs which can be used to decorate the cake, something I thought I'd do while the ganache was still soft enough to hold them. But the cake crust is removed just before composing the cake, and then need to air-dry for several hours before the scraps can be processed into crumbs.

But you know, it eventually all came together, and the result was a very nice cake. The cocoa syrup brushed on the torted cake layers plus the interspersed ganache kept things moist, as the cake name promised. The hint of raspberry flavor in the ganache was present but not strong--I might have gotten better flavor if I'd added the Chambord, but the liqueur flavorings haven't been well-received around here. Fresh raspberry garnish and the extra raspberry sauce gave most of the non-chocolate flavor--the raspberry in the ganache was very subtle, only noticeable on the first few bites.

Tasting results: This is probably the best-received génoise yet, with the possible exception of the one slathered in passion fruit curd--I'd have to ask younger niece for a head-to-head comparison, as chocolate automatically creates bonus points. No one complained of it being dry, the chocolate flavor was intense (though the raspberry could have been a little stronger). However, it's still a génoise, and despite all these months of baking from Rose's Heavenly Cakes with many many variations on génoise, we're still fundamentally a butter cake family. Which means next week's devil's food cake should really hit the sweet spot.

BBA #9: Cinnamon Raisin Walnut Pecan Bread

2011-03-06T14:01:00.002-05:00

I have to admit to having few problems with this bread. The dough was lovely (maybe a tad dry, contrary to others' experiences) with the exact amounts of flour and liquid, and I worked a couple more tablespoons of liquid in only because I'd over-measured a bit and had this milky water sitting right there. I did fail to drain my raisins well enough and so things got a little sticky as I hand-kneaded them in, but I can't blame that on Reinhart. A little blotting with a paper towel and I think I could have kneaded without added flour.

[Forgive the lousy photo quality on most shots--one dial on this camera is fatally easy to shift without noticing, and I don't pay enough attention to the results until I've downloaded to the computer. Things were very over-exposed this week until the last couple of pics of both bread and cake.]

I added cinnamon in all the suggested places--the base amount in the dough, the full amount of cinnamon-sugar for the swirl, and the coating glued on the hot loaf with a little butter. I'd skip the top coating next time--it added some extra flavor, sure, but made the loaf messy to handle and slice. There's plenty of cinnamon in the dough + swirl.

The dough rose beautifully, as did the loaves. I might let the loafs go a little longer on a repeat....or not, as the crumb was good and I'd hate to have a loaf collapse on me.

On slicing, the "open swirl" problem emerged--I don't mind a little separation of the layers, but a big opening is not what I'm looking for. I thought I was rolling tightly, but perhaps not. And perhaps the amount of cinnamon-sugar affects this, too, and I had a pretty heavy layer.

I took the second loaf to my hairdresser, as I'd described it as she was doing my perm and gotten an enthusiastic response. That was a good decision, as I suspect the nephew will be the only one next door to try it: older niece is on a school trip (robotics competition), younger niece hates raisins, and my brother and sister-in-law are avoiding carbs they unless the temptation is very strong. Come to think of it, my brother may never have learned to enjoy raisins. I could have made younger niece happy by subbing dried cherries, but with the weekly whole-wheat dried-cherry challah I just wanted something different. And *I* love cinnamon raisin bread!

RHC: Sticky Toffee Puddings

2011-02-28T22:07:00.001-05:00

Quick report with few pictures, as I was out of town for the weekend and am composing this in at the last minute. (The cinnamon roll post was mostly written on Thursday.)

Sticky toffee pudding is a British dessert, a cake with sauce and not an American's idea of "pudding". In Rose's version, dates soaked in stout are pureed, and that gets added to the cake batter for flavor and moisture. A toffee sauce (brown sugar and butter, mostly, with a dash of cream) is poured warm over the cake, add a dab of whipped crème fraîche and a sprinkle of toasted pecans and it's done.

I made 9 cakelets (a half recipe) baked in my 1/2 cup ramekins. That made a very nice sized dessert for me. The cake had a very nice flavor, and the tang of the crème fraîche complements the sweet toffee sauce and cake very nicely. I don't know how the kids next door ate this one, if they did at all (no report yet), but if they skipped the crème fraîche they really didn't get the optimum combination.

I did feed cakelets to both my brothers, and they declared it very good. I did slightly overbake my little cakes, but with the sauce and the date paste in the cake batter dryness wasn't a problem. Still, next time (there will be a next time) I'll cut back on the cooking time a little.

BBA #8: Cinnamon Rolls

2011-02-28T21:01:00.002-05:00

Back in the land of the familiar, after last week's only partially successful attempt at ciabatta. This week it was cinnamon rolls, and while it's my first attempt at Reinhart's version, I've made similar recipes. A favorite for a number of years for Christmas morning was "orange swirl buns", which were basically cinnamon rolls with the cinnamon replaced with orange peel.

I kept the dough quite wet--letting it knead in the mixer for most of the stated time before adding small amounts of flour. I let it rise, shaped the rolls using KA's cinnamon filling instead of the cinnamon/sugar mixture, then put the rolls into the fridge. This was not to be able to have hot cinnamon rolls the next morning, but because it was already midnight and I had to got to work the next day. :) The next evening the rolls came out of the fridge when I got home from the office, and I let them rise and come to room temperature for about an hour and a half before baking. As they had risen a good bit in the fridge, I didn't think they needed more time.

Baking went pretty smoothly, though my inability to get a very even size as I sliced the rolls had a few extra-tall rolls that got a little too brown before the shorter ones were done. (I was initially trying for 16 smaller rolls, but gave up after the first slice and went for 12.) A few pieces of foil protected the worst spots from burning.

I'm not much on the powdered sugar-and-liquid frosting/glazes, so instead I faked a cream cheese frosting. I had a small cube of cream cheese and added a dab of butter, some powdered sugar, and a dash of vanilla to make a few tablespoons of frosting. My sister-in-law had already carried off 4 rolls sans frosting for their breakfast, but I spread a little of my cream cheese mix on my roll the next morning after warming it up slightly in the toaster oven.

Taste test: it's a very light-textured roll, almost too much so for me--I think I like a little more chew in my cinnamon rolls. The little lemon flavor in the dough was good, but like others have said I'm glad I didn't add more lemon in the frosting. My brothers (older brother was down for the weekend) both approved of the rolls. However, I think next time I need cinnamon rolls I'll either go to the orange swirl buns recipe, or go back to trying to replicate my father's biscuit-based cinnamon rolls, a treasured memory from my childhood.

BBA #7: Ciabatta

2011-02-21T21:48:00.001-05:00

This bread didn't give me major problems of mixing, kneading, shaping, or baking....but on the other hand the texture wasn't the big open-hole style that a ciabatta should be. On the other other hand, we all loved the loaf and went through the whole thing (a half-recipe) at dinner Saturday night. The "Carraba's-style" herb mix and olive oil we were dipping in into helped, sure, but the bread was pretty good too. I'll just have to see if the whole baking process gets harder when I try it again in search of the true ciabatta texture.

I used the poolish version, and used buttermilk because I had an excess and didn't care if the loaf was more tender than one made without dairy. I will try using water for a crisper, chewier version, and take a vote on what the family prefers. I did work in in the maximum amount of liquid called for in the recipe and had a nicely sticky dough, but given the texture problem I need to go even wetter. From Chris's writeup (thanks, Chris!) I also realize my folding technique needs lots of work, and the videos on the folding technique also underscore the fact that my dough wasn't wet enough.

I want to keep working on this bread and try to get a more ciabatta-like texture. First idea is to work on the stretching and folding, as Reinhart says that's part of the key. Second idea is that I may have de-gassed it too much when moving it to my peel, thgouh I didn't notice a great loss of volume and there were some large air bubbles visible just below the skin as it went into the oven. All that after getting the hydration level up.

The ciabatta crumb shot.

Several of the ciabatta variations look good--I may try a combination of cheese and caramelized onion next. Whenever we're next ready for a bread pig-out, that is. And with the BBA Challenge schedule, it may be a while before I come back to this one. I must note, however, that I squeezed in a second round of bagels this weekend on request of the folks next door. I used the KA high-gluten flour ("Sir Lancelot"), and maybe shouldn't have cut the refrigeration period to only 8 hours, for many of the bagels were a little flat. Taste and texture are OK. I'm not going to try to solve that problem right now...

RHC: Heavenly Seduction Coconut Cake

2011-02-21T21:09:00.001-05:00

It's a free choice week, when we can work on catching up with cakes yet unbaked. I went with the Heavenly Seduction Coconut Cake--there's yet another coconut cake still to go, and I didn't want to have 2 scheduled too close together. I've been thinking of this one as the "5 forms of coconut cake"--of which I only managed 4. Dessicated unsweetened coconut, canned cream of coconut, coconut flavoring (I couldn't find a natural extract), and the conventional flaked sweetened coconut. Ignore that yellow box labelled 'coconut cream' which I'd hoped was the specialty coconut cream powder--it turned out to be the "coconut cream" that is specifically not to be used instead of canned cream of coconut. I made this one in a 6" (half-recipe) size for the same underlying reason as not baking 2 coconut items close together: neither my brother nor sister-in-law like coconut. The kids and I do, but still taking 1/3 of the family out of the tasting group makes the smaller cake the way to go. The cake, as is the other coconut one we haven't baked yet, is a white cake. Wonder why...trying to keep the color palate white to match the flaked coconut toppings?

This recipe unavoidably uses both food processor and mixer (well, if you want to use electric appliances at all, that is.) I did manage to think ahead and not do things in recipe order, so as to not have to wash the food processor in the middle. First grind the desiccated coconut with the sugar. Remove to the mixer bowl. [Note to self: solid layer of coconut oil on the top of the can will geyser the liquid underneath it when it gives way.] Open canned cream of coconut, place in food processor (what didn't splash on your shirt, that is), and homogenize. Measure out what is needed to mix with egg whites and flavorings.

That little logistical snare avoided, the rest was easy: it's the usual butter cake mixing method. Flour, baking powder, and salt joined the ground coconut in the mixer bowl. Add the softened butter and some of the egg mixture and beat. Add the rest of the egg mixture in 2 parts, and the batter is done. My half-cake took just about 30 minutes to bake to where it started to pull away from the sides of the pan and a tester was clean, and as Rose warned, the top dipped slightly as it cooled. All the better to hold whipped cream, as it turns out.

The topping, if you don't have the coconut cream powder, is unsweetened whipped cream (I tried my hand at the gelatin-stabilized form) topped with sweetened flaked coconut. I actually added a little of my boxed "coconut cream' to my mixture figuring it might add some additional coconut flavor, but either that or the gelatin mixture gave my whipped cream a slightly lumpish appearance, though the lumps weren't really apparent in the eating. I love the simplicity of the topping idea: whip cream, pile on top of cake, add coconut. I'll be wishing for this when we do the "Southern (Manhattan) coconut cake with silk meringue buttercream" which takes 3 pages of recipe for the frosting. The whipped cream may limit the life of the frosted cake and requires refrigeration, but it certainly is easy.

Tasting results: I took Rose's comment on serving this cake to heart: it was baked a couple of hours before dinner, and topped with the whipped cream and flaked coconut within minutes of eating. I had a very limited sampling this time, as older niece declined a piece for lack of appetite and brother and sister-in-law, as I said, dislike coconut. Nephew liked it, but wasn't wowed by it. Younger niece felt the unsweetened whipped cream wasn't compensated for by the sweetened coconut,and suggested a little addition of sugar would have helped. I think I agree with her, though I still enjoyed my piece very much. If I were to repeat the cake (unlikely, given the limited appeal around here) I might try toasting the flaked coconut to give some crunch and a different flavor.

RHC: Quail Egg Indulgence Cake

2011-02-13T22:19:00.002-05:00

Visit after visit to the nearby Your DeKalb Farmer's Market I've spotted the quail eggs and thought "here's where to buy them when the Quail Egg Cake comes along." Friday morning when I went to buy them after my exercise class....no quail eggs. They were out, and the not-good English of the African immigrant stock clerk wasn't up to communicating more than "we're out".

As it turned out, Friday wasn't a good day to bake the cake, anyway, so I had another chance at finding quail eggs. I went to my backup idea and called the Buford Highway Farmer's Market. Not as close to my house, but indeed BHFM had quail eggs. I picked up two backs of 10--I planned to double the recipe which called for 5 yolks, but after considering the difficulties of shelling and separating quail eggs, plus the common problem of the yolks not adding up to Rose's specified weights, the second carton seemed like a good idea. In the end I had 1 spare out of my 20. [Edited to add: quail egg costs seem to have varied a good bit, so I thought I'd add in that mine were an inexpensive $1.59 for 10 eggs. ]

Quail egg separation is a tough proposition--either it's just the tiny size, or those whites really do cling tighter to the yolk than chicken eggs do. Or maybe the quail eggs were fresher and that made a difference. However, once the eggs were separated, the cake came together quickly with the now-familiar butter cake mixing method. This cake uses heavy cream as the liquid, plus the butter...the 'indulgence' part is more than the effort of using quail eggs.

I had decided to make 6 cakelets to reduce the serving size somewhat. The base recipe called for a mini heart-shaped pan to make a cake for two. My Texas muffin pans looked to be about the right capacity at 7+ ounces, as the heart pan was supposed to be 3 cup capacity. That turned out to be almost right. My cakelets rose just above the edge of the muffin wells and formed a small lip of the lovely crusty top. When the cakelets cooled and shrank, those lovely crusts fell off in little semicircles. Had I been an unscrupulous baker I'd have scarfed them all down leaving the poor little cakes bereft of most of their crust, but I was good and served the crusts with each cakelet.

We ate these with raspberries and lightly sweetened whipped cream, and really felt that the little bit of cream was needed, even though the cake was lovely by itself.

Tasting results: only the nephew didn't think much of this one--he didn't finish his and said he'd rather have another cake than this one on some future occasion. The rest of us, though, loved the crispy crunchy crust (as advertised), the fine crumb, and the nice vanilla/butter flavor. I'll make this one again...though probably with chicken eggs next time.

BBA #6: Challah

2011-02-12T22:43:00.001-05:00

Bread-of-the-week is Challah, the braided egg bread that's a part of many Jewish ceremonies. I'm not Jewish, but my sister-in-law and the kids (the next door neighbors) are, and for quite a while now I've been baking challah every Friday for SIL's Shabbat. After several years, I've settled into a version that's mostly whole-wheat, with dried cherries. Occasionally I'll try a variation like doing something special that's sweeter for Rosh Hashanah, but the usual response is that whatever I tried isn't as good as the standard. I need to do an updated post with my current recipe (thought I had, but it didn't turn up when I searched my blogs), but this is fairly close if you add in 1/3 c. of dried cherries. I've since converted the flour measures from volume to weight, but I don't think the amounts changed.

With that background, I decided to use partly whole-wheat flour in Reinhart's recipe for challah and add the dried cherries, all in an attempt to forestall the comments I knew I'd get otherwise from the family. I went with half whole wheat, as that's usually a fairly safe substitution. I had no problems with the dough coming together with the lower amount of water, but I did keep adding more during the (machine) kneading as I like a fairly moist dough. I reason that it will help plump the dried cherries, which might otherwise steal moisture from the dough. I have no scientific basis for this reasoning. <g>

The first rise only got a little puffy in the allotted time , but there were no problems with the second rise--it started out at about 1 quart, and here has doubled that.

As I mentioned on Chris's post, I like to do a 6-strand braid for my challahs. I started with the 3-strand, then moved up with a few attempts at what Reinhart uses for his Celebration Challah, a smaller 3-strand on top of a larger one. On my attempts with that, either the smaller loaf fell to the side (or just off-center) during rising or baking, and/or the smaller loaf got too hard and crusty before the larger one was done. The 6-strand method I currently use is fast to do and gives a nicely complicated pattern and a fairly round cross-section which bakes evenly. I don't like to taper my challahs severely, because the smaller ends just get overbaked. Just a little bulging in the middle is what I want.

Improvised proof box--a plastic storage box turned over the loaf. I usually use my warming oven's proof setting for bread, but am sticking to Reinhart's preferred room temperature risings.

The crumb shot--nice textured.

Taste results: well, it didn't get tasted until about 9 PM, as SIL, nephew, and I went off to watch younger niece compete in the State high school diving meet. (She placed 12th--not bad for a freshman.) General reaction was that this challah was OK, but drier than the standard and not as flavorful. Some of the 'dry' problem might be that we usually get part of the challah eaten while still warm from the oven, which certainly boosts most any bread. However, I tasted it again this morning and still found it dry to the point that I reached for a little butter to go on it, something I never do with my standard version.

Another 'unfair comparisons' issue is that I didn't make Reinhart's recipe as written, and didn't use an equivalent proportion of whole-wheat flour as in my standard recipe. Nevertheless, I don't see any reason to abandon my standard for Reinhart's. Incidentally, early on in my attempts at challah I tried Beranbaum's from The Bread Bible, and also abandoned it. My memory is the same sort of issue--it just wasn't as rich and moist as the supermarket challahs (as I live very close to a large Jewish synagogue, the nearby supermarkets make good challah), and the recipe I now use is better. It certainly is if you like whole wheat and dried cherries!

RHC: Mud Turtle Cupcakes

2011-02-07T23:15:00.001-05:00

Well, they taste good, and *some* of them are pretty. Others...not so much.

Cake-of-the-week for the Heavenly Cake Bakers was from the "baby cakes" chapter: Mud Turtle Cupcakes. The base is a chocolate cupcake made with cocoa powder and sour cream, which is topped with ganache, caramel, pecans (to be the turtle's legs and head), more caramel, and more ganache. Plenty of goo, in other words.

Given my continuing issue with RHC cakes as too dry for my tastes, I was careful to not overbake and took the main pan out while I still got a few crumbs on my test toothpick. Alas, several tasters still found the cake too crumbly. Worse, several cupcakes baked with a outer crust around the top rim and when the cupcake then pulled away from the sides of the liner, this crust then fell into the gap between cupcake and liner. Four cupcakes were too high in the oven (the overflow cupcake pan wouldn't fit on the rack with my big pan) and the tops probably browned too fast, but several cupcakes in the main pan did this too. That was the ugly part. But you know, by the time everything was covered in ganache, caramel, and pecans, it was hard to tell which ones had the crusted edges and which didn't.

I made the caramel twice as I let my attention waver *just* at the wrong time and cooked the sugar to too high a temperature. I was afraid that batch would set up as too chewy (or worse, as hard candy) and so made another batch. As it turned out, my teaspoons of caramel must have been a little generous and I ended up using some of the 'bad' batch when I ran out of the good. Maybe it was a little firmer than the other, but not enough to matter.

Is it just a "mud cupcake" without the pecans to make a turtle? This one is for a co-worker who doesn't appreciate nuts.

Taste results: Unanimous positives on the toppings, and close to unanimous "too crumbly" on the cake. I was careful to eat my topping with the cake, and liked the combination. Others attacked the topping first (and it was rather difficult to do otherwise, especially as we were gathered around the TV for the Super Bowl and didn't have plates), then got down to cake and variously found it uninteresting, too crumbly, a little dry, or just not up to the level of the topping. At the office today the same sort of comments came out: lovely gooey topping, cake is too crumbly, and the combination is hard to eat. I think I'll remember this topping idea for some future kid's party or bake sale, but will hunt for a less delicate and moister chocolate cupcake to go under it.

BBA #5: Casatiello

2011-02-07T22:53:00.001-05:00

I did not have a good baking day yesterday, with problems with bread-of-the-week and cake-of-the-week. Both ended up edible, however, just not pretty. I've got theories as to some of the issues, but part of the problem was just doing too much at once, leading to timing problems. Starting with the bread...

It's week 5 of the BBA Challenge 2011, and the bread is a variation of #4, brioche. Casatiello adds meat and cheese to a brioche dough, making a sandwich-in-a-bread loaf.

The dough gave me no problems except that I added more water than called for--beyond the normal dry winter day humidity correction somewhat, but not too far. For the meat and cheese I used a Trader Joe's "Chianti Red Wine Artisan Salami" and a sharp provolone which I cut into cubes instead of shredding for more cheese impact. (Thanks for the suggestion, Chris.) I did sauté the salami, which was good and bad. The little 'crispness' made it harder to slice and eat, but on the other hand I did get rid of a good bit of fat which the bread didn't need. There was plenty already with the buttery brioche and the cheese.

I opted to bake my casatiello in an 8" springform. All went well, the bread got to an internal temperature of 185 within the allotted time for a large loaf, and I took it out. I decided the springform counted as a 'bread pan' and went to remove the bread from it to cool....and collapsed the loaf. The melting cheese had stuck to the sides a little so I loosened those, unlatched the springform, but when I was wiggling to get it loose the loaf tilted a little and collapsed the bottom. The sides looked very pale and perhaps didn't have the strength to hold up the tall, crusty part that had rised above the pan. Which perhaps is a sign that I let the bread over-rise--I was working on something else and let both rises go too far. I tried turning my baked loaf upside down, and even put it back in the oven to brown a little on the bottom (and dripped cheese on the oven floor as I did so), but it only collapsed further as it cooled. If I try this bread again I'll do a two-loaf option, and maybe even bake it in paper bags.

On slicing, the edges look great, with an tight even crumb around the cheese pockets. As you'd expect, the collapsed part is denser and has lines that look like streaks of cheese. I suspect that if I toast it a little, even this part will taste fine. Or maybe it will be a good base for a savory bread pudding...if I can make one that's not so rich it causes indigestion.

Taste results: my brother and sister-in-law liked it, as did I. Older niece had a small piece but thought that was enough, and younger niece found it way too cheesy for her. Those pockets of cheese are the opposite of what she will tolerate in a cheese bread--the grated stuff that melts away in the bread is more for her. Don't think the nephew tried the bread, as we were having a family Super Bowl snack dinner and he was more interested in the Buffalo wings, mini pizzas, mini veggie frittatas, etc.

BBA #4: Brioche

2011-01-31T21:35:00.002-05:00

The BBA Challenge 2011 assignment for the week was brioche. I've made brioche before, I think as a food-processor recipe, but it's been years. Reinhart offers three versions, with different levels of richness (primarily butter content). I went with middle-class brioche, the one with a cup of butter, as opposed to 2 cups (rich man's) or 1/2 cup (poor man's). No matter which level you pick, brioche is pretty indulgent stuff.

Clearly I need to work on my shaping methods for brioches à tête. Mine came out "brioches décapité", mostly (pardon my French). Part of that was maybe putting too much dough in the little tins, and maybe making the 'tête' too large. The larger part was certainly not getting the 2 pieces stuck together well enough. I used the technique I learned way back when: make the smaller piece into a teardrop shape, make a hole in the larger piece, and stick the pointy part of the teardrop in the hole. Well...that didn't work so well, and most of my heads ended up beside the bodies. Next time I'll try the one piece wrap-around and through method in the book.

I tried a few other experiments: I made 4 small cinnamon rolls with one piece of dough, using KA's cinnamon filling for convenience as I didn't have cinnamon-sugar mixed up and didn't want to add (more) butter in the filling anyway.

I stuck a chunk of dark chocolate in 2 for Brioche au Chocolat--that was lovely, though I should have skipped the 'a tete' on those for better centering of the chocolate. And when I was all out of mini brioche tins and couldn't find my big one, I made the rest of the dough into a plain loaf which will become toast and/or bostock, the variety that's staled brioche with an almond-cream topping. Meanwhile, that loaf will go in the freezer. I let the loaf over-rise, I think, as I lost track of its timing--certainly the texture isn't as nicely fine-grained as the brioche a tete.

Baking notes: no problems with the dough. It appeared to be too wet at one point with part of the mixture in a layer over the sides of the mixer bowl and the rest on the paddle, but when I did a scrape-down and started up the mixer again, the dough came together and was more like a usual bread dough ball. It still needed another scrape-down or two, but it crossed the line from 'batter' to 'bread' at that point. I never needed to switch to the dough hook.

I wrapped the dough in plastic wrap (instead of using a plastic bag) and tucked it in the fridge overnight for the requisite chilling, but failed to remember that it would rise some--almost tilted a fridge shelf with the rise.

I overbaked all of 'em to too high a temperature. I forgot to set a timer on one batch, but have no excuse for the rest except not checking early enough. But you know, brioche is so rich this was not a big problem. I get to try again next week, as the Casatiello is a variation on brioche.

RHC: Cradle Cake

2011-01-30T22:05:00.001-05:00

Cake-of-the-week is a sort of gimmick cake, and harks back to the 1953 Pillsbury Bake-Off where it was a "Senior Third Prize Winner". A yellow butter cake is baked in a "cradle" of dacquoise, or meringue with chopped nuts and chocolate in it. In the original incarnation it was baked in a tube pan: Rose reduced the recipe to fit in a loaf pan, and used a buttermilk cake for the filling. (This blog has both an adaptation and the original recipe, and the recipe for Rose's version is on Serious Eats.)

The interior cake is a quick-and-easy buttermilk cake, but by adding in the dacquoise I had a mess of a kitchen at the end. There was the food processor for chopping chocolate and pecans, the KitchenAid mixer bowl with wire whip for the meringue, plus the other mixer bowl with beater blade for the cake batter. Add the other things cooking in the kitchen on Friday (the weekly whole-wheat dried-cherry challah, Latin chicken, and curried cauliflower flatbread), and the place was a mess of equipment and ingredients all afternoon. I need to spread out my cooking so Friday isn't a marathon session

For the dacquoise, I didn't pre-chop the chocolate enough and the mixture got damp and clumpy when chopped with the nuts. When I stopped for fear of ending up with chocolate-pecan butter, some small chocolate chunks were still present. I ended up hand chopping those, then re-chilled the mixture before folding it in to the meringue.

[dacquoise-lined pan, batter filling the center, cake coming out of the oven, and cake turned out of the pan]

My non-stick metal loaf pan was the right capacity (7 cups). I sprayed with Baker's Joy then lined the bottom with parchment--but I wonder if it might have done better without the parchment lining. The cake came out of pan quite easily, but when I peeled the parchment off the bottom the meringue was still damp, whereas the sides were crisp. I notice on the original recipe there's a note to be sure to not underbake, and I wonder if getting the meringue to dry out is the reason. On one side of my cake the dacquoise broke and had a gap--looking back at my photos I think I didn't get the cake batter filled in against the dacquoise.

Tasting results:

Nephew: the meringue tastes like a brownie, and the cake is moist and has good flavor.

Older niece: reminds me of a Milano cookie--needs to be eaten with milk, just like Milanos do.

Younger niece: I see where the Milano and brownie comments came from--the brownie idea is because of the crunch of the meringue with the chocolate (probably from the drizzle). This is one of my favorites of the cakes.

Sister-in-law: good, but not a favorite. The meringue might have contributed too much sweetness for me.

Me: very nice combination, with the chocolate from the dacquoise and the drizzle glaze, the little crunch from the dacquoise, and a nice moist buttermilk cake in the middle. This one is going high on my list of favorites, too. However, I'm not sure I'd ever repeat it, as it was a lot of trouble to get that nice crunchy chocolate-pecan cradle.

TVP experiments: Chipotle Black Bean Burgers and Meatless Meatballs

2011-01-24T22:43:00.002-05:00

This was the first test of a new cookbook, Lukas Volger's Veggie Burgers Every Which Way, which I think I found via the Svelte Gourmand blog--it was some food blog or other of the list I read, anyway, and the Amazon reviews looked good, too. I'm always looking for ways to reduce the meat in my diet and not miss it (big carnivore here), and this looked like a possible option.

This first recipe was not an unqualified success. (The chipotle black bean burger is available in the Amazon "look inside" feature, so I'm not going to type it out.) First off, the oven temperature was omitted from the recipe--hitting a typo on your first shot is not a good sign. In a lot of the recipes Volger has you brown the burger on the stove first, then finish cooking it in the oven. The base of the recipe is a mix of reconstituted textured vegetable protein (TVP), cooked brown rice, and bread crumbs, with black beans, corn, and onion for character and chipotle peppers in adobo and lime juice for spice. I omitted the cilantro--I would have searched the garden to see if there was any usable parsley after our snow/sleet cover finally melted, but forgot. I did go the convenience route: canned black beans, brown rice in the pre-cooked bag (would have used Trader Joe's frozen, but I don't have any on hand), and panko.

These formed into patties without too much difficulty, and were pretty easy to brown and then move to the oven. I then had to hold them a little too long while waiting for sister-in-law's call that the rest of dinner was ready, and that probably contributed to my main problem with these: the brown rice was too hard, so the browned crust, instead of being a tasty bit, had these tough grains in it. Flavor-wise the burgers bordered on too spicy--I rounded up on the chipotltes, and should have stuck to the recommended amount. Without the cilantro (or a substitute), the peppers were the main flavoring, and it was a little one-note, I think. All in all, these were acceptable, but not great. I've got some other recipes marked to try, though!

Second TVP experiment was these Homemade Meatless Meatballs. Again some substitutions: I used smoked paprika instead of cumin, and dried basil instead of fresh. I've now got a container of browned meatballs in the fridge for quick meals--tonight's dinner was a handful of them with jarred marinara sauce on top. These are pretty good, overall. They're not going to fool anyone who's expecting ground beef or turkey, but the flavor is not bad, they hold together pretty well heated in a sauce, and are very low fat. I'll send some next door to see if anyone else finds 'em edible.

RHC: Génoise Très Café

2011-01-23T22:43:00.001-05:00

Lots of cooking and baking this weekend, thus this flurry of posts to document the results. I'm not sure that the black-bean chipotle burgers will get written up tonight...

Cake of the week is Génoise Très Café, or a sponge cake with coffee-coffee-coffee. Coffee in the cake batter, coffee in the syrup, and coffee in the whipped ganache frosting. My bottle of coffee extract got quite a workout. I added a fourth coffee touch with chocolate-covered coffee beans as decorations. Alas, despite the strong positive feelings towards coffee in my family, this cake got mediocre reviews because of my continuing problems with génoise.

I have made reasonable génoise, though usually not ones that achieve the heights RHC states they should. I beat the eggs for at least 5 minutes (usually just that long, as I'm afraid of overbeating), I fold the remaining ingredients in lightly and quickly, and....I get a not-so-tall génoise. This one, unfortunately, was downright dense, but with lots of other cooking to do I didn't make a second one. Perhaps I should stick to ladyfingers and biscuit, which are only supposed to be a half-inch or so high.

I was again doing a half-recipe (despite our love of coffee, we do not generally love the génoise), and you can see that my baked cake is little more than half as high as the 2" cake pan sides. The syrup gave it moisture, but the texture looked more like a pound cake--not what you want in génoise. The autofocus didn't cooperate on my slice-of-cake picture, and I'll refrain from sticking in a thumbnail of it. Trust me, it was dense.

On the other hand, the light whipped ganache did much better for me than last time, perhaps because with the small quantity (a half recipe yields about a cup) I did it all by hand. I whipped very briefly--far less than the 3 minutes called for by machine--and had a lovely smooth mocha ganache just making soft peaks. Alas, it did indeed continue to thicken as I syruped my cake layer, and when I stirred the ganache to start the frosting process, I had an instantly grainy mess. At this point I wasn't putting more effort into it (hey, the ganache still tasted fine, and didn't have an objectionable mouth-feel), so I frosted away regardless.

I think I've already summarized the tasting comments: nice flavor (coffee!), but dense. I've got 3 more sponge cakes to bake from RHC, so perhaps I'll have some technique breakthrough with one of those and get a truly light génoise. No wait--one of those is the Orange-Glow Chiffon. Two more cracks at a génoise....I'll try to contain my excitement. :)

BBA #3: Bagels

2011-01-23T15:46:00.002-05:00

The BBA Challenge 2011 is on bread #3, bagels, this week. I've never tried my hand at bagels before, but have always been intrigued by the technique of boiling, then baking. These came off very well indeed, and I'll keep working on getting just the bagel I like from the process.

The dough was (unusually for bread!) just right as written--I used the stated amounts of flour and water without adjustment. The result is an extremely stiff dough, but satiny smooth. This time I did check both temperature and the windowpane test after machine kneading, and the dough was great. I made a half-recipe again, then made the bagels in an in-between size to get 9 from the half-recipe. I let mine cold-rise for the minimum time, and my test bagel floated immediately in cold water (and also the next day when boiling them--lots of yeast action in my bagels, I guess). I was surprised at how easy and fast the boiling process was. I guess I expected the risen bagels to take careful handling, but these are sturdy and could be picked up and dropped in the water without difficulty.

I boiled mine for 2 minutes a side in search of the very chewy bagels I remember from my first bagel experiences back in the mid-'70's when I moved to Atlanta for college and had a Jewish roommate. (Best I recall there were no bagels in south Georgia at that point. No good ones, certainly.) I eventually settled on a bagel bakery at Ansley Mall that had great bagels: dense, chewy, lots of flavor. That bakery is long gone, and I haven't found a substitute for the same style. Not that there aren't some good bagel bakeries in Altanta (and I got good bagels indeed on a trip to NYC a few years ago), but the general style of bagel has gone to a less-dense and often less-chewy version.

Toppings: My favorite is sesame, sister-in-law's is poppyseed. Chris's post sparked an attempt at asiago, as there just happened to be a chunk of asiago cheese in my fridge. Younger niece requested an everything bagel. "Everything", based on my pantry contents, turned out to be sesame seed, poppyseed, kosher salt, and reconstituted dried onion. No dried garlic chips in the house, so I sprinkled a little garlic power over the blend, too.

I used Rose's suggestion in The Bread Bible of an egg white wash to glue on my toppings. I'd be interested in a side-by-side comparison of the egg white wash vs. topping the bagel when it's damp from the boiling to see if one makes the topping stick better. Next time....

Warned by Chris's post about the very short stated baking time, I checked Rose's and found it bakes at 5 minutes at 500° (like Reinhart's), but then 20 minutes at 450. I tried Rose's timing on my first batch of 6, but thought those were a little overbaked. I found a blog note with Reinhart's suggestions for asiago cheese bagels (summary: bake 8 minutes at 500, rotate, then 8 minutes at 450), and that seemed about right for full-sized bagels. I'll cut back a minute or two next time I make my mid-sized version.

Tasting comments: Good bagels! Nephew and younger niece really liked the everything bagels, sister-in-law approved the poppyseed one, and I had an asiago one with lunch yesterday and a sesame seed one for breakfast. The texture is not as dense as my memory of that long-ago bagel, but these have good chew and a nice flavor. Definitely up for a repeat, and I'll be trying cinnamon-raisin with Reinhart's adaptation, too.

Edited to add the shot of a sliced bagel, and to note that last night sister-in-law said the kids would like the bagel supply moved to their house, as they'd eaten all I took over for tasting. Too bad, I was down to two, and those are breakfasts for me this week. Guess I'll make a full recipe next time...

Chocolate Passionfruit Tart

2011-01-23T15:00:00.002-05:00

With only a little hinting, younger niece chose a 'clipping' (printouts of web pages these days, mostly) from my recipes-to-try file for her birthday celebration: Chocolate Passionfruit Tarts. I was seduced by the beautiful photographs and by the flavor of passionfruit, discovered first by making Rose's White Gold Pasison Genoise. That was for younger niece's birthday last year, come to think of it.

Recipe description in pictures:

Make a chocolate pate sucre crust and pre-bake. Brush with egg-white glaze to seal.

Spread a thin layer of butter-enriched ganache in crusts.

Make a passionfruit mousse, let it cool, and fill tarts with it.

Notes: we all liked the flavors, but had various comments to try to improve it overall. First on the cooking side: I made a half recipe of the crust and ganache, but decided to make a full recipe of the mousse to use up more of the package of passionfruit puree. However, when I'd filled my tarts I had about an ounce of mousse left. Maybe my tart proportions made the volume difference (the recipe doesn't give a suggested tart size), but just be warned. I got 6 4-1/2" x 3/4" tartlets, one 3" or so, and 2 baby 2" tartlet from the crust scraps.

The biggest tartlets were too large for our preferred dessert serving size: on a repeat I'd go for the 3 or 3-1/2" size. The chocolate crust was difficult to work with even rolling it between 2 pieces of parchment--it's got a very high butter content and went from "too rigid to be worked" to "about to melt" in what seemed like seconds, needing frequent trips back to the fridge to chill. Younger niece wanted a higher ratio of ganache to mousse, and I think I agree with her. I suggested that we do a crustless version, even, with maybe a 1:2 ganache:mousse blend and maybe a dab of whipped cream on top. My brother would like a different crust, though, to keep the crunch but do better than the flavor in this one. Maybe a shortbread crust, or plain pate sucree. (I'm no great shakes at pate sucree or any pie crust...might improve by changing crusts, might not...)

Last note of possible improvement is that the passionfuit mousse is quite stiff. The recipe describes it as "passionfruit puree, sugar, butter, eggs, and a smidge of gelatin", but that smidge is really 3 teaspoons. I'll cut that back to 2 next time, trying for a softer and less jello-like texture.

Lots of critical comments above, but don't be turned off. These tarts are a really nice flavor combination, and are beautiful to boot.

White Chili with Cornbread

2011-01-23T12:00:00.001-05:00

New recipe, White Chili with Cornbread from the King Arthur Flour site.

Notes: It starts with cooked chicken, and the easy route was rotisserie chicken. It took one plus the breasts of a second to get the 5-1/2 c. OK, I might have had 6 cups in there, or maybe a little more. I skipped the fresh jalapeño pepper because I didn't want to deal with chopping it, cut the cumin back from 1 tablespoon to 1/2 teaspoon (I don't like cumin very well, but even so I think I will up to a full teaspoon next time). Skipped the cilantro in the cornbread--I *really* don't like cilantro. And skipped the sugar in the cornbread because, well, sugar in cornbread is an abomination. (Hey, born-and-bread Southerner here!)

My usual pan for this type of dish is a flat Pyrex, and my 3 qt./13"x9" isn't as deep as they called for. I moved up to the 4 qt. Pyrex, and that was right for the amount of chili and cornbread. The effect was about the same thickness of cornbread and chili--seemed nicely balanced to me. This is a personal thing, as younger niece was looking for more cornbread with her servings.

I skipped putting shredded cheese on top of the chili and under the cornbread, and instead sprinkled about 3/4 c. on top of the cornbread where it browned prettily. I think it would have been lost in the middle of the casserole, at least at the amount I'd have been willing to add, even if reduced fat. A big gooey layer of it would have been tastable, of course, but the calorie load....

Tasting results: this went over well. It was not spicy, and I think several of us would like to up that next time--add the jalapeño, certainly, and maybe move up one or more of the cans of mild chopped green chilis to a higher heat level, if I can find them. (I'm not sure they come in anything but mild.) The pureed white beans give a nice 'sauce', and I found the chili mixture to be moist but not soupy, which wouldn't have worked as well under the cornbread topping. From my experiences trying to perfect Beatrice's Chicken Pie, it's difficult to hit that right balance of liquid in this type of dish.

Nephew was very dubious at first appearance, was given a sampler serving, and later went back for a serious full serving. The only person who really didn't eat it was older niece, who said she just wasn't very hungry. However, she did manage to choke down a full serving of cake-of-the-week, the Genoise Tres Cafe--she's a coffee fiend.

RHC: Banana Refrigerator Cake with Dreamy Creamy White Chocolate Frosting

2011-01-17T23:10:00.001-05:00

Free choice week for the Heavenly Cake Bakers: a chance to catch up with Marie on one of the cakes she baked before we started baking along. Once the icy streets had melted enough for me to get to a store, I bought some cream cheese and white chocolate for the frosting and was ready to make a half-size banana refrigerator cake. Luckily I had a frozen banana available (well, plus sister-in–law offered a backup banana that wasn't quite ideally ripe for banana cake), because the winter storm had left a dearth of bananas in my usual store.

I'm going with a quick write-up for this easy cake--I imagine only the frosting that keeps this one off the easy list, and it's not very difficult if the ingredient temperatures are OK.
For the cake, the wet ingredients (bananas, sour cream, eggs, lemon zest, and vanilla) are combined in a food processor for better homogenization of the banana. That combination transfers to the mixer for beating with turbinado sugar, then the oil (not butter, for better tenderness coming out of the fridge).The dry ingredients are sifted on top and beaten in, and the batter is done. Mine baked up with a fairly high dome in a 6" pan with a baking strip on it, and the small cake took longer than the time given for a full-sized one. I blame that on the more watery texture of my frozen banana. No sweat: I just frosted the dome. :)

For the frosting, the biggest issue was dealing with a yield of less than 1/2 cup. I turned to a mini-processor that came with my immersion blender, which took a little more scraping of the sides than if I'd been doing a full recipe in the big Cuisinart, but it got the job done. Unlike the last time I made the dreamy creamy white chocolate frosting, the melted white chocolate blended in to the butter-cream cheese mixture without forming any little chocolate chunks.

Tasting results: it's a hit! I love it--moist cake with a nice amount of banana flavor, and cream-cheese frosting. What's not to like? Younger brother really liked it, and so did older brother (in town so we could all three go spend the weekend working on our father's estate, to whit, getting stuff out of the house in south Georgia). I sent the rest of the little cake next door and didn't get a specific report other than "there's none left" when my brothers and I got back tonight. Next time there's an over-ripe banana around, I think I'll make this cake instead of freezing the banana--it would be a good snacking cake without the extra effort of the frosting.

BBA #2: Artos (Greek Celebration Breads)--Christopsomos

2011-01-17T22:13:00.001-05:00

Another product of the housebound period of last week's winter storm: bread #2 for the BBA Challenge. The base recipe for Artos is an enriched bread (it has eggs, honey, olive oil, and milk) with spices and flavorings--cinnamon primarily, with nutmeg, cloves, allspice, almond extract, and orange or lemon zest or extract. I needed my lemon zest for something else, had no orange on hand, so I used a touch of lemon oil. I decided to do the Christopsomos options, which adds raisins, dried cherries, and walnuts to the bread--but i skipped the raisins because the folks next door aren't fond of 'em. I have to get rid of all this bread somehow, you see...

Fist up was the barm, a term I've been seeing on people's blogs without knowing what it really is, other than one of several flour-water mixtures mixed up ahead of time and added to bread for flavor. Barm, in Reinhart's usage (I understand that the term maybe has some other definitions) is a sourdough starter, really. After reading through all the instructions for the multi-day project of starting your own with wild yeast, I saw the line "[over] time the organisms indigenous to your region will gradually take charge of it...a starter made from a seed culture imported from Egypt or Russia will, over time, produce bread that tastes like a starter made locally from scratch." Aha! My sourdough starter, purchased several years ago from KA and fed 1:1 by weight, surely has by now been taken over by indigenous microorganisms. It should be the same thing I'd get if I followed the make-your-own steps. All I need to do is feed the starter the night before I want to bake bread, and make sure I have enough volume for the recipe.

This dough was very well behaved. All the ingredients went in the mixer bowl, on went the dough hook, and eventually there was a lovely ball of dough. I didn't knead the full 10 minutes because the texture looked so good. Come to think if it, I also skipped the windowpane test and the temperature test...I'll try to do better next time...but it felt right.

The dough rose nicely to double, if slowly--I'm getting used to these room temperature rises instead of my usual practice of using my warming oven's proof setting, which makes things go much faster. Reinhart maintains the slower rise gives more flavor, but says if you need the speed, use whatever you need to to give the dough a warmer environment.

To shape the Christopsomos, the dough is divided 2/3 - 1/3, and the smaller piece goes in the fridge. The larger piece is formed into a boule and allowed to double, then the smaller piece comes out and is used to make the decorative cross and curlicues. Except...I misread and formed the decorations before the second rise. I guess if I'd followed the directions I'd have had better definition in the curls.

There's an optional sugar-syrup glaze which I skipped in fovar of a little butter rubbed over the warm loaf for some shine.

Taste results: a lovely bread, very nice flavor with the spices in the dough. The cherries are a great bread addition (my weekly challah almost always has dried cherries in it). It was great just plain, with butter, or toasted. I might make this one for a breakfast bread without bothering with the fancy shaping.

RHC: Double Chocolate Whammy Groom's Cake

2011-01-14T00:25:00.001-05:00

Atlanta got hit with a winter storm this week, as you may have heard. Sunday night to Monday morning saw about 4-1/2 inches of snow and sleet at my house, and then it got cold, so the usual "gone in a couple of days" storm stuck around. This is the South where such events are rare and the equipment to deal with it isn't in place. Soooo....schools have been closed all week. (The kids next door are thrilled.) My office was closed 3 days, and opened late today (but I could work from home). All you guys from places where snow is a regular occurrence, please snicker quietly so I can't hear you.

Until some melting started yesterday I was housebound--I'm a Southern driver, and I know better than to get out on the roads when things are very snowy/icy. The cats were thrilled, as I must be staying home to provide extra attention and playtime for them, right? Or maybe it would be a good time to do some baking. I could have done a cake for the free choice week we're in, but I'm down to 5 cakes Marie has done that I haven't. The banana cake needed cream cheese, not on hand. No cream of coconut for the Heavenly Seduction coconut cake, no cream cheese for the Whipped Cream No-Bake Cheesecake (which sounded like way too much trouble in any case--custard? Italian meringue? Not this week, thanks). No piles of berries for the chocolate trifle or the berry shortcake. Not looking good...but there's the Double Chocolate Whammy Groom's Cake. Marie isn't going to schedule it for HCB because it's in the wedding cakes chapter, but she made it during our first free-choice week last February and as a chocoholic I knew I was going to have to bake it sometime.

It's a gimmick cake, really. Make a pan of very fudgey brownies. Cut these up into little cubes. Fold brownie cubes into a chocolate cake batter. Bake (Rose used a specialty pan shaped like a stadium to emphasize the "manly groom" aspect <g>) and serve.

Brownies, maybe just a little underbaked. Younger niece assured me that was fine, as they would bake again in the cake.

Oh look! My cooling rack has made a 1/2" grid on the brownies to give me a cutting guide!

It makes quite a pile of brownies, even after niece steals one. Her verdict: skip the cake, eat the brownies now.

Is that all the batter, and can it possibly cover all the brownie cubes?

Guess it can....

I went with the old-fashioned Bundt pan to minimize the amount of odd crevices I'd have to pack the batter into, and to avoid thinner edges that might scorch. Even so I had a few air pockets on the cake.

Baked up beautifully, but again maybe underbaked. I went with the 190 degree mark given for the brownies and for butter cakes in general, not trusting my ability to pick the "springs back when pressed" moment. But you know, having to scrape some goo off your slicing knife after each cut isn't such a bad thing in a brownie-cake. Maybe I should have gone to a plastic knife like I use for brownies.

Tasting results: No complaints about this one, except for the general "why not just make brownies?" I had hoped to be able to see the brownie chunks in the cake, but they are only perceptable by the moister texture compared to the cake proper. On the other hand, there's really not much cake there anyway, so mostly you do just get brownies.

BBA #1: Anadama Bread

2011-01-13T23:07:00.001-05:00

First bread for the BBA Challenge 2011! This is the Anadama Bread, a standard white-flour loaf enhanced with some cornmeal and flavored with molasses. The cornmeal is soaked overnight (thus it's, logically, a "soaker" in this bread-baking terminology I'm learning to use)--that was different from anadama bread I've made in the past where the cornmeal was just added to the flour. Reinhart's version calls for polenta grind cornmeal.

Notes:

I used garden-variety "Grandma's" molasses, that being all I had on hand. I think I'd prefer this loaf with the lighter molasses Reinhart recommends--the molasses flavor was a little too strong. Or maybe I should have tried that leftover pomegranate molasses...not sure what the relative sweetness levels are, though.

I mixed and kneaded in the KitchenAid (I may do a post on 'how I do bread' to cover my level of experience and my usual methods), and found as others did that the recipe needed more flour than the recipe called for to get past a quite sticky dough to merely tacky.

I did a half recipe (one loaf) and used the slightly oversized 10 x 5" corrugated loaf pan purchased from King Arthur. The loaf took quite a while for the second rise, then I forgot it and let it over-proof slightly. I still got some oven spring, so perhaps it was no big deal.

The bread had a nice texture, very light. The molasses and cornmeal combo, though, just doesn't do much for my taste buds, so I suspect I won't repeat this one.

The BBA Challenge bread list

2011-01-10T22:44:00.028-05:00

I'll update this post to track my progress on the BBA Challenge 2011.

www.flickr.com

This is a Flickr badge showing items in a set called BBA Challenge 2011. Make your own badge here.

Anadama Bread
Artos: Greek Celebration Breads (Christopsomos)
Bagels
Middle-Class Brioche
Casatiello
Challah
Ciabatta (choose one variation)
Cinnamon Buns and Sticky Buns
Cinnamon Raisin ~~Walnut~~ Pecan Bread
Corn Bread
Cranberry-Walnut Celebration Bread
English Muffins
Focaccia
French Bread
Italian Bread
Kaiser Rolls
Lavash Crackers
Light Wheat Bread
Marbled Rye Bread
Multigrain Bread Extraordinaire
Pain à l’Ancienne
Pain de Campagne
Pane Siciliano
Panettone
Pizza Napoletano
Poolish Baguettes
Portuguese Sweet Bread
Potato Rosemary Bread
Pugliese
Basic Sourdough Bread
(Sourdough) New York Deli Rye
100% Sourdough Rye Bread
(Sourdough) Poilane-Style Miche
(Sourdough) Pumpernickel Bread
(Sourdough) Sunflower Seed Rye
Stollen
Swedish Rye (Limpa)
Tuscan Bread
Vienna Bread
White Breads (choose one variation)
Whole-Wheat Bread
Potato, Cheddar, and Chive Torpedoes
Roasted Onion and Asiago Miche

Starting the BBA Challenge....sort of

2011-01-10T18:21:00.001-05:00

As we're on the downhill slope of the Heavenly Cakes Bake-along, I've been thinking about another online baking project. French Fridays with Dorie almost seduced me, the Gutsy Cooks would keep up the connection with several HCBs (though I wasn't grabbed by the cookbook they are using), but I decided I was better off sticking with a baking emphasis. The Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge is out there, the cookbook (Peter Reinhart’s book, The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread) had been on my wish list for a while, so I decided to go for it.

Why not The Bread Bible, which I already owned? Size of project: BBA has 43 recipes or so, plus a few variations. The Bread Bible has 84 recipesand (I suspect) many more variations, and while I've done some baking from it, I have to confess that Rose's level of detail in some of those recipes may have crossed the line from helpful to 'I can't pick out the next step from all this verbiage'.

The main BBA Challenge started back in May 2009 with a rather different setup than some of the other Internet cooking groups. They don't bake together: each baker works on their own schedule. The only rule is that they bake all the recipes in BBA in the order presented in the book. The "in order" part may not get followed--we'll see. I first thought it was because the cookbook presented the recipes in some sort of logical order like requiring increasing skills, or contrasting different recipes, but it turns out that the recipes are presented in (wait for it)....alphabetical order. That rather changes my perception about the basic premise of the BBA Challenge from "has a purpose related to baking" to "akin to fraternity initiation ritual".

OK, small digression there, sorry.

The BBA Challenge quickly got too large for a "blog roll" approach and was frozen at 200 members. New joiners can just start baking, and post pictures, blog URLs, or questions to a Facebook group or a Flickr group. When they're done, they stop--rather like the Caucus Race from Alice in Wonderland, really. There's a new BBA Challenge 2011 group, just started this week, that is trying to do a more structured approach of bread a week, but I'm still uncertain about the "do 'em in order" thing so I'm debating whether to join.

Anyway, I may not bake these in order, though I did start with the first one today. I'll make another post with the list of breads and try to keep it updated as I bake.

RHC: White Velvet Cake with Milk Chocolate Ganache

2011-01-10T15:24:00.001-05:00

I was very glad that this week's cake-of-the-week for the Heavenly Cakes bake-along was on the quick-and-easy list. I attended my local filk convention this weekend, and so baking had to be either before or after that trip--I do go stay at the convention hotel even though it is in Atlanta, because filk convention activities run late into the evening. Or really, into the wee hours of the morning.

I think I started the cake about 2:30 Friday afternoon and still made it to the opening convention session shortly after it started at 7, including the time to pack, finish laundry, clean up the kitchen, photograph the cake, taste it myself, deliver it to the folks next door for them to taste later (with instructions to email comments to me), placate the cats made unhappy by the appearance of a suitcase, drive the 30 miles across town, and check in at the hotel. Add in the extras in the baking process of defrosting the frozen egg whites I'd forgotten to remove from the freezer, rescuing the ganache when it broke, and even digging out a pastry bag and star tip for at least a token amount of decorating, and you see that the actual cake-baking couldn't have taken very long!

(If I had known we'd have a winter storm in Atlanta Sunday night to Monday, keeping me home today, I could have reduced my Friday stress and baked today. Oh, well, I'm baking bread instead.)

The cake itself is a white cake (butter cake with egg whites only, no yolks), and is mixed with the usual method for RHC of blending the dry ingredients, adding the butter and some liquid (milk in this case), then adding the egg mixture in a couple of additions beating in between to create structure in the batter. Knowing my taste-test group and our usual reaction to Rose's butter cakes (a little on the dry side for our tastes), I did a half-recipe, baked in a 6" pan. I still used one of my Rose's (silicon) Cake Strips by clipping it with the ever-handy kitchen gadget of a binder clip to keep it tight around the pan. I've got sets of the Wilton cloth cake strips, but the silicon ones are so much easier to deal with if the cake pan is anywhere in the range that they fit.

My 6" pan was almost not big enough as it turned out, for this batter rose high during baking before subsiding a little to end up just completely filling the pan. It did end up with a very crisp edge around the top and a little bowing in the center of the edge of the cake, but a little trimming before applying the frosting took care of that.

The frosting is a milk-chocolate ganache, with some added butter and vanilla. After a search of several of my usual spots for superior chocolate, I was about to conclude that the higher-cacao milk chocolate called for wasn't going to be findable in this period of dark-chocolate mania. But Friday morning a quick stop at a smaller Whole Foods store turned up bars of "Endangered Species Chocolate" with a 48% cocoa content--even better than the 40-42% specified in the recipe. I was saved from having to mix the lower percent Ghirardelli I had in the pantry with some bittersweet.

For a change I actually followed the recipe's method of making the ganache--this time it was melt the chocolate in the microwave until almost melted, then stir until the melting was complete. Stir in warm cream until smooth....but my ganache broke despite care with the temperature. I rescued it by heating a couple of tablespoons of extra cream, adding a little chocolate, then adding some of the broken ganache. Stir, stir, stir, add this mixture to the rest of the ganache, and stir, stir, stir some more. Finally it all went smooth again. I used a small spatula instead of a whisk to incorporate the butter as the intent is not to add air to the ganache anyway. It was very hard to get all the little butter bits to blend in (and my butter was if anything too soft, so I don't know why), but most of them finally succumbed to being smashed against the side of my measuring cup I was using to make the ganache. I consoled myself by saying that a whisk would only have broken up the butter into even more little bits to stubbornly resist integration with the ganache. Don't tell me if there's some whisk magic that makes this wrong!

Once the butter and vanilla were incorporated, frosting went easily, if hurriedly at this point. I was worried that the ganache was too soft, but after a quick pause to finish my packing I came back to find it had set up almost too much. A stir softened it again, though, and frosting was completed with no more trouble.

Tasting results: I like this cake. The milk chocolate is a nice change, and the contrast with the white cake was nice. My brother agreed, liking the combination. However, the rest of the folks next door all felt the cake was dry (yeah, yeah, we always say that), though the ganache got praise. I certainly didn't think the cake was of the extra-moist type I really prefer, but eaten with the frosting I didn't find it unacceptably dry myself. Older niece said "not worth eating again because there are better options" (cake-of-the-week has spoiled these guys), younger niece agreed and noted that the cake part was "almost like white bread". Hmmm.....

Overall, a pretty good cake, but not in my list of ones to repeat. I may look for other opportunities for the milk-chocolate ganache, though.

RHC: Chocolate Bull's Eye Cakes

2011-01-02T23:29:00.002-05:00

This week's cake-of-the-week for the Heavenly Cake Bakers is from the cakelet section, making 6 largish cupcakes using a specialty Maryann pan--that's a pan that bakes a little depression in the top of the cake or cupcake, suitable for filling with fruit or a topping. I have a Maryann pan inherited from my mother, never used until the Heavenly Cakebake-along started. It's nice to be able to get the right pan down from the top shelf, and not have to debate the purchase of something new.

I think this week's post will be mostly pictures--as others have commented, this is a pretty straightforward cake, even though it has 5 components: cake, syrup, glaze, chocolate cream, and drizzle.

The Maryann pan that will create cakelets with a depression in the top of each one.

The cake itself is a genoise, which means beating the eggs and sugar for 5 minutes in a stand mixer as the egg foam provides the lift for the cake.

At the end of the 5 minutes, a lovely fluffy mixture to be blended with the flour, salt, and browned butter.

Browned butter (not very brown--I got impatient at the end), with vanilla, about to have some of the egg mixture folded in.

The genoise is complete and ready to bake.

Just out of the oven, with the cakelets barely browning and just starting to pull away from the edges of the pan.

The syruping of the cakelets was not so photogenic, but here you can see the glisten that the apricot glaze gives. The glaze also seals the cakes to keep them moist with the syrup.

The components for the chocolate cream, a chocolate custard. This was really luscious stuff.

Cakelets are filled and ready for the last step, a drizzle of chocolate ganache for decoration.

Ta da! Chocolate Bull's Eye Cake.

Tasting results: very favorable. Nephew likes the way all the flavors came together (but my brother was less certain that it all melded--he liked the components but was unsure about the combination). The nieces liked it. We all thought the cake was nice and moist, a point where we often find RHC lacking. And S., a friend of younger niece's who was having a sleep-over, said "This cake is amazing!"

RHC: Cranberry Crown Cheesecake

2010-12-27T17:31:00.002-05:00

I may be suffering from Heavenly Cake withdrawal--it's been two weeks since I baked from RHC. Last week's post was on a cake baked the first week in December, and this week's seasonal cheesecake seemed like a good contribution for my office holiday party potluck those two weeks ago. There was lots of other cooking and baking going on, just no Heavenly Cakes. I'm ready for those Chocolate Bull's-Eye Cakes! First, though, I'd better write up the cheesecake.

The first decision was whether to make the ladyfingers, or just use store-bought ones, or go with the no-crust option. After some pondering I decided to make them, partly because that way I could make a one-piece base for the cake and partly to reinforce my ladyfinger skills, newly gained when making the Lemon Canadian Crown.

The ladyfingers again came off smoothly, baked a couple of days before I needed to assemble the cheesecake. They did get sticky when stored in plastic wrap, and as I messed up a little and had to reposition the ring of ladyfingers around my springform pan because I forgot to grease it, I lost the pretty appearance of pristine ladyfingers. However, it didn't seem to matter--three people remarked that they thought the resulting cheesecake looked store-bought. Or maybe a few damaged patches are just to be expected, store-bought or no. :)

The cheesecake itself was extremely simple to mix up. One mixing bowl, beating first cream cheese and sugar, then adding eggs, then lemon juice, vanilla, and salt, then the large amount of sour cream. That's it--the batter is ready. When it came to pouring the batter into the prepared pan, I had too much cheesecake for my height of ladyfingers. I could have left them untrimmed and perhaps been able to fit all the batter in, though the rounded bottom might have left some gaps. However, I made a mini-cheesecake with leftover ladyfingers in a large custard cup, which let the family get a couple of bites each for tasting since the full-sized version went to the office party.

I baked it in a springform pan slid into a silicon pan (purchased cheap at a discount store), so no worries about water leaks into the springform. I was a little worried that the cheesecake might not be done, as you bake it for a specified time then leave it in the oven for another hour before opening the oven and removing the cake. At that point I did check the temperature, and the cheesecake was still at the lower end of the 'it's done' range so I felt safe taking it to the office party. The last step was to make the cranberry topping--cranberries and sugar with some cornstarch for thickening, cooked long enough to get the cranberries to pop. The results were festively red, and a nicely balanced level of sweetness.

I presliced the cheesecake before taking it to the office party, but didn't try to extract a piece for a "slice of cake" shot. I thought perhaps there would be a few pieces left afterwards (the office potluck tends to be well-supplied with sweets), but when I went to help with the cleanup, there was only a pile of crumbs in the center of the platter. I didn't get any detailed comments, but "good cheesecake" got repeated a lot. From my tasting of the mini-version, I agree. With a lot of sour cream to the cream cheese amount, this is a light-textured cheesecake with a nice hint of lemon flavor, nicely set off by the cranberry topping. Good cheesecake!

RHC: Tiramisù

2010-12-19T22:04:00.001-05:00

Tiramisù is another "catch-up-with-Marie" recipe--she baked it in July 2009 before the bake-along started in October 2009. I'd never tackled tiramisù before--I've had it in restaurants several times, but it was never a huge personal favorite and I never was drawn to making it myself. Maybe that was because each time it seemed different: a mushed up trifle sort of thing, an almost firm, close to cheesecake thing, strongly coffee, barely coffee, this is a recipe that can come out a number of ways.

I took advantage of my frozen half-recipe of homemade ladyfingers left over from the Lemon Canadian Crown, and decided to make a half recipe of tiramisù. The most complicated and time consuming part (and it was not very) was making a light custard flavored with marsala which involved beating egg yolks, sugar, and the marsala over simmering water and not ending up with scrambled marsala-flavored eggs. Maybe there was a little cooked egg yolk on the rim of the pan, but mostly I had a light fluffy egg mixture when the temperature hit the target of 165 degrees. Once the custard cooled down it was added to beaten marscapone, and then all folded in with whipped cream. I do have to stick in this shot of the pans I assembled as my "equipment mise en place" before getting started--this recipe does need a lot of dishes for all the components, and that's not counting what it took to make the ladyfingers. (Which I could have bought, after all.)

The luscious dairy layer is layered with the ladyfingers, which are dipped quickly in espresso syrup. Coffee-flavored ladyfingers on the bottom, then a layer of the marscapone mixture, then more ladyfingers, and the rest of the marscapone. Sprinkle on cocoa or grate on some bittersweet chocolate (that's what I did, or more like, what I had younger niece do), and then let the whole thing sit in the fridge for the flavors to meld.

The tiramisù was the second dessert option at one of sister-in-law's Hanukkah parties, and it was a big hit. Nancy W. (who considers herself something of a tiramisù connoisseur due to frequent tasting of restaurant versions) really liked this one, especially the noticeable coffee flavors and the good balance of ladyfingers to marscapone. Older niece really liked it, Sam W. and Claire W. did as well, and sister-in-law demanded that I get rid of any leftovers before she got home on Monday so as to not have the temptation around. The dissenter was younger niece, who thought the ladyfingers were too soggy with the espresso syrup. She likes the coffee flavor, but disliked the texture. That's certainly one of the tricky parts of putting this dessert together, as a couple of seconds too long and you can have ladyfinger mush in your pan of syrup. Even if things don't go too far as you soak, there's still a measure of personal preference in how the tiraamisù components are put together, so perhaps you can't expect to please everyone with a single version.

RHC: Financier-Style Vanilla Bean Pound Cakes

2010-12-13T21:16:00.001-05:00

Cake-of-the-week is back in the baby cakes chapter of Rose's Heavenly Cakes, with a mini pound cake baked in financier molds. I confess I don't remember the Mini Vanilla Bean Pound Cakes we baked back in July or the classic financiers from September well enough to "compare and contrast" with my taste buds--it's nice to have the blog entries to help.

This is not a true pound cake, as it uses egg whites only. While I miss the richness the egg yolks bring, I did get to pull a baggie of whites from the freezer--things have been heavy on the yolk side lately, I guess. I used my new vanilla bean paste for the first time, substituting for both the actual bean and the vanilla extract. (I didn't miss the task of trying to slice a somewhat shriveled vanilla bean in half, then scraping at the itty bitty seeds.) The batter mixes up very quickly, and as the recipe warned it did indeed look a little curdled when done. I did
measured out the ounce of batter into each financier mold squeezing from a zip-top plastic bag, trying to reduce my usual amount of slop over the top of the pan....but alas, it didn't help much. I ended up with 12 cakelets instead of the 10 promised by the recipe, nicely filling one financier mold.

My cakelets baked unevenly as this pan seems to do--one side of each cakelet rises higher than the other, sometimes enough to curl over slightly. Perhaps I need to rotate the pan halfway through to see if this might be due to uneven oven heating. The cakelets only browned slightly by the time they were done.

Tasting results were somewhat mixed, but this cakelet didn't wow anyone. My brother and I found it unremarkable, and I'll add that I prefer a tighter crumb on pound cake, (as almost always) would like it a little moister. Maybe the egg-white-only batter gave the larger crumb to this recipe. Older niece, noting that vanilla isn't among her favorite flavors but she does prefer vanilla bean to plain vanilla, found that this didn't say "vanilla bean" to her. Younger niece concurred. Older niece also found it a little dry and needing the accompanying glass of milk she got, and felt raspberries and whipped cream would greatly improved it. (I think everyone in the family agrees that raspberries and whipped cream enhance almost anything. Oh, and fudge sauce....) Nephew gave the most comments, saying it was moist and flavorful, but a little 'hard'--perhaps the cakelet, two days after baking, didn't hold well. Overall, this one was not a big hit. Based on my blog entries, I think the classic financier is the keeper of these three similar cakelets.

RHC: Chocolate Velvet Fudge Cake and Black Chocolate Party Cake

2010-12-06T21:54:00.001-05:00

It's Hanukkah this weekend, and my sister-in-law enjoys having a party or two during the holiday. This year it was 2 parties, one Saturday and one Sunday, and I took the opportunity to do a direct comparison of two unfrosted chocolate butter cakes that are presented back-to-back in Rose's Heavenly Cakes. The Chocolate Velvet Fudge Cake is the official cake-of-the-week, and the Black Chocolate Party Cake is one Marie baked before the bake-along got started. These cakes are similar is a lot of ways: both chocolate (duh!), both on the quick and easy list, both butter cakes, both use whole eggs, and both made with cocoa. The Chocolate Velvet Fudge Cake can be considered the base "chocolate butter cake", and the Black Chocolate Party Cake adds the variations: ground walnuts added to the batter, sour cream instead of water, turbinado sugar instead of superfine, and AP flour instead of cake. The last fillip for the Black Chocolate Party Cake is to brush it with a cocoa syrup while it is still hot.

I made the Black Chocolate Party Cake first. My only problems were related to using a new-to-me tube pan, a carousel pan that I think I bought because it was bundled with another one on eBay. The pan design is problematic for most baking, probably, because it produces a fairly thin edge of cake at the outer rim, guaranteed to over-bake--mine was noticeably too dark, though I didn't get any burnt taste. Then there were the issues produced by the cake-flipping called for in this recipe--the cake is turned out hot onto a plastic-wrap-lined plate so you can coat it with the cocoa syrup and not fling syrup dribbles all over your presentation plate. (Nonetheless I managed to fling syrup dribbles over myself and my counter. Maybe I should have covered more things with plastic wrap...) Once the cake is cool, the concept is that you turn the cake over onto a working plate, peel off the plastic wrap, then turn it again right-side-up onto the presentation cake plate. Alas, the carousel cake has a fairly narrow crown and a broad base. Flipping it onto the narrow crown, even for a minute or so, gave me a somewhat shorter, more compressed cake than I started with. I should have turned it back into the cake pan for support, and taken the risk of having some of the cocoa-coated cake stick to the pan.

After that, the Chocolate Velvet Fudge Cake was a snap. Like several other Heavenly Cake Bakers whose blogs I've already read, I used the dramatic Heritage Bundt pan. I had intended to make the large marzipan candle (candle, Hanukkah, you get it) for an accent, but alas ran out of time before the party started. OK, I used that time productively, as I made Monica's Asparagus Tart with Prosciutto as an appetizer--it got rave reviews, too, though I rather rushed next door with it after the guests had already arrived. I do think a fat marzipan candle would look great in the center of the Heritage Bundt cake pattern.

Both chocolate cakes were well received. The folks next door, who got to taste both, preferred the cake with walnuts, as it was a little moister. Or perhaps it was the coffee cream (borrowed from the recipe for Sybil's Pecan Torte) that added just the extra it needed. I served the velvet Fudge Cake without accompaniment, see above re: running out of time. As is my nearly constant refrain, both cakes were just a touch drier than we prefer, so my brother's comment about needing Coffee Cream to go with cake #2 was not just a plea for more whipped cream.

The remainder of the two cakes went in to the office today, giving my usual cake-of-the-week testers a chance to compare and contrast. There really weren't any negative comments on the pair, and when I asked people to pick between the two I got one vote for the Velvet Fudge, two for the Party Cake, and one who refused to choose. (That was about all the Party Cake that was left, as it was served at the larger Hanukkah party. Everyone else just got Velvet Fudge Cake.) I'd vote for the Chocolate Party Cake, myself--I think it's a little moister, and the cocoa syrup maybe puts the chocolate taste more front and center. The syrup did not, on my cake at least, give glistening coating like the picture in the book. I suspect some food stylist brushed the cold cake with extra syrup for dramatic effect. <g>

RHC: Ladyfingers and Lemon Canadian Crown

2010-11-29T22:59:00.003-05:00

I was traveling over Thanksgiving, which made my cake-of-the-week for the Heavenly Cake Bakers switch from a centerpiece dessert for the big meal to a half-size version stuck in at the tail end of the weekend. That's a pity, because this is a lovely party (or holiday) dessert. Even better, it can be completely made ahead of time and frozen for up to 3 weeks. I'm making notes for some future occasion--this cake will be made again. Another advantage is that the cake can be made in stages, and I used that to squeeze it in after returning from my Thanksgiving trip. (The Folks Next Door and I went to older brother's house in North Carolina. We carried up the cranberry-orange relish and the squash-cheese casserole and I helped with some cooking and made the turkey chowder while there, but it was nice to not be a principal cook for the big meal for a change.)

Before I left, I tackled the ladyfingers. These can probably be bought somewhere in Atlanta, though I've never noticed them in the stores. (I suspect that's because I've never looked.) I found them surprisingly easy to make. I did start by watching Rose's video on YouTube as a warm-up for piping ladyfingers, and that was very helpful in figuring out the cookbook instructions on drawing guidelines for the piping. My finished ladyfingers were a little undersized as I didn't have a pastry tube quite as large as the 3/4" specified (and I didn't squeeze my pastry bag as much as Rose did in the video), but that is all to the good as I planned to use them for two half-sized cakes: this week's Lemon Canadian Crown, and Tiramisù. I didn't even have as much trouble as I expected with the piping, and by the time my ladyfingers were baked, they looked, well, not like store-bought, but pretty darn good. Once baked and cooled, I wrapped the ladyfingers and my 6" disk (for the cake base) up in heavy-duty plastic wrap and popped them all into the freezer.

I constructed the half-size Lemon Canadian Crown in a 6" springform pan, which is a little less than half the capacity of the 9" pan called for. The smaller diameter made it somewhat hard to fit in even my smaller ladyfingers, but with a little pressing against the side of the pan the ladyfingers eventually formed a lining. Next was to wedge in the trimmed ladyfinger disk for the base, and that helped hold the sides up once in place. The lined pan then got stuck in the freezer while I made the filling.

The filling is a lemon curd made with whipping cream instead of butter. My curd took much longer than specified to thicken--about 40 minutes, not 15. The temperature stayed low even when the curd started to thicken, and I finally went with the consistency test even though temp was only 170. Strained into a large glass bowl, the curd cooled quickly, and then I folded in softly whipped cream. This mixture went into the ladyfinger shell and back into the freezer. Not all the filling would fit in the prepared pan, so I grabbed 3" soufflé molds, cut more ladyfingers in half to make an outer ring to line the sides, and filled them with the leftover lemon. In the little soufflés there was much more ladyfinger to the amount of lemon, and I ended up with 4 mini desserts.

The last step once the lemon is completely frozen is to make a meringue, spread it to cover the frozen filling, then run the cake briefly under the broiler to brown the meringue. Once that was done it was back to freezer to let the frozen parts recover from the heat blast.

Tasting results: My brother thought the ratio of ladyfingers to filling was skewed too far toward ladyfingers, but we both thought that was a problem of the half-size version, and a 9" cake would be fine. Older niece devoured one of the soufflé dish versions and departed for her homework without comment. Younger niece ate the meringue first because she didn't like it much, then finished the rest with appreciative notes. Nephew thought the ladyfingers were too dry (it was his first encounter with plain ladyfingers, not buried in tiramisù) and left the base uneaten. Personally this is right down my alley, nicely lemony, not too sweet--a lovely dessert.

RHC: Chocolate Génoise with Whipped Peanut Butter Ganache

2010-11-22T22:13:00.001-05:00

This should be an easy cake, at least now that I'm fairly comfortable with génoise. However, things just didn't go my way with this week's cake-of-the-week. The génoise was not too bad, the main flaw being that as usual, my batter didn't have the full expected volume. I think I've got a two-fold problem. First is that I need to continue to work on my folding technique so I don't lose the lovely volume from the beaten eggs. Second is speed--I think I'm folding too long (see #1), then also being too compulsive about scraping all the batter into the pan and otherwise dallying while getting the cake into the oven. I need to work on that TV chef style where utensils and pans with lots of the ingredients covering them are tossed willy-nilly into the sink, while the chef moves on in the recipe.

All that aside, I did get the chocolate génoise baked, and prepared the syrup with Chambord. (Unlike several Heavenly Cake Bakers, I had a dusty bottle in my liquor cabinet from some long-ago baking endeavor so didn't have to break the bank to get a new bottle.) Then it was on to the peanut butter whipped ganache. This should also have been simple--ganache has no terrors for me, and this recipe is just ganache with some peanut butter added, then whipped. Well, it was the whipping part that did for me. I carefully checked the temperature, but nonetheless when I started to whisk the mixture it seemed impossible to get soft peaks. I continued whisking and ended up with a grainy ganache. Rose says such a ganache can be rescued by re-melting it then beating it again, and indeed when I remelted it and got it to the right temperature it looked just like it had when I started. Unfortunately, it also once again never produced anything like soft peaks and quickly turned grainy. I gave up and frosted my syruped génoise with it anyway. It did have a nice light texture, so all that was affected (as far as I could tell) was the appearance.

Tasting results: not many opinions from the home front this week. Personally I thought it was good, with a nice light texture and well-balanced flavors. Peanut butter can be very "in your face", but this one is nicely balanced with the chocolate. However, it's still a génoise, and I strongly prefer butter cakes, especially the dense pound-cake styles. As far as the folks next door--sister-in-law and older niece dislike peanut butter and declined to taste (SIL did try a nibble, and found the PB to be at a very objectionable level). Younger niece tasted and declined any more. Nephew, a PB fan, presumably ate the piece I sent over to him but I didn't get a report. My brother didn't ask for any (and I forgot to offer it)--actually, I'm not sure how he feels about PB.

Office opinions: a big hit. My supervisor called it the best cake-of-the-week he'd had. (He does have a limited sample size, as his office isn't on my regular Cake Distribution Route. <g>) P, who hadn't had a cake-of-the-week before, loved it (he started out asking if it was a mix, and the concept of frosting not from a can seemed rather foreign to him), as did B and V. C, like me, prefers the butter cakes and gave it an "OK". Still, I think we'll call it a success.

Clay's Multi-Grain Sourdough Sandwich Bread from KAF

2010-11-20T21:54:00.001-05:00

Despite the high reaching almost 70 today, my brain has moved to "winter" mode and my cooking urges reflect it. I'm making soups, comfort food casseroles, and baking bread--more than the weekly challah, that is.

Today's bread is from a recent King Arthur Flour blog post (or just see the recipe), which also inspired me to go revive my rather evil looking sourdough starter. After feeding it yesterday I left it out overnight, and today it was very bubbly and ready to go. Don't know if it was the freshly revved up starter or other substitutions I made, but this bread didn't much resemble the description in the KAF writeup.

First let me document the substitutions: I used more whole wheat flour than called for (3 oz. instead of 2), reducing the AP flour. I don't have the "KA Whole-Grain Bread Improver" but added some vital wheat gluten instead--I see on further research that the bread improver is a mix of vital wheat gluten and soy flour, mostly. And I don't have the KA Harvest Grains Blend, so I mixed some poppy, flax, and sunflower seeds into a little Bob's Red Mill 5-Grain Cereal blend, which is an oat/wheat based hot cereal. Seemed close enough.

What was different? Well, I needed a good bit less AP flour than the minimum in the recipe, and then added more water during the knead as the dough didn't look nearly as wet as the blog pictures. OK, it's winter, and we're dealing with a sourdough starter with variable water amounts, so I give that a pass. But then it says "Cover the dough, and allow it to rise for 1 1/2 to 2 hours; it'll become puffy, though it may not double in bulk." Mine was tripled in a little over an hour when I first checked on it. On the second rise I let it get about 1-1/2" above the pan (and again it was much faster than the recipe), and it was over-risen and sank some on baking. Last thing was the texture, but here we're definitely in the subjective realm. They said "chewy texture of an artisan loaf", I'd say it's got a little more structure than a sandwich bread. Or maybe I just don't eat anything but artisan breads these days, if you don't count the whole-wheat challah.

Despite all that, it's a nice loaf of bread. Very light on the "multi-grain" bit, so I'd probably up the whole-wheat flour even more if I make it again, especially as it's clear the loaf has plenty of spring to handle it. The character could be varied quite a lot by using different seeds and grains for the Harvest Grains Blend.

RHC: She Loves Me Cake--sort of

2010-11-14T15:46:00.001-05:00

It's a free choice week for the Heavenly Cakes bake-along, and my list of "cakes Marie has baked and I haven't" is getting pretty short. Well, I think it's at eight cakes, so maybe not quite that short. Anyway, at the top was the She Loves Me Cake, which was the second cake Marie tackled. A little negotiation with younger niece to incorporate chocolate in the presentation, and we had a plan.

The result didn't look much like "She Loves Me" cake, though. First off, my flat decorative NordicWare baking pan is the snowflake design instead of the daisy--more appropriate for this time of the year, really, even though Atlanta may not see snow until February (or not at all some winters). Rose gives options of splitting the cake and filling it with lemon curd and blueberries (the Lemon Daisy Cake) or with whipped cream and berries (Berry Shortcake). I wanted to use the berry shortcake option (though I prefer a slightly sweet biscuit for a real strawberry shortcake). With this need for chocolate this week, raspberries seemed like a good choice for the berries. And that chocolate requirement....the hot fudge sauce from the ice cream cake was really yummy, and pretty easy. That'd do. Maybe my She Loves Me Cake is "Chocolate snowflake raspberry shortcake with hot fudge sauce".

This cake is on the quick and easy list, and my only slight reservation about that rating is that it's an egg-yolk only cake. That doesn't make the preparation harder, but I find the excess egg whites to be an annoyance despite all the Heavenly Cakes that have needed them. Egg separating aside, the cake mixes up very quickly using Rose's butter cake technique of adding the butter and some liquid to the dry ingredients, then adding the egg mixed with other liquid ingredients. I spread the batter in my snowflake pan, and it was into the oven. Despite my setting my timer for 5 minutes under the baking time, the cake had started to pull away from the sides of the pan when I checked it. My sister-in-law felt the cake was again a little dry (I didn't notice myself, but that might have been the presentation), and perhaps that touch of over-baking did it.

I cooled the cake and made the fudge sauce, then asked younger niece to come over and experiment with some decorations to highlight the snowflake design. As we were adding chocolate, I melted a little 62% chocolate and handed her a small paintbrush, and she put a chocolate coating over a few of the snowflakes.

That was it, except for the assembly. I cut cake squares, split them in half, and put raspberries on the bottom piece. A healthy (ha!) glob of whipped cream covered the raspberries, then the other piece of cake went on top. Finally I drizzled warm fudge sauce over the top.

Tasting results: Sister-in-law noted a little cake dryness, as above, but had found a little whipped cream easily dealt with the problem. My brother said the cake made a nice platform for the other components. :) The kids chimed in with 'really good', and I failed to get the picture of younger niece licking the last of the fudge sauce off her plate.

I did make an effort to judge the cake separately from the berries, cream, and chocolate, and really liked it. It has a lovely even crumb, a nice vanilla flavor, and a good yellow color from the (5+) egg yolks. I'd eat it plain, or jazzed up any number of ways--the lemon curd idea will be one of them, I'm sure.

RHC: Swedish Pear and Almond Cream Cake

2010-11-08T22:56:00.003-05:00

I'm back baking in real-time, after posting on baking I'd done in advance of three weeks of travel. There was the annual trip to exhibit at the ag. show, one day at home, my 9-day vacation at Disney World, one day at home, and a trip to Reston, Va. and Washington, D.C. for meetings. I'm glad to be home this week! The post will be short, though, because I'm still trying to recover my brain, lost somewhere in all that travel.

Cake of the week is the Swedish Pear and Almond Cake, a sour cream cake with a band of almond cream (almond paste, sugar, and egg) and a layer of pear slices. Theoretically, the layers of almond cream and pears, applied to the top of the cake batter, sink during the baking to end up at the bottom--which becomes the top as you turn the cake out. In actuality, my pear layers stopped about half-way through the cake, though the almond cream did end up on top.

Overall it's a very easy cake, except for cleaning up after using the food processor for the almond cream and the stand mixer for the cake batter. It rose beautifully and turned out easily, and the design of the Bavaria bundt pan I chose showed up nicely. Tasting results were good too--I found it a moist cake with good flavor, almost a pound cake texture (which I love), though I could wish that mine hadn't ended up with essentially 3 zones: the plain cake, the pear layer, and the two bites of almond-y goodness. It didn't integrate well, though each bit was tasty on its own.

Other tasters' comments mostly stuck to "good cake", with the exception of one friend who was wanting a different cake. When I told her this was a pear and almond cake, she was expecting more the style of the apple upside-down cake or the plum and blueberry torte--half cake, half fruit. That is not this cake. :)

RHC: The Bostini

2010-11-01T18:17:00.001-04:00

I have a feeling that the Bostini, for many of us, is the most delectible picture in the book. This "re-imagined Boston cream pie" caught my eye time and again as I flipped through for some other cake-of-the-week, and I'd pause to look at the chocolate dripping down the sides of that cappuccino cup, maybe read a little bit of the recipe to see what the pieces were, then would flip on to another page. But now it's time for the Bostini itself.

As is my usual approach I did a half recipe, and for this individually composed dessert, I wanted half-sized servings--all the adults in the family are watching our weight, and while the active teenagers don't need to, they also are fine with smaller dessert sizes. Half-size seemed about right.

What to serve this in? Part of the reason the photograph of the Bostini is so attractive, I think, is the chocolate sauce flowing down the sides of the cappuccino cup used for serving. However, my practical side said that would be incredibly messy to eat--the cupcake would be pushed down into the pastry cream with the first few bites, sending (more) chocolate sauce and pastry cream cascading over the sides of the cup. Rose notes that if you have the right diameter of cup the cupcake will act as a stopper to keep the cream from running out of the cup, but I didn't have much choice of container diameters. Besides, I was going to have a half-sized portion, so coffee cups were out. After a scan of my cabinets, I decided on some slender 6 oz. white wine glasses (I had 4 of those) and custard cups for the rest. The custard cups weren't a good idea, as it turns out, for exactly the problem I'd thought of with the cappuccino cup. The wine glasses, on the other hand, were just right.

The first step was to bake the orange glow chiffon cupcakes, and for my half-size servings I couldn't use the specified cupcake pan. I went with a mini muffin pan. However, mini cupcakes are a lot less than half of a "regular" cupcake, so I ended up with 24 or so mini chiffon cakes. I was shooting for 8 half-sized servings, so decided that I'd use 2 mini chiffon cakes per.

Once the cakes were baked, it was on to the pastry cream. Rose describes it as a cross between a pastry cream and a crème anglaise--less cornstarch, richer, and much less sweet than a usual pastry cream. I created quite a mess of my island counter top by spilling part of the egg mixture over it while doing the juggling act to mix a little hot cream into the eggs, then mixing all the eggs into the cream, and not ending up with scrambled eggs. (No scrambled eggs, indeed, but lots of items on the countertop collected a coating of egg along the way.) However, the amount of egg lost to the spill must not have been enough to be a problem, as my pastry cream thickened nicely. After straining the custard, I poured it into the 4 wine glasses and 4 custard cups, and tried to put plastic wrap on the surface of each one. That's when the narrow wine glasses became a problem--it was very hard to maneuver a little piece of plastic wrap into the glass and onto the surface of the custard.

The last component is the chocolate butter glaze, basically equal weights of dark chocolate and butter. I used a ganache instead of the chocolate butter sauce. I'm sure the butter sauce would be wonderful, but I love ganache, too, and did you know that heavy cream has half the calories of butter, tablespoon for tablespoon? <g> I did use the same amount of cream in my ganache as butter called for in the chocolate butter sauce.

To compose the Bostinis, I put two of the mini orange chiffon cupcakes into each container with the pastry cream, and pushed it down a little. Then the warm chocolate sauce was poured on top--but not dripping down the sides, as my wine glasses had enough room to contain it.

This one is another unanimous hit, even from younger niece with her anti-cream/dairy attitude. (Which, you may recall, does not extend to whipped cream, so I suspected pastry cream would be OK.) She did ask if she could just have a wine glass full of the ganache, but being refused that, she ate a Bostini with no problem. There was some difficulty in eating them even from those who got the wine glasses--the chiffon cupcake was a little hard to cut into bites with a spoon. Perhaps I should have let them soak in the pastry cream for a while before serving, but in the end, one way or another, no one had leftovers in their cup.

RHC: Heavenly Vanilla Bean Cherubs

2010-10-25T08:06:00.001-04:00

Or, the vanilla bean angel-food cake option made in mini angel food cake pans.

The Angel Food Cake recipe is the most "build your own" style in Rose's Heavenly Cakes, I think. Because of the varying sizes of angel food cake pans, Rose provided a guideline of 1 egg white per cup of pan capacity, gave the ingredients in proportion for that amount, and left it to the reader to scale up to their pan. At least, that's on the main recipe: on the chocolate tweed version we did back in January she gave the amounts for a 16 cup pan, and also gave a "baby cake" version of that one called Chocolate Cherubs.

I'm not fond of angel food cake. All sugar, no fat--I prefer my indulgences weighted toward butter/egg yolks. Sugar, not so much. Baby cakes seemed like the way to go for this week's "Angel Food Cake any way you want", and I used the vanilla bean option because I'd done the grated-chocolate route once. Math seemed like too much trouble, so I went with the proportions for the Chocolate Cherubs, without the grated chocolate and with vanilla bean seeds and lemon juice added for the Heavenly Vanilla Bean version. I had 4 smaller (1-1/4 cup) mini tube pans for the baking, and grabbed a silicon madeleine pad to use for the extra batter.

Enough egg whites emerged from the freezer for the recipe, saved from previous cakes. I used my mini chopper to mix the vanilla beans into the sugar, then added the Wondra flour--the amount was way too little to dirty up my large food processor. Everything else was as the recipe directed: egg whites with cream of tartar and the lemon juice, beaten with sugar to a stiff meringue, fold in the flour mixture, and pour into ungreased pans.

Results: 4 pure white angel food cakes (as all the browned bits stuck to the pan when I turned the cakelets out), and a handful of two-bite cakes from the madeleine pan. I did induce my brother and the nephew into trying a piece--my brother and I both felt "sure, it's fine, but not a style of cake we like". Nephew tried it but I got a report that he didn't care for it, older niece gave it a pass, younger niece was on a school trip but came by later to say she'd heard it was not good. Just translate that as "not to our tastes"--for an angel food cake lover, I suspect this is a lovely version. I did appreciate the little lemon tang in there, but it couldn't transform this into something other than an angel food cake.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad (from Disney World!)

RHC: Many-Splendored Quick Bread

2010-10-17T21:44:00.001-04:00

Cake-of-the-week for the Heavenly Cakes bake-along is a nice change of pace to a quick bread, not a cake. This one is a combination banana/zucchini/carrot bread with nuts, not too sweet. Very suitable for a breakfast bread, to my tastes.

When the bread assembly started, I had been making something else (some unsuccessful chocolate chunk scones, for the curious) and had a partial bag of mini dark-chocolate chunks from Whole Foods out on the counter. It seemed like dark chocolate would be another nice addition to the bread--banana and chocolate generally combine nicely. I added about 1/3 cup of chocolate chunks along with the toasted pecans that I substituted for the walnuts. There's no cacao percentage on the bag that I can find, but it's quite a dark chocolate.

The batter uses a combination of brown sugar and white, a moderate amount of banana (less than one large one), a little zucchini, and a little carrot. I weighed all of these as I went, and appreciated having the weights given in the recipe. I always dislike those recipes that just say "1 banana" or "1 zucchini" or even "1 medium banana"...sizes vary so. The mix of zucchini and carrot makes the loaf very colorful when it's cut.

I baked the bread in a Pyrex loaf pan, reducing the oven temperature down to 325 as usual for glass. The loaf took more than 10 minutes longer than the 35-45 minutes stated in the recipe before it reached the right temperature. Maybe this was the glass pan and temperature difference, maybe there was also some effect from another 1/3 cup of stuff (chocolate!) in the batter.

Taste results: a very nice quick bread. It sliced nicely, was not too sweet, and had a great texture. The nuts give a nice crunch, and the chocolate was definitely a good idea--it gave a nice taste accent and helps even more with the "not too sweet" part of the bread. I'll make it again, and will keep the chocolate in there.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

RHC: The cakes so far

2010-10-13T21:05:00.001-04:00

Marie asked that we send in our votes on the best cakes so far in the Heavenly Cakes bake-along, and allowed us to vote for up to 5. I decided to skim through all my blog posts to do this--it's been a year since we got started, and that's a lot of cakes to remember. Then I took the list next door to my brother's house and solicited opinions over there. Everyone made some level of attempt to look at the list and figure out which were standouts for them--though I perhaps should have hidden my votes to avoid prejudicing the jury. I used their votes to help weed my favorites down to 5 to send to Marie, and they did influence me to up the rating for the Plum Round Ingots.

There were a few arbitrary calls on cakes, or places where I might not have been totally consistent--usually where some aspect of the cake was a negative but I liked something else very well. In other words, this is a subjective rating based on inconsistent criteria. <g> I used a 5-point rating myself, and the folks next door just marked their "really good" cakes with a plus. Mine were double-plus for the standout cakes, plus for the good ones (you could also call this "will make again if the right occasion comes along"), a neutral for ones that just didn't stand out at all or had various negatives that pulled them down from a plus, single negative, and a double negative. One more note on the consistency issue: I'm resisting the urge to second-guess myself, which is another sign of how hard this is to do. (Don't one of the cheesecakes rate a double-plus, maybe the coconut one? Or the coffeecake, that one was really good...)

It was interesting that a few cakes that I remember negatively don't have that opinion reflected in my write-ups. I guess memory always morphs over time, and it also might be that I did a writeup after the initial tasting but my opinion shifted on a second taste. I don't think there were any cakes that went the other way: that is, where I was remembering them as wonderful but the blog entry was meh.

I'm a couple of weeks ahead on the baking list due to upcoming work and vacation travel, so there's a few in here that haven't been blogged.

Double plus:

Golden Lemon Almond Cake (family favorite)
White Gold Passion Génoise (family favorite--probably #1)
Apple Upside-Down Cake
Pumpkin Cake (but not the buttercream)
Plum and Blueberry Upside Down Torte (family favorite)
Plum Round Ingots (family favorite)
Chocolate Layer Cake w/ Caramel Ganache (for the ganache...the cake was OK <g>) (family favorite)
Many-Splendored Quick Bread

Single plus:

Financiers au Chocolat
Ginger Cheesecake with Gingerbread Crust
Apple-Cinnamon Crumb Coffee Cake
German Chocolate Cake
Barcelona Brownie Bars
Almond Shamah Chiffon
Woody's Lemon Luxury Cake
Pure Pumpkin Cheesecake
Fruitcake Wreath
Classic Carrot Cake
Individual Pineapple Upside-Down Cakes
Lemon Poppyseed Sour Cream Cake
Peanut Butter Ingots
Sybil's Pecan Torte with Coffee Cream
Banana Refrigerator Cake
Two Fat Cats Whoopie Pie
Gateau Breton
Baby Lemon Cheesecakes
Coconut Cheesecake w/ Coconut Cookie Crust
Chocolate Ice Cream Cake
Lemon Meringue Cake
Chocolate Feather Bed
Gold Ingots
The Bostini

Neutral:

Deep Chocolate Rosebuds
Marble Velvet Cake
Hungarian Jancsi Torta
Baby Chocolate Oblivions
Whipped Cream Cake (I need to try this one again, as I had problems with it. I should like this cake...)
Chocolate Streusel Coffeecake
Torta des las Tres Leches
Chocolate Tweed Angel Food Cake
True Orange Génoise
Double Chocolate Valentine
Sicilian Pistachio Cake
Coffee Chiffonlets with Dulce de Leche Whipped Cream
Saint-Honore Trifle
Bernachon Palet d'Or Gateau
Chocolate Butter Cupcakes with Chocolate-Egg White Frosting (Golden Neoclassic for Marie)
Mini Vanilla Bean Pound Cakes
Chocolate Banana Stud Cake
Designer Chocolate Baby Grands
Marionberry Shortcake
Apple Caramel Charlotte
Chocolate Tomato Cake w/ Mystery Ganache (the opposite of the chocolate cake with caramel ganache--I really disliked the ganache, and thought this was the best RHC chocolate cake I've made so far)
Caramelized Pineapple Pudding Cakes/Classic Brioche
Molten Chocolate Soufflé and Lava Cakes
Angel Food Cake
Yellow Butter Cupcakes with Chocolate-Egg White Buttercream

Minus:

Rose Red Velvet Cake
Catalán Salt Pinch Cake
English Gingerbread Cake
Chocolate Apricot Roll with Lacquer Glaze
Le Succès
Chocolate-Covered Strawberry Cake
Génoise Rose
Spice Cake with Peanut Buttercream Frosting

Double minus:

Holiday Pinecone Cake (One where memory is much more negative than my blog writeup. The blog says we liked the cake roll once we'd all thrown away the chocolate fondant. I don't now recall anything positive about it. You should factor in that I'm primarily interested in great tastes, and while a fancy presentation will attract me just like many other people (see the pumpkin cake, up in double-plus land) if the taste isn't up to the effort of the presentation I'm down on it.)