it's been a while...

It's been a while since I updated here. So, a quick recap:

December involved a lot of cookies. This was my first time with royal icing. They look a lot better from this distance than they did up close.

I tried being creative with the circles.

gingerbread men made of sugar cookies

sandwich cookies with strawberry-blueberry jam

turtle thumbprints- chocolate cookie, chocolate caramel ganache, pecan garnish

January involved Eugenia's baby shower, I made this baby blanket for her little Nathan (who was born in the middle of a blizzard!)

February was Kristin's baby shower, but I didn't actually get this to her until March. As far as I know, baby's not here yet.

For my mom's birthday, I made her a cake from Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." The cake was delicious, but the icing was a bit too sweet. Sometime, I will find a frosting that is not super sweet. I think I'm just going to have to use a whipped cream frosting (so no butter, less sugar) and add some kind of a stabilizer so it doesn't separate. Dad's birthday is coming up in a few weeks, perfect chance to experiment! ;)

orange sponge cake with orange icing

And February was also a bake-off at church. It was a busy month. I made tiramisu. Kevin says this is cheating, because tiramisu doesn't involve baking, but I will have you know that I made the ladyfingers from scratch. I also baked a biscuit jonde for a shell. Thanks to the daring kitchen for the recipe. I am of course completely remiss as a Daring Baker, and haven't done any of the challenge recipes in months. Somehow it's less motivating to bake when you don't have an audience. And then, their recipes are always so involved... I'm getting lazy.

the biscuit jonde. piped out the chocolate pattern, froze, then spread the cake batter over it. 

tiramisu in the springform pan

unmolded in all its glory

I actually wish I had a picture of this sliced, because it had nice layers (from what I saw). Unfortunately, as it was for the church fellowship time, I only saw one person's slice, and most of it ended up rather mutilated. But, even though several people didn't get to try it, I still managed to win the bake-off. ;) My brother told me that I was a baking bully, because everyone else brought cookies. But I didn't know everyone else was going to bring cookies. Tiramisu is one of my go-to recipes though, it's never anything less than amazing, so if that's cheating then I'm sorry.

Finally, tonight I made some blueberry mochi cake. I managed to forget to add the evaporated milk until after I had added both the rice flour and the blueberries, so my batter was shockingly purple. The baking toned it down considerably, but it's still obviously blueberry. These are delicious. They're mini-muffin sized, but I've still eaten about 10 so far, which means... more than I care to think about. I've been meaning to try this for a while and I will have to make them again (this time adding ingredients in the proper order, :P) I'm pretty sure that the original recipe was in regular-sized muffin tins, so I reduced the bake time, but it was still about 25 min total. I made 72 mini mochi cakes. Roughly half are going to my parent's house this weekend, I have the feeling my dad will really like these (don't tell him that butter went into the recipe! shh!! my dad is always on a diet).

I have a baking extravaganza planned. I just threw together a batch of brioche dough, and I'm hoping to bake it tomorrow. I've got my fingers crossed that this brioche recipe works, because I've tried it before and it's been a dismal failure. But I'm using the recipe from Artisan Breads in Five Minutes a Day. This is the first time I'm trying anything that isn't the basic master recipe in the first few pages of the book. :P Not from anything against other kinds of artisan breads, I just love basic french bread (and this one develops a bit of a sourdough flavor as you let it sit in the fridge) and I'm also lazy (as discussed above). Also, I don't really keep ingredients on hand for everything, despite what you might think. I don't know if that makes me a poor excuse for someone who calls herself a baker, but seriously, how many different kinds of flour does one girl need? In my opinion: one. All-purpose. Haha. This is why I'm not a healthy baker. (Wheat flour is also way too dense for me, but I read somewhere that whole wheat pastry flour is much lighter. My only problem is I'm sure it's also more expensive, and I'm trying to keep expenses down these days.)

Anyway. We shall see how the brioche goes. I've made enough for 2 batches, so I'm going to try regular brioche first, then a chocolate brioche. I'm excited!!

nutella chocolate chip cookies

I was going to make peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, when I realized I didn't really have enough peanut butter. So I made these, kind of making it up as I went along.

1.5 sticks butter (12 tbsps)

1 c brown sugar

1 c white sugar

1 tsp (approx) vanilla

1/2 c (approx) nutella

2 eggs

2 c flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

12 oz chocolate chips

cream first five ingredients until smooth. Add eggs one at a time, blending well after each addition. Mix flour and baking powder, add to sugar/butter/egg mixture and blend. Stir in chocolate chips.

Drop by rounded teaspoon onto a cookie tray. Bake at 350F for approx 12 minutes. Cool on tray for a few minutes before moving to a cooling rack to cool completely.

Love.

note: next time, I might cut down the sugar slightly. 2 c of sugar is a LOT of sugar. On the other hand, they spread nicely and were chewy but crunchy all at once...

tiramisu kisses

I decided to make french-style macarons again today, only I had trouble deciding on a flavor. Then I remembered the instant coffee in the cupboard, along with the marcapone cheese I had made a while back (when I was contemplating making canoli for the Nov Daring Bakers challenge- that never happened, mostly because I was in charge of Thanksgiving dinner at our house, and who has time to fry canoli when all that's going on?).

So I made little tiramisu kisses. Coffee meringue cookies, sandwiched with a white chocolate marcapone filling and some chocolate ganache (because honestly, who doesn't like chocolate ganache?). I used a different macaron recipe from the Oct 2009 Daring Bakers Challenge, this time the one that came in my Dec Food&Wine by François Payard. He uses soft ball stage sugar to make the meringue, and I have a soft spot for Italian meringue after working at Sarah's. I omitted the red food coloring and added 2 tsps of instant coffee to the meringue before folding in the almond/sugar mixture.

The cookies turned out well, only some of them kind of exploded in the oven. The rest puffed beautifully and had the distinctive feet. My personal theory is that the cookies on the bottom tray (that kind of exploded) heated up too quickly and thus exploded.

Marscapone filling:

2 oz white chocolate, melted

8 oz (approx) marscapone cheese, softened.

-combine white chocolate with marscapone, mix well.

The assortment of cookies:

One that kind of 'sploded:

Perfect:

The only thing about french macarons is that they remind me of little hamburgers and thus I always have to remind myself that no, actually, they are sweet and fantastic.

french kissing

The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

I've never made macarons before. Not to get them confused with macaroons, which are the American version made with coconut. These however, were fantastic. They're made with almond flour or meal (recipe here). And apparently they're really hard. Well- I didn't find them really hard to make yummy, but I did find it difficult to make them pretty. These are delicious- chewy, sweet, and almond. I do think that you have to think carefully about the flavors and filling, because I can easily imagine this becoming sickeningly sweet and therefore not as yummy.

Take 1: Plain almond macarons with an orange dark chocolate ganache filling. Okay, except bumpy and cracked.

Take 2, part 1: Green tea macarons with plain dark chocolate ganache filling. Better, but not as much rise, and still many were cracked. But these are definitely my favorite- not too sweet, and I love the green tea/chocolate/almond combination.

Take 2, part 2: cinnamon apple macarons with plain dark chocolate ganache filling. Almost complete failure. Some of them burned, almost all of them cracked- if not while baking, then while trying to remove them from the sheet. And they were a little on the sweet side.

Someone made a bacon macaron with cream cheese/cheddar filling. I don't know how I feel about that, because the cookie base is mostly egg whites and sugar. But it's intriguing. The one I really really want to try is a pumpkin pie macaron, but the grocery store was out of pumpkin. (I KNOW, right??)

cookies and cupcakes

The July Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Nicole at Sweet Tooth. She chose Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Cookies and Milan Cookies from pastry chef Gale Gand of the Food Network.

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So, I'm at home. And so is my brother. This is the brother who said to me the other day "I'm so glad you love to bake!" And when I asked him why, he replied "because I LOVE to eat!!"

So when time came for this month's baking challenge, I asked him what he wanted, marshmallow cookies or milano cookies. He voted for the marshmallow first. (Then he realized that this would take a while, since the cookies had to bake, the marshmallow had to set, and the glaze had to set. He was mildly annoyed, being one for instant gratification. But he got all the cookies he could eat and then some, so y'know, sometimes patience is its own reward.)

Apparently, homemade marshmallows are little more than an Italian meringue with some gelatin in them. Who knew?

Anyway, these cookies are a not-so-sweet cookie topped with a dollop (that's such a nice word, "dollop", hehe) of marshmallow, dipped in a chocolate glaze. They were pretty good. Real marshmallows stay sticky though, who knew?

Pre-dipping:

a tray of extra marshmallow:

Dipped cookies:

I really wanted some white chocolate or something to drizzle over these, but alas, we had nothing I could think of to use at home. Que sera, they were good anyway.

So, at home, I'm dealing with my mother's oven, which is broken (the oven works fine, it's the door that requires two people to shut it after you open it), so I made these cookies in the toaster oven. It's a nice toaster oven, and fairly large as toaster ovens go, but it's still just a toaster oven (I have to be careful, I might hurt the toaster oven's feelings). And so I only baked about a third of the cookie dough for the first round. Then I got lazy, and made squares instead of circles (easier to cut) and made s'mores. I just cut up the tray of leftover marshmallow and sandwiched them between cookies and orange chocolate ganache (leftover from the milano cookies). They were pretty good, except the cookie part was too thick. I'll have to go thinner next time.

s'mores:

I did eventually make the Milano cookies as well. I love Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies. And now I know how to make them. This time I had my brother help me wrestle with the oven, so the cookie baking went much faster, but since the oven door doesn't open well and the glass window needs serious cleaning, I ended up burning a lot of these, how sad. However, they were delicious and tasted pretty similar to the pepperidge farm cookies. My sister was home last week and tried some and was like "huh. this actually tastes like a milano cookie. good job." Actually, I got the same response from everyone in my family. Let's be fair, they don't actually know what I mean when I say "I like to bake" because I got really into baking in grad school. And I don't bake at home as much, mainly because the oven's broken.

A tray of milano cookies:

My brother decided that this would be a good arrangement for the cookies. Hardy-har-har.

And then, I had 8 egg yolks left over (plus a good deal of orange chocolate ganache). So what did I do? I made sponge cake. Or more accurately, sponge cupcakes.

vanilla sponge cake with an orange chocolate ganache topping.

Even my dad likes the cupcakes. And my dad isn't a big sweets fan.

fin.