pick me up

The February 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen and Deeba of Passionate About Baking. They chose Tiramisu as the challenge for the month. Their challenge recipe is based on recipes from The Washington Post, Cordon Bleu at Home and Baking Obsession.

Mmm. Tiramisu. I've been making tiramisu for a long time now. Ever since my sister hunted up this recipe to make at home, after my brother spent most of his time at the sushi buffet eating the little tiramisu squares at the dessert bar. At least, I think that's approximately when it started. Everyone thinks tiramisu is difficult and impressive- let me tell you, it's really not. It does take a little patience, and the knowledge of how to use a double broiler (or a pot of hot water with a heat-proof pan on top), but seriously, not difficult. A little time consuming, because it's the kind of dessert that gets better as it sits. But anyway, I digress. I love tiramisu, and I made it twice in the span of two weeks.

Anyway. This time, the challenge included making the marscapone cheese and making the lady fingers. So this one was a little more time-consuming, requiring some planning ahead.

I've tried this marscapone cheese recipe several times (who knew marscapone cheese was just heated cream? Why does heating the cream and adding some acid- lemon juice- then separating out a little bit of water turn it into cheese? It's like magic!) but it never seems to work quite right. I think I need more space between my sieve and the bottom of the bowl I let it sit in, because it took way longer than overnight for it to set, and that was after dumping out the residual water (whey?) twice. I had to use a smaller bowl in order to fit it in the fridge. And I gave up on trying to use cheesecloth- after I poured the curdled cheese into the cheesecloth, nearly all of it filtered through into the bowl, which didn't seem right at all to me. I used two coffee filters instead- maybe that's why it took so long to set, but at any rate, it worked.

I also don't think my ladyfingers rose quite as much as they were supposed to- not sure if the temperature was off in the oven, or what. But they still tasted good. I should have dipped them fully in the coffee mixture the first time, I was a little worried about them crumbling after reading other DB's comments in the forums, so I only dipped them halfway, but then the tiramisu was a little too cakey for my liking.

I've never made it with a pastry cream, so that was fun. And I don't usually put lemon zest in my zabaglione, so that was interesting. (I really need a zester.) But I really liked the slight lemon kick to it.

Assembled tiramisu

Mini tiramisu

Tiramisu take 2: this one I should have put in a 8x8 pan instead of a 9x13, and made 3-4 layers instead of just 2. I also left out the pastry cream and used the amount of zabaglione that I normally use, and it was lovely.

I am not very creative. I thought about doing a green tea version, with a dusting of green tea powder on top, but I wasn't sure that the tea would be enough oomph to dip the cookies into. And I'd love to try passionfruit, but nowhere seems to sell it. I'm also a stickler for following directions. ;)

Anyway. I could get into the habit of making my own marscapone cheese (so much cheaper than buying it), but I dunno if I want to take the effort to make my own lady fingers unless I have something special in mind. Different shaped tiramisu would definitely benefit from homemade ladyfingers.

happy birthday mommy!

My mother's birthday was last Thursday, so I baked her a cake. I think this made up for the fact that both my siblings and I miscalculated her birthday and had convinced each other that her birthday was Friday. (This is the peril of keeping track of your mother's birthday via the lunar calendar- but we've never gotten it wrong before, I'm not entirely sure what happened this year.)

Anyway. It's just a vanilla cake with blueberries and vanilla buttercream. And kiwi and blackberries on top (the strawberries at the grocery store were not fresh at all). It tasted good, but the buttercream sucked. I'm giving up on real buttercream until I get a stand mixer that can handle it and incorporate the butter quickly enough. My hand mixer just doesn't have the horsepower.

See what I mean about the buttercream? It's not supposed to be grainy like this, but it's because the butter wasn't soft enough when I added it and it didn't melt into the meringue quickly enough. Bah. For my dad's birthday I'm going to go with a whipped cream frosting, it's just easier.

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.

gingerbread house!

The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.

I finally got around to baking/making this today. Kevin and I were originally going to do some post-Christmas shopping, but then it was snowing and didn't stop. So I baked instead.

Okay. So I tried the recipe from the Scandinavian Baking Book first, but it was way too dry, and then I made the mistake of leaving it in the fridge for way too long and not wrapping it so that it was airtight. So that batch of dough went in the trash (sad). I wasn't feeling like trying that recipe again, and I didn't have the ingredients for the other recipe (I don't keep heavy cream on hand, though maybe I should), and since it was snowing (still) and the snowplows had not come by after they did at about 10:30 am, I used Google and found a recipe by Chris Broberg. This was simple, I had everything I needed, and the cookies tasted great fresh out of the oven. After a few hours, they had hardened up- good for gingerbread house-making, not so good for eating. But still, yummy. Kevin was dipping his gingerbread men in milk (I think it might work better in hot cocoa, since he soaked them for a while to get them soft).

Anyway.

I used a (very rough) hand-drawn template for my house:

Baked gingerbread house pieces:

Next step was the royal icing. I obviously didn't use enough egg whites, because the icing was way too stiff to pipe (at least out of a plastic bag- I'm working on getting some pastry bags and tips- as in, I asked for them for Christmas, but we haven't taken the effort to go out and get them yet. And yes, I realize it's past Christmas at this point). After it started flinging out of the bowl and covered my brother's sweater, I decided we were done. Since it wouldn't pipe, I used my hands. This was definitely a two-person job: I got my fingers sticky with icing as I slathered it all over the joints of the house, and my brother was useful and held the walls together until they could stand up on their own. As far as I know, the thing hasn't fallen apart (but I left it in the kitchen about an hour and a half ago, so who knows what may have happened by now).

Here's a slideshow of (part of) putting the house together. We used Skittles and Starbursts for decorations, mostly because I didn't have the forethought to get any holiday-related candy or food coloring (I keep forgetting we have no food coloring in the house). The Skittles and Starbursts are leftovers from Halloween. Halloween 2008. But Skittles and Starbursts are pretty generic, and it's not like I was planning on eating this house later anyway (I think my brother may have other plans).

What Kevin plans on doing with the gingerbread house when I'm not looking:

And here, for your viewing pleasure, is a rotating view of the house. I tried setting it to music, but it was way to large to upload (since I looped the video 11 times to make it last as long as the song), sadness.

This was a lot of fun. Maybe I'll do it again next year (possibly with icing that pipes properly). :)

merry christmas

Little knitted gifts:

For my sister, a pair of mittens that open to be fingerless mitts:

I started from the pattern given on Knitty.com for their "Fetching" fingerless mitts, modified the cables, and added a mitten top and thumb cap.

A lacey scarf:


This one is the Juliet Scarf by Louisa Harding

A lacey beret:

This one is the Grace Lace beret.

For my brother, a knitted sweater. It looks best on a person, so here he is:

This was the Woven Bands Pullover by Hana Jason

For my mom, a knitted lace scarf:


Estonian Lace Scarf by Nancy Bush

For my dad, a knitted scarf:

Pattern from Cotton & Cloud