Challa in...

 


Challah out.

Confections 1 - Golden Eggs

Recently I read an advance reader copy of Confections of a Closet Master Baker by Gesine Bullock-Prado. I mentioned that it was one of the few books that include recipes that I've ever read where I literally wanted to make every one of them. Feeling like I needed to do some baking recently, I decided to do just that. This is the first.



Golden Eggs are a very rich yellow cake batter, baked in egg molds (or in my case, muffin pans) then dredged in butter and cinnamon/sugar. I'm not going to type out the recipes here, you'll need to get her book eventually for that.

Here's a batch ready to go in:



I did one batch in a silicone muffin pan, the other in metal. Had much better luck getting the silicone batch to release. FWIW.

The recipe said this made about 12 "eggs." I think I could have got 30+ out of it, and these are pretty big muffins. Also - possibly because of their size, I had them in the oven for almost 10 minutes past the 15 called for.

After dredging:



Had to let them cool a bit before dredging - and be really careful not to drop them in the melted butter!

Ready for the close-up?



Mmmm... decadent.

Lemon curd cake with ginger frosting

I threw this together last night and today for a friend's birthday party, and was asked to take pictures of the construction.

Laying in the lemon curd filling, in between layers of white cake:



Cake assembled and ready to frost:



And on the table, cut into and being enjoyed:



Recipes, for the record:
White Cake from Better Homes and Gardens
Lemon Curd from Joy of Cooking
Fluffy White Frosting from Better Homes and Gardens (using water with ginger soaked in it, then strained out and boiled down to concentrate flavor. Still wasn't hugely noticeable...)

A weekend of pies

For some reason, I was inspired to do some baking this weekend. On Saturday, Mich's brother Nathan and sister-in-law Sarah came over with the kids for birthday dinner for Sarah - Mich made French onion soup, and I made a coconut cream pie:



It should have cooled more, it was a little soupy. Yummy, though...

On Sunday, my America's Test Kitchen Family Baking book tempted me to make a bacon, Camembert and potato tart. Great thyme aroma, and I added some asparagus for a little color:



Delicious, but seriously full of calories...

Turkey cookies?

It's really hard not to enjoy the blog Cake Wrecks. This is the first time I've ever been inspired by one of the wrecks, though. The second picture on this post got me thinking the other day. Already had the oven heated for something else tonight, so I threw together a batch of pumpkin cookies. Let 'em cool, applied candy corn, frosting and mini chocolate chips for the eyeballs, and voila! What do y'all think?

Pumpkin Pie-balls

I love this season - in large part because I get to bake with pumpkin. Pies, cookies, cheesecakes, souffles... Mmmmm. There's a recipe for pumpkin pie in the new Cooks' Illustrated that I want to try out, too, come to think of it. Anyway...

I have a few different Halloween baking opportunities this year, and wanted to come up with something creative to make for them. In a nod to my genes (thanks, Dad) I feel the need to name my creations with some terrible pun. Hence: Pumpkin pie-balls.

This is basically a pumpkin cookie, covered with a disc of pie dough with a slit down the center and a raisin for a pupil. Steps:


Pumpkin cookies - I use some old recipe I have laying around, but I'm sure any pumpkin cookie recipe will work. These scoops are too big by about half, I cut them down a lot on the second batch.


Pie dough. Cookie cutter circles. Slit in the middle. Pretty simple.


Terrible picture. But: pie dough draped over cookie dough. As I said, there was too much cookie dough on this first set, on the second batch the pie dough draped more fully over the edges and baked up better. Plunk a raisin in the middle (not pictured) and push it in a ways - it'll try to rise up as they bake.


Et voila. Pumpkin pieballs. Making them again, I'll probably scale them down - use a smaller circle cutter and less filling.

On the resilience of muffin recipes

Woke up this morning to a request for bran muffins. As I have a new favorite baking book, I was excited to try out a new recipe.

Turns out this particular recipe was a little too much for my pre-coffee consciousness. LOTS of steps and a sink fill of dishes later, the muffins were in the oven. Looking down on the counter, I saw three ingredients - walnuts, melted butter and raisins - that I had completely forgotten to include. The muffins had already baked to the point where I couldn't pull them out and include the forgotten parts, so I just let them go. And they turned out wonderfully.

Red Bean Pumpkin Muffins

A friend and fellow baking adventurer, Kirsten, recently made some black bean brownies that she blogged about and shared with me. Kind of inspiring; I decided to try the baking-with-beans meme a bit myself. First I tried a banana bread with white beans. I think it needed more flour to make up for the added liquid of the beans; it was tasty (and not at all beany) but didn't bake through all the way. The ends were good, though. Today, I decided to give it another try - Pumpkin muffins, with red beans. These came out awesome. I used a recipe out of the King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion, with a little extra flour added to make up for the liquid, and heavy on the spices to mask any beaniness (and the fact that my spices are getting old...) Moist but not too dense, and a little glaze for sweetness and visual interest. Yum...

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip

I've made a few batches of these cookies recently, due to a couple of Costco overpurchases. My wife bought a gigantic bag of chocolate chips a while ago, thinking she'd make some chocolate mousse to take to work for her annual Bastille Day celebration. Those have been sitting around for a little while. Then, more recently, we bought 4 pounds of salted butter in 1 pound loafs, instead of the usual UNsalted 1/4 pound sticks. So: cookies.

Let me just state for the record right now: These cookies rock. They're by far my favorite cookies ever, and have been for a long time. That's partly because of how I make them, some of the secrets of which I'm going to share with you right now.

First, the recipe. This is an easy one. It's on the bag. Follow the directions, but toss in about a cup of old fashioned oats with the flour or before the chips. Easy.



And yum.

Now: This picture illustrates a few things to do right (ie; my way):


(Yeah, tilt your head to the right. I dunno, it looked fine on my computer...)

1. Silicone baking sheets. I actually have a couple of brands of these - Silpat, Matfer, whatever, they seem to work the same. They make the cookies bake up nice, though, and cleanup is super easy. I wish I had actual half-sheet pans that they fit on better, but haven't make it to my local restaurant supply house for them.

2. Dough scoop thing. Yeah there's probably a correct term for this. What am I, a pro? Anyway, the scoops make all the cookies the same size, so they cook up evenly. Plus it's easy and fun to scoop them out. These are my default purchase every time my wife or I feel obligated to buy something from a Pampered chef party. I have like three different sizes now; they come in handy for different types of cookies, as well as other things. (I have no idea what size this is - I thought they were labeled, but I can't find a volume on this one. Medium, as far as the three that I have are concerned.)



See how nice those cook up?

3. Nine minutes. The recipe says nine to eleven. Sure, it differs from oven to oven, but I like them undercooked. I went ten on my last batch, and it was too much.

4. Take them out and let them sit for a couple minutes before you transfer them to cooling racks. This lets the bottoms brown up and firm without overcooking the rest of the cookie.



5. Multilayer cookie racks. Two words. Counter. Space. Plus they look cool.



6. Kitchen mascot. Very important for kitchen morale.

And there you go. Hope you have as much success as I have.

Cinnamon blueberry

I've been jonesing to bake recently, and had an occasion to yesterday, with the BBQ up at the reservoir. I mada a Cinnamon blueberry pie, a recipe which Amber had passed on to me. Turend out pretty good - I'd make this again. Cinnamon was not overpowering, just an aftertaste. Kinda forgot to take a picture of it; this is the best I could do...

Lego Birthday Cake

I read a bunch of geek parent and baking blogs, and had seen this meme go by a few times, so I was excited to try it out. I started with a double batch of fudge cake (from Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook) baked in two loaf pans. Froze them for a couple of days for ease of working, then leveled them and got ready to go:



Set them up on a tray and started frosting. Red first:



Then blue, then stacked the yellow one on top:



Then figured out how to make the studs on top - marshmallows, cut in half and "finger-frosted" worked perfect.



Then it was just some more studs, and some filling in and smoothing:


(Don't know why that one won't rotate...)

I think it was enjoyed...

Pear Bread

Man, I wish blogs had smell-o-vision. My kitchen smells soooo good right now. Saw this recipe on a baking blog that I read about a week ago, and have been itching to make it ever since. I made two loaves, one with pecans and one without. Also substituted half a cup of whole wheat for the same amount of regular flour and cut the sugar fro two cups to a cup and a half. Pretty nice, although I think I'd go with a smaller pan size next time. The kids and I munched on the nutless loaf after dinner; I think I'll surprise some old friends with the other loaf tomorrow...


(No idea why this is rotated; it never was, even when I edited it, but that's how blogger insists on uploading it. Sorry - tilt your head to the right...)

Banana Gingerbread

After granting a request for Peanut butter-banana-chocolate chip pancakes this morning, I was still in a baking mood - and realized that I had a couple of overripe bananas left. Fortunately, Amber had just posted about some Banana Gingerbread she had baked, and it sounded interesting enough to try. I added some crystallized ginger to the top, just for an extra ginger kick. Pretty yummy...

Catch-up pics

Ok, I've been slacking on both this blog and my running blog. Sorry - you know how it is. Anyway, a little about what we've been up to, with pictures!

Sofia played hard last weekend, was a tiiiired girl. Napped out on the couch while I was making lunch...

Super-cuteness...

We also hosted a rotating dinner party at our place last weekend - I haven't talked about it here, just letting it be it's own thing, but it was a blast. No pictures from the event, but while I was cleaning up the next day, I lined up some bottles to document some AMAZING wines that we shared...


Last night was the spring "carnival" at Julien's school, Elmcrest Elementary. He dragged Sofia and I up to it, and we did the bounce house, the wheel of fortune, the fishing hole, the lollipop derby, the cake walk - and face painting! Julien asked to be a clown, and this is what he ended up with...


Some of you may know that I like to make homemade pizza. It's usually been a weekend thing, because it takes time for the dough to rise, etc. Lately, though, I've figured out that I can get it ready in the morning, rolled out and topped, keep in on the pizza peel in the fridge all day, then slide it onto the pizza stone in the oven when I get home. Comes out very nicely. So, this is what we had for dinner tonight. Jealous?

Eclipse cookies

For some reason, the people at work decided to have an "Eclipse Party" to celebrate the lunar eclipse that's happening tomorrow night. For some reason, the first thing that popped into my head was the classic New York Black and White Cookie. I've never actually had one, being a west-coaster and having never been to New York, but I've read and heard about them. If nothing else, the Seinfeld episode that featured them cemented them in my generation's popular culture. At any rate, I thought it was time I gave them a try. Found a good sounding recipe for them at epicurious.com and modified it slightly, I went with straight dark chocolate for the "black" half instead of cocoa frosting. Here's the progression:

Dough ready to bake


Cooling cookies


White glaze


Chocolate side


Plated and ready to go...

Chocolate Class

I went to a Chocolate class tonight, at Reno's premiere (pretty much only) cooking school, Nothing To It. The class was a gift from our friend Anju; one of the most thoughtful gifts I've been given in a long time. It was supposed to have been taught be Alice Medrich, who has written prize wining cookbooks and owns a San fRancisco based chocolate company, Cocolat. She had an emergency and couldn't make it, so the class was taught by a man (I forget his name, how good is that) who has a chocolate company in Gardnerville, NV, Grimaldi's. The class ended up being about making truffles, which is what this guy's specialty is. I was hoping it would be a bit more about chocolate in general, not just about dipping one thing in another, but there you have it. Did learn a bit about different types of chocolate, percentages and whatnot, but (gasp) I'm not really a huge chocolate fan. I told myself that's why I was there, to learn to appreciate it so I could bake with it for others, but... Didn't get bit by the chocolate bug. Plus, I'd never been to a "cooking class" before, and it felt a little bed-and-breakfasty -then whole enforced interaction with people that you otherwise wouldn't get along with or even talk to. But I'm kind of private that way...

Treats

I was supposed to go to a baking party at Amber's tonight, and wanted to bring something premade so as not to hog oven space. Party got snowed out, but here's what I made to bring: rice krispy sushi treats. I was inspired by this blog post; theirs looks nicer because they used colored and molded marzipan for a bunch of it. But I thought mine turned out OK, and a little more natural. The orange and yellow pieces are dried apricots and pears with black licorice ties, and the rolls have Dots and Airheads (faux celery) inside. Yikes, sounds too sweet just typing it...

Santa hat cupcakes

Since I had apparently been cured of my inability to make decent cupcakes while making the vampire cupcakes at Halloween, I decided to make some Christmas cupcakes. Not sure where the idea came from, maybe the domed shape of a cupcake, but I thought it would be cool to frost them to look like little Santa hats. I did a few google and google image searches and found lots of Santa face cupcakes, but no Santa hats! Surely I can't have been the first person to try this. Anyway, here's the process in pictures:


Start with whatever kind of cupcakes you want, I used a basic yellow cake.


Pile some red frosting up into a cone shape. I used a bag, but you could probably spread it into shape just as easy...


Because I had to spread the red frosting a bit anyway so it didn't look like, well, a big red poo.


Frost a white border around the bottom, and a white pompom on top. Voila!

I'm sure someone else could make these look a lot better, my cupcake "production values" weren't the best this morning. But they were fun to make.

Muffins with Julien

Couldn't decide what to have for breakfast this morning, and Julien talked me into making chocolate muffins. Actually, DOUBLE chocolate muffins - he was very specific about that. Here are the bakers:


(Yup, that's what it says. Mich's apron, originally, but I kinda took it over. Not true, though...)


The best part of baking...


Ready to go in the oven. Funny, I didn't take any "after" photos of the finished product, but they turned out pretty well. Maybe with this and my recent vampire cupcakes, I've finally overcome my weird mental block with being able to make cupcakes and muffins...