The June Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Jasmine of Confessions of a Cardamom Addict and Annemarie of Ambrosia and Nectar. They chose a Traditional (UK) Bakewell Tart… er… pudding that was inspired by a rich baking history dating back to the 1800’s in England.  Check out their blogs for a discussion of the history behind the “tart…er…pudding” and the recipe.

Basically, the tart consists of a sweet pastry crust filled with a layer of jam and topped with frangipane. Frangipane is an almond flavored filling that, when baked, has a consistency somewhere between sponge cake and custard.  For the challenge, we had to make the crust and frangipane ourselves, but making the jam was optional.

Because I didn’t have a lot of time for the challenge this month,  I just used a storebought blueberry lemon ginger jam for the filling.

I chose it because I wanted a tangy filling to balance out the sweetness of the frangipane, but this jam was still a bit too sweet. Next time I think I’d use something like lemon curd, or else make my own jam with little or no sugar.

Everything came together pretty quickly, which was nice because I made the tart at 6pm on a Wednesday night, and I had plans to go out at 9pm

I was pretty happy with how the tart turned out overall–everyone in my lab seemed to enjoy it, and it was gone by the end of lab meeting. In the words of my labmate, Lil, “You baked your bakewell very well. It was a well-baked bakewell.”

When we decided to throw a baby shower for Rachel, a post-doc in my lab, I immediately knew I wanted to bake something. Since she’s having a girl, I also knew I wanted it to be pink. So when I found this recipe for pink lady cake on my favorite cooking blog, I knew it would be perfect.

The cake itself is pink due to the pureed strawberries in the batter (plus a drop of red food coloring–I would add a few more drops next time, as it still wasn’t as pink as I was expecting). I was tempted to dye the frosting pink too, but I decided to restrain myself

Instead, I just wrote “It’s a girl” in pink gel icing and decorated it with fresh strawberries (though I used frozen strawberries in the batter, as suggested in the recipe).

Rachel and her husband Jay cutting the cake.

Overall, I was happy with how the cake turned out, though my amateurish decoration inspired me to look into cake decorating classes   As you can see, it only had two layers–I made 2/3 of the recipe because I only have two cake pans, and the original recipe calls for three. I also added a layer of strawberry rhubarb jam in the middle, in addition to the frosting, and that worked out nicely.

Of course, being a perfectionist, I did think cake was a little dry, probably due to a slight overbaking. I think next time I’d split the layers to make a total of four, and make more frosting (which was really great). Regardless, the cake was devoured pretty quickly, and I think everyone enjoyed it. Stay tuned for the June Daring Bakers challenge!

The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey’s Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge.  I’m not sure what makes the cheesecake infamous, but it was a good base recipe for elaboration.  I decided to replicate a really great dessert I’ve had several times at Cafe Rouge: goat cheese cheesecake.

The goat cheese is subtle, but detectable enough to make it interesting. I used a 2:1 ratio of cream cheese to goat cheese, which worked out well, and the red wine poached rhubarb gave a nice acidity to counter the creaminess of the cheesecake.

I do have one admission to make–I knew I wanted to make mini cheesecakes (a huge cheesecake for two people, one of whom is ostensibly on a diet, is not the best idea), and so when I saw the cute mini graham cracker crusts at the store, I couldn’t resist. Hopefully no one will hold that against me (and I’ve included the crust recipe below anyway)

Abbey’s Infamous Cheesecake:

This is the base recipe for the challenge. I cut it in half for my six mini-cheesecakes, using 5 oz of goat cheese and 8 oz of cream cheese for my variation.

crust:
2 cups / 180 g graham cracker crumbs
1 stick / 4 oz butter, melted
2 tbsp. / 24 g sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract

cheesecake:
3 sticks of cream cheese, 8 oz each (total of 24 oz) room temperature
1 cup / 210 g sugar
3 large eggs
1 cup / 8 oz heavy cream
1 tbsp. lemon juice
1 tbsp. vanilla extract (or the innards of a vanilla bean)
1 tbsp liqueur, optional, but choose what will work well with your cheesecake

DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (Gas Mark 4 = 180C = Moderate heat). Begin to boil a large pot of water for the water bath.

2. Mix together the crust ingredients and press into your preferred pan. You can press the crust just into the bottom, or up the sides of the pan too – baker’s choice. Set crust aside.

3. Combine cream cheese and sugar in the bowl of a stand-mixer (or in a large bowl if using a hand-mixer) and cream together until smooth. Add eggs, one at a time, fully incorporating each before adding the next. Make sure to scrape down the bowl in between each egg. Add heavy cream, vanilla, lemon juice, and alcohol and blend until smooth and creamy.

4. Pour batter into prepared crust and tap the pan on the counter a few times to bring all air bubbles to the surface. Place pan into a larger pan and pour boiling water into the larger pan until halfway up the side of the cheesecake pan. If cheesecake pan is not airtight, cover bottom securely with foil before adding water.

5. Bake 45 to 55 minutes, until it is almost done – this can be hard to judge, but you’re looking for the cake to hold together, but still have a lot of jiggle to it in the center. You don’t want it to be completely firm at this stage. Close the oven door, turn the heat off, and let rest in the cooling oven for one hour. This lets the cake finish cooking and cool down gently enough so that it won’t crack on the top. After one hour, remove cheesecake from oven and lift carefully out of water bath. Let it finish cooling on the counter, and then cover and put in the fridge to chill. Once fully chilled, it is ready to serve.

Recipe for red wine poached rhubarb (This recipe was good, but next time I would cook the rhubarb less–it ended up pretty mushy. Also, I removed the rhubarb after 10 minutes and reduced the syrup to ~1/2 cup before combining them again and refrigerating.)

I made these cupcakes for our Superbowl party–a Guinness chocolate cupcake topped with Bailey’s frosting sounded like a perfect dessert for a group of (mostly) guys watching football.  But I thought I’d save the post for closer to St. Patrick’s day, so of course I’m now late

I’m sure no one minds, though, because people love cupcakes year-round.  The original recipe from Smitten Kitchen (now dubbed “chocolate whiskey and beer cupcakes” due to some controversy on that blog about the name) actually called for a filling of chocolate ganache mixed with whiskey–the cocktail, the “Irish car bomb”, consists of Guinness, Bailey’s irish cream, and whiskey. But I didn’t want to buy a whole bottle of whiskey to make this, and I thought the filling might make it too rich.  I actually wish I had done it, though, because the cake part wasn’t very sweet on its own, so I think the addition of the filling would have made it just right.  They were good anyway (the topping is a just shaved chocolate for decoration), but maybe I’ll try them again with the filling–especially since I have a whole bottle of Bailey’s left over!

Occasionally I like to embrace the Jewish part of my heritage (on my mom’s side), albeit usually in food form — bagels, lox, pastrami sandwiches, etc. So when I found out that last Friday/Saturday was Purim, I decided to make Hamantaschen. These triangular cookies supposedly resemble either the hat or ears (depending on who you ask) of Haman, the villain of the Purim story. They usually consist of a shortbread or sugar cookie-like dough filled with jam or poppyseed filling.  The dough I used leans more toward shortbread, but I really enjoyed it because it stayed moist and slightly tender.

I decided to do the traditional poppyseed filling (my fiancé Greg’s favorite)  along with a few cherry jam-filled ones. The poppyseed filling was tricky–most recipes call for grinding the poppyseeds using a coffee grinder, then cooking them in milk and sugar. But since I don’t have a coffee grinder,  I found a recipe that supposedly didn’t really require grinding. Instead, you boil the seeds once and let them sit in hot water for an hour, then drain that water and cook them in the aforementioned milk and sugar. Then, at the end, you puree them in the food processor to get more of a paste. Maybe I have a crappy food processor, but it didn’t seem to do much of anything to the seeds except spray them all over the lid. Still, even without that final puree, the filling turned out fine — the flavor was great, though it did stick a little in your teeth.   As for the cherry filling, the jam I used ended up boiling out of most of the cookies. I think the key is moisture content — the poppyseed filling is relatively dry and so stayed put. I’ve read that pie filling is better, so maybe I’ll try that next time.

p.s. I’ve been remiss in posting — it’s been over a month (since I didn’t do the Feb. Daring Bakers challenge)! To make up for it, check back soon for Irish car bomb cupcakes!

Gil Marks’ Cookie Dough Hamantaschen
[recipe from this blog]

1/2 cup + 3 Tbs butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1 large egg
3 Tbs orange juice, or sweet red wine, or a water/lemon juice combo [I used 2 T lemon juice and 1 T water]
1 tsp vanilla extract or grated lemon zest
1/4 tsp salt
About 2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
About 1 1/2 cups filling — poppyseed, jam, pie filling, etc.

Beat the butter until smooth. Gradually add sugar and beat until light and fluffy (5-10 min). Beat in egg. Blend in juice (or wine, or water), vanilla (or zest), and salt. Stir in flour.
Wrap dough in a plastic wrap and chill until firm, 1 hour minimum. At this point, it can be fridged for days or frozen for months. Let stand at room temperature for several minutes, until workable but not soft.
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
For easy handling, divide the dough into 4 pieces. On a lightly floured surface, roll out each piece 1/8″ thick. Using a 3 inch glass (ish), cut out rounds. Reroll the scraps.
Place 1 tsp of filling in the center of each round. Pinch the bottom side of the dough round together over the filling. Fold down the top flap and pinch the two other sides together to form a triangle, leaving some filling exposed in the center. Hamantaschen can be prepared ahead to this point and frozen for several months. Defrost before baking.
Place the Hamantaschen 1 inch apart on ungreased baking sheets. Bake until golden brown, about 13 minutes. Let cool completely.

Makes about 30-40 small cookies.

Poppyseed filling
Adapted from How To Bake by Nick Malgieri
Yield: 1 1/2 cups [I halved this and had enough to fill 3/4 of my cookies -- the rest I filled with jam]

1 cup poppy seeds
1 cup milk
1/4 cup sugar
1 Tbsp. butter
1/2 cup golden raisins
1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon

Place the poppy seeds in a saucepan and cover them with three cups of water. Bring to a boil, remove from heat, cover the pan, and allow the seeds to soak for an hour.

Drain all the water off the soaked seeds and add the pareve milk, sugar, and butter. Bring to a boil over low heat, stirring occasionally, and cook until the mixture becomes fairly thick and you can easily see the bottom of the pan while stirring (this took about 30 minutes for me). Allow mixture to cool.

Puree the filling in a blender or food processor, making sure that most of the seeds are reduced to a paste (as I said above, this didn’t really happen for me).  Right at the end, add the raisins and cinnamon and pulse until the raisins are finely chopped. Filling can be stored in refrigerator for several days or freezer for several months.

This month’s challenge is brought to us by Karen of Bake My Day and Zorra of 1x umruehren bitte aka Kochtopf. They have chosen Tuiles from The Chocolate Book by Angélique Schmeink and Nougatine and Chocolate Tuiles from Michel Roux.

Tuiles are basically really thin cookies that are shaped while warm. They’re traditionally made into sort of a Pringle shape by draping a round cookie over a rolling pin, causing it to resemble a roof tile (hence “tuiles”).  However, they can pretty much be made into any shape you desire. So, inspired by those pirouette cookies, I decided to roll mine and dip them in chocolate.

First, I used a stencil made from cardboard from a cereal box to spread the dough into a thin circle. Some were thinner than others–almost transparent–and I think those turned out the best. The thicker onces got spongy when they dried, but the thin ones got crisp. However, I had to be careful about my cooking time — 6 minutes, no longer, or they were too crisp to roll.

I baked the cookies in batches of 5-6 so I could shape them right as they came out of the oven. The first were a little rough because I had baked them for too long, but the later batches got better and better.

Finally, I dipped the cookies in semisweet Scharffen Berger chocolate.

I was pretty happy with how these turned out overall, since I was able to get them quite thin. But they don’t store well–by the next day, when I brought them into my lab’s weekly meeting to get rid of them (I started Weight Watchers a few weeks ago, and I’ve already lost about 8 lbs!), they were spongy. I do have to admit that we were supposed to serve something “light”, like fruit or a mousse, on the side with the tuiles. I made these at the last minute for my lab meeting, so I didn’t have the ingredients to make any side items. Sorry DBers!

I’ve been putting off posting, and hence I decided to post about two of my recent baking experiments at once to make up for it

Part I : Cinnamon Roll Muffins

Recently I made these cinnamon roll muffins from Joy the Baker. They’re made with yeast, but only take about an hour total as opposed to regular cinnamon rolls, which usually require several hours for the dough to rise, rest, bake, etc.

The recipe, which was originally for a loaf version, isn’t clear about when to rest them as muffins instead of a loaf–I ended up resting them in the pan. That turned out fine and they rose ok, but I was concerned when I took them out of the oven because the cinnamon topping had melted off the top and spread out in between the muffins in the pan. However, it ended up being pretty easy to scoop it up and get it back on top of the muffins, so crisis avoided

As for the taste, the muffin part was pretty bland and had the muffin-like texture you’d expect (not like a cinnamon roll, despite the yeast in the batter–which is to be expected because the dough wasn’t kneaded to develop the gluten), but the topping was so sweet that I wouldn’t have wanted a sweeter muffin. Overall, they were good and perhaps could substitute for cinnamon rolls if you had a real craving, but I’d rather use my calories on real cinnamon rolls!

Part II: Tarte Tatin

When I was at home in Atlanta, I decided I wanted to make a fruit dessert, so I chose the apple tarte tatin from smitten kitchen. I love tarte tatin, and will usually order it in a restaurant that has it on the menu, but I’ve never tried to make it. I guess I was always intimidated by the amount of caramelization you have to do to the apples…plus the fact that you need a pan that can go from stovetop to oven But, emboldened by my recent completion of the Daring Bakers caramel challenge, I picked up my mom’s stainless steel pan and decided to go for it.

Overall, it went way better than I expected. In fact, it was almost perfect — apart from the fact that the apples got a little too caramelized (some might say burnt) in the middle. The problem was that the pan I used was about 15 inches across, and just didn’t heat evenly enough to caramelize everything at the same time. So rather than having perfectly caramelized apples in the middle and undercaramelized ones on the outside, I ended up cooking the ones in the middle a bit too much. Still, the flavor was amazing. The crust was super easy to make and really flaky and delicious, and the tarte even came out of the pan with minimal apple displacement (only a couple in the middle stuck)! In all, I was really proud of it, and I guess everyone else liked it because it was gone by the end of the meal

This month’s Daring Bakers Challenge was to make caramel cake, with the optional addition of homemade caramels. I decided to do both — I made the caramels in my apartment here in Berkeley, then brought them home to Atlanta for Thanksgiving. There, I made the caramel cake and frosting. I’m posting a day late because  I didn’t have my camera USB cord with me in Atlanta, and I was traveling back to California all day yesterday. I know you’ve been on the edge of your seat!

Sea salt caramels

Recipe from Alice Medrich’s Pure Dessert.

First stage of making caramels–getting sugar and golden syrup to 305F. I bought my first candy thermometer for this recipe, so now I need to make more use of it

After adding the cream and butter. Look at the sides of the pan and you can see how high it bubbled up at first! The key here is definitely using a very large pot. The recipe said to cook this mixture to 260F, but I only let mine get to about 248F because others had trouble with the caramels getting very hard (i.e. becoming toffee). Mine turned out nice and soft, and I was definitely assured I did the right thing when Barefoot Contessa cooked her caramels to 248F on the episode I watched today!

Caramel poured into pan to set.

After cooling in the fridge overnight, topping with gray sea salt, and cutting into pieces.

Greg helped me wrap all the caramels in squares of unbleached waxed parchment paper.

Finally done wrapping! This recipe probably made about 80 caramels.

Caramel cake with caramelized butter frosting

Recipe from Shuna Fish Lydon, http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2006 … he-recipe/.

Making the caramel syrup. I used a big pot because when you add the water to stop the caramelization process, it spatters a lot. I actually poured the water through a hole in some aluminum foil to avoid getting hot sugar on myself.

I was worried I had made the caramel a bit dark, even though David Lebovitz says it should be the color of an old penny. It tasted kind of bitter, but in the end,  the cake and frosting both ended up just tasting really caramelly.

Cake before frosting. My mom only had a 10-inch cake pan (not the 9-inch one called for in the recipe), so I didn’t try to make multiple layers.

After frosting and decorating with some caramels.

Yum! I had this for breakfast the next day too

This month’s challenge was hosted by Shuna Fish Lydon (http://eggbeater.typepad.com), along with Dolores (http://culinarycuriosity.blogspot.com/), Alex (Brownie of the Blondie and Brownie duo: http://blondieandbrownie.blogspot.com/), Jenny of Foray into Food (http://forayintofood.blogspot.com/), and with Gluten-free assistance by Natalie of Gluten-a-Go-Go (http://glutenagogo.blogspot.com/).

Check out their blogs for more info about the recipes!

This month’s Daring Bakers challenge was another savory one — homemade pizza, using the dough recipe from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart.  This was slightly different from the recipe I normally use, since it calls for leaving the dough in the refrigerator overnight. While that did help split up the work and made for a stronger yeasty flavor (which honestly I wasn’t a huge fan of), I felt like the dough didn’t really rise as much as it should have — though that could also have been my old yeast I split the original recipe, which was supposed to produce 6 9-12” pizzas, in half. Though I was hoping to make two pizzas with it (another part of the challenge) I ended up only being able to make one ~13-14″ pizza with a normal crust.

As part of the challenge, we also had to attempt tossing the dough in the air. I had never tried it before but was excited to go for it.  Here’s my best toss (thanks to my fiancé Greg for the great photo!):

[Yes, that's Anthony Bourdain on my t-shirt]

I was able to toss it a few times, but I ended up doing the final shaping on a cookie sheet. The sauce was homemade too, using this great recipe from Smitten Kitchen:

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Moderately Easy Tomato Sauce

4 roma tomatoes
1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves of garlic, minced
Pinch of red pepper flakes
Splash of white wine
1/2 teaspoon sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt

Bring medium pot of water to a boil. Poach the tomatoes for one minute only, and then drain them. As soon as they are cooled off enough that you can touch them, peel them. The peels should come right off. If they don’t, make a slit in the skins. This always does the trick.

Drain and dry the pot. Put it back on the burner over medium heat. Pour in olive oil and let it heat completely before adding the garlic and stirring it for a minute with a wooden spoon. Add the red pepper flakes and stir it for anther minute. You do not want the garlic to brown. Put the peeled tomatoes in the pot, along with the wine, sugar and salt. Break the tomatoes up with your spoon.

Let the sauce simmer for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the tomatoes break down. Carefully taste without burning your tongue and adjust seasonings, if necessary.

Makes enough for one small/medium pizza.

(Note: I substituted red wine for the white wine with no problems. SK also has a recipe for a sauce that calls for canned tomatoes, but I haven’t tried it yet).

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I topped the pizza with my old favorites: sun-dried tomatoes, feta cheese, onions, and fresh basil.

I think next time I would add the basil at the end of baking to keep it greener.

Although I have a pizza peel and a baking stone, I always get nervous about moving the pizza from one surface to another after topping the unbaked dough. Because I want to leave the stone in the oven, I just assemble and bake the pizza on a cookie sheet for about 5 minutes, then slide it directly onto the baking stone for the last few minutes of baking to help crisp the crust.

For the pizza dough recipe, check out the blog of this month’s host, Rosa.

And stay tuned — for dessert after the pizza, I made pumpkin crème brûlée

I’ll take a moment from playing with my new iPhone to post about a favorite recipe   As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m allergic to some tree nuts, including pine nuts. Since I can’t eat regular pesto, but love basil, I recently started making almond pesto. I can’t tell you how the taste compares to regular pesto, but I love it.

The base recipe is from Giada’s Family Dinners–I’ve just changed the pine nuts to almonds.

Almond Pesto

• 1 garlic clove, peeled
• 2 cups fresh basil leaves
• 1/4 cup almonds (I prefer roasted & lightly salted)
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste (less if your almonds are salted already)
• 1/2 cup to 3/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan

Into the bowl of a food processor, add the garlic, basil leaves, almonds, salt, and pepper. Pulse until finely chopped. With the blender still running, slowly pour 1/2 cup of olive oil. Check for a thick, yet smooth consistency, adding more oil if necessary. Transfer to a bowl and stir in 1/2 cup Parmesan. (Alternative: add piece of Parmesan to food processor and let it shred it for you. It might leave a few chunks though, as you can see in some of my pictures).

Cook spaghetti according to package directions. Drain, then add pesto.

Stir to mix until pasta is evenly coated.

Enjoy!