BCM | a whisk and a spoon

Tuesdays with Dorie BCM: Tiramisu Tart

August 13, 2019 at 8:19 am | Posted in BCM, groups, pies & tarts, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 9 Comments
Tags: baking, chocolate, tarts

I do love a good tiramisu, so there was no doubt I would be game for a Tiramisu Tart. This has all the required elements of a classic tiramisu– a layer of ladyfingers soaked in strong coffee and plenty of delicious mascarpone cream– housed in a sweet pastry shell.

I decided to scale the recipe back and make a few small tartlets instead of a large tart. There are only two of us here, and even though I think regular tiramisu gets better and better as it sits, I was a little worried that I’d have a soggy crust long before we could finish up a full-size tart. I put a thin layer of melted dark chocolate on the bottom of each shell for some extra insurance that they’d stay crisp for a couple of days. Also for some extra chocolate…who am I kidding?!? I bought a domestic mascarpone instead of my favorite Italian one, which I have to walk to another neighborhood to find, and it was a little loose when I mixed the filling up. I was glad that I chose to make tartlets, as the individual shells kept the soft filling contained and I didn’t have do deal with messy slices. At work I have access to lots of different kinds of cake scraps, one of them being housemade ladyfinger cake. I absconded the other day with a little scrap packet to put to use here and saved myself a bit of work.

I’d be equally happy with a “regular” tiramisu, but the tart shell is a fun twist. It does give a nice crispy element, it’s really pretty and I did love it. A pick-me-up that you can actually pick up…I mean, what’s not to love?

For the recipe, see Baking Chez Moi by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!

Tuesdays with Dorie BCM: Roasted Rhubarb with Bitters

July 9, 2019 at 12:01 am | Posted in BCM, jams & preserves, other sweet, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 3 Comments
Tags: fruit

This is actually the third year in a row that I’ve made this Roasted Rhubarb with Bitters recipe. If you love rhubarb like I love rhubarb, then you’ll appreciate having it in the fridge to top yogurt, ice cream, plain cake, etc. And it’s hot pink– the best food color. Prettiness counts cuz we eat with our eyes first. Taste counts, too, of course, and this has that balance I like with rhubarb…sweet enough to enjoy it, but not enough to kill its natural tartness. A few dashes of bitters from the bar cart give it a barley there something else that has me plotting to use the syrup to make a beautiful pink cocktail when I’m done with the fruit (or err…vegetable).

For the recipe, see Baking Chez Moi by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll.

Tuesdays with Dorie BCM: Bread and Chocolate Coffee Can Brioche Ice Cream Sandwiches

June 25, 2019 at 9:43 am | Posted in BCM, groups, ice creams & frozen, sweet things, sweet yeast breads, tuesdays with dorie | 8 Comments
Tags: bread, chocolate, ice cream

It’s gotten hot and muggy here these last couple of weeks, and the only kind of sandwich I really care about right now is the kind with ice cream in the middle. These Bread and Chocolate Coffee Can Brioche Ice Cream Sandwiches tick all the boxes for what I want for lunch. Haha.

Maybe it was out of a sense of shame for having missed last week’s TWD posting, but I decided to go all out and make all the components for this treat myself. I did bake the brioche in a can, which came out great. I made chocolate ice cream (I actually used the Philly-style recipe Dorie has in Dorie’s Cookies because I didn’t feel like adding to my egg white collection), which is super rich and dense. I then froze what I needed for these inside tart ring molds to get perfectly circular ice cream pucks that matched up with the round bread slices. And I already had some homemade salted caramel sauce in the fridge. You can totally use all store-bought stuff for this, though, and whatever flavor of ice cream or type or sauce you’d like (I’m thinking coffee ice cream and butterscotch sauce would also be pretty darn good…).

Dorie has you assemble the ice cream sandwiches first and then drizzle warm caramel sauce over the tops. That then becomes more of a knife and fork dessert situation, which to me is less fun than a hand-held ICS situation. So I slathered my brioche slices with the caramel before sandwiching it with the ice cream pucks. There’s a bit of drippage, but getting messy is what it’s all about. Did I mention these are crazy good??

For the recipe, see Baking Chez Moi by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll.

Tuesdays with Dorie BCM: Pistachio and Raspberry Financiers

June 11, 2019 at 3:56 pm | Posted in BCM, cakes & tortes, groups, simple cakes, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 4 Comments
Tags: baking, cake

These Pistachio and Raspberry Financiers will make you feel rich even if your savings account balance states otherwise. Nutty and brown buttery, they are decadent and just a little bit will do (although I could probably be quite greedy with them). Dorie makes financiers in mini muffin tins, but I happen to have a silicone bar mold, so to mimic the traditional shape, I used it here. I had the space so I popped three raspberries on top instead of just one– oh, the luxury! I like the way the zing from the berries contrasts with the richness of the cakes.

By the way, did you know I spent six years working as an investment banker before I quit and went to culinary school? It’s why I moved to New York after college. Unfortunately, we were more likely to be found eating cookies from the trading floor vending machine than these beauties.

For the recipe, see Baking Chez Moi by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!

Tuesdays with Dorie BCM: Crackle-Top Cream Puffs

May 28, 2019 at 7:41 am | Posted in BCM, general pastry, groups, other sweet, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 6 Comments
Tags: baking, choux

I love making all things choux— It’s one of the most fun doughs to make, IMO, and yields some of the most tasty pastries! While I’ve made pâte à choux treats here many times, this was my first attempt at making Crackle-Topped Cream Puffs. A standard cream puff gets topped with a small, thin disk of cookie dough that fuses to the top and gets beautifully cracked as the choux beneath it rises and expands. Dorie said we could either use a “craquelin” made from a simple brown sugar cookie dough or we could use her Sweet Tart Dough made with nuts. I happened to have some STD (hahaha) made with almond meal in the freezer, so I just went with that. I will say that, while I did have a crispy-crackly top, I didn’t get the color contrast that I would have with the brown sugar dough version, so mine look less striking than I would have hoped. Next time I will try the other way.

You can fill these babies however you’d like– with pastry cream, whipped cream, mousse, curd, or with ice cream, like I did. I even had a hidden layer of cookie butter at the bottom, as I’m still trying to use up a jar I made for other things. The first local strawberries were at the market this past weekend, so I snagged some of those to along with, too. Kind of like strawberry shortcake cream puffs, they were delicious and perfect for Memorial Day dessert.

For the recipe, see Baking Chez Moi by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!

Tuesdays with Dorie BCM: Cookies-and-Cream Tartlets

May 14, 2019 at 12:01 am | Posted in BCM, groups, pies & tarts, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 7 Comments
Tags: baking, chocolate, tarts

We are on a cookie butter roll here in TWD-land. First two cookies, now Cookies-and-Cream Tartlets. These tartlets are an assemblage of components, which I like, because they can be done over time if I just don’t have the time. We’ve made Dorie’s Sweet Tart Dough for so many things now, and here it’s baked in mini tart pans. There’s a layer of cookie butter on the bottom of each fully-baked shell and then a luxurious salted dark chocolate ganache covering that. The recipe has chunks of broken-up speculoos cookies mixed into the ganache, but I chose to hide them underneath in the cookie butter because I wanted a smooth and shiny top layer. I did dust some crumbs over the top for a hint at what’s inside. What’s inside is pretty fabulous.

For the recipe, see Baking Chez Moi by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!

Tuesdays with Dorie BCM: Cardamom and Mocha Marble Cake

April 23, 2019 at 2:29 pm | Posted in BCM, cakes & tortes, groups, simple cakes, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 8 Comments
Tags: baking, cake

I love cutting into a marble cake. Will there be swirls? Will there be layers? Will there be blobs? It’s like a surprise inside! This Cardamom and Mocha Marble cake is one of Dorie’s Bonne Idée suggestions for the Double Chocolate Marble Cake in the book. Chocolate with coffee and cardamom is a combo that really speaks to me, so I went for it.

This cake is pretty much like a pound cake, with dark chocolate (and espresso powder) mixed into half of the batter and white chocolate (and ground cardamom) mixed into the the other half. I didn’t need a whole 9″x5″ loaf, so I scaled down the recipe to 2/3 the original (fun times with kitchen math!) to make it my 8.5″x4.5″ pan instead. I was sure to watch it in the oven and it took around an hour to bake through. I did tent it with foil at the 40-minute mark so that it wouldn’t get too dark and crusty. This is a dense cake with a fine crumb. Even though it’s a simple loaf, the flavors make it seem more sophisticated. And the marbling is, of course, very exciting to behold.

For the recipe, see Baking Chez Moi by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll to see other rewinds!

Tuesdays with Dorie BCM: Palmiers

April 9, 2019 at 12:01 am | Posted in BCM, cookies & bars, general pastry, groups, other sweet, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 7 Comments
Tags: baking, cookies

What to do with a little stack of frozen puff pastry scraps left over from Banana-Nutella Chaussons and a Potato Tourte? Make Palmiers! These are so easy. Just roll puff into a square, brush with melted butter, sprinkle with sugar and fold in towards the center. I used vanilla sugar for extra flavor, and because I found a jar of it in my cupboard and want to use it up. Some of my palmiers sort of unfurled into donut shapes the oven, but I don’t mind. Puff pastry does what it wants to sometimes…I like things made with it to be really caramelized and crispy, taken almost to the edge of dark. I’ve got no time for pale puff. These palmiers are just as good with ice cream as they are with coffee.

For the recipe, see Baking Chez Moi by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!

Tuesdays with Dorie BCM: Banana-Nutella Chaussons

March 26, 2019 at 7:53 am | Posted in BCM, general pastry, groups, other sweet, pies & tarts, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 8 Comments
Tags: baking, chocolate, turnovers

These Banana-Nutella Chaussons are a take on traditional French puff pastry turnovers that are usually filled with apples. Dories says chaussons are most often breakfast or snack treats, but they are pretty amazing for dessert, too, especially when they are filled with a combo of gooey melted chocolate and bananas. Maybe even more so when you replace the straight-up chocolate in the filling with a generous amount of Nutella, like I did here. Things got a little wild in the oven, and my chaussons pretty much erupted, even though I egg washed and sealed them well. C’est la vie…the delicious filling and flaky layers just could not be contained! My evil genius dessert brain spotted an opportunity and decided a scoop of salted caramel ice cream would be perfect tucked into the opened sides.

For the recipe, see Baking Chez Moi by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!

Tuesdays with Dorie BCM: Toasted Buckwheat and Chopped Chocolate Sablés

March 12, 2019 at 9:23 pm | Posted in BCM, cookies & bars, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 10 Comments
Tags: baking, cookies

These Toasted Buckwheat and Chopped Chocolate Sablés begin with the unusual instruction to toast the buckwheat flour until it darkens and and smells roasted. Buckwheat has a nutty, earthy flavor to begin with, and this extra step really brings that out. I think it changes the texture of the flour a bit, too, making it drier, and in turn making the sablés even sandier. Buckwheat and chocolate is a winning combo, and I liked these, with their flecks of chopped bittersweet chocolate, a lot. Sweet with a touch of savory, they are sturdy and crisp, yet crumbly and tender all at the same time. Seems I’m churning out batch after batch of cookies these days, but I have another winner on my hands so I’m not complaining!