Tuesdays with Dorie: Blueberry Crumb Cake
March 24, 2009 at 9:02 am | Posted in breakfast things, cakes & tortes, groups, simple cakes, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 47 Comments
Homemade crumb cake for breakfast is something I definitley could do with more often. One small problem…I don’t know about you, but it’s awfully hard for me to put together a cake in the morning that takes almost an hour to bake! Solution…make it the night before, have some for dessert and heat the rest up for breakfast the next morning.
Why am I going on about crumb cake? Well, Sihan of Befuddlement chose Dorie’s Blueberry Crumb Cake for TWD this week. It is loaded with berries (I went with the standard blue ones, but next time I just may try cranberries), and has a crumb topping that is sweet, nutty and crisp. I swapped out a little bit of AP flour for whole wheat in both the crumb and the cake. How healthy, right?! Also, I made a half recipe and baked it in a loaf pan. It’s just perfect with coffee.
For the recipe, see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, or read Befuddlement. Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie: French Yogurt Cake with Marmalade Glaze
March 17, 2009 at 2:50 am | Posted in cakes & tortes, groups, simple cakes, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 56 Comments
I always have yogurt in the fridge (a granola/yogurt mush-up is my standard pre-work brekkie), but sometimes the expiration date does sneak up on me. A yogurt loaf cake is the perfect use-it-up recipe, so I’m no stranger to Liliana’s (of My Cookbook Addiction) pick for TWD this week. I’ve actually made a similar version of Dorie’s French Yogurt Cake before. There was also the time I made Ina’s lemon yogurt cake. Oh, and I even did yogurt cupcakes awhile back. See– these cakes have saved a lot of yogurt from the bin!
A yogurt cake is kind of like a pound cake, but without that nagging, butter-filled guilt. I used low-fat (2%) yogurt and cut back on the oil in the recipe by a couple tablespoons. My cake still stayed nice and moist for a few days. Dorie flavors hers with lemon, but since TWD just did lemon custards last week (and I’m doing something else lemon at the end of this week, too), I used orange zest and orange marmalade in mine. Any citrus works great here, to tell the truth.
I love the addition of almond meal in this version of the cake…très French, I think. The marmalade glaze gives it some bittersweet stickiness. Dorie says to strain the marmalade first. I’m not sure why…I like the zesty bits, so I didn’t bother.
For the recipe, see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, or read My Cookbook Addiction. Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie: Lemon-Clove Cup Custard
March 10, 2009 at 2:58 am | Posted in groups, pudding/mousse, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 47 Comments
Bridget, from the gorgeous blog The Way the Cookie Crumbles, chose Dorie’s Lemon Cup Custard for TWD this week. I opted to go for the lemon-clove “Playing Around” suggestion in the book, and since it is a cup custard, I naturally baked mine in a cup.
I actually don’t have too much to say on this one, but there was a lot of talk (mostly not-so-positive) on the comment board. For group members who didn’t like the recipe, the main problem was the “egginess” of the custard. I happen to love eggy custards. In fact, I chose Dorie’s flan when my turn to pick came around last March (I was worried that if I didn’t, no one would!). These little cups are prepared similarly to flan custard, and their texture and eggy taste did remind me of flan. But without the caramel sauce, they were rather unremarkable. This recipe was not bad by any means, just a bit boring.
If you’d like to check it out for yourself, read The Way the Cookie Crumbles or see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan for the recipe. Don’t forget to scroll through the TWD Blogroll.
Tuesdays with Dorie: Chocolate Armagnac Cake
March 3, 2009 at 2:44 am | Posted in cakes & tortes, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 58 Comments
I’ve been waiting for more than a year for someone to choose Dorie’s Chocolate Armagnac Cake for TWD! Not just hoping it would be chosen for the sake of trying it…it was actually the very first recipe I made from BFMHTY, when I was still living in Sydney and I hadn’t yet joined TWD. A couple of weeks later, I signed on to the group and have been waiting patiently, holding on to the picture, ever since. Finally LyB of And then I do the dishes came through and picked it for this week’s recipe!
It was my brother who requested this cake. I was looking for something to make for dessert while he was staying in Sydney with us, and asked him to choose a recipe from the book. I think he did it on picture alone, because he sure was surprised to see me chopping up prunes! That’s right, prunes. Armagnac-flamed prunes are part of what gives this cake it’s little something-something, and a great texture. I actually didn’t use Armagnac here but used Jameson instead, which thanks to my father (yeah, please don’t ask), I had already had on-hand.
This is another dense, chocoholic type of cake. (There have been a lot of those lately, right?) Really good, as far as I can remember, and a bit of glaze puts it over the top. If you are baking for someone who’s anti-prune, sub another dried fruit, like raisins, or just keep it hush-hush…they’ll probably never pin it down.
For the recipe, see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan (read Dorie’s funny story about the cake, too). It will also be on And then I do the dishes. Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll.
Tuesdays with Dorie: Caramel Crunch Bars
February 24, 2009 at 2:51 am | Posted in cookies & bars, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 60 Comments
We have another yummy cookie for TWD this week. Whitney of What’s Left on the Table? had me putting caramel crunch bars on my table, and trust me, nothing’s left!
This cookie does have a lot of crunch. It’s a brown sugar shortbread, flavored with a little cinnamon and espresso powder and a lot of chopped chocolate. On top there’s melted dark chocolate and a generous sprinkle of toffee bits. I have never bought Heath Toffee Bits before, and was completely amused by the package. Not only does it say “Bits o’ Brickle,” which is enormously funny to me, but it also says “finest quality English toffee” in one spot and then “artificially flavored” in another. Hmmm…
In the book, Dorie suggests using these for ice cream sandwiches. I had a little homemade fresh mint ice cream, so I decided to give it a try. I topped the bars that I was using for the sandwiches with cocoa nibs instead of toffee (these I scattered sparingly, because they are kinda bitter). Tasty? Yes, but also a little hard to eat. I thought the bars were a little too crunchy for ice cream sandwiches. They were difficult to bite into frozen…I think I prefer a softer, more yielding cookie for that purpose. The caramel crunch bars are sweet enough and rich enough on their own, that I preferred them just as they were. Well, with a cup of herbal tea, that is.
For the recipe, read What’s Left on the Table? or see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll.
Tuesdays with Dorie: Devil’s Food White-Out Cake
February 17, 2009 at 2:19 am | Posted in cakes & tortes, cupcakes, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 49 Comments
Oh, I bet a lot of TWDers have been waiting a long time for this one, and we have Stephanie of Confessions of a City Eater to thank for finally choosing it! Actually, I feel a twinge of guilt posting this picture. It’s almost as if, by turning Dorie’s cover cake into cupcakes, I haven’t quite done her recipe justice. Please forgive me…it’s just that I’ve been doing a lot of layer cakes with The Cake Slice group lately.
Geez Louise, I love devil’s food cake. I mean, really…it’s so chocolaty, and that moist but dense thing it has going on…it’s just the best type of chocolate cake (by the way, I like it chilled). This particular devil’s food recipe is extra-special because it has little chopped chocolate bits throughout. I made a half recipe and got ten cupcakes. I actually only turned six of them into White-Outs. The others went, unfrosted but nicely wrapped, into the freezer, and later (along with some leftover cream cheese frosting you’ll read about in a few days) became Valentine’s cupcakes.
The White-Out Cake is Dorie’s spin on the classic Brooklyn blackout cake, but here the filling/frosting is homemade marshmallow Fluff. Yay, Fluff! I even cut a hole out of the center of each cupcake and filled it with extra marshmallow meringue. You know where I was going with that, right? I reserved the little plugs of cake for my crumbs. One note about the frosting: I reduced the cream of tartar in the recipe. A friend had made this cake about a month ago, and told me she thought the frosting had a slightly metallic taste…the large amount of CoT was the only culprit I could think of.
So good…it was so good. Make it yourself and see– the recipe, of course, is in Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, but she also has it here on NPR’s site. Don’t forget to read Stephanie’s post and check out the TWD Blogroll to see what everyone else came up with!
Tuesdays with Dorie: Floating Islands
February 10, 2009 at 2:39 am | Posted in groups, other sweet, pudding/mousse, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 41 Comments
Shari, a loyal TWDer who does cool things with classic dishes on Whisk: a food blog, chose Floating Islands (île flottante), a traditional French dessert, for this week’s recipe. I actually would have called this “snow eggs” (oeufs à la neige), but now I realize I don’t know what the difference is, if there really is one (and Googling it didn’t help, as I found different info on each link…too much information sometimes just confuses me).
This dessert makes me smile; it looks kind of goofy, don’t you think? The basic idea is this: a milk-poached meringue sits in a pool of crème anglaise custard. It’s light from the meringue and, at the same time, rich from the custard…and because it’s served chilled, it’s really quite refreshing.
Rather than quenelling smooth, egg-shaped meringues, I tried to make cute, spiky little islands. Unfortunately, my cute spikes flattened as I turned the meringues during the poaching process, and I ended up with deformed blobs. Whatever…looks aren’t everything. I made my meringues first, and so that I wouldn’t waste the poaching milk, I strained and remeasured it and used it as the basis for the custard sauce.
Traditionally, a drizzle of caramel finishes off floating islands, but because caramel doesn’t keep, and I had to take the blog pictures several hours before I’d be eating the dessert, I chose to skip that bit. I didn’t want my islands to look barren though, so in an effort to spruce them up another way, I decided to infuse my anglaise with orange zest and garnish with a few fresh berries. And since this is an old-school dessert, I went with some old-school baby mint sprigs, just for good measure.
For the recipe, read Whisk: a food blog or see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll.
Tuesdays with Dorie: World Peace Cookies
February 3, 2009 at 2:50 am | Posted in cookies & bars, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 54 Comments
I know these cookies. Not that I’d ever made them myself before Jessica of cookbookhabit chose them for this week’s TWD, but a few summers ago, I spent a couple of days in Paris visiting a friend. It was August and several of the shops I hoped to visit were closed for their own vacations. That was a bummer, but I was happy to find that Pierre Hermé on rue Bonatparte was open. I pretty much scarfed down the entire macaroon display, and then moved on to the shelves, where I picked up a little baggie of chocolate sablés for the plane trip home. I hadn’t a clue that these cookies were super-famous, but I knew after tasting them that they should be! Honestly, I couldn’t believe how good they were– crumbly and chocolaty…but it’s the hit of salt that really made me say, “Oh la vache!”
I used Sel de Guérande in these cookies, but if you don’t have fleur de sel, don’t worry. I maybe wouldn’t recommend regular table salt (which is too harshly salty– if that makes sense–for my tastes, even for everyday cooking), but a “softer” salt, like Kosher or sea salt, will work just fine. The recipe has a bit of chopped dark chocolate folded in at the end…you can be experimental with this bit, if you want. I used a combo of chopped bittersweet chocolate and cocoa nibs, so that there would be a little gooey melted chocolate and a little bitter crunch in each bite.
Can world peace really be achieved through a cookie? Oh, if only it were that simple…but if the new Administration wants to give it a go, I’ll happy accept the position of Secretary of Snacks! To feel like you’ve gone to Paris without leaving home, read cookbookhabit or see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan for the recipe (she also has it here on The Splendid Table’s website). Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll.
TWD Rewind: Quintuple Chocolate Brownies
January 29, 2009 at 4:13 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, events, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 40 Comments
Quintuple–that’s five! I’m sure you know that and I’m not trying to insult your intelligence, but I myself am still a bit shocked that five types of chocolate can fit into a single brownie. Somehow, in one little square, there is room for cocoa powder and unsweetened, bittersweet, milk and white chocolates.
Talk about a fudgy brownie…I think this one may actually be fudge! If that white chocolate glaze looks I laid it on a little thick, well umm, that’s because I did. I thought the original amount seemed a little thin so I added a bit more white chocolate and a bit more cream, and suddenly I had a thick slick of icing!
These brownies are so dangerously good, that I’d feel guilty (in many ways) keeping them to myself. Jenny from All Things Edible has a beautiful new home, and I’m going to bring them to her housewarming party!
This was Brown Eyed Baker Michelle’s TWD pick shortly before I joined the group, about a year ago. For the recipe, look in Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan (she also has it here on NPR’s website) or read Michelle’s post.
Tuesdays with Dorie: Fresh Ginger and Chocolate Gingerbread
January 27, 2009 at 1:46 am | Posted in cakes & tortes, groups, simple cakes, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 57 Comments
I’ve had my eye on this recipe for quite awhile, and I was pretty happy when Heather of Sherry Trifle picked it for this week’s TWD. My mum made gingerbread cookies with us every year at Christmastime, but gingerbread in cake form is one of those “newer discoveries” that I wish I hadn’t missed out on for so long.
With the addition of chocolate and icing (yay, icing!), Dorie’s version takes the classic gingerbread cake and shakes it up a bit. I have been a little cacao-deprived as of late, so I really liked the little flecks of chocolate speckled throughout the cake. And the chocolate icing..my gosh, the icing. I used a shot of espresso from the coffee shop to make it, so the coffee kick was quite noticeable, and quite tasty. The chocolate and coffee worked really well with the cake’s spicy ginger trifecta (fresh, ground and candied).
I made two-thirds of a recipe and baked it in an eight-inch sqaure pan. I did this before I even saw Dorie’s note, so I gave myself a pat on the back for that one. Dorie’s serving size suggestion was a bit…ummm…gigantic. I was actually able to get nine pieces (instead of six) out of my smaller cake. This was four nights worth of dessert for us, so we paired it with vanilla ice cream one night, whipped cream the next, and enjoyed it plain-Jane with tea another. Every which way, it was delicious, and stayed nice and moist the whole time.
For the recipe, read Sherry Trifle or see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan (she also has it here on Serious Eats). Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll.
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