Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: Double-Decker Salted Caramel Cake
April 23, 2024 at 8:47 pm | Posted in breakfast things, BWD, cakes & tortes, groups, layer cakes, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 8 CommentsTags: baking, brekkie, cake
This month we have a Double-Decker Salted Caramel Cake to celebrate all the April TWD babies: Diane, Kayte and yours truly. My birthday was at the start of the month, but I actually didn’t bake this till this past Sunday, which was Kayte’s big day, so I blew out a candle made a wish for her. This cake was one of her picks, and it’s two layers of soft brown sugar cake, filled and frosted with a sticky caramel icing.
Any good caramel cake should start with a good homemade caramel sauce. There are two tricks to avoid a tooth-ache here…the first is to be brave and take your caramel syrup to a pretty dark place (but don’t go over the edge and burn it, because that is really no bueno), and the second is to season the finished sauce well with salt. The frosting is just a mix of this caramel sauce and powdered sugar with a little heavy cream added, and is a soft consistency that’s more like a thick glaze than a swoopy, swirly frosting. I thought it seemed like not enough when I made it, but scraping my mixing bowl well, I was able to fill and frost the cake, and I think a thin layer is actually all you really need with this one.
For the cake component, I did a bit of fiddling because I wanted to make a smaller 6-inch version, as is my usual MO for the two of us. Looking at the ingredient list and thinking about how best to tackle scaling things back, I first decided that I wanted to use a single full egg and just forget the extra whites. Then I deduced that amount of egg by weight would roughly correspond to 5 tablespoons of butter, and from there I used my calculator to help me do the math to scale down the rest of the ingredients proportionally (about 42% of the original amounts). And then I decided that, while I do have a deep removable-bottom 6-inch pan I could have used here to keep in line with the recipe, I preferred to split the cake batter into two regular cake pans. I don’t really like dividing cakes with a knife– I never get the layers perfectly even or perfectly level and there are always too many crumbs. Also something about having to bake a soft and fluffy cake like this one for 40+ minutes doesn’t sit right with me, and I figured two thinner layers would be out of the oven in way less time. And then, because I am a lazy auto-pilot baker who doesn’t read through a recipe first, I didn’t realize I was supposed to swirl caramel sauce into the cake batter before the pans went into the oven. So I didn’t do that bit. I was kind of mad at myself, but my layers baked beautifully in about 25 minutes, and instead of a caramel swirl inside the batter, I just gave each layer a thin caramel sauce schmear before frosting.
Well that was a pretty long post to come to a short and sweet summary– this cake is delicious! The cake itself is super soft and really flavorful (and it’s awesome drizzled with a little bourbon, in case you were wondering) and the frosting is just the right amount to not to make your fillings zing. I decorated my cake on top with some mixed crunchy pearls and on the sides with some chocolate flakes that I’ve had for like a million years and can now finally say I used up. A successful and satisfying birthday bake!
If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan yet, get it and join us as we bake through it every second and fourth Tuesdays! Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll and all the other participation deets over on Tuesdays with Dorie!
Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: Parisian Custard Tart
March 26, 2024 at 12:01 am | Posted in BWD, groups, pies & tarts, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 4 CommentsTags: baking, pie
I don’t know about you, but recipes that call for making pastry cream can make me grumble a bit. Often that pastry cream is just one of several components you need to pull together for what you’re making, but for this Parisian Custard Tart, it’s the only thing you really have to prepare. You can choose to make your own crust, but you can also choose to use store bought puff pastry, which I assure you works wonderfully well. This is a simple dessert, just custard and crust, and it’s an everyday, snacky treat in Paris. To me, even though it’s simple, it still feels fancy. The custard is luxurious mix flavored with brown sugar, vanilla and rum that’s baked till it’s a charred, dark brown on top. I was a bit skeptical that the puff pastry was going to cook through, especially on the bottom, but it did, indeed, bake up super-crisp. My custard puffed when it baked and then fell when it cooled, and I was left with kind of a wonky baked custard ledge around the tart. If it happens again, I’ll probably trim it off for the sake of looks, but other than that, no complaints about this tasty one.
If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan yet, get it and join us as we bake through it every second and fourth Tuesdays! Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll and all the other participation deets over on Tuesdays with Dorie!
Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: Breakfast-in-Rome Lemon Cake
March 12, 2024 at 5:04 pm | Posted in breakfast things, BWD, cakes & tortes, groups, simple cakes, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 12 CommentsTags: baking, brekkie, cake
Somehow neither The White Lotus nor seemingly the entire world’s fabulously dreamy Instagram summer vacay pics have spurred me to book a flight to Italy yet, but this Breakfast-in-Rome Lemon Cake may do the trick. I can imagine being pretty happy for a few days to wake up to a double espresso and a slice of the breakfast/snack tube cake known as chiambella. Until I get my passport renewed, luckily Dorie has provided us with her Italian vacation version to bake at home. She makes a lemony separated egg sponge that results in a tall, light, bouncy cake. Berries are optional, but since I had some frozen blackberries in my mess of a freezer, I rummaged around and found them. If I’m going all the way to Italy, I’m not just going to Rome…I’m also going to the Almalfi Coast, so I drizzled the top of my cake with a little limoncello while it was still warm and at its most absorbant for another hit of lemon.
If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan yet, get it and join us as we bake through it every second and fourth Tuesdays! Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll and all the other participation deets over on Tuesdays with Dorie!
Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: Copenhagen Rye Cookies with Chocolate, Spice and Seeds
February 13, 2024 at 9:30 pm | Posted in BWD, cookies & bars, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 10 CommentsTags: baking, cookies
I am not loyal to one chocolate chip cookie recipe– I want to play the field and try them all. These Copenhagen Rye Cookies with Chocolate, Spice and Seeds are the latest to have caught my eye. At first glance, these seem pretty similar to the Mokonuts ones we made a couple years ago, but these swap the dried fruit for a strong hit of spices (coffee, cinnamon and cardamom) and use a mix of seeds (sunflower, flax, poppy and sesame for me). Dorie says you can put either milk or dark chocolate in these, so I naturally had to go with a combo. I’ve taken to usually creaming any spices in a recipe into the butter and sugar, rather than just stirring them into the flour. A lot like rubbing citrus zest into sugar, I feel like that bashing and smearing in the mixing bowl really makes spices pop, too. Creaming in the espresso powder at this early stage also helped to make my cookies look extra-dark. Before baking, I basically rolled the dough balls in more of the birdseedy mix (plus flaky salt) for good coverage, including on the bottoms. These cookies have so much complex flavor and a great texture with chewy middles and a crisp, toasted seed coating. Even if it is onto the next CCC, I’ll circle back to this one for sure.
If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan, get it and join us as we bake through it every second and fourth Tuesdays. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: Spinach-Mozzarella Pie with Parm Crumble
January 23, 2024 at 5:31 pm | Posted in BWD, groups, other savory, pies & tarts, savory things, tuesdays with dorie | 8 CommentsTags: baking, savory, tarts
If you’re wondering how to get cheese and custard and green stuff and pastry all in one dish, the answer is a Spinach-Mozzarella Pie with Parm Crumble! What we have here is basically a spinach quiche dotted with cubes of mozzarella and topped off with a Parmesan-loaded crumble. It’s salty and cheesy and textured and great warm or room temp for any meal of the day.
Last year, I tested the recipes for an upcoming savory baking cookbook and I’ve had an empty par-baked pie shell sitting in the freezer ever since. I almost never bake a full-sized pie for the two of us, but I’ve been itching to reclaim that freezer space (and that pie plate), so when this recipe was nominated, I decided to use the crust here. It’s different than Dorie’s flaky crust, in that it’s a press-in situation with a shortcrust texture, and it’s also in a standard-sized plate instead of a deep dish, but it worked out well in this pie by slightly scaling back the custard amount. Another thing I had in the freezer from those testing days was an almost-full bag of frozen spinach, so I pulled that out, too. Rather than wilting down and squeezing fresh spinach, I thawed the frozen stuff and squeezed the heck out of it before adding it to my sautéed aromatics. Technically, my spinach-to-custard ratio was a bit higher than Dorie’s because I wanted to use up all the spinach that was in the bag. My filling was more like creamy greens and lacked a separate quiche-like layer, but more green stuff is always fine with me. Also, I like a bit of heat, so I added some pepper flake to the filling.
After the spinach mixture and the creamy custard are inside the par-baked shell, on went cubes of mozzarella and lots of parm crumble, and then it was into the oven. I only made 3/4 of the crumble and it still seemed plenty to cover the pie. We’ve had this with a salad the last couple of nights for dinner, and since I made a full-sizer, we can have it for a couple of lunches, too.
If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan, get it and join us as we bake through it twice a month. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: Chunky Citrus Cornmeal Cake
January 9, 2024 at 10:42 pm | Posted in BWD, cakes & tortes, groups, simple cakes, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 3 CommentsTags: baking, brekkie, cake
Dorie’s Chunky Lemon Cornmeal Cake is a sunny loaf, getting color and flavor from cornmeal, lemon zest, chopped up lemon segments and sumac. I happened to notice a few bags of cute, tiny, bright orange calamansi at my neighborhood grocer. I’ve only ever come across calamansi here as frozen juice at some of the Asian grocery stores, so I snapped up a bag. Even though I didn’t have any plans for them, I like to be sure to buy things that I don’t normally see on the shelves so my store knows people are interested.
I sat on the calamansi in the fridge for a few days and then thought I could use them in this cake. Prep was super easy, since you can eat the whole fruit…they have thin, sweet skins with almost no pith and puckery, tart insides. I simply quartered each calamansi, popped out any seeds or membrane I found and used them in the simple one-bowl cake batter just like that. I left out the sumac, but I had about a tablespoon and a half of spiced sugar left from some holiday cookies and I sprinkled that on top of the cake batter before I put it in the oven for a little crust.
This was so tasty with the little pops of calamansi and it stayed fresh for several days. I loved the color and the texture (just a bit gritty from the cornmeal) and was super pleased when I cut into the cake.
If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan yet, get it and join us as we bake through it every second and fourth Tuesdays! Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll and all the other participation deets over on Tuesdays with Dorie!
Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: Iced, Spiced Hermits
December 12, 2023 at 10:57 pm | Posted in BWD, cookies & bars, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 4 CommentsTags: baking, cookies, holiday
What’s hiding inside the cookie tin? Hermits! These Iced, Spiced Hermits are old fashioned, chewy molasses-spice cookies with raisins (or another dried fruit), baked as a log and then sliced up. You can actually hide them away because they’re good keepers, but if people know they’re in the tin, they’ll disappear fast. I brought them to my college’s NYC alum holiday party, and there weren’t any left to bring back home. Very satisfying.
I made the hermits a couple of years ago as well (the below photo). Both times I soaked the raisins in a bit of rum for a few hours before making the dough and set aside the strained-off booze to use in the glaze drizzle. Both times I also added festive sprinkles…who knew a hermit could be so charming?
If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan, get it and join us as we bake through it every second and fourth Tuesdays. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: Mulled-Butter Apple Pie
November 27, 2023 at 5:04 pm | Posted in BWD, groups, pies & tarts, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 3 CommentsTags: baking, pie
Swapping out stuffing for bread pudding wasn’t the only renegade move I made this Thanksgiving. I also traded our holiday staple pumpkin pie for Mulled-Butter Apple Pie. What is mulled-butter? It’s browned butter steeped with a cinnamon stick, a cardamom pod, black peppercorn, star anise, ginger and orange zest. This spiced butter coats the heap of apple slices (I used a combo of gold rush and cameo apples) that fill the double-crust pie. Dorie tells us to taste the filling for sweetness before we turn it into the crust, and when I did that, I thought what my apples really needed was not more sugar, but more spice. The mulling spice mix has some similarities with Chinese five-spice, which I have a jar of ground, so I added in a couple shakes of that to my filling.
I baked a half-sized pie in my little (about 6.5″) pie plate and while I was initially kind of sad about not having a slice of pumpkin pie, this came out so nicely, I couldn’t not be happy with it. The crust had great color and the filling held together just right. I decided that pumpkin pie can happen in December and I enjoyed every bite of this one.
If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan yet, get it and join us as we bake through it every second and fourth Tuesdays! Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll and all the other participation deets over on Tuesdays with Dorie!
Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: Pecan-Cranberry Loaf
November 14, 2023 at 7:16 pm | Posted in breakfast things, BWD, cakes & tortes, groups, muffins/quick breads, simple cakes, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 7 CommentsTags: baking, cake, loaf
I made this Pecan-Cranberry Loaf two years ago, and really, I think I should have made it again so I could write a more comprehensive post. I remember liking it, that I swapped the coriander with five-spice and that I made a honey-cream cheese schmear to go with. But the whole group really raved about it (and called for more cranberries!), so I think that’s giving me some FOMO this week. Maybe after I buy my Thanksgiving crannies, I’ll have round two with this one.
If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan, get it and join us as we bake through it every second and fourth Tuesdays. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll and all the other participation deets over on Tuesdays with Dorie!
Everyday Dorie: Chocolate-Covered Chai-Tea Bars
October 27, 2023 at 12:01 am | Posted in cookies & bars, everyday dorie, groups, sweet things | 5 CommentsTags: everyday dorie
I’ve always liked Dorie’s sweet recipes the best, and here we are with our final Cook the Book Fridays sweet treat from Everyday Dorie! Does that mean it’s actually bittersweet? These Chocolate-Covered Chai-Tea Bars have a chai-flavored financier base and a simple melted milk chocolate topping. While I didn’t have any chai in teabags on hand, I do have a chai spice blend and a box of nice Earl Grey, so I made those work to flavor my bars. These are a slim treats, but a little goes a long way, as they are moist and dense with lots of butter and almond flour. I’m sure they’d be just perfect with a cup of chai, but they’re also pretty great with coffee.
For the recipe, see Everyday Dorie by Dorie Greenspan, and head over to Cook the Book Fridays to see all of our bakes this week.
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