Tuesdays with Dorie BCM: Dark Chocolate Mousse
February 12, 2019 at 12:01 am | Posted in BCM, groups, puddings, custards, mousses, sweet things | 9 CommentsTags: chocolate, holiday, mousse
Dark Chocolate Mousse…so fancy, I decided it was worthy of the good silver. Definitely Valentine’s Day dessert-worthy, too, if you are into rich, creamy, velvety, chocolatey deliciousness. If you are not, I guess come back next week…when I’m making buttery, smoky, heart-shaped chocolate cookies…haha.
Let’s get down to business here. I could tell that Dorie’s (originally Pierre Hermé’s) recipe would have a large yield– the 1 3/4 cup of cream alone tipped me off– so I decided to make just a quarter of the original. (And, btw, I still got 4 reasonable servings, when I thought I’d only get two.) In order to downsize though, I had to modify just a bit. The recipe calls for folding together melted chocolate and whipped cream, which I did as written, along with eggs and yolks that are whipped fluffy with a boiling sugar syrup. I know from past experience that trying to make a pâte à bombe like this out of just a yolk or two and a small amount of sugar can go very wrong. Instead, I decided to get the volume into my single yolk and half an egg by whipping it with the sugar over a water bath, sabayon-style. While I was at it, I added a splash of cognac, you know, because it’s French.
My little switcheroo seemed to work just fine. After I chilled my mousse, I was able to scoop it nicely into my little silver coupes. Dorie says the mousse also makes a nice cake or cream puff filling, but whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles seemed to be a more expeditious way for this chocoholic to enjoy it.
For the recipe, see Baking Chez Moi by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll. Happy Valentine’s Day, loves!
Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Date-Nut Pinwheels
February 5, 2019 at 12:01 am | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 5 CommentsTags: baking, cookies
Ok– wow– these Date-Nut Pinwheels are amazing! And aren’t they so cute? If you love dates like I love dates, then these are a must-make. If you don’t love dates (what, who are you?), I do suspect they’d work with jam, too, especially a thicker one, like fig.
To make these old-fashioned slice-and-bake spirals, you need to make a sweet brown sugar cookie dough and a paste from cooked down dates and chopped walnuts. Actually, I did not cook the walnut bits in with the filling…I sprinkled them over the date paste after I’d spread it onto the rolled out dough. I don’t know if I’m right about this, but I just thought it would be easier to distribute everything evenly that way. No one wants to be jipped of walnuts in their cookie! Then you take your date-schmeared dough and roll it into a log, chill it and slice it into chubby pinwheels.
I made a full recipe of these cookies, but only sliced and baked half of them. The other half of my dough log is in the freezer, but it won’t be there for long. I shared these with the trainers at my gym, and they have requested more. Also, I am requesting more. Haha.
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan (the recipe is also here). Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
TWD DC Rewind: Lemon Sugar Cookies
January 29, 2019 at 12:01 am | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 8 Comments
I always look forward to these Rewind weeks to play a bit of catch-up on a TWD recipe that I skipped for one reason or another. As it turns out, I’m not missing much off the list of completed recipes from Dorie’s Cookies, and now that I’ve ticked these Lemon Sugar Cookies off of it, I think I’m just one bake behind (that would be the World Peace Cookies, but I have made them before).
These cookies are classic old-fashioned sugar cookies with a lemon twist. The lemon zest, juice (and also a dot of lemon extract for me) in the dough really do make them bake up with, not only a definite lemon flavor, but also a sunny yellow color. I rolled them in vanilla sugar before baking, hence the speckles. I made just a quarter recipe, and with my cookie scoop, wound up with a baker’s dozen. That extra one was my secret baker’s treat, you can be sure! These were great, and I followed Dorie’s suggested baking time for chewy centers, because that’s how I prefer them.
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of this week’s rewind on the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie BCM: Saint-Pierre Poppy Seed Cake
January 22, 2019 at 12:01 am | Posted in BCM, cakes & tortes, groups, simple cakes, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 7 CommentsTags: baking, cake
It’s been a while since we’ve made a simple loaf cake from BCM, and Saint-Pierre Poppy Seed Cake was an easy one to pull off this week. Rather than the standard lemon-poppy seed combo, this uses orange, and the result is a very sunny and not too sweet tea cake. It’s a rich cake, though. In addition to butter and poppy seeds, the batter also contains a good amount of heavy cream.
When I buy organic citrus, I try to remember to freeze the zest if I’ve not already planned to use it. I have a little baggie with packets of various zests in my freezer drawer and I dipped into that here to find some orange zest. Since I was using the frozen zest, I also needed to find some juice. My juice turned out to be Grand Marnier…I guess I’m lucky I don’t have scurvy.
Dorie is not shy with the poppy seeds here– the full recipe has a whole 1/3 cup of them, so make sure they’re fresh or they’ve been properly stored (airtight and in the freezer, as she recommends). Unlike most poppyseed muffin recipes, where I often feel like the couple of tablespoons of seeds are mostly there for looks, you can taste them in this cake, and they crunch. Dorie says this tea cake is meant to be served plain, but I can never resist a little dressing up, so I took home a few slices of candied clementines from work to garnish my pieces.
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 DC: Fruit and Four-Grain Biscotti
January 15, 2019 at 12:01 am | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 5 CommentsTags: baking, biscotti, cookies
We’re on a TWD new year health kick this week with Fruit and Four-Grain Biscotti. The recipe specifies certain fruits and grains. Some of those I had and some I didn’t, but I found suitable subs in my pantry for what was missing. Dorie said she originally made these as “scavenger cookies” to use what she had, so that told me I really couldn’t go wrong here. I had the whole wheat flour and rolled oats, so no problems there. I had ground flax instead of whole seeds, oat bran instead of wheat germ and granulated almonds instead of kasha. I used a combo of dried apricots and calimyrna figs as my fruit. I snipped them into bits with scissors, I task find incredibly satisfying. A task I do not find satisfying is slicing biscotti. Dorie says you kind of have to let it go. It still frustrates me. You can see some of my crumbles in the photo…there were other crumbles you can’t see because I ate them!
I made half a recipe of biscotti, which gave me one log to slice up. I brought a few cookies to the trainers at the gym, who got into them right away. The rest we’ve been enjoying with coffee over the last several days. They aren’t not too sweet, have good texture and great flavor.
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll and please join us if you haven’t already!
Tuesdays with Dorie BCM: Chocolate-Coconut Tart
January 8, 2019 at 11:13 pm | Posted in BCM, groups, pies & tarts, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 7 CommentsTags: baking, chocolate, tarts
Our first BCM bake of 2019 and it’s a good one! This Chocolate-Coconut Tart has one of my very favorite flavor combos, with coconut pastry cream hiding under a shiny dark chocolate ganache, all inside a sweet tart crust. I’m glad that cutting back on sweets was not one of my new year’s resolutions, or I guess we are saying “intentions” now, because I do intend to enjoy every bite of these babies. I did decide to responsibly keep myself from going overboard by scaling back the recipe to make a few small tartlets instead of a large format tart.
This recipe has a few components, but I spaced them out over a couple of days to make things manageable. I actually had some of Dorie’s Sweet Tart Dough in the freezer and I used that to line my shells. I made the pastry cream (I used all toasted coconut and coconut sugar to boost that flavor) and I stashed it in the fridge, along with my lined tart shells, overnight. The next day, I baked and filled the shells, then made the ganache and topped them off. Easy peasy to make and to eat. It tastes like a fancy Mounds bar. Why did it take us so long to make this?
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 DC: Coffee-Cardamom Cookies
January 1, 2019 at 11:27 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 3 CommentsTags: baking, cookies
Happy 2019, everybody!! I baked and decorated some Coffee-Cardamom Cookies today, so I’d say the new year is starting off quite nicely. These cookies are just the thing to keep the festive spirit from the last couple of weeks going a little longer. With coffee, cinnamon, cardamom and molasses, they’re another type of spice cookie, really. You don’t have to decorate them with royal icing, but if you do, you then have the glue to hold down sprinkles! So I wouldn’t skip it, naturally. These do go well with coffee, as I’m sure you can imagine, and I’m thinking they wouldn’t be too shabby alongside some chocolate ice cream, either. I’ll test that one out tomorrow. Dorie says that the cookies turn crisper as they keep. Right now they’re fairly soft, so I’m interested to observe the change in texture over the next couple of days.
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll and please join us if you haven’t already.
Tuesdays with Dorie BCM: Speculoos
December 30, 2018 at 8:11 pm | Posted in BCM, cookies & bars, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 4 CommentsTags: baking, cookies
I didn’t realize it until much later, but I grew up eating Speculoos. Although my mom’s family is Dutch, so I should have been calling them “speculaas.” But I just called them “windmill cookies.” And I loved them. This was way before cookie butter was a thing in the US, and you could find Biscoff in just about any store. Windmill cookies were a special treat when we visited my Granny Bea in Michigan.
This was actually my second time making this speculoos recipe. I first made it a couple of years ago when we did the Apple Speculoos Crumble recipe. These crispy, spicy little cookies are perfect for coffee, tea or boozy eggnog. I will say mine were almost too crispy (but great for dunking!). Next time, I’ll cut one or two minutes off the bake time and I’ll try them as roll-outs rather than as slice-and-bakes. Maybe I’ll also sprinkle them with flaked almonds like the windmill cookies I grew up with.
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll and please join us if you haven’t already. Happy New Year!
Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Double-Ginger Crumb Cookies
December 18, 2018 at 12:03 am | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 8 CommentsTags: baking, cookies
It’s certainly the time of year to be baking with warm spices, and these Double-Ginger Crumb Cookies are a perfect candidate for your cute holiday cookie box. Or my very classy black plastic take-out box, as the case may be…whatevs, they’ll be eaten up regardless of container. These use Dorie’s Do-Almost-Anything Vanilla Cookie Dough, which makes a deliciously buttery sugar cookie, as the base. Fresh ginger gets worked into that dough, which is then rolled and cut. At the restaurant where I work, we keep a tub of sweetened ginger purée around that we use in a couple of things. I think it is really intense and delicious, so I took home a little blob of it to use in my dough. The next hit of ginger in these cookies comes from a crumb topping scented with ground ginger. I like these a lot. They’re not fancy looking, but lovely tasting, and perfect with tea.
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll and please join us if you haven’t already.
Tuesdays with Dorie BCM: Alsatian Christmas Bread
December 11, 2018 at 12:01 am | Posted in BCM, cakes & tortes, groups, other sweet, simple cakes, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 9 CommentsTags: baking, cake
Alstatian Christmas Bread (aka baerewecke) is a bit of a project, but it also couldn’t be easier. It’s not a bread that needs flour or yeast, just dried fruit and nuts. Instead of rising time, it needs chopping and mascaerating time…also some shopping time to gather ingredients. This uses all sorts of yummy dried fruit- figs, apples, pears, raisins, apricots and prunes- plus walnuts and almond flour. The fruit is cut and soaked in juice until it’s very soft and makes a sticky paste when mixed with the nuts. Form the paste into logs, bake them until they hold together, and you’re done! This is one of those things that, like fruitcake, lasts a long time and probably even gets better with age. I made mine a few days before I first cut into it, and I still have the second log sitting in my chilly kitchen. I’m thinking of mailing it to my mom in Seattle, because I think she’d like it.
By itself, it’s gluten free, dairy free and vegan. You can nibble on this like a snack or energy bar, but I think it’s also great with cheese. If I make a cheese plate I always like to have some sort of jam or fruit paste on the side, and this is a perfect accompaniment.
For the recipe, see Baking Chez Moi by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
-
Baked Fresh Weekly
Blog at WordPress.com.
Entries and comments feeds.
