a whisk and a spoon

Tuesdays with Dorie: Peanut Butter Torte

There are a few recipes in Baking: From My Home to Yours whose pictures and titles are so alluring, I’ve been surprised no one’s chosen them for TWD yet.  Well, the time has finally come for one of these, as Elizabeth of Ugg Smell Food has picked Dorie’s Peanut Butter Torte as our recipe of the week!  Kind of like the Snickery Squares, I think Dorie has played candy bar dress-up here, except this time the candy in question is a Reece’s cup.  I don’t mean to sound like a buzzkill, but the ingredient list is a little frightening, I have to tell you…Oreos, peanut butter, cream cheese, heavy cream, chocolate and peanuts.  April was my busiest posting month to date, so that means it was also a very busy eating month.  If I didn’t want to feel my heart racing (in a bad way) with each bite, I knew I had to tweak this torte a bit. 

It was a given that was not going to make a full-sized torte.  I rarely make a full-sized anything for the two of us.  My six-inch springform would be prefect for a half recipe, and I’d still get six pieces out of it, but even a half batch seemed like so much cream and peanut butter.  After some intense volume calculations (not really), I decided that I could still use my six-inch pan and get away with just a quarter recipe of the filling.  Sure, it wouldn’t be as high as the one in Dorie’s picture, but I didn’t mind if my torte looked more like a tart.

I am a peanut butter fanatic, and I love the sugary, salty, junky stuff.  I am sorry to say though that I don’t think the Aussie peanut butter is very good…it’s pale and doesn’t have peanuty specks in it.  That may explain why, according to an informal poll taken by yours truly, it doesn’t seem to be a popular food item here (I was even told by someone that my favorite lunch, PB&J, is gross!).  No matter–I’ve been “importing” my own peanut butter since my first trip back to the States.  My current PB of choice is reduced fat Jif (smooth, never crunchy) so that’s what I decided to go with in this torte. 

Back in the US, I wouldn’t think twice about swapping full fat cream cheese for the light Philly they label “Neufchâtel.”  Here, though, the light Philly doesn’t have the same consistency at all…it tastes good, but even straight out of the fridge, it’s incredibly soft.  Further inspection of the package says that it’s a blend of cream cheese and cottage cheese, so I guess that’s why.  I didn’t think my filling would set up properly if I used it, so I went with the light version of a New Zealand brand called Mainland.

I also decided that rather than using Oreos to make my crust, I’d save a few more fat grams and use some almond cookie crumbs that I had in the freezer already.  Adding cocoa powder turned them into chocolate crumbs. 

I’m happy to report that my filling set up nicely after several hours in the fridge, and although I can imagine how wonderful the full blown PB torte would be, the skimpy version was still great!  I loved the chocolate-peanut crunchy bits throughout the filling.  Now you know my tricks, but you can find the original version of this recipe in Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, and on Elizabeth’s site.  Don’t forget to go check out the TWD Blogroll!

Tuesdays with Dorie: Fluted Polenta and Ricotta Cake

This cake reminds me of the kind of thing my Italian nonna would make, if I had an Italian nonna.  No wonder my husband, who is half Italian, scarfed this up!  Caitlin of Engineer Baker chose this, Dorie’s Fluted Polenta and Ricotta Cake, as our TWD recipe of the week.

Polenta in this case is just another name for yellow cornmeal, so the cake had sort of a sweet cornbread feel to it, but combined with ricotta and honey, it was quite moist.  And you can’t tell from the outside, but hidden in the cake are…dried figs!  Normally, I am not a fan of dried figs (a lasting side effect of my childhood aversion to Newtons), but they work really well here.  Their little seeds give a pleasant crunch to the cake.  I did use a couple less than the recipe called for, though, and I chopped them into quarters so I could more evenly scatter them throughout the batter.

I wanted to follow Dorie’s suggestion to put a few thyme leaves into the batter, but then of course I forgot!  So I made thyme whipped cream instead, by rubbing thyme leaves into the sugar that sweetened it.  Please, no judgements about the massive amount of cream in that photo–I know I went a little overboard!

This was a lovely cake…simple and homey and good for breakfast (maybe without the mountain of whipped cream).  I made a half batch, which fit perfectly into my 7 1/2-inch tart pan.  Early reports from some other TWDers were that the cake was a bit too sweet.  I went a little skimpy on the measurements for both the sugar and honey, and it came out just right.  The only thing that left me scratching my head was the extra little hunk of butter that gets dotted on top of the cake before it goes into the oven.  It didn’t seen to do much but make some pale colored spots on top…I think I’ll leave it out if I make the cake again.

You can find this recipe in Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, and on Caitlin’s site.  Now go check out the TWD Blogroll!

TWD Rewind: Gooey Chocolate Cakes

This cake was not too photogenic, but it sure was delicious.  While I was away, the Tuesdays with Dorie gang, led this time by Leigh of Lemon Tartlet, made Dorie Greenspan’s Gooey Chocolate Cakes.  I knew I wanted to whip them up myself as soon as I was back home.  And poor R hadn’t had a homemade dessert in weeks, so a little chocolate gooeyness seemed like a good place to start.

In her opening description, Dorie notes that these cakes are fairly ubiquitous at this point.  In fact, at one restaurant where I used to work, we had a very similar molten cake on our menu for private parties.  We’d do up giant batches (sometimes over 100, depending on the size of the party) of individual ones, also using disposable aluminum cups as Dorie suggests.  Here, quantities were a bit more manageable…I only made two!

If you’d like to make up these little ultra-chocolatey cakes yourself (and it’s easy, I promise!), the recipe is on Lemon Tartlet and in the book Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan.