Tuesdays with Dorie: Cornmeal and Fruit Loaf
August 30, 2011 at 12:01 am | Posted in breakfast things, groups, muffins/quick breads, tuesdays with dorie | 10 CommentsTags: baking, breakfast
An earthquake and a hurricane in the span of a few days– what a weird weather week for New York City! If it weren’t for Irene cancelling work this weekend and keeping me housebound, I would not have gotten to make this Cornmeal and Fruit Loaf. Something about baking at home helps calm my nerves if I’m feeling anxious, and wondering if our house would make it through the big storm without any major damage was making me fret (more than just a bit). Thankfully, a little water in the basement was the extent of it for us. If you are on the East Coast, I hope you managed to stay safe.
Whether you are baking to take your mind off something, or just because you want a tasty breakfast treat, this loaf works. It’s totally made by hand…theraputic, quiet and easy. And it’s hearty and satisfying to eat…cornmeal and apples (fresh and dried) give it great texture. It’s not too sweet, so it definitely leans more towards a comforting breakfast or snack than dessert.
For the recipe, see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan or read the always enjoyable Engineer Baker, as it was Caitlin’s pick this week. Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie: Golden Brioche Loaves
August 23, 2011 at 12:01 am | Posted in groups, sweet things, sweet yeast breads, tuesdays with dorie | 10 CommentsTags: baking, bread
When I first saw that we’d be making Golden Brioche Loaves this week, I thought, “Haven’t we made this one already?” Well, yes and no. We’ve made brioche on a few occasions, but always for an end result other than a simple loaf. Jules pointed out that last week, King Arthur wrote a post on brioche made in a 9″x4″ pullman pan. Go figure, I have that same pan at home! Doing a little back-of-the-envelope math, I geusstimated that 2/3 of Dorie’s full recipe would make enough dough to fill one 9″x4″ pullman to the lid. I had to add about 10-15 minutes to Dorie’s baking time, but I had a gorgeous (and golden) square-cornered loaf.
I bet some people find brioche to be intimidating, but to me it’s one of the easier yeast breads to make. The dough is soft and supple, and comes together easily by machine. Also, great brioche bakes up nicely in a home oven, unlike, say, a great baguette, whose perfectly shattering crust seems to elude me at home. And the dough freezes well, so you can have fresh brioche buns in a snap.
This recipe really does produce a delightful loaf. I can’t lie, though…the fact that I made a single loaf of bread that contains two entire sticks of butter is somewhat horrifying to me! Nevertheless, I enjoyed a fat slice with homemade apricot jam (made identically to this plum jam), and, you guessed it, more butter (I have a weakness for fancy French salted butters on my toast and bread).
For the recipe, see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan or read Tea and Scones, as it was Margie’s pick this week. Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll!
P.S.: I got a new camera…what do you think?
Apricot and Cinnamon Cake
August 19, 2011 at 4:13 pm | Posted in cakes & tortes, simple cakes, sweet things | 3 CommentsTags: baking, cake, dessert, fruit
No big story here…some apricots that needed using up led me to rifle through my cookbook collection for inspiration. I found this Apricot and Cinnamon Cake in Bill Granger’s Every Day. When we lived in Sydney, visiting one of the bill’s restaurants was always a special treat, and I think he is a master of simple cakes and baked goods (and he makes the best pancakes!).
This is a cinnamon-spiced cake with halves of juicy apricots baked in. A crumb topping with more cinnamon gives it a perfect morning coffee cake vibe, but if you add a scoop of ice cream, it suddenly seems more like dessert. I used small apricots, but I think peaches or nectarines would be equally delicious (if they are large, they may need to be cut into thick slices, rather than simply halved, though). This cake smells wonderful in the oven.
Apricot and Cinnamon Cake— makes one 8″ cake
adapted from Every Day by Bill Granger
Steph’s Notes: The cinnamon is front and center in this cake. If you’d rather have it little more subtly spiced, I’d suggest leaving the cinnamon amount as-is in the cake portion and reducing it by half in the topping. If you don’t have self-raising flour to make the cake, you can use 140 grams of all-purpose flour combined with 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder and 1/8 teaspoon of salt.
for the cake:
140 g (5 oz) self-raising flour
1/2 t ground cinnamon
50 g (1 3/4 oz) sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten
4 T milk (or 3 T Australian)
1 t vanilla extract
85 g (3 oz) unsalted butter, melted
350 g (12 oz) apricot halvesfor the topping:
40 g (1 1/2 oz) all-purpose flour
1 t ground cinnamon
35 g (1 1/4 oz) sugar
pinch of salt
35 g (1 1/4 oz) unsalted butter, chilled and diced
-Preheat oven to 350°F (180°C).
-To the topping, put the flour, cinnamon, sugar and pinch of salt in a bowl. Rub the butter with your fingertips until crumbs form. Chill while you assemble the rest of the cake.
-Grease and line the base of an 8″ (20 cm) round springform pan. (You can use a regular 8″ cake pan, greased and lined with parchment, instead, but you will need to flip the cake out and reinvert it if you want to serve it out of the pan.)
-Sift flour and cinnamon into a large bowl and stir in the sugar.
-Make a well in the center and pour in the egg, milk, vanilla and melted butter. Mix with a wooden spoon until the batter is smooth, then spoon into the cake pan.
-Arrange the apricots, cut-side up, evenly over the batter and then press gently down. Scatter the topping evenly over the apricots.
-Bake for 35-40 minutes or until the cake is light golden and a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. Leave on a rack to cool before removing from the pan.
Tuesdays with Dorie: Stonefruit Crumble
August 16, 2011 at 12:01 am | Posted in cobbler/crisp/shorties, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 11 CommentsTags: baking, dessert, fruit
This was supposed to be a Tropical Crumble with mangoes and bananas, but like I mentioned when I made jam, I have apricots and plums up the wazoo right now. So this became a Stonefruit Crumble instead, with apricots and yellow plums (look, I kept the colors similar!), and a little red plum ice cream for good measure. I tried to keep my version along the same lines as the original, flavoring the fruit with ginger and citrus, but since my fruits were small and soft, I didn’t pre-cook my filling before baking the crumble and I added a sprinkling of flour to the fruit mix to help thicken the juices.
Does anyone know if theree’s technically a difference between a crisp and a crumble?? Maybe there is, because my topping wasn’t as crunchy as I thought it would be. It had pecans, brown sugar and butter (cut back from the original recipe by a couple of tablespoons), so it wasn’t bad, but it did just kind of meld into the smooshiness of the baked fruit.
For the recipe, see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan or read Laws of the Kitchen, as it was Gaye’s turn to pick again. Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie: Carrot Spice Muffins (aka Morning Glories)
August 9, 2011 at 12:01 am | Posted in breakfast things, groups, muffins/quick breads, tuesdays with dorie | 9 CommentsTags: baking, breakfast, muffins
“Muffin” is a weird word. And I just realized that I totally spelled it wrong in the titles of my last two muffin posts. How dumb, and obvious now that I look at those posts again. (OK, I’ve just gone back and corrected that, so it’s as if it never happened).
These Carrot Spice Muffins are something of a substitute for when your tummy really wants a piece of Bill’s Big Carrot Cake (wow, that cake was awesome…I think about it all the time) for breakfast, but your head just won’t let you. Like a good carrot cake, they have lots of add-ins beyond carrots…walnuts, coconut, raisins and, of course, a gentle amount of warm spices. Unlike carrot cake, though, they are sans that decadent cream cheese frosting (but now that I think about it, a thinned out cream cheese glaze would have been fabulous!), and they are a bit dialed down in the oil department. These seemed like they could be a vehicle for a little fiber boost as well, so I swapped about 25% of the flour with whole wheat. I also used unsweetened desiccated coconut instead of the sweet stuff. Then I ate two.
For the recipe, see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan or read The Dogs Eat the Crumbs, as it was Nancy’s pick this week. Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie: Cocoa Almond Meringues
August 2, 2011 at 12:01 am | Posted in cookies & bars, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 9 CommentsTags: baking, cookies
We are having hot, sticky weather here. I’ve baked enough to know that sticky weather equals sticky meringues, so I thought about hitting the snooze bar on TWD this week and skipping these Cocoa Almond Meringue Cookies. But I had some weekend time on my hands, and I figured I could do a scaled down batch…just enough to be eaten the same day, with nothing left to wilt in a container overnight.
I like meringues, and I’m a fan of these. Beneath their crisp, light cocoa shells, they are chewy and very dark with chocolate (studded with crushed hazelnuts, too, in this case). If you like your meringues drier and crisped-through, I’m guessing you could bake them longer, or at the end of the book’s suggested time, turn off the oven and let the cookies continue to hang out for a few more hours inside. I actually did bake these about 15 minutes longer than the recommended hour and ten because I made a few quite large meringues as opposed to a zillion little guys, and I wanted to make sure they weren’t soup inside. I made a special exception to my “no coffee after 3:00” rule and served these with a little glass of milky iced joe. It was the perfect thing to cut the sweetness of the meringues.
Next time I find myself with extra egg whites, I’ll be sure to keep these in mind! For the recipe, see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan or read Ugly Food For an Ugly Dude. Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie: Cream Scones
July 12, 2011 at 12:01 am | Posted in biscuits/scones, breakfast things, groups, tuesdays with dorie | 9 CommentsTags: baking, breakfast, scones
It’s steamy hot out…hot and gross…but these Cream Scones were sooo worth turning the oven on for. Butter and cream…they are a combo to be reckoned with. I don’t know how two things that are so rich can make something that is so light, crumbly and almost melt-in-your-mouth, but there you have it. I’ll be making these again when it’s cooler out and I can stand a proper cuppa to go along with them.
After many attempts at scones and biscuits that wound up looking annoyingly like pancakes (sad!), I think that with my last few batches, I’ve finally gotten it down. I already told you all this stuff with the last one, but….now I grate my cold butter, and then pop it into the freezer while I assemble my dry ingredients. Then I just give a quick, fingertippy toss of the butter and dry stuff. I find that this way, I don’t have to do as much rubbing and working to get the two incorporated. Also, I pat the scones out a little fatter than Dorie says to ensure a tall rise (which I don’t think the angle on this photo shows, but I assure you, they were nice and high). Of course I get one or two fewer scones per batch, but that’s fine by me.
I skipped the currants here (I didn’t have any), but they aren’t really necessary anyway…especially when there’s jam. Also not strictly necessary (but crazy delicious!), one of my favorite things about British-style tea service is the thick cream you spread on along with jam. I found some of that Luxury Clotted Cream in a local shop, and shelled out for it in anticipation of these guys.
For the recipe, see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan or read Cafe Lynnylu, as it was Patricia’s pick this week. Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie: Chocolate-Chocolate Chunk Muffins
July 5, 2011 at 12:01 am | Posted in breakfast things, groups, muffins/quick breads, tuesdays with dorie | 12 CommentsTags: baking, breakfast, muffins
Will you think less of me if I admit to you that I don’t really “do” chocolate for breakfast? I eat sweet stuff for brekkie all the time–usually pancakes or waffles drowned in syrup– but chocolate for some reason feels a bit too indulgent. I made a little exception this past weekend (since it was a holiday and all) for these Chocolate-Chocolate Chunk Muffins. OK, these really are great with coffee. They’re not too sweet at all, and I did follow suggestions to add more chocolate chunks by doubling the amount of chips I folded into the batter at the end. Hey– if your gonna have chocolate for breakfast, you may as well really have chocolate for breakfast.
And, if chocolate in the a.m. isn’t really your thing either, I can assure you that they are also fab for dessert with a scoop of ice cream (may I suggest something like Strawberry- Sour Cream Ice Cream?).
For the recipe, see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan (it’s also here on Epicurious) or read The Way the Cookie Crumbles, as Bridget got to pick again this week. Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie: Sour Cream Chocolate Cake Cookies
June 28, 2011 at 12:01 am | Posted in cookies & bars, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 12 CommentsTags: baking, cookies
Hooray, Spike, for finally giving these Sour Cream Chocolate Cake Cookies their fifteen minutes of fame. This is one of the first recipes in the book that really piqued my interest, mostly because I couldn’t imagine what the heck a “cake cookie” could be. But then, after making approximately a hundred zillion whoopie pies at the bakery in Red Hook where I used to work, it dawned on me that these might something similar. Although Dorie says they are thin and plain, somehow mine came out chubby and rounded– like little cakes in cookie-mound form. These are nice and moist, and to boost the chocolaty-ness, I used my darkest cocoa, replaced the cinnamon and nutmeg in the recipe with a bit of instant espresso powder and left out the currants entirely. While they are pretty good on their own (just grab a glass of milk or iced coffee and have at ’em), I think they’d be great filled with buttercream. Since it’s so schwetty out here, I decided to make them into ice cream sandwiches instead, using a bit of the caramel gelato I help to make at the shop where I now work.
For the Sour Cream Chocolate Cake Cookie recipe, see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan or read Spike’s blog. Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie: Date-Nut Loaf
June 21, 2011 at 12:01 am | Posted in breakfast things, cakes & tortes, groups, simple cakes, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 18 CommentsTags: baking, cake
I hate to admit it, but I didn’t think this Date-Nut Loaf seemed like much when it came out of the oven. It was kind of pale, and when I sliced into it, I thought it looked a little dry. Boy, I was wrong! This was a great cake with a cup of coffee for breakfast. It’s actually really soft and has a tender crumb. My husband was pumped for this, because he loves dates. They taste like soft brown sugar nuggets in the cake.
I made a half recipe in my little loaf pan, so I shortened the baking time to under an hour (and didn’t bother to foil tent it). Because it sounded like a good candidate for a little whole grain flour swapping, I subbed about a quarter of the AP for whole wheat pastry flour. I haven’t yet tried Dorie’s suggestion of toasting left over slices, but if there’s any remaining tomorrow morning, I might give it a shot.
For the recipe, see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan or read Popsicles and Sandy Feet, as it was Mary’s pick this week. Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll!
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