Author: Lillian

Categories
baking boys Dorie

Tuesdays With Dorie: Chipster-Topped Brownies

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I like brownies. I love chocolate-chip cookies (most especially ones made from the amazing oatmeal chocolate-chip recipe on the Quaker Oats box). How could I go wrong with this week’s TWD recipe, which combines the two.

I managed.

I made these in a hurry, a couple of hours before #2 Son’s belated 12th-birthday party. He planned it himself; my only job was to provide the food, so I figured this was a perfect opportunity to make this week’s selection. (I also made one of June’s selections, but you’ll have to wait a while to hear about that.)

A lot of people mentioned having trouble spreading the cookie dough over the brownie batter. That wasn’t a problem. The batter stiffened a bit while I was making the dough, and I just used small spoonfuls of dough and smooshed them together.

Then I baked it for 45 minutes, less than the 50 to 55 called for in the recipe, and when I took it out the cookie layer was dark, maybe too dark, and had risen higher than I expected. I stuck a knife in and got just a few streaks of chocolate, just like the recipe says. So I let the brownies cool in the pan. They unmolded fine.

I trimmed off the burnt edges, and they were good. I sliced a couple of rows of bars, and except for a distressing tendency for the cookie layer to crack, all was well. But when I got to the third row brownie batter oozed out, essentially unbaked. I happen to love brownie batter, so I’m perfectly happy to eat it that way, but it felt wrong serving raw eggs to other people’s children.

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They ate the edge bars, though, and they seemed quite happy with them. I got only three quotes, though; sorry about that.

Friend #1: I’ve never heard of a cookie being on top of a brownie. I thought it was really yummy!

#2 Son: They were pretty good. The brownie was delicious, but the chocolate chip cookies on top were overly salted and too crunchy and not all that good. [That didn’t stop him from scarfing them down.]

Husband: I liked the middle ones better, where the bottom of the cookie layer was still gooey. Overall, I thought they were a little too sweet.

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I thought the brownies were pretty good, although too dark for me. I loved the cookies on top. But together, they just weren’t as sublime as I thought they’d be. Oh, well.

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Go see what all the other TWD bloggers did with this recipe, and if you want to try it for yourself, buy Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan or visit Supplicious; Beth is the blogger who chose this recipe for us this week.

Categories
baking boys bread Dorie fruit recipes

Tuesdays With Dorie: Fresh Mango Bread

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I’m a sucker for quick breads, as long as they’re good; I’ve certainly had more than my share of dry, tasteless banana bread. But this week’s Tuesdays With Dorie recipe, chosen from Baking: From My Home to Yours by Kelly of Baking with the Boys, is not dry and tasteless, not by a long shot.

Y’all know I’m not a fan of fruit (nor am I Southern!), so I diced the mango up pretty small. I didn’t want big chunks of fruit messing up my quick bread. (And it took forever, let me tell you.) I got the required 2 cups out of one mango, so either my mango was larger than most or my dice was smaller.

Being so anti-fruit, I tweaked the recipe a bit: Dorie mentions that the original version had nuts in it, and that sounded good to me. I found some dry-roasted macadamias in the fridge, a bit more than a cup, so I chopped those up and threw them in there. I also used nutmeg rather than ginger, in deference to Husband’s lack of love for the latter, and left out the lime, in deference to mine.

Other than that, it was all Dorie.

Oh, except for the King Arthur white whole-wheat flour I used in place of the all-purpose.

So after the forever it took me to cut up the mango, the batter came together quickly. It was, as the recipe cautioned, really thick, not at all like most quick breads. I baked it for about an hour and 20 minutes, and the outside is just a bit overdone — not terribly, and it doesn’t affect the taste.

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I was going to save it for breakfast, as per Dorie’s recommendation that it’s better the second day, but we had a friend here helping Husband put up some shelves, and I didn’t cook an actual dinner, so I figured we could at least have the mango bread. It was still a bit warm inside when we cut it.

And it was good.

It was moist and flavorful, although I can’t say that I tasted a whole lot of mango flavor. But from my point of view, of course, that’s a good thing. I ate my slice plain, and it was delicious.

Husband: It was really good — I enjoyed it. There was just enough fruitiness and sweetness to mark it as a quick bread, but the nutmeg really made it almost a piece of a meal. Somewhat strangely, it meshed well with the Can Blau 2007 I was drinking.

#1 Son: I really liked it. The fruit was good, the nuts were perfect, and the crust had this crunchy sweetness I can only compare to the top of a blondie. It would have been better with ginger, though — damn my father’s constrained palate.

#2 Son: I liked it. It was a little crumbly, but the macadamia nuts were very good, the crust was crunchy and good, and the entire thing was good. I don’t think I’ve ever not liked something of Dorie’s [editor’s note: or anything at all, really].

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We managed to save more than half the loaf for breakfast the next day, when it was still delicious. It was less crumbly, but the flavor was the same. Good.

Oh, and I’m supposed to tell you that it’s excellent with cream cheese and fruit compote, which #2 Son made by pouring a bag of Trader Joe’s frozen mixed berries into a pot with 2 tablespoons of honey, then cooking on low till the berries were soft. Then he mashed them with a potato masher and cranked up the heat to medium to cook off some moisture.

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So really, you should give this one a try. It’s yummy. And if you ignore the sugar and oil, you can persuade yourself that it’s healthy! Kelly will have the recipe at Baking with the Boys (or you could buy the book!), and the hundreds of other TWD bakers will all have their own little tweaks on it. Bon appetit!

Categories
baking boys Dorie

Tuesdays With Dorie: Tartest Lemon Tart

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Again with the fruit. I was so not looking forward to this week’s Tuesdays With Dorie recipe, chosen for us by Babette of Babette Feasts. Not only do I not like fruit as fruit, I particularly don’t like citrus fruit, even the flavor.

But you know what? I actually liked this, the only member of my family who did.

As seems to have become a bad habit, #1 Son made the tart. (Am I going to get kicked out of TWD if I don’t start baking again soon? I hope not. I’ve been on one deadline or another for weeks, and I’m just too fried to think, let alone bake. I’m still writing, though! Sometimes.)

So first he made the crust, using the new food processor blade that had just come in the mail and hadn’t yet been washed. I’m going to choose to believe that it wasn’t made in China and that there were no weird chemicals coating it, and that we’re not all going to die. He doesn’t like making crusts, but Dorie’s are at least easy to handle.

Then he made the filling, exactly as the instructions instructed. I noticed in the P&Q on the TWD site that several people had problems with bitterness from the pith of the lemon, and others recommended cutting off the ends of the lemons to mitigate that. But I read that this morning, so he didn’t do it.

My only part in this whole endeavor (besides grocery shopping and teaching the ungrateful child to cook in the first place) was taking the tart out of the oven, which I did when it looked as described in the recipe. Unfortunately, by this time the crust was a bit, shall we say, Cajun.

And then #1 Son added his own little touch: orange whipped cream, made by adding a bit of orange juice and vanilla to Dorie’s whipped cream recipe.

And then we had it, after dinner on Friday night. It was room temperature, and a little puddingy, and I liked it. It was a bit tart, but not horribly, and the lemon was actually nice. (For context, I don’t even like lemonade or lemon water ice. Everyone likes lemonade and lemon water ice.)

But the men of the house, all of whom love lemon, were unanimous:

Husband: I wasn’t fond of the orange whipped cream. The crust had some sort of weird metallic taste to it, and the lemon tasted burnt, as if someone had scorched a lemon and then forced me to eat it.

#1 Son: I thought the lemon was almost bitter — it had almost no depth of flavor. And the crust baked for too long, which was partially my fault and partly the recipe’s fault — it said to cook it till the lemon looked a certain way, but that was too long for the crust. Just overall, not what I wanted or expected. The orange whipped cream blended texture, flavor and presentation into a touch of genius.

#2 Son: I found the crust not horrible. The lemon was weird — Dad’s right about the burnt taste. But I really liked the orange whipped cream.

So what do I know?

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We ate it again cold, two days later. It fared a bit better this time:

Husband: The lemon flavor mellowed, but still tasted scorched to me. And the whipped cream tasted even more like a creamsicle. I hate creamsicles.

#1 Son: Some of the graininess went away — it was much smoother cold. The whipped cream thickened beautifully. And while the crust is still overdone, it doesn’t bother me as much cold. I think some moisture got into it and made it softer.

#2 Son: The whipped cream is more like a creamsicle now and I definitely like the lemon taste more, but the crust is still burnt.

I liked it even more cold. I won’t make it again, since chocolate always beats fruit in my book and the men didn’t like it, but I did think it was pretty good.

Go see what hundreds of other bakers did with this, and if their families liked it better than mine did. And if you want to try it yourself, Babette will have the recipe on her blog for you.

Next week (maybe!): Fresh Mango Bread!

Categories
Dorie

Tuesdays With Dorie: Tiramisu Cake (But Not for Us!)

Not only did I forget to make the delicious-sounding TWD recipe this week, but I forgot to post that I forgot to make it. (Sorry — things have been insane around here all week.) Please go see what all the other TWDers made!

Categories
baking boys Dorie

Tuesdays With Dorie: Chocolate Cream Tart

This week’s TWD pick was a chocolate cream pie that seemed to be very similar to a chocolate silk pie I make every Thanksgiving and Christmas. (See here for the recipe for that one.) I thought I’d make it and compare the two, although I was pretty sure mine would win. It’s awesome.

However, I left this for the last minute, and I made it miniature. (We were also having cheesecake for the Daring Bakers challenge, also left for the last minute, and we really didn’t need two full-size desserts, even though it was #2 Son’s birthday.)

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I made one-third of the recipe and baked it in a 5-inch springform pan.

The crust came together and rolled out really nicely, but it was dry. My magic pie uses (gasp!) a store-bought graham cracker crust, and it’s a perfect foil for the chocolate. The chocolate crust on this pie was just too much chocolate. I didn’t know such a thing was possible, but it is.

#1 Son made the cream, because I was at karate. So I don’t know how hard it was; when I came home there was a cute little pie waiting for me in the fridge.

I put canned whipped cream (another gasp!) on top; I couldn’t see trying to whip a sixth of a cup of cream.

It tasted OK, but just OK. It’s not going to replace my magic pie or anything. (Really, you ought to try that one. Get some nice free-range eggs so you don’t have to worry as much about salmonella, because it’s totally worth the risk.)

And without further ado:

Husband: I liked the puddingy middle, but the crust was too much. It was chocolate overkill.

#1 Son: I thought it had a really flat flavor, and the crust was incredibly dry. Didn’t like it.

#2 Son: It’s akin to an Oreo with both chocolate and vanilla filling, softened lightly in milk. Delicious. Tasty tasty tasty.

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I really dropped the ball creativity-wise with this one. And skill-wise. And writing-wise. And the photos are pretty bad too. I apologize.

This recipe was chosen for us this week by Kim of Scrumptious Photography; she’ll have the recipe posted if you want to try it yourself. And go see what all the other TWD bloggers did with this one — there are sure to be all kinds of interesting variations, along with some good writing and photography. Unlike here.

Categories
baking boys Daring Bakers

Daring Bakers: Cheesecake, and It Sure Is Daring

The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey’s Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge.

I don’t like cheesecake. And I forgot to check this month’s recipe till the middle of last week. And I was away all weekend.

So my entry in this month’s Daring Bakers challenge has been farmed out to the ever-daring #1 Son. Take it away, #1:

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I love cheesecake. It’s my favorite baked good, no contest. I’ve never found a flavor variation I’ve truly liked, always preferring the pure taste. Chocolate was too rich, coconut ruined the texture, and the maple I tried once was just strange. So when my mother shunted the Daring Bakers challenge onto me, I was determined to find some change that would be palatable, nay, delicious. I ran through a number of possibilities before landing on one I thought would be both tasty and inventive: lychee-thyme cheesecake loaf.

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Inspired by a Susanna Foo sorbet I made a few months back, I decided to riff on the standard lemon cheesecake, adding the mild tang of lychees and the herbal warmth of thyme. In the absence of a watertight springform or circular metal pan, I was forced to use a foil mini-loaf pan. The cheesecake cooked evenly, somehow, though it lacked the browned sides I usually see.

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As far as the recipe goes, I was a little less precise than perhaps behooved me as a guest blogger. I took the standard recipe, cut it down to a third, and took out the flavorings, then added a 15-ounce can of lychees (half diced, half pureed), four or five sprigs of thyme (pureed with the lychees), and two splashes of lemon juice. I used half-and-half instead of cream, because that’s what was in the fridge. Also, partly to keep the Eastern theme going and partly for silliness, I used panko for the crust.

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I think it turned out pretty well. Between the half-and-half and the fruit, it ended up very light and summery, and I could eat a lot more of it than a normal cheesecake. Whether this is a good thing or not, I can’t say. The lychees gave it a wonderful fruitiness, and the thyme gave it that earthy finish I was looking for. The panko crust worked well too, with a little more chew than normal crust and some absorbed cheesecake flavor. I think I’d fine-tune this recipe before I made it again, but I certainly would make it many, many more times.

Here’s what my family thought:

Confectiona: I don’t like cheesecake, but this was pretty good. I had two bites!

Father: It tasted like key lime pie. In a good way.

Brother: It started out with a nice cheesecakey beginning, and I got a little bit of that thing you get when you chew cherry skins — but it was lychee skins — in the middle. At the end it leaves a kind of herby aftertaste at the back of your throat. All in all, excellent job.

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I’m back. He did a great job with this one, and I’m sure the other Daring Bakers did too. Go check them out!

Categories
Uncategorized

No Tuesdays With Dorie: Chocolate Bread Pudding

Sorry — too much work, too much running around. No time or energy for the yummy bread pudding. Go read about everyone else’s bread pudding, and look at their lovely photographs. Stop back next week, when there will be (I hope!) a nice chocolate cream tart in this space.

Categories
baking Dorie holidays

Tuesdays With Dorie: Chocolate Amaretti Torte

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No fruit! (Although I hear that almonds are closely related to peaches, but still …)

I thought I was going to have to pass on this week’s TWD recipe. It’s Passover, and it’s a Passover tradition that you’re not allowed to eat anything that tastes good. Well, that’s not completely fair. There are two main groups of Jews in the world, the Ashkenazim (whose ancestral or current homeland is in Northern and Eastern Europe) and the Sephardim (from Southern Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East). Ashkenazic Jews have insane strict rules about what’s kosher for Passover and what’s not; what’s not includes not just wheat and any form of leavening, but just about every other grain and legumes. Legumes? Sephardic Jews are much more mellow and have a much smaller verboten list.

My people are from Russia.

We are not a religious family, but both boys have attended a secular Jewish Sunday school (and #1 Son works there now) and we celebrate the major holidays in our own quirky ways. On Passover, we don’t eat grains. Or legumes. (Generally.)

But Holly of Phe/MOM/enon, whether accidentally or on purpose, chose what may be the only recipe in the entire book that I could make during Passover: no flour, no leavening, no legumes.

And it was good.

First of all, it calls for amaretti or amarettini. I had no idea what these were; I was picturing (for no real reason, actually) something like biscotti. So I deployed my formidable research skills (and Google) and found a few recipes, some of which used almonds and some of which used almond paste. That was a no-brainer; I didn’t have almond paste.

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I went with this recipe from Allrecipes; I’ve had pretty good luck with several different Allrecipes recipes in the past few weeks. It calls for almonds, ground fine in a food processor. I had almonds, but I also had almond meal, and several of the commenters had used the latter successfully.

Science experiment!

I conveniently had six egg whites left over from a dinner #1 Son had made earlier in the week (post to come, if I can get him to write it). What’s a girl to do? I made two batches of amaretti, exactly the same except that one used 3 cups of raw slivered almonds and the other used 2½ cups of almond meal. The almond meal was made from unblanched almonds, so it had brown specks in it, but you know what? There was a huge difference between the two batches. The almond batch was much harder, the same consistency throughout. The almond meal batch was crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside, just as they should have been.

And you know what else? I’ve been looking for these cookies for 20 years, but I didn’t know what they were.

My first job after college was working at Philadelphia magazine. Restaurants and bakeries often sent us samples, in the hopes of a good write-up. Shortly before Christmas one year we got a big cookie tray from Termini Bros. Bakery, an Italian bakery with a long history in the city. On that tray were these little almond cookies, crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside, and the most marvelous things I’d ever tasted. I ate an unforgivable number of those adorable little things (and because I was 20 years old my body forgave me). Ever since then I’ve been trying to find a recipe, but I didn’t know what they were called.

They’re amaretti. (Or maybe amarettini; I’m not sure where the size division is.) And now I can have them whenever I want.

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Bliss.

I love Holly.

Oh, yeah — we made some sort of a cake thingie this week too, right? Sorry. Got distracted by the amaretti.

It looked like nothing more than a giant brownie when I took it out of the oven, and it wasn’t domed at all (as the recipe said it would be); it had an edge like a Reese’s peanut butter cup. And the glaze was very runny when I put it on; I made a horrific mess trying to get it into the refrigerator. #1 Son saved the day there. Yay #1 Son!

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The glaze did thicken up nicely, though the half-hour specified in the recipe was not really enough. I took it to Easter dinner at the home of friends, and I put it back in the fridge when I got there to harden some more. I also made the almond whipped cream there, figuring it wouldn’t travel well.

The torte was good. It was very dark, very rich, very sweet. I am not in general a big fan of whipped cream, but it really made this cake. Without the whipped cream it was too much, but with it was delicious. In very thin slices.

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We have some extra opinions this week:

Friend #1: Stupendous.

Friend #2: The torte with the whipped cream was sublime.

Friend #3 (age 13): Fantastically amazing.

Then my three:

Husband: Great cocoa burst at the outset, with a rich mouthfeel. Hints of almond in the whipped cream made for a deliciously complex dessert.

#2 Son: It was super! It was amazing!! It was better than Cats!!!

#1 Son, always the contrarian: Too dense. Too sweet. No depth or dimension of flavor.

So there you have it. Ignore my charming first-born; this was a delicious cake. Just cut the slices thin.

If you want to try it yourself, Holly will have the recipe for you (or buy the book!). And if you want to see what all the other TWD bakers did with it, check out the blogroll.

Next week, chocolate bread pudding!

Categories
baking boys Dorie fruit

Tuesdays With Dorie: Banana Cream Pie

Again with the fruit. I’m beginning to feel that every single blogger whose turn it is to choose a TWD recipe has some sort of vendetta against me. You’re all out to get me, aren’t you? I knew it! My five readers a week are threats to you all!!!

Anyway, I turned this one over to #1 Son. As is his wont, he tarted it up a bit. I do so need a lightbox, don’t I?

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I now turn this post over to guest blogger #1 Son:

I’m a tinkerer. No, not with electronics or carpentry. That’d be, y’know, useful. I tinker with recipes.

My usual inclination is to add more meat, but when working with pastry, that often has rather displeasing consequences (except with the bacon-chocolate-chip cookies, good lord).

Therefore, when it came to this week’s banana cream pie (which my mother refused to make, fearing fruit), I had to use a little creativity. What I came up with was the Tropical Cream Pie.

The crust and base custard are identical to Dorie’s, but I added about two tablespoons of rum to the custard, sliced up a quarter of a pineapple along with the bananas, and topped it with toasted coconut and raisins.

The taste, at least in my eyes, was spectacular. I have definite plans to make the custard again on its own, either as a flan or pudding. The things that weren’t taste could have used some work. The crust was too thick, which is wholly my fault, and the custard never really set, which I’d like to share the blame for with vague instructions. The first night, it was more like pudding with a crust.

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All in all, I’d happily make it again, maybe with more of a chocolate interpretation. And a longer cooking time for the custard.

Impressions:

Confectiona: It turned out fine, I guess, if you like banana cream pie. The custard was yummy (if a bit runny) and the crust was good, but there were these banana-y things in there, and some pineapple-y things too. Not for me.

Father: I found the addition of fresh pineapple chunks intriguing, but overall was only moderately satisfied with the banana flavor of the whole dish — it was best when I reached the whole banana slices at the rear portion of the slice. The second day I found it nearly inedible, but that might have been a bum piece of pineapple.

Brother: That was really good. The first day the banana was nice and soft but not mushy, and it all blended together really nicely. I didn’t taste any rum. The second day it kind of fell apart, because there wasn’t much cream and there wasn’t any banana, but the bite that I had with the pineapple was good. I still didn’t get any rum, though.

OK, I’m back. The kid can write, can’t he? Go check out what all the other TWD bloggers did with this pie, and if you want the recipe, buy the book or head over to Sing for Your Supper, where Amy will helpfully provide it.

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Amazing the different natural light makes, isn’t it?

No fruit next week!

Categories
baking Dorie

Tuesdays With Dorie: Coconut Butter Thins

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Mmm, cookies.

I love cookies.

The only problem with cookies is that I eat them. And eat them. And eat them. It’s only another cookie — what can it hurt?

This week’s Tuesdays With Dorie recipe was Coconut Butter Thins, chosen for us by Jayne of The Barefoot Kitchen Witch. Coconut. Butter. What’s not to like? I was very much looking forward to them.

Anyway, I made these. I made them exactly as written, except I used orange zest rather than lime, because the label on my coriander said it had hints of orange, and I thought it might work well. I even used coriander, which in previous days I would have left out (along with the zest).

My palate is what you might call unadventurous. #1 Son calls it boring. I tend not to like anything weird, which includes anything, you know, weird. Like coriander.

But the lemon zest worked so well in last week’s Blueberry Crumb Cake that I threw caution to the wind and decided to trust Dorie.

Good call.

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I loved these cookies. They’re just buttery shortbread, but with really interesting flavors underneath. Must be the coriander and orange. Who knew?

They’re very easy to make, although not as easy as Dorie’s food processor recipes; the only hitch was my last-minute discovery that we had no shredded sweetened coconut. Husband was happy to oblige (luckily, he and #1 Son had just gotten home from a weekend away), and the dough was soon all mixed and pretty.

I really like the technique of rolling the dough in a ziplock bag. Rolling has always been my nemesis; I absolutely hate it. The bag was neat and easy, and after I refrigerated it for three hours the dough was easy to plop down on a cutting board and cut with a pizza wheel.

I was working on a couple of other recipes at the same time as this one, and somehow I managed to reuse the timer while the first batch was in the oven. I have no idea how long they were eventually in there; they weren’t at all burnt, but there was definitely browning around the edges. I took the second batch out at 17 minutes, with just the merest hint of darkening at the edges.

The difference was amazing. The well-done cookies were crispy and delicious. The rare cookies were chewy and delicious. OK, maybe it wasn’t so amazing. My point is that it’s hard to screw these up. They were great the second day, too: completely different, much softer, but delicious. (I keep using that word. But I do think it means what I think it means.)

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Family liked them too:

Husband: I thought the dough was a bit iffy — had a bit of a flat, almost metallic taste — but the baked result was quite gratifying. It was quite a feat to have a chewy center (thank you, shredded coconut) in such a thin, crisp cookie.

#1 Son: Tasty but ultimately unspectacular. I didn’t get any of the special flavors I was promised. It was just a butter cookie, but a good butter cookie.

#2 Son: I like them. They were not very coconutty, and I didn’t get any coriander or orange. To me they were basically butter cookies with coconut in them — which is not bad. I look forward to having more.

And a bonus!

#1 Son’s Girlfriend: Delicious. I loved the texture. Didn’t really get a lot of coconut, and if you hadn’t told me there was coriander and orange I wouldn’t have known. But delicious!

You should try these. Really. Even if you don’t like coconut. Get the recipe from Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, or on Jayne’s blog. Either way, you won’t be sorry. And check out what all the other TWD bakers did with these, too.

Next week, banana cream pie!

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