Category: baking

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
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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Categories
baking Dorie fruit

Tuesdays With Dorie: Blueberry Crumb Cake

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I’m back! (Although, sadly, Passover is approaching. I’m hoping the April recipes are posted soon, so I can work ahead.)

I don’t like fruit; you all know that. I have actually skipped TWD recipes because they were fruit-based. But my two weeks of slacking guilted me into making this cake, and I am so glad I did.

This week’s recipe was Blueberry Crumb Cake. I like crumbs. I don’t like blueberries.

I decided this sounded like a breakfast cake, so breakfast it was. In a pathetic attempt to make it a touch more healthful, I used my beloved King Arthur white whole-wheat flour. See? It’s breakfast! It’s whole-grain!

Right.

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So I used the flour and I used frozen wild blueberries (because they’re smaller) and I used pecans rather than walnuts in the crumbs (because I like them better), but other than that I made this straight, exactly as Dorie prescribes. I even used the lemon zest, which I have left out of every single recipe I’ve ever made that has called for it. (I actually had to look up what zest is, because I was unsure, although #2 Son told me, and he was right.)

We had it for Monday breakfast, to celebrate the fact that Husband didn’t have to go to work for a whole week. Happy vacation! We’re not going anywhere, although he’s going to spend a few days with his father, but vacation is vacation!

Despite my worries about the whole fruit thing, it is delicious. Really delicious. The best fruit cake I’ve every had, and right up there contending for the spot of best cake ever. It’s moist (I never know when to take cakes out, so I generally get it wrong; got this one right) and flavorful (I actually likes the slight lemon flavor from the zest!), and the crumbs on top lend the perfect amount of sweetness. Magnificent. There have been TWD recipes that I haven’t been terribly impressed with, but this is not one of them.

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And the gang says:

Husband: Delicious breakfast cake. It was just phenomenal. I wish I’d had some coffee with it. [I tried to pin him down. Didn’t work.] It was just awesome. The whole thing, the sweetness and the … I don’t even know what you’d call it. [He’s a writer.] It almost tasted like toasted whole grains, like a meal.

#1 Son: Really delicious. Moist, great flavor, and the praline on top was simply magnificent.

#2 Son: Please can I have some more? It could have used a bit fewer blueberries in my second slice, because they overwhelmed the praline topping. The praline really makes it much better; it would not work without the praline. Yum. Please?

I guess the takeaway here is that my family is considerably less erudite when they like something than when they don’t. They liked this cake, a lot.

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Go check out the hundreds of other versions of this cake, and then get yourself a copy of Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan and make it. Blueberry Crumb Cake was chosen for us this week by Sihan of Befuddlement (or maybe Walking in the Rain?), so you can also just head over there to get the recipe. But make it you must, no matter how you feel about fruit in your cake.

Categories
baking boys

No Tuesdays With Dorie, but Lovely Hamantaschen Instead!

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This week’s Tuesdays With Dorie recipe was Lemon Cup Custard, chosen for us by Bridget of The Way the Cookie Crumbles. I didn’t make it. Today is Purim, a Jewish holiday celebrated most significantly, at least for my family, with hamantaschen, and given that we made two batches on two different days, I decided to skip the custard. If you want to read about Lemon Cup Custard, visit the several hundred other TWD blogs, where you will no doubt see many lovely photos and read many vivid descriptions.

But if you want to read about hamantaschen, stay right here.

When I was young, I learned that hamantaschen were named for Haman’s hat, Haman being the awful nasty villain at the heart of the Purim story. Turns out that, as with so many other things we learn as children, that’s probably not true. And I always wondered why we were eating a bad guy’s hat anyway. But no matter why we eat hamantaschen, we do eat them. A lot of them.

Traditionally (meaning the ones I ate as a child, and the ones you see in bakeries today), hamantaschen are filled with cherry, prune, or poppyseed fillings. We are not traditional.

We’ve been refining our filling selections over the years since #1 Son was very young, and we’ve settled on some perennial favorites: Marshmallow Fluff and chocolate chips, almond pie filling and chocolate chips, cherry pie filling and chocolate chips …

Did you pick up on the common thread there?

We also use Nutella and pecans, plain cherry filling, almond butter and sweetened shredded coconut, and other things I’m forgetting right now.

On Friday #1 Son made a batch of dough, using a new recipe for us (because we couldn’t find the book with our regular recipe, but let’s not discuss that right now). He and his girlfriend and #2 Son and a friend of his made hamantaschen Friday afternoon. Fun was had. But the recipe didn’t make very many, and I didn’t get even one.

So Sunday night I made another batch, and this morning I baked them (with a little help from #2 Son, who made a turkey version).

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First I rolled out the dough and cut it into circles; our regular recipe involves rolling the dough into logs and slicing (like World Peace Cookies!), then rolling out each individual circle.

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Next I put a dollop of filling in the middle of each cookie.

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I used lots of different fillings.

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And then I folded them into adorable little three-cornered hat simulacra.

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The dough was much drier than our usual. #1 Son had neglected to mention that, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so I made do. They’re not the prettiest hamantaschen ever; some were prettier than others.

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But they are absolutely delicious, as always, and I am very happy with them. And I am even happier that I made them in daylight, and so got some decent photos for a change.

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Categories
baking boys Dorie

Tuesdays With Dorie: Chocolate Armagnac Cake

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This week’s recipe, chosen for us by LyB of And Then I Do the Dishes, did not sound the slightest bit yummy to me. I don’t like fruit. I don’t like alcohol (except for Kahlua and the amazing mudslide mix my father-in-law buys at Christmas). And I’m sick to death of dark chocolate.

I wasn’t going to make it. I do TWD almost every week, so I figured I could skip a week.

Then #1 Son got hold of the recipe. He likes fruit. He loves alcohol. And he loves dark chocolate.

So I turn over the bulk of this post to my guest blogger:

“I made it with rum and prunes, and it was one of the easiest and tastiest chocolate cakes I have ever made. I would happily make it again.”

He’s a man of few words, at least when there’s no bacon involved.

So I guess that wasn’t the bulk of the post, and I apologize for its brevity. He cut the recipe by two-thirds and baked the result in an oval ramekin.

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I had the smallest bite of this cake, and as expected, I didn’t like it. The rest of them did, though:

Husband: I actually thought that the alcohol-softened prunes added quite a bit to the dark fudginess. There was a light fruit note that was quite enticing. I found the glaze a little simple, but it didn’t detract. I didn’t think it was necessary, ultimately. Given my choice, I would have put a little dollop of unsweetened whipped cream on top.

#1 Son: I liked it a lot. It had a really great fudgy texture, but wasn’t too rich and had a real depth of flavor. It was my favorite thing out of the Dorie book so far. Didn’t get much prune or rum flavor, though. I would have liked it with a little orange marmalade on top. That would have enhanced both the dark chocolate and fruit flavors, and been a light counterpart to the fudginess.

#2 Son: It was pretty good overall. The cake was good; I liked the bits of prune.

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Sorry, folks — that’s all I’ve got today. Go check out all the other TWD bloggers to see what they did with the cake, and if you want to try it yourself, buy Baking: From My Home to Yours, by Dorie Greenspan, or visit And Then I Do the Dishes, where the recipe will appear.

Categories
baking Daring Bakers

Daring Bakers: For the Love of Chocolate

My first Daring Bakers post! This is so exciting!! I don’t think I’ve ever used so many exclamation points before!!!

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The February 2009 challenge is hosted by Wendy of WMPE’s Blog and Dharm of Dad ~ Baker & Chef. They have chosen a Chocolate Valentino cake by Chef Wan, a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Dharm, and a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Wendy as the challenge.

This cake has three ingredients: chocolate, butter, and eggs. With something that basic, quality really matters. I used Trader Joe’s dark chocolate, because that’s what I had in the house, and because three-quarters of my family really likes it. (All three of you loyal readers will know I’m the fourth quarter!) The resulting cake tasted exactly like that chocolate, but warmer and gooier. (That does not look like a word, but it is, according to the fine folks at Merriam-Webster.)

And because it tasted just like the chocolate, I really wasn’t terribly fond of it. It was interesting, and the texture was great. And it melded perfectly with the peppermint ice cream, but the cake on its own, not so much. Had I gone with the Trader Joe’s milk chocolate, or even better the absolutely amazing Icelandic milk chocolate I can get at Whole Foods on the extremely rare occasions that it’s on sale, I’d have loved it.

I was overruled, though. Everyone else loved it, including the four guests we had for dinner and dessert the night I made it. I didn’t interview the guests, but here’s what my people had to say:

Husband: It was semi-jelled pudding, in a good way.

#1 Son: Hugely rich, but gooey and wonderful too. Fantastic with the mint ice cream.

#2 Son: Delish. It was chocolate, but held together by butter and eggs! It was delicious. It was really good with the peppermint ice cream.

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So there you have it. Chocolate Valentino comes from Chef Wan’s Sweet Treats, which is apparently not easily available in the United States. Here’s your opportunity to try out one of the recipes without spending $55 for the one copy available at Amazon.com.

You can use any shape pan that gives you an area of about 50”; I used an 8-inch cake pan. A lot of people probably used heart-shaped pan, in keeping with the chocolate/Valentine’s Day thing, but I don’t have one.

Chocolate Valentino
Preparation Time:  20 minutes

16 ounces (1 pound) (454 grams) of semisweet chocolate, roughly chopped
½ cup (1 stick) plus 2 tablespoons (146 grams total) of unsalted butter
5 large eggs, separated

  • Preheat the oven to 375F/190C.
  • Put chocolate and butter in a heat-proof bowl and set over a pan of simmering water (the bottom of the bowl should not touch the water) and melt, stirring often.
  • While the chocolate-butter mixture is cooling, butter the pan and line it with a parchment circle, then butter the parchment.
  • Separate the egg yolks from the egg whites and put into two medium/large bowls.
  • Whip the egg whites until stiff peaks are formed (do not over-whip or the cake will be dry). Set aside.
  • Beat the egg yolks.
  • Add the egg yolks to the cooled chocolate.
  • Fold 1/3 of the egg whites into the chocolate mixture, then another 1/3, then the remaining 1/3. Fold until no white remains, being careful not to deflate the batter.
  • Pour batter into prepared pan. The batter should fill the pan 3/4 of the way full.
  • Bake for 25 minutes or until an instant-read thermometer reads 140F/60C. If you do not have an instant-read thermometer, the top of the cake will look similar to a brownie and a cake tester will appear wet.
  • Cool cake on a rack for 10 minutes, then unmold.

The Daring Bakers challenge included ice cream. I love ice cream. I love making ice cream. The challenge provided two recipes for vanilla ice cream, classic (with eggs) and Philadelphia-style (without eggs). Until I discovered David Lebovitz‘s Perfect Scoop I almost always made Philadelphia-style, but he has really converted me to the joys of custard.

This time, though, I thought less rich was the way to go, given the richness of the cake. And I was so right. I made peppermint ice cream using (with slight modification) the recipe in Bruce Weinstein’s Ultimate Ice Cream Book. Lots of good recipes in this one, kids.

Mint Ice Cream, Philadelphia Style

3 cups heavy cream [I used 2 cups whole milk and 1 cup half-and-half]
½ cup sugar
1 tablespoon peppermint extract [the first time I made this, it was hideously strong, so I cut this down to 1 teaspoon; it was still pretty strong]

Heat the cream (or milk, or half-and-half) in a heavy medium saucepan until small bubbles appear around the edge. Do not let the cream boil. Remove from the heat and add the sugar. Stir until the sugar dissolves completely. Cool to room temperature. Stir in the mint extract. You might want to start with ½ teaspoon and taste the result. Refrigerate till cold or overnight. Freeze in your ice cream maker!

Check out what all the other Daring Bakers did — there are sure to be all kinds of interesting ice cream variations. Enjoy!

Categories
baking Dorie Friday dinner

Tuesdays With Dorie: Caramel Crunch Bars

We’re back to cookies this time, but cookies of a different flavor. This week’s recipe, chosen for us by Whitney of What’s Left on the Table?, was for Caramel Crunch Bars — essentially chocolate-chip shortbread with chocolate and toffee bits on top.

This was not a big production. I made them fairly late in the day, and (unlike last week) they didn’t keep me up way past my bedtime. Make the dough — in the mixer, not the food processor, which is where I generally make shortbread — and bake the dough. This dough is thick and sticky, and I knew from reading the comments that a lot of people were using a smaller pan, but I’m brave (and I was having a party the next day); I went for the recipe-specified 9×13. But forewarned is fore-utensiled, and I used my offset spatula, sprayed with butter-flavored cooking spray, to spread it around. Easy as shortbread.

I am notoriously bad at knowing when to take things out of the oven; I can never make reality line up with the description in the recipe, and this time was no different. Dorie says the dough will look as if it’s “trying to pull away from the sides” of the pan. Never got that. The edges were browning and the center looked done, so I finally took them out after about 23 minutes. (My oven temperature is fairly random.)

I chopped the chocolate for the top in the food processor, and I made it very fine — almost like commercial breadcrumbs. So when I sprinkled it on top of the hot cookies, I didn’t have to spread it around; it just melted in place. One invariably frustrating step saved. Then I sprinkled on the the toffee bits and pressed them down with the back of my offset spatula. Piece of shortbread.

I liked these a lot. They weren’t World Peace league, but they were good. I’d have liked them better if I’d used milk chocolate on top, but I was pandering to the masses:

Husband: It just tasted like a big Heath bar, nothing particularly special. They were tasty, but I didn’t get the point of them. [Allow me to interject here that the point of them is the same as the point of Heath bars: They’re delicious.]

#1 Son: Pretty damned good. They could have used a little more crunch and a little less sweetness, but I liked them.

#2 Son: The bottom really adds nothing to it but texture — it’s just a Heath bar. But it’s a really good Heath bar. I would eat a billion of these again. And again. And again. [Allow me to interject once again to point out that Husband and #2 Son made these comments in isolation. They are scarily alike.]

There were four extra people at my house when I served these cookies, but there were also two whole cakes, homemade ice cream, and more cookies — not to mention quite a bit of my amazing homemade pizza — and every single cookie was eaten. One guest even asked for the recipe. I guess that means they were a hit.

Oh, and I apologize for the lack of photographs this week. My camera did something odd, and the 30 or so photos I shot seem to have vanished into the mist. My pictures are never all that good anyway, so no big loss!

Lots of other people made these, and I bet there are tons of interesting variations (and lots of photos!). Go check them out. If you’d like to try these for yourself, buy Baking: From My Home to Yours or head on over to What’s Left on the Table?.

Categories
baking Dorie

Tuesdays With Dorie: Devil’s Food White-Out Cake

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Yum.

My sister’s birthday was Saturday, so I thought that would be a perfect opportunity to make this cake and not have to watch it devoured in a matter of seconds by the four of us. A whole cake for four people is just silly.

But the usual logistical nightmares meant my sister and the assorted other guests would not be joining us this weekend.

Plan B was cupcakes, but the cake was so glorious that I couldn’t bear to reduce it like that.

Plan C was making the cake, but sending a quarter to the neighbors and another quarter to #1 Son’s girlfriend and her mother.

The best-laid plans of mice and mothers …

So, I made the cake. It was after piano lesson and grocery shopping, so I didn’t start till almost 3 in the afternoon. That was dumb. It’s a cake. I’ve made cakes before. I know how long they take.

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Couldn’t find my 9-inch cake pans. (I have sons who have lived in this house their entire lives and still can’t manage to put things away in the same place two times in a row.)

Couldn’t find a non-warped 9×13 pan. (That one’s my fault. I really need to upgrade my baking pans.)

But what’s this? A Bundt pan! It holds the same amount as two 8-inch pans!! Yes!!!

So I made it as a Bundt cake. I buttered and floured the pan, but skipped the parchment — my imagination was just not up to the task of figuring out how to line a Bundt pan with parchment. It baked fine and slid right out of the pan, smooth as silk.

I sliced it into four layers with considerably less angst and cursing than I was expecting, and crumbled the bottom-most one.

Then I made the frosting, increasing the amounts by 50 percent because I like frosting, and so that I could fill the center hole with lovely, fluffy whiteness.

From comments I’d read from other TWDers, I knew the sugar-water part of the frosting was going to have to cook for a while, and yet I didn’t start it till after 8 in the evening. I’m not always the brightest person around. But I had the cake, and I had people waiting for dessert, so I did it despite knowing it was dumb.

Put the egg whites in the mixer. Put the sugar and water and cream of tartar in the pot. Stirred. Boiled. It got up to 230 fairly quickly, maybe 10 minutes or so. And it stayed there. And stayed there. And stayed there. Maybe 20 minutes later it was up to 240. And it stayed there. And stayed there. And stayed there.

I had started to beat the egg whites when it hit 235, just like the book says, and they were done, so I turned the mixer down, just like the book says.

Still 240.

I leaned over the mixer bowl to see how the whites were doing, and when I looked back at the thermometer it read 250. Literally 10 seconds had elapsed, and it had jumped 10 degrees.

Husband later mentioned a slightly burnt aftertaste. I hit him.

But back to the slightly overcooked sugar syrup. I soldiered on, pouring it into the egg whites and beating them till they cooled. Here’s something I hadn’t considered: Increasing the ingredients by 50 percent increases the output by 50 percent. This was not buttercream frosting — this stuff was essentially marshmallow fluff. Marshmallow fluff that expands a lot when it’s beaten.

Filled my five-quart Kitchenaid right up to the top, but luckily no further.

It tasted kind of weird, though, beyond the aforementioned aftertaste. It tasted almost lemony. I figured that had to be the cream of tartar, although I’ve never noticed a flavor from cream of tartar before. It was a little offputting, at least to me. #1 Son liked it a lot.

Slapped the cake together pretty quickly — it was well after 9 by this point — but it looked pretty good, if I say so myself. #2 Son lovingly applied the cake crumbs.

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The recipe says to refrigerate the cake for an hour before serving. That was not going to happen. We ate it. We mostly liked it, although we weren’t overwhelmed. That lemony taste turned me off, and I’m not a big fan of chocolate cake to begin with.

Husband: It didn’t thrill me in any way. The lemony taste of the frosting was overwhelming.

#1 Son: I really liked it. Something gave the icing the slightest hint of lemon, and it worked beautifully. The texture of the cake was also perfect; not too mushy, not too crumbly, but a happy, top-of-the-brownie-like middle ground.

#2 Son: I liked the cake, but the icing wasn’t very good. It tasted weird, so instead of eating the leftover frosting, I just put it in a bowl.

So I covered it with plastic wrap and stuck it in the fridge, hoping for a better tomorrow.

I got one.

Twenty-one hours or so later, the lemony taste had gone, and the frosting was sweet and pillowy and lovely. The cake was fudgier, more like a brownie than cake. I liked the whole package much better. As for those people who live in my house:

Husband: It was better the second day, because the cake had more of a brownie consistency. But I didn’t find the chocolate taste at all special, and I found the icing tooth-piercingly sweet.

#1 Son: I really liked the contrast between the almost too dry cake and the frosting the first day. The second day, the cake got a moistness and a fudginess that I felt equalized the textures more, so I didn’t like it as much. But the flavor and texture of the icing intensified overnight, and I really like that.

#2 Son: It was overall much better today. The sweetness increased, which was good, because it decreased the weird taste in the frosting, but it also  started hurting my teeth. I would eat this again on the second day, but not the first. And I really do recommend milk with it [slurp].

Oh, and #1 Son, brilliant as sometimes, sprinkled cinnamon over his slice. That was amazing.

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So there you have it. Mixed opinions, as usual, but I was happy. And that’s really all that matters.

Check out the myriad variations dreamed up by the other Tuesdays With Dorie bloggers. And if you want to try this cake for yourself, buy the book or head on over to Confessions of a City Eater, where Stephanie will have the recipe for you.