Initial holiday baking

Over Thanksgiving I cooked more than baked.  Still, there was time for a nice pumpkin muffin and a pumpkin cookie.

I also taught Miranda how to make some pies.

Three different types – apple, pumpkin & pecan.

Every day I’ve been baking cookies – trying to figure out what might be great ones for gifts.  Also, I re-made various breads including the bagels – which were a huge hit with cream cheese and Colorado smoked salmon.  (These are the same bagels from Peter Reinhardt’s book.)

What was really fun is the King Arthur Sharing bread.  It really does bake up make 2 cute small loaves that you can give away to 2 people rather than 1 or you can check to see if the loaf turns out well and give the other one away if it turns out.  Fun.

Panettone, Pizza, Portuguese Sweet Bread

Aside from making cookies, I’ve also been baking breads. Again, these breads are from Peter Reinhardt’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.  I’ve been baking the breads as part of Pinch My Salt’s BBA challenge.

24. Panettone: This bread is filled with lovely dried fruits and nuts. It’s usually served around the holidays and great for gifts. So this was a perfect way to try it out before everyone shows up. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the fancy liners; however, it was easy enough to make a collar for my pans. I made 2 smaller loaves and a few muffin tin loaves. Because I don’t like those odd candied fruits, I used a blend of dried cherries, raisins, and cranberries. I also sprinkled more almonds on the top for decoration. The flavor was really good and wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

25. Pizza Napoletana: I’ve been making sourdough pizza for a while now, because I have a sourdough starter and I have to feed it. I hate throwing out starter and so I convert the remainder to pizza dough. Needless to say, none of the various recipes I’ve tried compares to this dough. This is the best pizza dough I have ever made. The size of the pizzas are smaller but they came out perfectly. I can’t emphasize enough how great this dough is.

26. Poolish Baguettes: This dough is interesting because it has a mix of whole wheat and white. There are detailed instructions about what to do and I basically followed the sifting. However, the dough ended up very dense and I think I would have been better off following the alternative instructions – reducing the amount of whole wheat and not bothering to sift. I may try this again because the flavor was good (especially since I used my wonderful locally produced whole wheat.)

27. Portuguese Sweet Bread: After having gushed about the pizza dough above, I’d say that this dough is also incredibly fantastic. It’s so good that I actually photocopied it for a friend (whom I’d consider a master bread baker). We both grew up in Southern CA and had this bread as we were growing up. Her father really likes it and she’s headed there right now. I’m hoping to find out whether it worked as well for her as it has for me. I’ve made it both exactly as the recipe is written and with my sourdough starter as a substitute for the sponge. Both ways are fantastic. I’d highly recommend this recipe, as well as the pizza dough, from this set of 4 from this week.

Healthy cookie recipes

We’re headed into the holiday baking season.  It’s my favorite time of the year because you can bake things and give them to people and they really appreciate it.  It’s as if for a brief moment in time, people allow you to bake for them.

Anyway, I’ve been getting a lot of e-newsletters.  EatingWell magazine is having a cookie contest. Their test kitchens have already chosen the finalists but they’re letting the general public vote, as well.  Given that I love to bake and would like to have an arsenal of healthier cookies, I thought I’d vote – after baking some of the recipes.

The first test for a recipe is whether it gets past the title screening.  If you like the title, then you’re willing to try it.  I picked out 6 recipes and baked 5 of them in the last few days.  If I have time, I may make the Italian ice honey-lemon cookies; otherwise, these are the recipes I tried.

1. Honey Baby Cookies:  These are essentially a very flavorful sugar cookie or a variant on the Mexican wedding cookie.  These cookies use whole wheat flour & cornmeal in place of AP.  (I used local WW flour.)  However, since they have a full stick of butter, it’s hard to call them incredibly healthy.  The various tasters had mixed reviews.  I think the texture with cornmeal is just a little bit gritty.  However, this can be fixed.  I used a little flower cutter and the cookies spread, ever so slightly.  If I make these again, I’ll put them in the fridge after cutting before baking them off.
2. Double Peanut Butter-Chocolate Chewies:  Full disclosure = I doubled the amount of chocolate and peanut butter chips.  Otherwise, I made the recipe as it was.  I even found the Sunspire chips.  (I’m not impressed with these chips.  They don’t have a very strong peanut flavor.)  This recipe was one of the favorites and garnered many votes, although one friend who doesn’t like the PB/choc combination passed on it.  I’ll make these again.
3. Chewy Chocolate Fudge Cookies with peppermint glaze:  First, my cookies weren’t that chewy.  They were more cake-like.  Then I had to do the glaze twice because my natural peppermint was far stronger than whatever the author must have used and I didn’t need the full ½ tsp.  I’d recommend mixing everything and then adding peppermint to taste.  People thought this was OK.
4. Almond Cherry Bites:  I am always looking for almond recipes because I just love nuts so much.  I followed this recipe exactly and would reduce the amount of cherries next time – in order to have a bit more cookie.  However, my friend loved them as they were.  Mixed reviews overall, with some really liking it and others not.
5. Double Nut and Date Tassies:  These cookies were like little pecan pies.  I love that there are two different types of nuts in this recipe and that the dates are not “in your face”.  The crust turned out to be very crumbly and did not hold together very well.  I could have pressed it down a lot harder, maybe.  I suspect it needs just a tad more butter.  The filling was fantastic.  My daughter inhaled 2 of these right after I got them out of the pan.  I’d say that these were my favorite (with the PB-choc chip as second).  I will definitely make these again.

Summary:  These cookies were all pretty good; however, you could definitely tell that some of the recipes were healthy versions.  I was glad that I made them because my daughter would definitely eat three of the above recipes again. So, get into the kitchen and bake some of these (especially the double nut tassies). They taste great.

Two slow bread weeks….

Boulder Breakfast Mummies

Last week I only managed to do two of the breads.  Halloween took up the whole week.  It was so much fun, though.  Aside from making the petit fours and Madeleine for the 5^th grade biography tea [see Halloween post], I also made hash brown brains & Boulder Breakfast mummies (i.e., mummies made with Boulder sausage) for breakfast (my daughter had fun helping), made pumpkin pancakes for another breakfast, and put together a (homemade) hummus graveyard and a Halloween cat teapot cake to bring to my sister’s house.  [This isn’t the best teapot cake I’ve made.  I just threw it together at the last minute to bring over.  I wanted to try out a new cookie dough to give more dimension to the handle & spout without using fondant.]

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I’ve been baking along with the bread baker’s challenge.  [This baking challenge can be found on Pinch My Salt’s BBA challenge using Peter Reinhardt's The Bread Baker's Apprentice.] I finally finished the third bread yesterday (since I’m posting 3 at a time).

21.  Pain à L’Ancienne:  The picture shows long thin, odd-shaped breads.  That’s exactly how mine turned out.  They tasted amazing, however, the whole shaping and end product were just too odd.  I have a much better understanding of Ciabatta after making this bread, though.  [The Pain à L’Ancienne is the bread on the left.  I baked a lot of things that day, including a whole wheat oatmeal loaf, a raisin/oat soudough loaf, and chocolate chocolate chip cookies.]*

Pain de Campagne

22.  Pain de Campagne:  This was a fantastic recipe.

23.  Pane Siciliano:  Quite honestly, I tried making this bread before.  When you do sourdough and care for a starter, you’re always on the lookout for something to do with the leftover starter after you’ve fed the base.  This formula, though, works perfectly with the pâte fermentée specified – You’d have to make a starter that was firmer (less hydrated).  On the other hand, the current attempt was great.  The flavor was fantastic, largely due to the pate fermentée and the overnight rise of the formed dough.  With less hydration, the shaping was easy, too.

Halloween Petit Fours

This month has been crazy because my daughter had 2 concurrent projects – biographies and the Civil War.  For the biographies, each student picked out someone that they wanted to be and they became that person today (for the whole day).

The teachers had activities all day long where they had to do things as their character and answer questions.  Events where parents helped/attended started with a poetry reading.  It was extremely dramatic.  In a darkened room, around the outside of the room, the students lined up in front of their posters and the parents sat in the middle.  One teacher started reading her poem and then she lit the candle of the student next to her.  That student then read his/her poem and so on around the room.  The traditional school parade happened with the students wending their way from classroom to classroom.  Then the students sat down to tea.

*The tea:  The parents essentially put on the tea.  Everyone volunteered for something – from setting up, serving, cooking/baking, and clean up.  It was amazing how well everything ran.  My friend Maggie was organizing the food and serving tea.  She thought that the students should have authentic food served and asked if I’d mind making petit fours cakes.  (For the French, petit fours would be from cakes to cookies that are 2-3 bites, including little tarts and little cookies.  Here most people think of little 1.5-2″ cakes.)

*For a petit four cake, the traditional cake is made with almond flour.  Due to nut allergies, I could not use that batter.  Instead I used a regular cake.  Inside I chose strawberry jam because it has less seeds (and some children are bothered by seeds).  The white frosting is poured fondant and the chocolate is chocolate glaze.  (I prefer chocolate glaze (and so does my sister), although pouring fondant is much cheaper.)  I did learn that cream is better than milk/water to get a more opaque consistency.

*Believe it or not, I repeated the whole process with my own gluten free mix and my own gluten free adjusted classic butter cake.  (Note again that I could not use a nut batter here in place of the AP flour.  I had to go with my GF mix.)  I didn’t have a picture of them, because the gluten free items had to be plated only with other gluten free items; I brought them in a tupperware and that mother took care of things. (However, you can see them on the rack in the upper left of the first picture).  The GF ones were slightly smaller (3/4″ rather than 1-1.25″) unfortunately.  However, one of the mothers of a gluten free student told me that she liked it a lot.

*I also made Madeleines – which are also traditional.  (Sorry no picture.  Everything was supposed to be on silver platters and I only have the 2 at home.  Someone else plated and served them.)   I tried making a gluten free version but was unhappy with the result.  (I was told that they were OK as well, but I knew better.  My friend Marilyn and I chatted about them after the event — more egg yolk and butter next time, maybe.)

*In the end,  in terms of the biography tea, I agree with Maggie that it will be sad to part from all these great parents who volunteered and made this tea happen.  The tables were set with linens, the tea (from Boulder Dushanbe Tea house) served in teapots donated by parents, all the food (little sandwiches and treats) was made by parents, and clean up was really efficient.  It was a beautiful event.

October 2009 Daring Bakers’ Challenge – Macarons

The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

Quite honestly, I have never had a macaron that I thought was really great.  I know that a lot of people like them and, recently, news articles have come out about them.    I’ve also never made them.

So, I read David Lebovitz’s site.  Then I went from his site to other sites.  [Go to Syrup and Tang if you want a very detailed description of what to do and why these should always be called macarons and not macaroons.]  I looked through my collection of cookbooks.  I made a grid with Claudia Fleming’s, David Lebovitz’s, and Kate Zuckerman’s recipes [The Sweet Life] and compared the ingredients.   I mise en placed all 3 recipes and dove in.

The Fleming (almond) cookie is the light colored one in this picture.  The almond flavor was not very predominant and it was perfectly smooth on top.  I didn’t get much poof but I did get a prominent foot.   Next time I will toast the almond flour, let it cool, and then proceed with the recipe.  On the other hand, I can see how this basic recipe is a good foil for many other flavors.

The Lebovitz cookie is the chocolate one in the picture above.  I followed his procedure of rapping the pan and sticking it in.  I think that the cookie was less predictable in how it turned out.  The dough was quite a bit drier and stiffer than the other 2 – mostly I think that there was a greater sugar to egg white ratio that the meringue felt more like a true meringue.  The other 2 recipes might be better with an adjustment to the powdered sugar and granulated sugar mix.

The Zuckerman (hazelnut) cookie is the smallest one.  The proportions are almost exactly the same as the Fleming cookie.  Although all were piped to match circles drawn (and with the timing method of piping),  the Zuckerman cookie stayed the size it was piped and just went upward.  Most of the cookies had tiny feet to match.  [Note that I purchased hazelnut flour.  Bob's Red Mill produces both almond and hazelnut flour and so my calculation was approximate.  The recipe calls for 5 oz of whole hazelnuts and I used 4 oz of hazelnut flour – after calculating the amount per the measurements given to me by a Red Mill representative.]

For the fillings I made: peanut butter, buttercream (flavored with orange and also vanilla), and chocolate ganache (from Lebovitz).  The peanut butter filling was too stiff to spread easily and so I fluffed it with some buttercream.

In terms of flavor, the hazelnut/chocolate combination was still the best.  My sister thought it tasted like a Nutella cookie.  However, the hazelnut with orange buttercream was also very good.  The peanut butter filling overwhelmed both the chocolate and almond cookies.  (I didn’t use it on the hazelnut.)  The chocolate and both buttercream flavors tasted good in the almond cookie.

What did I learn? A 30 minute wait time is much better than just throwing them into the oven.  It’s fun to have several fillings to try when you’re making them for the first time and I can see how flexible these cookies are (both to changing the flavor of the base cookie and the filling).  Finally, very small changes result in huge differences among recipes.   I’m proud to say that my daughter thought mine tasted better than the one made by a local bakery…

Lavash, WW & multigrain breads

OK…. finished the Lavash crackers and two breads from Peter Reinhardt’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.  [This baking challenge can be found on Pinch My Salt’s BBA challenge.  They started in May.]  Note that I’m skipping the Marbled Rye.  I dislike rye.  So, I don’t keep rye flour around the house.

17.  Lavash Crackers:   I love crackers – salty, crunchy, not overly fat.  So, I’ve been looking forward to trying Reinhardt’s Lavash recipe.  Let’s just cut to the chase:  They are great.  The formula is easy to make, the dough is easy to roll, and they turn out beautifully.  I used just Kosher salt because the little ones don’t care for seeds.  (Hopefully, we can start getting them to try them again over time.)  I would definitely make this recipe again.   As an aside, I baked the crackers according to the recipe.  However, after cooling, they didn’t seem as crisp, probably due to resting on the cookie sheet.  So, I stuck the crackers back into the oven straight on the rack.  Both sides crisped up nicely.  Also, be careful of the edges because they can get thick and will not bake crisply.

18.  Light Whole Wheat:  This is an extremely basic recipe, slightly enriched with powdered milk and butter.  The dough could have taken a bit more water.  After baking, it was delicious, with a nice crumb.

20.  Multigrain Bread Extraordinaire:  This dough is another 2 day process.  You soak the grains the night before and add them to the mix.  I used more water because my soaker seemed to use all the water almost instantly.  Then I just didn’t need to use as much water when making the base dough.  Reinhardt specifies pan sizes.  Note that the pan size for this dough is larger than for the Light Whole Wheat.  I thought I grabbed the right one, but instead took the smaller one – it still looked great, though.  Due to the grains, there’s a texture to the crust but the inside was soft.  I liked the flavor.  It’s not one-dimensional;  instead the flavor is a little on the sweet side and you can taste the different types of grains.  I would definitely make this again substituting different types of grains.

French, Italian & Kaiser rolls

Yeah!  Three more breads from Peter Reinhardt’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice done on top of the three 166% hydration starter described earlier.  Basically, I interleaved breads – due to all the starters and varying rising techniques.   I’ll say again that I like autolyse (allowing the flour and water to sit for a bit before adding yeast and continuing with the formula) because it seems to make the whole process of creating the dough easier and overnight retarding of the shaped dough (or of the dough).  There’s a lot of flavor development.

15.  French Bread:  This bread is a 2-day bread which allows for some additional flavor development.  My dough was on the wet side and therefore harder to shape.  However, the flavor was great.

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16.  Italian bread:  This is also a 2-day bread.  The base dough formula includes barley malt powder (but not a tremendous amount).  I loved the flavor of this bread and the dough was not quite as wet as the French Bread.   Because I baked both of these doughs in parallel, I could compare the finished products.  They tasted really different from each other but both equally good.  I’d give the edge to this Italian bread though.

17.  Kaiser rolls:  This is a fairly basic dough – requiring a pate fermentee (please excuse the lack of accents here).  Again, this dough used barley malt.  So, it’s basically a mix of the French bread and Italian bread recipes.  I don’t own the neat tool to make the pattern on top and so used the knotted-roll technique shown earlier in the book.  Actually, this is one of the best parts of Reinhard’ts book – there’s a full color picture section in the beginning of the book with different shaping techniques.  I loved the crustiness of the rolls and they tasted fantastic.  I would make these again.

**Visit this page to see the rest of the breads I’ve baked so far.

166% starter

OK… So, I was looking up some other information about sourdough starters and ran across several references to a website where they have recipes that use a 166% sourdough starter.  Since I’ve been baking from Peter Reinhardt’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, I’ve been following his instructions fairly closely.  These are closer to 100%.  166% produces a sourdough that is like pancake batter.  (I’ve used some of my regular sourdough starter to make pancakes.  It’s a good way to use the half that you have to remove before storing your refreshed sourdough starter.)  Anyway, I thought I’d try a few recipes that were posted there – in between my baking of the next 3 breads.  Here are some results:

This is the Alaskan sourdough recipe.  I didn’t push my thumb in hard enough and so it doesn’t look as much like a flower.  However, the flavor was fantastic.  I let this rise in a bowl, in a food-grade plastic bag, overnight and then turned it out to bake the next day (as per instructions).   I would definitely make this bread again.

*The next dough I tried was the sweet dough with the coconut filling.  It’s made like a cinnamon roll and often called a coffee cake.  I tend to think of coffee cakes as those cakes with a large crumb layer that people also call crumb cakes.

*Anyway, I made half the dough into this round, coffee cake roll, and the other half, I made as the shape shown below. I used melted butter, cinnamon sugar, and chocolate chips. The mixture of cinnamon sugar and chocolate chips is hard to beat.

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*The final bread I made was the sourdough roll.  The dough was extremely wet and hard to shape.  (The recipe does warn that this is true; however, I also made these on a day when it was rainy/snowy and I think there was a lot of extra moisture in the air.)  Because I wanted to get something else done, I just cut rectangles.  They became a little deformed transferring from the counter to the sheet pan.  Oh, well.  I ate one after they had cooled and then another later heated for dinner.  These are fantastic heated but just OK when cold.

**So, what do I think of 166% starter?  I think it’s about the same as starter that is closer to 100%.  The difference is really in the formula for the bread and not necessarily the starter.  The doughs seemed to rise more slowly but it has been colder the last few days here.  Although the flavors of all 3 doughs were good, the Alaskan recipe was fantastic because it combined the sourdough starter with a later overnight retarding in the fridge.

Peanut butter frosting filled chocolate cupcakes

One of my sister’s elderly patients is having a birthday on Sunday, but the patient cannot be released until Tuesday. So, today I baked some cupcakes to decorate and deliver on Sunday. With the extra cupcakes, I decided to make a cupcake version of a peanut butter cup.
*After you’ve made the peanut butter frosting, you make a little cone shaped circle into the cupcake.
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*Then you fill the cupcake with the peanut butter frosting and put the cap back on. (You can take off some of the excess cake.)
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*Finally, you frost the top so that no one knows.

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I’ve done the same thing with root beer flavored cupcakes (filling them with a really light buttercream – no powdered sugar here). These can taste similar to root beer floats if you get the buttercream right.