Thumbprints!

Tuesdays with Dorie, the wonderful group of bakers who have been baking through Dorie Greenspan's fabulous book, Baking from My Home to Yours,  finishes up this week.  (I still have 19 recipes left to bake, so I'm going to keep on posting till I finish!  And the group will soon begin to bake through another Dorie book, Baking with Julia.)  Yayyy!


This week, Dorie herself chose the last recipe, Thumbprints.  Check out Dorie's blog for the complete recipe and a wonderful perspective on the Tuesdays with Dorie bakers.

When I started to write this post, I found myself writing only about Dorie and her book and how it has changed how I bake.  I decided to save that for another post in a day or two.  For now, let me just say that Dorie's is the most-used cookbook on my shelf, the one I always write in, the one that has given me the most pleasure, and the one that has brought me the most positive compliments about baking from family and friends.  If anyone reading this post does not yet own Baking from My Home to Yours, you need to rush right out and buy it.

My much-loved Baking from My Home to Yours

And now for this week's TWD pick!  They are wonderful little peanut butter thumbprint cookies with encouragement to use a variety of jams or chocolate to fill the thumbprint.  I mixed up the dough and prepared the chopped peanuts which will coat the cookies.  This coating, by the way, makes these cookies extra special and quite pretty.

Mixing up the batter

I intended to take pictures all along the way, but got caught up in the process of baking!  So here's the first batch cooling, after I added the filling.  I used cherry preserves on most of them but on some, I spooned in a bit of shaved chocolate which melted very nicely on the warm cookies.  Then I had the inspired notion to spoon a bit of preserves on top of the chocolate.  Those were the best of the bunch.  That little bit of chocolate was an unexpected happy surprise!

The finished cookies

Thanks, Dorie, for encouraging me to be brave and experimental in my baking, and for standing beside me as I baked through all of the recipes.  Like the aroma of cookies in the oven, your warm enthusiasm for the joy of baking continues to envelope not only many home  bakers but also their family and friends who have had the pleasure to eat the terrific baked goods.  Thank you! 

Peggy the Baker, Dorie, Peggy's husband Rich in Kingston, Ontario

Rugelach & Fluted Polenta and Ricotta Cake

Today I baked one recipe that I made before but which needed a little tweaking and one that I had not yet baked.

Last year I baked Rugelach for the holiday reception for my co-workers and when my friend Lynne passed down the goodie table, she exclaimed, "Rugelach!  Who made the Rugelach?  It's wonderful!!"  So I decided to bake the Rugelach again for these same coworkers.    The problem in the past is that Dorie says to heat up 2/3 cup preserves to smear on the dough.  The past two times I've baked these, I've dutifully tried to use up all  the preserves, only to find that a lot of it oozed out while baking and made things stickier and ickier than I'd like.  So this time I used about half and the results were much better.  I also decided to cut down a little bit on the chocolate, for the same reason.  I'm very pleased with how this year's Rugelach turned out.

Traces left from rolling up some of the Rugelach!

Rugelach for the party.

 I'm about 20 recipes behind in baking through the whole of Dorie Greenspan's great book, Baking from My Home to Yours.  The rest of the Tuesdays with Dorie bakers officially finish next week, but I'll be playing catch up just a little longer!  This week I baked Dorie's Fluted Polenta and Ricotta Cake which is to be made in a 10 1/2 inch tart pan.  I had a 9 inch tart pan which I must confess I failed to measure before I started.  So the batter was really near the tippy top of the pan and baked over a little during the baking.   I had to bake it longer than the recipe says--not a surprise.  I feared that I wouldn't be able to slide the cake out because the top edge of the cake was pretty firmly stuck to the fluted tart pan ring.  But I gave it a little nudge all around with the side of a knife and it came out very easily.  This goes off to work with my husband who promises to take a taste and report back.

A bit of a spillover because my pan was too small!

The final product looked lovely!

Madeleines and a Separate Cinnamon Experiment

Well, it's Tuesday and I was all set to post this week's delicious treat made from Dorie Greenspan's great book, Baking from My Home to Yours.  So I made Earl Gray Madeleine's, only to discover that that was last week's pick for the Tuesdays with Dorie bakers.  I guess while I was away in Seattle and Corvallis last week, time marched on!

Since we're in the home stretch of the book, I'm going to share my pictures of my madeleines anyway.  Better late than never!

The recipe I used was Dorie's Earl Gray Madeleines which attempt to flavor the little sponge cakes with Earl Gray tea.  The technique is to melt the butter and then put the tea leaves into the melted butter and allow it to infuse for 15 minutes.  Then you put the tea and melted butter through a cheese-cloth lined strainer.  (That would have been a good photo to shoot!)  The other flavor used in these cookies is lemon zest, which my husband thinks is the dominant flavor.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

As it happens, Dorie herself referred to madeleines in her blog post today!  To get them puffy, her recent discovery is to place plastic wrap on the batter and refrigerate it for an hour, then spoon the batter into the pans, cover with plastic again, and refrigerate for another hour.  Then put a baking sheet in the oven and preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  Then pop in the pans and bake.  This is the suggestion she learned from  Phillippe Conticini of Patisserie des Reves in Paris.  


Here's what I did:

In the cute little mini madeleine pan

In my silicone madeleine pan

The mini madeleines

Minis next to the regulars

The interesting occurrence was the uneven baking.  Notice how some of the mini madeleines are browner than others?  And notice the brown stripe on the regular-sized madeleines?  What's with this?

I sprinkled them all with powdered sugar and they were very much enjoyed.  But I have to figure out my oven.

Since I'm a week late with my post, I might as well share a non-Dorie but very interesting experiment.  When visiting my son and his wonderful girlfriend Rose in Corvallis last week, I brought them a present of four different cinnamon's from Penzey's, one each from Ceylon, China, Indonesia, and Viet Nam.  Wonderful Rose saw this as a perfect opportunity to do a taste test of cinnamon rolls and what a wonderful experiment it was!

The four kinds of cinnamon

Rose rolling out the dough

Four different cinnamon/sugar mixtures

And raisins

Rolls rising

Can't you just smell them?!!!

The cinnamons definitely had distinctive tastes and all were yummy.  Our preference was the Chinese cinnamon in the cinnamon rolls.  The Vietnamese had a more robust flavor--almost too much for cinnamon rolls but outstanding in Dorie's Double Apple Bundt Cake.  The Ceylon and Indonesian cinnamons were unique, but not as tasty as the Chinese.

Hopefully I'll be back on track next week!  The Tuesdays with Dorie bakers will finish up the book this month.  I am a bit behind with 20 recipes left to bake.  I will finish, but not this month!

Normandy Apple Tart & Sour Cream Pumpkin Pie Tart

We are on the home stretch in baking through Dorie Greenspan's fabulous book, Baking from my Home to Yours.  Since I joined the Tuesdays with Dorie crowd after they got  started, I had already begun to bake some of the recipes.  That's the deal with this week's two tarts.

I baked the Normandy Apple Tart for New Year's Day 2010.  It was very apple-y and very beautiful.  The thing I remember about this tart is the lovely applesauce which is spread on the lovely sweet tart crust.  And how gloriously beautiful the tart is.  For the recipe, scoot on over to Tracey's Culinary Adventures.

Normandy Apple Tart

I also baked the Sour Cream Pumpkin Pie/Tart last year.  Pumpkin pie is not my favorite dish, but boy did people love this.  Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture!  The filling made quite a bit more than would fill the crust, but I baked it up in custard cups and people ate it right up.  For the recipe, check with Judy of Judy's Gross Eats.

Dorie's Favorite Pecan Pie

For Thanksgiving, I baked Dorie Greenspan's Favorite Pecan Pie, one of the last of the recipes in her great book, Baking from My Home to Yours.   In her comments, Dorie says that she has thought that most pecan pies are too sweet and so she kept experimenting until she figured out  how to make a non-sweet pecan pie.  The secret is to add bittersweet chocolate and 2 teaspoons of espresso powder.

People loved this pie!

I was disappointed in the shrinking crust, but I knew it would taste great.

Mixing up the filling

Adding in the pecans

Covering the already browned crust rim

The end result!  Puffy and yummy!

With my traditional apple pie and its crumb topping.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Bittersweet Brownies and Hidden Berry Cream Cheese Torte

As I close in on the last couple of dozen recipes in Dorie Greenspan's fabulous book, Baking from My Home to Yours, I am trying to bake the choices of the Tuesdays with Dorie gang and also catch up by baking some recipes that were chosen before I joined the group.

This week, I baked Bittersweet Brownies (one of the TWD selections) and Hidden Berry Cream Cheese Torte (my catch-up recipe).  First off, I got out lots of butter and eggs and allowed them to come to room temperature.

Getting ready with eggs and BUTTER

The brownies are easy to make with butter, sugar, melted bittersweet chocolate and just a little flour.  There are no nuts in this recipe, but the texture of the finished product is so wonderfully fudgy that I didn't miss the nuts.  I cut them in gorgeous pieces . . . .but you'll just have to take my word for it because I neglected to get a picture before they were consumed by the attendees of our contra dance planning committee!

The Torte has a lovely pre-baked crust which is supposed to go up the sides of a spring form pan.  It's chilled, then partially baked while lined with form-fitting foil and pie weights.  What happened to my crust, however, was that the sides squished down so I couldn't pour in as much of the filling as I wanted to.  There is a layer of cherry preserves on the crust, then the cream cheese/eggs/cottage cheese/vanilla filling.

Baking the crust

It was super tasty, although my "hidden" berries snuck up to the top.

A little bit of cherry preserves sneaking out

A lovely week of baking!  Next time, I'll try to remember to keep my camera handy.

Far Breton

Two great advantages of baking through Dorie Greenspan's book, Baking from My Home to Yours, are learning some new techniques (it's so much fun to set something on fire!), and baking creations that are beloved in other parts of the world but previously unknown to me.  Such is the case with this week's pick, a Far Breton.  It's a lovely pudding-y cake with prunes that have been soaked in Armagnac.  It was so much fun to light the cognac and watch the lovely blue flames burn away the alcohol, leaving only the amazing taste behind.

I took this to my weekly brunch and the gentlemen were particularly pleased with it.

Going into the oven

Coming out of the oven

Ready to serve