Wordless Wednesday - A baker's trip to Costco

Good things come in small packages

I have no idea how it can possibly be the end of May and the end of the school year.  Brianna's last day was last Thursday.  Being a worrier, I don't think she was completely convinced that she had been promoted to 4th grade until she saw it in writing on her report card.  Then last night we had Gillian's graduation from pre-K.  (She'll still be at the daycare for the summer, but they had the ceremony at the end of the traditional school year so that no one would miss out because of vacations, etc.)  It wasn't a very long program, since 4 and 5-year-olds don't have very long attention spans, but it was certainly entertaining.

One of the things I like to do at various times including the end of the year is make little gifts for the teachers.  I don't usually do anything big, but I try to make sure that it's something special.  For Teacher Appreciation Week in early May, I made World Peace Cookies.  What teachers wouldn't welcome a little more peace in their lives? =)  Since I went with chocolate for that occasion, I wanted something different for the end of the year thank-yous.  Something...vanilla.  

Over the past couple of weeks Central Market did a focus on France, with lots of interesting French products and ingredients.  I picked up some salted butter, so I had to find something to make with it.  Naturally, I turned to Dorie.  I remembered seeing a cookie recipe of hers in a recent issue of one of my cooking magazines.  I had to do a bit of searching through the stack by my computer, but I found it.  Vanilla Bean Sablés--French butter cookies.

The recipe calls for unsalted butter and sea salt, so I used my salted butter and skipped the additional salt.  Rather than two vanilla beans, I used one and some of my vanilla sugar.  I love rubbing the vanilla seeds into the sugar--it always makes my fingers smell good.  (And after I scraped the seeds from the pod, I stuck the pieces into my container of vanilla sugar to make more!)  The rest of the ingredient list is simple, just some powdered sugar, flour, and an egg yolk.  The dough mixes up quickly in a stand mixer, and gets formed into a couple of logs.  Once the dough is chilled, it's rolled in coarse sparkling sugar, then sliced and baked.  I did skip the step of brushing the dough logs with egg wash before coating with sugar; I just pressed the sugar into the dough.  The cookies bake for about 20 minutes, and you can smell when they're done.  

The verdict?  I totally love these cookies.  The flavors of butter and vanilla play so well together, especially when the bottoms of the cookies turn such a lovely golden brown.  The cookies have a great texture, short and crumbly and with the contrast of crunchy sparkling sugar on the edges.  They're great paired with a mug of tea.  I hope the teachers enjoyed them as much as I did.  

If you'd like to try these cookies for yourself, you can find the recipe in the April/May issue of Fine Cooking, or here online.  

Ready for kindergarten!

One of those days (Cooking the Books)

I've been having one of those days.  Except that it's not the usual one of those days.  It started with me getting up at 5 because I was scheduled to work all day today.  That schedule usually means that I have to drop the girls at school and daycare before I go to work at 8:15 or so.  But things didn't go as planned.  Brianna was still complaining of a really sore throat when I went to wake her up.  She'd been telling me the same thing for most of the weekend.  I checked, and it was red.  But it didn't look that bad, and since she hadn't been running a fever I figured that she was suffering from a virus and not strep.  I could tell she wasn't quite herself, though, since she napped for about 3 hours on Sunday afternoon.  

So I had the always fun parenting dilemma...  B didn't seem that sick, but sending her to school probably wasn't a good idea.  At the same time, I was worried about leaving my coworkers shorthanded.  Jamie had already left for work, and it was doubtful that he'd be able to come home early to stay with B.  I just love it when the parenting guilt wars with the work guilt--nothing like having an unexpected day off that you can't really enjoy because you feel like you're supposed to be somewhere else.  I did get to take a nap, but it wasn't a very good one.  I ended up feeling sort of restless and out-of-sorts all day.  I did get some reading time in, but couldn't really settle on anything.  And writing was right out.  I've been trying to get this post done for my Cooking the Books event for two days, and just haven't been able to figure out what to write, which is why you're getting my sad story.  =)

Maybe some dessert would make me feel better.  We had Brianna's favorite soup for dinner, this chicken chowder from Cook's Country.  Naturally, since B loves it, Gillian hates it.  (I decided not to fight that battle tonight, and just made G a sandwich for dinner.)  I like it just fine, and soup is nice because it generally leaves room for dessert.  This particular one was inspired by the new book J got me for Mother's Day--Alice Medrich's new Sinfully Easy Delicious Desserts.  The idea is that you can make lots of great desserts from simple, tasty components.  What I came up with first was sort of a mini ice cream tart/sundae.  

The base was a simple butter cookie.  Central Market has an event going on called Passport France, and they've had a lot of great French products and ingredients available.  I bought some Breton salted butter, and turned to Dorie's Around My French Table to figure out what to do with it.  Naturally, she didn't let me down, and I found a recipe for Sablé Breton.  I didn't want to do a full-size tart, but there was a Bonne Idée for making slice and bake cookies with a variation on the dough, so I went with those.  I didn't add any salt, since my butter was nicely salty, with noticeable crunchy crystals in it.  I did roll the log of dough in a combination of sparkling sugar and a bit of fleur de sel before slicing it up for baking.

Besides the great butter, I also picked up a package of dark muscovado sugar on my shopping trip.  My new Medrich book has several caramel-type sauces in it.  One is a simple mixture of muscovado sugar, cream, a bit of salt, and a splash of rum.  It was really easy to make.  For the final component of my dessert, I wanted something that would provide a contrast to the richness of the cookie and sauce.  I found what I was looking for in one of my earlier Medrich books, Pure Dessert--sour cream ice cream.  It's a non-custard ice cream, which really allows the sour cream flavor to shine through.  The technique for making it is similar to the one in my Jeni's ice cream book, and I tweaked the procedure just slightly to make it even closer (I added a bit of corn syrup to the milk/sugar mixture, and boiled it for several minutes before adding the cornstarch in a slurry).  

For the final dessert, I started with a cookie, topped it with a scoop of ice cream, and drizzled warm tropical sugar sauce over the top.  The verdict?  Yum!  All of the components are really tasty, and work well together.  There's a great contrast of sweet and salty, cold and warm, soft and chewy/crisp.  The cookies are also great with a cup of tea.  My favorite part was the ice cream.  We also ate some of it topped with fresh strawberries--the cold tartness of the ice cream is a great foil for fruit.  I can't wait to try it with peaches, too.

I definitely encourage you to check out all of the books that I mentioned.  Your local library might even have them!  To get you started, you can find the ice cream recipe here.  This is my contribution to our spring Cooking the Books blog event; you can find links to the other contributors in this main post.  If you'd like to join in, submissions are welcome anytime this week.  If you'd like to be notified of future events, send me an email at diskitchennotebook at gmail dot com and I'll add you to the list!  

The great debate

Welcome to Wednesday with Dorie! (Oops.)  The first couple days of the school year have been a bit hectic and tiring for everyone, so some things are running a little behind.  No homework yet for B, but other things have been worrying her.  She is -so- my child.  What 3rd grader worries about flunking on the second day of school?  That would be my 3rd grader.  She worries so much, and takes everything so seriously.  Gee, I wonder where she got that?  But is it nature or nurture?  I've always been the same way, so is it in the genes?  Or am I causing her to be this way, mainly because my parents influenced me the same way?  Either way, I've been there, so I'm trying to do what I can to relieve some of her anxiety.  Which is tricky, since I'm also trying not to let my own anxiety show, about whether I'm being a good parent--since I have a 3rd grader who worries about flunking on the second day of school... *sigh*  No one ever said this parenting thing was going to be easy.

Fortunately, some things are easier than they look.  Like this brioche.  Though it is another one of those things you can question--is it bread, or is it pastry?  Margaret of Tea and Scones picked this recipe for us to make for this week's Tuesdays with Dorie.  You hear the word brioche, and immediately think, "French! Complicated!" (or is that just me?)  I know I felt rather intimidated by it the first time I made it, back in March of 2008 (wow, has it been that long?), when we made the Brioche Raisin Snails.  But even if you're kind of scared of yeast, it really doesn't take a lot of skill--just patience, and hopefully a stand mixer (or food processor, if you're like my friend Nancy).  Some of the bread I make is dense enough that I forego the mixer--it's not getting any younger, and I don't want to overtax it.  But brioche is a soft, sticky dough, so it doesn't cause any problems.  Despite what Dorie says, mine never really pulled away from the sides of the bowl.  In fact, you may wonder how this buttery blob could ever turn into bread.  The answer?  Time.  And some serious chilling before shaping.  

I mostly followed the recipe as written.  I used instant yeast, rather than active dry, so I reduced the amount.  I actually used some of my SAF gold yeast, which is designed to work better in a sweeter, rich dough.  (I ended up using 10 grams, or about 3 teaspoons.)  I wanted to use my "Nancy pan," so I changed the shaping a bit.  I took half the dough, which was about 600 grams.  (I froze the other half.)  I divided it into 4 portions of about 150 grams each, and formed each piece into a ball, rather than a log.  I put them in the pan, and covered it with plastic wrap.  I let it rise until the dough was almost to the top of the pan.  I skipped the egg wash, but about 15 minutes in the top of the loaf was getting rather brown, so I tented it with foil.  I ended up baking the loaf for 30 minutes, at which point the internal temperature was about 190ºF.

The verdict?  I love pastries, and brioche really isn't far off.  My favorite part is the crunchy, buttery crust.  I'm happy with how the pan worked for this loaf--the small slices provide nice portion control. =) So far, I've just been snacking on the brioche, making little jam sandwiches.  Yum.

If you'd like to try this one for yourself, you can head over to Margaret's blog for the recipe.  And be sure to check out the Links to see how everyone else did this week.  I leave you with pictures from the first day of school.  G doesn't start kindergarten til next year, but of course we had to take her picture, too.