Turn, turn, turn

It's been a weird day.  The time changing aways seems to do that.  I had lots of stuff that I wanted to accomplish this weekend, and having an extra hour should have helped with that.  Unfortunately, it's been a rather disjointed couple of days, with just enough stuff to do away from the house to really throw things out of whack, thanks to the timing of everything.  

I actually slept later than I expected to--7am by the new time on the clock.  Gillian was up before me, and looking for breakfast pretty much as soon as I walked down the stairs.  She's still making up for not eating much for a couple of days, and quickly polished off some yogurt while we figured out what I should bake for breakfast.  We settled on pumpkin muffins, though I admit I was a little worried about making something pumpkin for breakfast after Gillian's experience with the scones on Friday.  But she was enthusiastic about the idea, since I pretty much always put chocolate chips in them.  And they stayed down, so it was a better day. =)

I'm trying to get better about using the ingredients in my pantry, rather than just squirreling things away.  I've started to accumulate a pretty good collection of cupcake papers, for instance.  I love the high quality grease-proof ones, because you can peel them off without losing a bunch of the cake in the process.  And I've found that they come in lots of pretty colors and patterns.  I get some from my local baking supply shop, and quite a few from King Arthur.  Since I don't make that many cupcakes right now, they're starting to pile up, so I've been reminding myself to use them for muffins, too.  The ones pictured above seemed perfect for some autumn muffins.  You can find the muffin recipe here ( showing off some more of my collection of cupcake papers).  It's bedtime here, since I have to get an early start tomorrow, but hopefully it'll feel easier thanks to the change back to standard time.

From brownies to biscuits

No, your eyes do not deceive you--that is not a picture of White Chocolate Brownies.  I haven't been having much luck with Tuesdays with Dorie recipe selections for the past few weeks.  A couple weeks ago was Apple-Apple Bread Pudding.  I'm not a big fan of custardy things, and didn't get a chance to try it anyway, with all the illness around here.  Last week I skipped the Banana Coconut Ice Cream Pie.  Coconut is evil and is generally banned from entering this house, and I'm not that excited about banana desserts, either.  So going into this week, I knew I should really participate so I wouldn't miss three weeks in a row.  But I wasn't exactly thrilled about the latest recipe, either, since I don't really like white chocolate.  That's too bad, because I've recently gotten to know this week's host, Marthe of Culinary Delights, via Twitter, and I wanted to make the recipe because of that.  So I decided to try to overcome my dislike of white chocolate and try them anyway.

Sadly, that try wasn't very successful.  Now, I admit, I did play around with the recipe just a bit.  I had white chocolate, but after tasting it, I realized that it had been in my pantry way too long.  So I tossed it, and tried milk chocolate instead (similar sweetness, I figured).  I skipped the meringue topping.  And I tried making individual brownies in my muffin tin, to avoid the problem that many people reported of their brownies being under-done in the middle.  The taste wasn't that bad, but the texture was very unappealing.  Soggy from the raspberries, and as my friend Nancy put it, rather spongy.  Not good.  And not even photogenic:

So what to do?  Well, I decided to do a rewind as well.  One of the recipes that I missed recently was the Sweet Cream Biscuits that were picked by Melissa of Love at First Bite back in April.  Hard to believe I missed them, since the recipe is a quick one to make.  But we had a chance to try them for breakfast on Monday morning.

Only five ingredients--flour, baking powder, a bit of sugar and salt and a bunch of heavy cream--go into these biscuits.  That means they only dirty one bowl, which is always nice.  You whisk together the dry ingredients, then add the cream and mix it with a fork.  The dough gets lightly kneaded to bring it together, then rolled out to a thickness of about half an inch.  I used a cutter that was just a bit over two inches in diameter, and got 16 biscuits (11 or 12 on the first pass, and the rest after rerolling the scraps).  I put the biscuits close together on a parchment-lined baking sheet and baked them at 425F for about 15 minutes, I think.  By the time they were done, I was tired of hearing from the girls about how they were starving, so we didn't really let them cool at all before digging in. =)

The verdict?  Well, Brianna and Gillian each ate three, so I guess they liked them. =)  (They really weren't very big, so that isn't as impressive as it sounds.)  It gave them a chance to sample the various jams in the fridge, too.  No one wanted the cherry (I must have bought that for Jamie), but blueberry, blackberry and raspberry all made it to the table.  Even just with butter (the way I ate one of mine), these were very good.  I definitely think they'll make future appearances around here, especially since they're so easy to make.

If you'd like to give the brownie recipe a try, head on over to Marthe's blog.  Hopefully you'll have better luck than I did.  You can see what the other TWD bakers did with this recipe on this week's Leave Your Links post.  And be sure to check out Clara's blog--she's been waiting a very long time for this day to come. =)  For the biscuits, Melissa has the recipe on her TWD post.

Turning the pages back to... Perfect Party Cake

This week's Tuesdays with Dorie pick comes from Carol of mix, mix... stir, stir. She chose the Perfect Party Cake for us to make this week. I really wanted to make it, but life has been conspiring against me again. (Jamie's doing better, but definitely not yet recovered from his tonsillectomy.) Part of why I wanted to make it is that I really enjoyed this cake the first time I made it, for my first Daring Bakers challenge in March 2007.

It's interesting for me to look back to one of my earlier posts. I was still trying to figure out the style of my blog, and definitely still working on my photography skills (something that never ends anyway...). And that blog post was done when I was still trying my hand at some process photos. You can find this week's recipe at Carol's blog or in my original post. And be sure to head over to the Tuesdays with Dorie blogroll to see what everyone else did with this week's delicious recipe!

So here's a look at my experience with the Perfect Party Cake...

I Dare to Make Cake!

(originally posted March 30, 2007)

It took me until today (life's been a bit challenging recently), but I've completed my first Daring Bakers challenge! This month's recipe is Perfect Party Cake, selected by Morven of Food Art and Random Thoughts. The recipe is from Dorie Greenspan's Baking From My Home to Yours. As a member of the Tuesdays with Dorie baking group, I'm quite familiar with this particular cookbook, but I hadn't had a chance to make any of her layer cakes. Based on past experiences, though, I figured the recipe would be straightforward to follow and the end result would be delicious. Right on both counts!

I've made cakes before, but this particular challenge prompted me to try a few things that I haven't done before. Although Morven did give us the option of selecting different flavorings, I stuck pretty much with the recipe as written. I did substitute a teaspoon of vanilla extract for the lemon extract in the cake batter, though I did leave in the lemon zest.

The batter was easy to make. I made sure that all of my ingredients were at room temperature before I started, which I think helped. I chose to use buttermilk rather than milk, to complement the lemon flavor. I divided the batter between the two pans and ended up baking them for 30 minutes. (And hey, I had an excuse to use my cool new giant sheet pan!)

The cake layers didn't turn out too tall, but they were certainly thick enough to slice into two layers each. That's one of the new things for me--I don't think I've ever made a cake with more than two layers. Fortunately, the cake was really easy to work with, and I had no problem slicing the layers in half.

I chose to fill the cake with raspberry fruit butter (like jam, but not as sweet) along with the lemon butter cream. That was another new one--I've made buttercream frosting, but it's been years, and the one I made before was based on egg yolks, rather than whites. I really enjoyed making this one. The recipe warned that the mixture might curdle, but I didn't have a problem with that. Again, I think I managed to have the ingredients at the right temperature for things to work well.

Even though it was down to the wire, I really enjoyed making this cake. It has a nice flavor and it comes across as very light, despite the fact that there's so much butter in it. Now I just need to work on my decorating skills. =)

A year of Dorie

I've always been a rule-follower.  It often drives me crazy when others don't follow rules, especially traffic laws.  =)  I joke about Brianna's "hall monitor" attitude, but much as it pains me to admit it, she gets it from me. =)  And then there's the fact that I'm also a bit of an over-achiever.  I tend to go above and beyond what I need to do, which sometimes causes me to get stressed out over things more than necessary.

Tuesdays with Dorie is a good case in point.  The point of the group is to bake on a weekly basis, working through the recipes in the fabulous Baking From My Home to Yours.  But because life sometimes gets in the way, Laurie said that we have to participate a minimum of two weeks out of four. I tend to feel guilty, though, when I miss a week, even if life is crazy or I really don't like what we're making. 

This week was more the former than the latter.  Shari of Whisk: A Food Blog chose Floating Islands for this week's recipe.  I had a busy week and weekend because of work, and by the time Sunday got here, I just didn't feel motivated to make the recipe.  Eggy and custardy things usually aren't that high on my list either, which didn't help.  I felt bad about it, but by Sunday night, I decided that I wasn't going to participate this week.  

But then on Monday, I realized that this week is the anniversary of when I joined the group.  My first recipe was the Brown Sugar-Apple Cheesecake.  In 52 weeks, I've only missed 5 recipes.  Not bad!  =)  And those were primarily because one of the main ingredients (e.g. coconut or blueberries) was something I really dislike, and I couldn't figure out a way to change up the recipe without completely re-writing it.  I still didn't feel like making meringues, but I did want to bake something.

So I turned to the list of recipes that were made before I joined TWD.  There aren't all that many, but one of them caught my eye.  I decided to make the Quintuple Chocolate Brownies.  Now when it comes to baking, my rule-following tendencies are often at war with my let's-see-what-will-happen-if-I-do-this experimental scientist tendencies. =)  So I did change a couple things in the recipe.  First, my chocolate choices.  I mostly use El Rey chocolate discs for baking, since I can buy them in bulk.  I used Gran Saman (70%) bittersweet, Caoba (41%) milk chocolate, and Icoa white chocolate, along with some Nestlé unsweetened and Scharffen Berger cocoa powder.  For the nuts I used toasted pecans.  Since I'm not that big a fan of white chocolate, I didn't actually make the glaze; I just chopped up some white chocolate and stirred it into the batter in place of some of the milk chocolate.

The verdict?  Pretty good, but not my favorite brownie recipe.  I'm not sure if I overbaked them (though I only baked them 30 minutes rather than 35), but they seemed sort of dry in texture, though very chocolatey.  I like the idea of the different types of chocolate chunks, though, so I may add them to a brownie recipe that I like better.  I'd probably skip the nuts though--I'm okay with them in cookies, but don't really like the texture of them in brownies that much.

Be sure to head over to the blogroll to see how everyone else did with the Floating Islands.  You can get the recipe here on Shari's blog.  (I do want to make them eventually!)  And the recipe for the brownies can be found on Laurie's blog.