Irish Soda Bread

In honor of St. Patrick's day, the Tuesdays With Dorie baking group baked Irish Soda Bread as the second March recipe.   The group chooses one easy recipe each month from the book Baking With Julia, and one that's a bit more involved.  The soda bread is the easy one, and, folks, it doesn't get any easier than this: 4 ingredients and a minute of kneading and it's ready for the oven!

n.o.e.'s notes:

-  Julia's contributing baker for the soda bread is Marion Cunningham; you can find her recipe on either of the host blogs this week:

Carla of Chocolate Moosey put dried cherries in her bread

 Cathy of My Culinary Mission  made a gruyere version

 
-  Although the most traditional form of soda bread is plain, the recipe suggest adding currants so that's what I did.

-  I baked a half recipe, yielding one smallish loaf.

-  For one quarter of the flour I used Irish Style Wholemeal Flour from King Arthur Flour.  How could I not?  I had it on hand and it even has Irish in its name!  I love the slightly rough texture and full flavor of this flour.

-  I've learned from my yeast bread baking (thanks to British bread baker extraordinaire Dan Lepard) to knead the dough on an oiled rather than a floured counter.   For the soda bread, I used walnut oil, figuring it wouldn't hurt to add a bit of nutty flavor while I was conditioning the dough.

-  Soda bread is usually baked as a hearth loaf, but around my house bread made in loaf pans is the preferred type when it's destined for toasting, as this was.  So I used a medium-sized loaf pan.  The bread baked for 35 minutes at 375 degrees.

the verdict:

Eaten fresh and barely cooled from the oven, this bread was delicious: tender, nutty from the wholemeal, with little pops of sweet fruitiness from the currants.  I ate it spread with salted butter and my husband toasted it then buttered it.  Although the recipe indicates otherwise, we found the bread to be a decent "keeper." We both liked the bread, and you absolutely cannot beat the ease of preparation.

Brioche Raisin Almond Snails

In the breakfast section of her book, Baking: From My Home to Yours, Dorie Greenspan has a recipe for basic brioche dough which makes Golden Brioche Loaves and also forms the base for her Brioche Raisin Snails, which were originally baked by the Tuesdays With Dorie baking group four years ago today.  Thus the raisin snail recipe is this week's recipe in my TWD catch-up project.  (The brioche dough is also the base for Pecan Sticky Buns, which will be coming up in a few weeks' time)

As it worked out, although the raisin snails and the pecan sticky buns were chosen in the first 6 months of TWD, we baked the plain(er) Golden Brioche Loaves towards the end of TWD, just a few months ago, and I saved enough dough in my freezer to make the snails that I had not yet baked (and the upcoming sticky buns too!)

n.o.e.'s notes:

- [edited to add:
The recipe for these pastries is on Laurie's post here.]

- I made 1/2 recipe, yielding 6 rolls, using 1/4 of Dorie's brioche recipe that I had kept in the freezer.

-  There are four elements to the raisin snails recipe: brioche dough topped with pastry cream and flambeed rum raisins then sprinkled with cinnamon sugar.  These are all rolled together, sliced into individual coils (resembling snail shells), left to rise at room temperature, then baked until golden brown.

-  When I paged to the back of the book to find the pastry cream recipe, I saw Dorie's recipe for almond cream and began to formulate a plan to go rogue and use almond cream rather than pastry cream in my snails.  Then I saw in the almond cream recipe that Dorie actually suggests that would be a good filling for her brioche snails.  So I even had Dorie's permission to make the switch and I feel so much less guilty!

-  I added almond extract instead of vanilla or rum to the almond cream to intensify the almond quotient.

-  I soaked the raisins in hot water, then heated them, doused them with rum and lit a match. and another match. and another, well, four matches actually and there really wasn't much flambe, even though I had doubled the rum.  There wasn't much rum flavor to the raisins either.  Next time I'll soak them in hot rum instead of hot water.

- According to the recipe, right before rolling up the dough, it's time to sprinkle with cinnamon + white sugar.  My plan was to sprinkle with brown sugar and leave out the cinnamon so it wouldn't fight with the almond direction I was taking. At the appropriate time I was so busy rolling the dough that I forgot about the sugar step entirely.

-  My rolls didn't rise much before baking and they didn't rise much in the oven either.  They spread horizontally but not so much in height.  As it baked the almond cream puffed but it also oozed onto the silicone baking sheet liner and browned.  When I removed the rolls from the pan, it was an easy matter to break off the browned almond cream.

the verdict:

Things these snails were: buttery, yeasty, almond-y, raisiny.  Things the snails were not: rummy, sugary.  We enjoyed them for breakfast, a mid-afternoon snack, and for dessert with vanilla ice cream.  They were a little involved to make, so it's not likely that they will go into any regular rotation in my kitchen, but they were definitely delicious.

My baking buddy Leslie baked the snails this week; she's also playing TWD catch-up!

Shaker Lemon Pie for Pi Day

Baking has a lot to do with math - proportions, quantities of ingredients, precision all come in handy for optimal results.  I seem to end up using extra math in my baking.  I'm always reducing a recipe, or increasing it, and I have to multiply or divide ingredient quantities.  Or I am using a different type and/or shape of pan and have to calculate areas or volumes.  This kind of math is oddly satisfying to me, although I know that it gives most bakers headaches.

But once a year - on March 14 - all bakers get to have FUN with math: it's Pi Day (3/14, get it?) and we can all just bake a pie to celebrate and forget about the actual math if we want!

For this year's big pie holiday, I decided to make a recipe that intrigued me: Shaker Lemon Pie.  The distinguishing feature of this pie is that it is made with the entire lemon, rind and all. I had read a lot of recipes for the Shaker Lemon Pie, and many of them stresses what a great pie the Meyer lemons made (and what a tart pie the regular lemons made). Whole Foods was fresh out of Meyer lemons the day I stopped in so I had to make do with regular lemon in my pie.  After all, most of the recipes - and I daresay the Shakers themselves - use regular lemons.

n.o.e.'s notes:

-  As Deb Smitten explains in her Shaker Lemon Pie post, most recipes for this pie are nearly identical: 2 lemons, 2 cups of sugar, 4 eggs. A variation is to add melted butter and flour, and the recipe I used, from Molly O'Neill's One Big Table, followed this variation.  It it similar to the recipe on Smitten Kitchen, but doesn't require zesting the lemon before slicing it, and uses one tablespoon less of both the butter and the flour.  Also, the recipe I used calls for an initial oven temperature of 450.

-  My favorite part of this Shaker pie version is that it calls for a lattice top crust.  It looks so pretty and I like how the crust ends up being variable in thickness, with some parts crisper and other softer.

-  For this pie, the lemon is sliced very very thin, and I did this step by hand because my cheapo mandoline doesn't actually slice super thin. My lemon slices macerated in sugar on the countertop for about 8 hours before I put the pie together and bakes it.

-  I made a mini pie in 7 pie shell. For the crust I used half a recipe of the Cook's Illustrated Foolproof Pie Dough, which I posted here.  This time the dough was on the sticky side, which was controllable as long as I refrigerated the dough at every step. Making the lattice top, while not difficult per se, got a little tricky as the dough warmed.

-  I also made half recipe of the filling

the verdict:

This recipe was a runaway hit at our house.  My daughter JDE said it was her new favorite pie recipe, and this is coming from a girl who is a serious fan of pie.  Indeed the pie combined flaky dough with dense lemon intensity.  If you like lemon desserts, I'd highly recommend this pie - but don't wait until Pi Day rolls around again to bake it!

My previous Pi Day pies:
2011 Buttermilk Pie
2010 German Apple Pie

Meyer Lemon Pudding

Although I love most any kind of fruit, citrus is my very favorite fruit family.  It is in season over the winter, and through the miracles of modern transportation, rays of citrusy brightness shine into cold, dreary, dark days everywhere.  As a celebration of all things citrus, Di, of Di's Kitchen Notebook is sponsoring a (Late) Winter Blog Event - Citrus Sunday, inviting her fellow bloggers to prepare a citrus dish and link to it on her site. 

I had found some lovely Meyer Lemons at the store and looked around for a dish that would spotlight this sweet, mellow variety of lemon.  I settled on Meyer Lemon Pudding, perfect cheery comfort food for the chilly, gray weather we were having.

n.o.e.'s notes:

-  I found the recipe on this blog post; it's from a book called Luscious Lemon Desserts.

-  The recipe called for 3 egg yolks, but used 4 egg yolks because the ones from the Jumbo eggs still looked pretty small to me.  I was in California when I made this recipe and it seems true that egg yolks in the western US are smaller than those in the east.

-  I didn't read the recipe and put the lemon juice in the saucepan along with the milk, eggs, sugar, and zest (it was supposed to be added later).  I realized my mistake right away and was nervous that the lemon would curdle the dairy, but I'm happy to report that it turned out fine!

-  I reduced the amount of sugar to 2/3 cup, wanted to retain some tartness of the lemon.

the verdict:

We enjoyed this lovely version of lemon pudding, finding it subtle but unmistakably lemony.  We loved that it was rich and creamy and not too sweet.  The pudding was also a good keeper; we enjoyed it for dessert each evening for several days, plain and dotted with fresh berries.

You can join the fun of the Citrus Blog Event - check out all of the linked recipes or post one on your own site and add your link (until March 25, 2012).

Rugelach

This week's recipe for the all-new Tuesdays With Dorie (Baking With Julia edition) is Rugelach.  I have baked rugelach once: Dorie Greenspan's recipe in the original TWD group, which I posted here.  Rugelach is a traditional Jewish cookie, and consists of a cream cheese dough filled with a jam or jam-like spread, and sprinkled with nuts and dried fruit then rolled and baked.


n.o.e.'s notes:

- The host blogs for the rugelach are Jessica of My Baking Heart and Margaret of The Urban Hiker; you can find the recipe if you visit their posts (here and here).

-  The rugelach recipe in Baking With Julia contains several different components.  One is prune or apricot lekvar - a sort of a spread or paste made from dried fruit.  I had some nice soft prunes that I had used for a different recipe and wanted to use them up while they were still fresh.  I made 1/2 recipe of the prune lekvar.  It was easy enough to prepare and I froze the leftover lekvar for a future baking projects.

- For the dough, I had 2 ounces of cream cheese in the fridge to use up so I decided to make 1/6 recipe of the dough and the other components.  I know that I mixed up the dough without incident, but got a little tricky when I moved onto the "filling and topping" component(s)  I was cruising along with my mental calculations and then suddenly I got totally confused by my math in the sugar and nuts measurements.  I know that I reduced the sugar by a little bit, and reduced the cinnamon by a good bit (I wanted the fruit and nuts, not to mention the prune lekvar, to shine)

-  Roll-and-sliced was the recipe's preferred method of shaping the cookies, but it also allowed for the traditional crescent shaping - where you form long thin triangles of dough and rolling those around the fillings.  I decided to go for the crescent shape even though I suspected it would be hard to fit all of the filling inside the cookies.  I rolled my dough into a rough semicircle, spread it with the prune lekvar, scattered the fillings, and cut triangular wedges.  The recipe cautions against rolling the dough too thin, because it has a lot of filling to hold.  As it turned out, filling was spilling out, even before my cookies made it to the baking sheet.

halfway through the process of coating with egg wash and sugar/spices/nuts before baking

-  Once filled and formed, the cookies were treated to an egg wash and rolled in a mixture of  cinnamon, sugar, and nuts.  It turned out that the egg wash glued all of the elements of the cookies together.

-  These cookies, in my hands, were an unholy, glorious mess. They melted all over the baking sheet (thank goodness for silicone mats!) and stopped this side of charring before the pastry was finished baking, but they ended up perfectly baked inside.

the verdict:

Matching their untidy appearance, my rugelach were a riot of fruit and nut flavors, with a hint of sweetness + cinnamon.  My husband and I had no trouble polishing off the half dozen or cookies and wishing for more.  They were especially good with a cup of hot coffee or tea.

Somewhat Snickerish Squares

Four years ago today the Tuesdays With Dorie bakers posted Snickery Squares, a shortbread-based bar that contains the flavors of the world's most popular candy bar: caramel+chocolate+peanuts.  I'm on a mission to make up the all the TWD recipes that were chosen in the early part of 2008 before I joined the group. 

The recipe is one that I've wanted to taste for a long time because (1) the picture in the book (Dorie Greenspan's Baking From My Home to Yours) is very very inviting, and (2) I have heard good things about these bars from those who baked them before me.  What has kept me from baking the bars?  Four elements to prepare and then layer.  I usually default to an easier recipe.

When I saw that the bars were coming up in the list of TWD recipes, I included them as part of my pre-Lenten flurry of baking sweet treats.

n.o.e.'s notes:

-  The Snickery Squares were chosen and hosted by Erin of the blog  Dinner and Dessert.  You can find the recipe on her post.

-  The recipe gives direction for three elements - caramelized peanuts, shortbread, and chocolate topping - and specifies store-bought dulce de leche for the fourth.  As it turned out, only one of the four elements was prepared as directed by Dorie's recipe!

-  I did not use the dulce de leche but instead located some homemade caramel in my freezer and used it for the bars.  I had made the caramel from a recipe in the book Baked Explorations and it was a really intense, smoky batch of thick caramel.

- As I've shared in a previous TWD caramel+chocolate+peanut recipe, I don't really care for peanuts and chocolate.  This week, rather than peanuts, I used roasted, salted pistachios, which I caramelized according to the recipe's directions for preparing peanuts.

-  I wanted to experiment with a gluten-free version shortbread as a base for these bard.  I tried a recipe from Alice Medrich's cookie book.  I've never had a failure with a Medrich recipe, so I had high hopes for this shortbread crust.  The dough was not difficult to put together and the crust baked up to a nice, firm cookie that held together beautifully.

-  For the topping, I used 70% Green & Black's chocolate.


the verdict:

I found the combination of rich shortbread, good caramel, dark chocolate and crunchy candied pistachios in these bars to be out of this world.  Two tasters joined me for these bars.  One loved them and one didn't card for the caramel.  I'm guessing she would have loved them had I used dulce de leche.

I enjoyed the bars so much that I put some in the freezer for an after-Lent indulgence!  As much as I enjoyed this recipe, I am equally excited to find a gluten-free shortbread recipe to use as a base for other cookies and even for tarts.

Pecan Biscuits

Whew! After all the chocolate desserts that have appeared on the blog lately, I'm relieved to post a recipe for biscuits - basic, easy, breakfast-friendly, and not chocolate!  This is the next recipe in my project to finish all the recipes in Dorie Greenspan's book Baking From My Home to Yours, is Sour Cream Pecan Biscuits.  This recipe was the assignment for the original Tuesdays With Dorie group four years ago today.

n.o.e.'s notes:

-  You can find the recipe on the post of the original host blog, Ashley of Eat Me, Delicious, here.

-  Dorie's biscuits are simple enough to put together.  Although you never want to overwork biscuit dough, I didn't mix the dough quite enough; it was crumbly, and floury, which you can see in the finished product.

-  I used 3" cutters and gently patted the scraps together and cut them again.

-  I baked up half the recipe and froze the other half for a future biscuit occasion.

-  My biscuits didn't rise very high as they baked; they turned out like hockey pucks in shape - the top one pictured above is the only one that had any significant rise.

the verdict:

Although I was a little disappointed in the appearance of my biscuits, that was fleeting.  Once I tasted them - warm with salted butter - I didn't really care about their (lack of good) looks.  I loved the taste of these, a touch sweet and with appealing crunch from the nuts. 

Chocolate Truffle Tarts

refrigeration dulled the appearance of the filling but not the chocolate flavors!

Fat Tuesday is often celebrated with King cakes, but on this blog post and the posts of a couple of hundred other Tuesdays With Dorie bakers today, Fat Tuesday is chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate.  And really, that is quite appropriate for the day of excesses before the austerity of Lenten fasting begins on Ash Wednesday.  In years past, the faithful would want to clear the pantry of eggs, cream, and other rich ingredients before the beginning of Lent, because these ingredients did not have a place in the strict Lenten diet during the 6 weeks before Easter.  The effort to use up the rich ingredients led to creations such as the King cakes.

Although the fasting rules are significantly more relaxed these days, I used the occasion presented by this recipe to clean out my chocolate drawer of all manner of white, milk, semisweet and bittersweet odds and ends.  And the finished product more than qualified as a rich indulgence.

n.o.e.'s notes:

- There are four host blogs for the tarts this week, and you can find the recipe at any of their sites, along with some pretty spectacular tarts: Steph, Spike, Jaime and Jessica.  Of course you can also find the recipe in the book Baking With Julia!

-  The recipe is David Ogonowski’s Chocolate Truffle Tartlets.

-  I made 1/2 recipe of the chocolate crust in the book.  Some of my fellow bakers have pointed out that the chocolate crust is very close to Dorie's recipe in Baking: From My Home to Yours.  The crust dough comes together beautifully (I used the food processor) with 5oz/cup for the flour weight, as it says in the front of the book.

-  I find that tarts are one of the easiest desserts to adapt to gluten-free baking (the fillings often have no gluten, and with a few good gluten-free crust recipes in the baking arsenal, whipping up a gluten-free dessert is simple.  So I made 1/2 recipe of gluten-free (and grain free, actually) crust from the blog Deliciously Organic.

- From each dough I made two 4" tarts (my tart molds are quite deep) and two 3" shallow tarts in my silicone mold (using 4 of the 6 wells in the mold).

-  The recipe clearly directs us to remove the bottoms of the tart pans before baking the crust, I suppose so that the crust would bake on the bottom without too much insulation from the tart pan bottoms and the baking sheet they were on.  Rule-follower that I am, I did take out the bototms of my little 4″ tarts but if I were making a full size tart I’d definitely leave the bottom in.  In fact, I would leave the bottoms in any tart pan because it was very difficult to unmold the tarts with no bottom to push against, and my crusts crumbled on the edges.

-  I made a full recipe of the filling.  The recipe calls for 8 egg yolks.  One thing learned from Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc cookbook is that egg yolks vary – those on the West Coast (of the US) are smaller than on the East. So when you are using a large quantity, the differences can really multiply!  Ad Hoc suggests a weight of 15g per egg yolk, so I measured a total of 120g for the 8 yolks, using a mixture of duck eggs and chicken eggs from my farm box.

-  This was a great recipe for cleaning out the chocolate drawer - I used 4 or 5 different kinds of bittersweet - ranging from 62% to 75% - in the egg mixture for the filling.  When it came to the chocolate cubes that were stirred into the filling I used two kinds of white chocolate, two kind of milk chocolate, and two kinds of semisweet.  I don't like white chocolate but I have some hanging around so I added just a bit - 1/2 ounce of white chocolate.  The rest of my cubes were 1 oz of semisweet chocolate and 2.5 oz of milk chocolate

-  The recipe calls for biscotti or amaretti biscuits to be crumbled into the filling for crunch.  I used 5 amaretti (they seemed small, and I would use a few more next time).

the verdict:

The tarts were quite good and quite, quite rich.  Just one of the 3" tarts (which were really small) bordered on being too big of a serving!  The texture of the amaretti got lost in the heavy richness of the filling.  The gluten-free crust turned out very well, and I'll be making it again.

If you want to see a lot of chocolate tarts, go to the link post on the TWD site, and start clicking on posts of the different bakers.  Happy Fat Tuesday!!

Almost Fudge Gateau

This week my blog will feature a Tuesdays With Dorie dark-chocolate one-two punch.  Today's post is the recipe chosen by the group four years ago, Almost Fudge Gateau, and on Tuesday we'll have Chocolate Tarts for the new Tuesdays With Dorie - Baking With Julia group.

n.o.e.'s notes:

-  The founder of Tuesdays With Dorie, Laurie, featured the gateau recipe on her blog four years ago, here.

-  I baked 3/4 recipe in an 8" springform pan.

-  The cake's generous quantity of eggs are separated and the yolks are combined with melted chocolate and butter, then with flour.  Finally, the egg whites are whipped and folded into the chocolate mixture, then it's all baked until puffed and set.

-  Dorie gives an optional chocolate glaze for the cake, but I decided to dust the top with powdered sugar and call it a day.

the verdict:

Although I suspected that the cake would be good with ice cream or whipped cream, I was lazy and served it to my book group straight up.  And nobody complained!  There were plenty of smiles on the faces of my tasters, as we all enjoyed the trufflish, fluffy-yet-dense cake. It's deep and dark in flavor, rich rather than sugary.  I thought that an overnight in the fridge improved it, as it usually does with chocolate cakes, by making the texture fudgier.

All in all, this was a lovely cake, if not the very best chocolate cake in the book.  My favorite one-layer chocolate cakes from TWD:
16 Minute Magic, Chocolate Almond Torte
and
Chocolate Grand Marnier Cake

Leslie of Lethally Delicious baked this cake, complete with the glaze, and it's stunning.
[If you are also playing catch-up with the old TWD recipes and baked this cake this week, let me know and I will add your link here]

Brown Sugar Apple Ginger Cheesecake

For my money the best apples in the world are Macouns, which grow in Central New York and are available for a fairly limited time each Fall.  I've been known to order these apples directly from New York orchards because there's no guarantee that in any given year I'll be able to find Macouns in Atlanta.  Luckily this past October we spent a week in New York State for the wedding of my daughter ALE to her long-time beau KJB.  In a perfect stroke of luck, it turned out to be the only week that the Macoun apples were available at the local orchard.  We commissioned some friends to pick bushels of the apples to use as table decor at the wedding.

look how pretty the apples were in baskets made by the groom's mother

Even with giving away bags of the leftover apples to wedding guests, I still ended up with lots and lots of apples.  Luckily apples keep very well when refrigerated, and I've been doling them out for lunch each day and for special cooking and baking projects, such as this week's make-up recipe for Tuesdays With Dorie, the Brown Sugar Apple Cheesecake (chosen by the original group 4 years ago this week).

why yes, that is an entire trunk filled with Macoun apples

My daughter and new son-in-law spent time over the Christmas holidays with us in California.  They are both huge fans of cheesecake so I planned a to bake this recipe for them. I carried some of the wedding apples in my suitcase from Georgia to California, and when my daughter and son-in-law arrived I baked the cheesecake for them with the apples from their wedding weekend.

n.o.e.'s notes:

-  You can find the recipe on this blog from the early days of the original Tuesdays With Dorie group four years ago.

- To enhance the flavor of the the apples, I added bit of salt as I tossed them with the brown sugar.

- For the filling, I reduced cinnamon to 1.5 tsp and added 1/2 tsp of ground ginger. Also I added 1/2 tsp salt to the cheese filling.

I thought this was a pretty ingenious way to prevent water leaking into the cheesecake crust

 - Baking cheesecake in a water bath, or "bain marie," always makes me nervous.  Although the pan gets wrapped in a layer or two of aluminum foil, it all seems poised for watery disaster.  (In fact my first-ever cheesecake got soggy in the crust that way)  This time, instead of foil, I sheathed the springform pan with a silicone cake pan.  They were both 9" pans, so the fit was nice and snug.  I put the assembly into the water bath, which I thought was pretty ingenious. I didn't have a very deep roasting pan, so the hot water went about 1/3 of the way up the side of the cheesecake.

- Somehow the pan leaked liquid (looked like melted butter in the bottom of the silicone pan when I took out the springform pan) as it baked; despite my efforts the crust was a bit soggy when I unmolded the cake.

the verdict:

Despite my crust woes, the cheesecake was appreciated by all, especially the newlyweds. We topped each piece with candied ginger which provided nice spicy counterpoint to the smooth sweetness of the cake. The apples blended nicely in texture with the creaminess of the cheesecake, while the cinnamon and ginger contributed the lovely flavors of a good apple pie.

The cheesecake might not be heart-shaped or bright red, but I think it makes a lovely story on this Valentine's Day of a special dessert for two very sweet young love-birds. 

Leslie and Margaret are also playing catch-up with the early TWD recipes.  You can find their posts: Leslie's adorable cheesecake and
Margaret's cheesecake and black/white cake

Basic White Bread

It's been a while since I posted a sandwich bread on this blog, as usually all the yeasted goodies are posted on my bread blog.  But White Bread is the first choice in the all new Tuesdays With Dorie baking group, wherein we begin our journey through Dorie Greenspan's book Baking With Julia.

That's right, there will be more Dorie on Tuesdays!  I thought long and hard about whether to join the new group. I hemmed and hawed. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I waffled.  And then, I decided to give it a try; we'll see how it goes.

The recipes in the new book tend to be more complex than Dorie's recipes in the previous TWD book, Baking From My Home to Yours, were so the group is only going to bake 2 recipes per month.  I am aiming to bake at least one of the selections each month, posting on the appropriate Tuesday.  For the next several months I'll also be catching up on all of the recipes that I missed from the early days of the first TWD, posting on close to the date when they were originally assigned for the TWD group four years ago.

The book for this round of TWD, Baking With Julia is based on the Master Chefs television series that aired back in the 1990s.  Julia Child was the host of the series, and 26 bakers were guests on the show, baking with Julia Child in her kitchen.   Dorie Greenspan made it all into this book.  Of course the book's recipes are not Dorie's, or even Julia's, and it's going to be fun to try recipes from many different bakers in the course of this new version of TWD.

n.o.e.'s notes:

-  The bread recipe is a contribution by baker Craig Kominiak.  If you want to bake this bread, you can find the recipe on Jules' blog, here, as she is one of our hosts this week, along with Laurie of Slush.  Or you could buy the book and bake along with the group; the last I heard there are 300+ blogs from almost every state and from countries around the globe.

-  I like a sturdy crumb on my bread, so I used bread flour.

-  I never use with active dry yeast when baking, but instead use instant yeast, which doesn't need to be 'proofed' or activated.  To convert, use about 3/4 the amount that you would use of active dry yeast.  The instant yeast is added along with the flour.

-  My stand mixer has been ailing for a couple of years (I'm hoping that 2012 will be the year of Operation Repair Kitchen Aid.)  I've learned to avoid kneading dough with a mixer but to knead by hand, which I enjoy, or use my food processor instead.  I learned the food processor method from Rose Levy Beranbaum and I like it so much that even when my stand mixer is fixed I won't go back to making bread dough with it.  When using a food processor, the ingredients are mixed in a slightly different order but the dough turns out much more quickly and I think just as beautifully.  So, using this method, I first put dry ingredients together in my food processor, including the instant yeast and pulsed several times to mix the ingredients together.  Than I added the water and finally the salt, pulsing until the dough pulled together and the gluten began to develop.  Then I turned the dough onto the counter and kneaded it by hand, adding softened butter as I kneaded, although I could have done this step in the food processor also.

-  My dough was very slow on both rises: it took 2 hours for first rise and 1.5 hours for the loaves to rise after they were formed.  I just told myself that the dough was developing more flavor!

-  I made half recipe of the bread dough, which I split and baked in two medium-ish metal pans of slightly different sizes.  Did you know that if you save the papers from sticks of butter they are great for greasing baking pans?  This time I also used the papers to line the bottoms of the pans to make sure the loaves would release.

the verdict:

We enjoyed the bread toasted with butter - it has a sturdy crumb and the browned crust was a bit chewy in a good artisan-white-bread way.  While this bread doesn't unseat our very favorite white bread, it is one that we savored down to the very last crumb.

If you want to see a passel of other white bread posts, head over here and start clicking on links to the other bakers in the all-new Tuesdays With Dorie!

Black and White Chocolate Layer Cake

Dorie Greenspan's book Baking From My Home to Yours includes several Big Cakes, as it should.  Those time-and-equipment-intensive layer cakes, each composed of multiple different elements, alternately inspire and terrify me.  If this were just an average book on my shelf, I might select one of these layer cakes if I had something that I wanted to celebrate (with cake) and I had the time at my disposal to bake it.

In the course of baking through the entire cookbook as part of the Tuesdays With Dorie baking group, with recipes announced monthly as assignments for the group, however, these cake recipes periodically popped up like little landmines. Boom - a cake recipe was chosen, and suddenly I would find myself scrambling around for a layer cake occasion and meshing the cake's steps and my schedule.

It's a little easier now that I'm catching up on the recipes that I missed from the early days before I was a TWD member, and posting them in the original order, because I know which recipes are coming and when.  I have a list of all the recipes and the original posting dates [which you can see on my Tuesdays With Dorie page] so now I can plan ahead to fit baked good to appropriate event.  The Black and White Chocolate Cake was chosen as the TWD baking assignment four years ago today, and I prepared a mini version several weeks ago for my book group meeting.

n.o.e.'s notes:

-  The founder of TWD, Laurie of the blog Slush, posted the recipe on her blog in February, 2008.

-  I baked a half recipe in two 6" cake pans.  The cake layers are a vanilla buttermilk, and the cake is filled with a dark chocolate mousse and frosted with a white chocolate whipped cream.

-  I measure my ingredients by weight whenever possible, and I know that Dorie's cup of all purpose flour is 4.8 ounces or 136 grams.  This recipe calls for cake flour, though, and I had no idea how much to use by weight.  Internet sources varied wildly on weight of 1 cup of cake flour, anywhere from 3.5 oz to 4.25 oz.  I went with the heaviest because Dorie uses a "heavy cup" for regular flour (4.75 oz).  Also that's what it came out to when I double checked the measurement with my measuring cup.

-  There was no buttermilk in my fridge, so I used pourable yogurt from Traderspoint Creamery for my cake batter. (Nope, they don't pay me to mention their product, same with any brand I mention on my blog.)

-  In the cake batter I also used some wonderful duck eggs from my farm box.

-   For the white chocolate, I used a mixture of Callebaut and Ghiradelli.

-   For the dark chocolate, I used a mixture of 61% el Rey and 72% Trader Joe's.

-   This recipe used 8 bowls, 4 sauce pans, 2 cake pans, 1 cookie sheet, 1 cooling rack, 2 sieves, 4 silicone scrapers, an arsenal of table knives, 2 measuring cups, a knife, and assorted measuring spoons. To be fair, some of the bowls were prep bowls where I pre-measured ingredients, but this was a sink-ful of dishes for a little cake!

-  Constructing a cake with even layers, frosting it neatly and cutting it cleanly so that the filling doesn't smear into the layers is beyond my ability, but it must be possible because the picture of the cake slice in the book is absolute perfection!

the verdict:

The cake was well-received at my book group, but in this after-holidays time of year, most of the members were limiting carbs, or limiting sweets, or on diets, so the pieces they cut from the cake were mighty small.  I ended up with a good bit left over, and I can report that it keeps extremely well in the fridge.  Because it is not sugary-sweet, it is great any time of day, and makes for a lovely breakfast in a pinch.

The cake layers are tender and moist with a charming touch of vanilla.  The chocolate pastry cream was fantastic as a slightly-bitter filling, and the whipped cream frosting provided a creamy sweetness and just a hint of white chocolate flavor.

With this cake, I've finished all of the layer cakes in Dorie's book.  Here are my posts from the others:
Perfect Party Cake
Devil's Food "Wite Out" Cake (the "Cover Cake")
Chocolate Caramel Chestnut Cake (variations)
Cocoa Buttermilk Birthday Cake
Bill's Half-Sized Carrot Cake