Zosia's Profile

From: Toronto, ON

Joined: October 19th, 2011

Silk Chocolate Cream Pie with Pecan Crust from The Dahlia Bakery Cookbook: Sweetness in Seattle

This is a showstopper of a pie with rather sophisticated flavours - intense chocolate filling with salty, crunchy crust. Can't say I cared much for the crust on its own but it was a great foil, both texturally... read more >

recipe reviews (781)
book reviews (23)
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Zosia's Reviews

20 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 20Sort by: Title | Date | Rating

Baking for All Occasions

By Flo Braker
Chronicle Books - 2008

This is an all-butter pastry made with the most basic of ingredients, AP flour, butter, salt, sugar and water, which are combined in the usual way. But the similarities to any other short crust pastry recipe I’ve seen end here.

The recipe calls for quite a bit of water which results in a fairly soft and sticky dough. Instead of refrigerating the dough once it’s formed, the author has you use a technique that’s used in making puff pastry to ensure flakiness. The dough is rolled into a long, narrow rectangle on a well floured surface and folded into thirds like a business letter. After giving the dough a quarter turn, these steps are repeated once again. The softness and stickiness disappear during this process as the dough absorbs more flour. The dough is ready for use after a short period of refrigeration.

The chilled dough is very easy to work with and baked up to be one the flakiest crusts I’ve ever made.

The recipe makes enough for a double-crust pie. I used it to make the Sweet Ricotta Galette on page 122.

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This is a delicious almond-flavoured coffee cake studded with tart rhubarb bits with a crunchy toasted almond topping.

The cake comes together easily from basic pantry items. It’s quite dense despite the use of cake flour, but does have a fine crumb that’s kept moist by the fruit that’s baked in. There’s an omission in the recipe: sliced almonds are listed among the cake ingredients but no direction is given. I added them to the batter with the fruit.

Overall, the cake was good and stayed moist for days but I found it too sweet and would have preferred more fruit. I, however, was in the minority!

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Easy, oil based coffee cake with a crunchy, nutty streusel topping.

This recipe uses the most unusual method I’ve encountered of making a cake – a portion of the cake mix actually becomes the streusel topping! The leavening, buttermilk and egg are mixed into a flour-sugar-oil blend to create the batter; nuts and cinnamon are added to the balance of the flour mix to make the topping.

I kept to the basic recipe though the author suggests several add-ins including fresh berries, diced apples or grated carrots. The cake was light and moist and mildly spiced. But the star was really the topping which became beautifully browned and crisp during the relatively short baking time.

This is definitely a recipe I will use often…..it uses very basic pantry ingredients and equipment and bakes up quickly. Excellent results for very little effort.

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These are lovely orange-scented scones chock full of tangy bits of apricot and crunchy pistachios.

The recipe is for a basic buttermilk scone dough which I put together in just a few minutes in the food processor. Instead of just kneading briefly and patting the dough out, Ms Braker has you take the very shaggy dough, roll it out, fold it into thirds business letter style and roll again before cutting, building the layers of flattened butter into the dough to ensure a flaky texture. After cutting, the scones are brushed with buttermilk and sprinkled with turbinado sugar as the finishing touch. I made these the night before and baked them from a frozen state; they were done within the allotted time.

The scone is buttery and only slightly sweet and would be a great vehicle for whatever nuts, fruit etc you may have on hand…..I think chocolate chips and dried cherries may be next…..

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Ripe summer fruit that’s barely held together by an almond-scented cake batter is the idea behind this cake. I used local plums and blueberries; topped with crunchy toasted almonds, this made a lovely dessert.

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It’s the crunchy streusel topping on this tender, buttery banana cake that earns this recipe 5 stars.

Made with cake flour and butter and using the standard creaming method, this cake is nothing like a dense or coarse-crumbed banana bread; the crumb is fine, moist and delicate. I chose to bake it in a loaf pan and the one I own always takes longer than a recipe states so it took an extra 10 minutes. I couldn’t imagine inverting the cake topping side down and then righting it again, so I lined the pan with parchment first, making certain the piece was large enough to overhang the pan edges creating handles. After cooling in the pan for 30 minutes, the cake was easily lifted from it without any loss of streusel.

It was really delicious but a little too fragile to slice thinly because the cake was so tall. Next time I’ll bake in a square pan….baking time is much shorter and it will be much easier to serve.

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A heavenly taste of the tropics in a cupcake. Their plain exterior belies the surprising flavour within – a tender banana cake with a tangy pineapple cream cheese layer.

They took a little bit of time to put together, but no more than a frosted cupcake would have, and once these were baked and cooled, they were ready to be served.....no fiddling around with frosting. The cream cheese layer didn’t swirl as much as I expected based on the author’s description but did form a distinctive layer. I baked them in paper liners and found that the cream cheese didn’t release cleanly from them – next time I’ll either grease them or skip them altogether and use a greased tin.

A great use for some spotty bananas and a can of crushed pineapple.

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It may look like a giant sticky bun, but there’s far more to this yeasted coffee cake than that….

The dough itself is beautiful…..tender and airy and lightly spiced with cardamom, and very easy to make. It mixes up like a thick cake batter, but after its first rise, can be rolled out easily. It’s spread with a cinnamon-butter mixture and cut into strips which are then coiled around each other. There’s a trick to finding the correct tension for the coil which I didn’t quite master: the centre of mine was coiled too tightly, so it rose up, and the outer layers were coiled too loosely, so they spread outwards, resulting in an uneven cake.

The dough is baked in a butterscotch sauce after its second rise. I lost a little of this sauce through a leak in my springform pan, but there was still enough to glaze the top of the cake and add a little sweetness, but not enough to detract from the star of this dessert, the yeasted cake.

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Good flavour but a little drier and more crumbly than I like a cake to be. I am curious to know if it fares better baked as cookies or biscotti.

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This is a very festive cake which I made for our Canada Day celebration, using the author’s signature yellow butter cake (page 348), cream cheese buttercream and beautiful, local strawberries.

This review is for the buttercream and finished cake only as the cake portion was reviewed separately.

The frosting starts as a classic French buttercream made with egg yolks, hot sugar syrup and butter. In this recipe, part of the butter is replaced with cream cheese. The addition of gelatin (I used agar agar) and powdered sugar should have been a warning to me that this was going to be a soft frosting that needed stabilizers to help it set. And it was…. so soft it was almost pourable at 70F. I could work with it chilled to 60F but it was difficult to maintain this temperature as my kitchen was 70F with the help of air conditioning.

The cakes were split horizontally and 2 layers spread with red currant jelly. A layer of buttercream and fresh strawberries filled the centre of the cake. The flavour was quite nice but you can’t really go wrong with juicy, summer berries and vanilla cake and the cream cheese buttercream complemented the fruit beautifully.

Overall, the cake was a huge success but I won’t ever make that buttercream again …….

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This is a really lovely treat: sweet, creamy cheese, flavoured with orange and almond, surrounded by buttery, flaky pastry.

Most of the work is in making the dough (all-butter flaky pastry recipe page 356). The filling takes just a few minutes to mix after the cheese is drained. Half the dough is rolled out, spread with the cheese mixture and topped with the remaining dough. After a final sprinkling of sugar, the pastry is baked. As with the other recipes I’ve tried from this book, the instructions are clear and baking times accurate.

Not too sweet and very delicious. The filling is moist but not runny.....it would be great in hand pies.

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I’ve never understood eggnog as a beverage, but with eggs, cream, sugar and nutmeg as some of its components, I can appreciate its merits as a baking ingredient. This moist cake is how all eggnog should be consumed: by the slice, redolent with nutmeg and studded with rum-soaked currants.

I followed the recipe exactly and it turned out perfectly. The cake was a lovely golden yellow colour with a very fine crumb; I particularly liked the effect of the sugar-water-rum glaze which dried to form a sparkling, crispy crust.

This delicious cake is the perfect embodiment of one of the flavours of the holiday season…. It was so popular, I baked a second batch in small loaf pans to give as gifts.

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Crunchy almond streusel and berries top a really tasty focaccia with a light and airy crumb in this breakfast treat that’s as savoury as it is sweet. Baked the day before, it was still moist as promised the next morning but I think if the shaped dough were refrigerated overnight after the second proofing, it could be enjoyed freshly baked in the morning.

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This was a really delicious moist chocolate cake made with cocoa powder only that could easily stand alone. The frangipane added delicious almond flavour and would have added visual interest had my 2 layers not melded together and sunk to the bottom of the cake! (I missed the instructions to refrigerate it before assembling the cake so that may have been the problem).

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This was a moist and tasty vanilla cake bursting with blueberries. The use of cake flour gave it a very fine and tender crumb, elevating it from a coarse-crumbed coffee cake to a more refined and elegant cake.

I made a half recipe to use up some egg yolks and baked it in a 8 1/2" x 4 1/2" loaf pan. I also used the same weight of sugar as flour, a 25% reduction in the sugar. It was still sweet (but more to my liking).

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A fudgy chocolate brownie baked on top of a crispy, buttery shortbread base….. 2 treats in every bite.

The recipe is easy but involves baking in stages. First, the shortbread ingredients are whizzed together in a food processor, pressed into a cake pan and baked. Then, a chocolate-y saucepan brownie is poured on top and sprinkled with finely chopped nuts before baking. The recipe calls for hazelnuts but I used pecans instead. There’s no need to toast the nuts in advance as they toast during baking. The yield was supposed to be 36 (1 ½” squares) but I cut them smaller and got 49.

These are extremely rich and a little goes a long way but they are delicious.

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Fabulous pie! The flavours of the 3 fruits melded beautifully and the crumble topping was crisp and golden, providing great texture.

In my part of the world, local raspberries and cherries are available long after the rhubarb is finished so I used frozen rhubarb. The amount of sugar and thickeners called for seemed excessive but were necessary in the end. The filling was nicely tart and sweet with fresh fruit flavour and was soft but not runny when completely cooled.

The pie was baked in this Flaky Pie Pastry.

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This is a beautiful tender butter cake with a fine crumb and good vanilla flavour.

It’s made using the creaming method and contains the standard ingredients though it does have egg yolks in addition to whole eggs – hence the lovely pale yellow colour.

Flo Braker provides ingredient weights as well as volume measurements and her instructions are very detailed …… this is a no-fail cake if you follow these precisely. She mentions that the cakes dome when they’re baked, but I used cake strips and they baked up perfectly flat.

The recipe makes 2 - 9” layers or 3 - 8” - a perfect base for a special occasion cake. I used it for Cupid’s Strawberry Cake.

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This is indeed a very flaky pie crust. Made with both butter and shortening, it has a high proportion of fat to flour and is too tender and crumbly for my liking. Because of the quantity of fat, I found that the dough needed less water to hold together than the recipe states.

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The house smelled heavenly while this baked. And the finished cake tasted even better!

The texture was nice and moist – courtesy of the yogurt, or perhaps the ½ lb butter required – and had a very complex flavour: it was nicely spiced, without one ingredient being predominant, with a nice kick provided by black pepper. Ground walnuts in place of some of the flour, and orange rind were nice complements to the spice mix.

I’m unfamiliar with this author so I was happy to see that the instructions were clear and baking times, accurate; it baked up beautifully in the time mentioned in the recipe.

The author suggests serving it with mangoes, which I did. Delicious!

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