Zosia's Reviews
780 recipes reviewed. Showing 1 to 50Sort by: Book Title 
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Website: 101 Cookbooks
I had a few over-ripe bananas on hand that needed to be used and had just recently made my favourite banana bread from Flour so I went on a search for something new and came across this recipe. It appealed to me for a variety of reasons: it was low fat, made with olive oil and part whole wheat flour, used weights and metric measurements (yeah!), and the combination of banana-chocolate-lemon flavours sounded intriguing.
The method was simple and quick, wet ingredients folded into dry, and didn’t require any specialized ingredients. My loaf baked a little longer than the recipe indicated, 1 hour instead of 50 minutes, but was moist with a tender crumb. It did taste of whole wheat, but it also had good banana flavour with a hint of lemon from the grated rind, and then, of course, there was the chocolate. I don’t normally add glazes to my quick breads, but this one was made with dark brown sugar and lemon juice so I thought I would try it. It was a great addition, adding the tanginess of lemons to the loaf.
I really enjoyed the texture of the loaf and the flavour combination. Some family members thought orange would go better with the chocolate so I might try that next time. This recipe’s definitely a keeper!
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Website: 101 Cookbooks
The finely sliced raw sprouts dressed with a simple olive oil-lemon juice dressing and finished with chopped hazelnuts and shaved parmesan made for a refreshing change from a typical coleslaw.
A mandoline is recommended for finely shredding the Brussels sprouts but I decided to practice my knife skills instead. Chopped chives and fresh thyme added another level of flavour. Dressed just before serving, the raw sprouts retain their crispy texture and are quite sweet in flavour.
A very light-tasting salad with great texture and a great end use for fresh sprouts.
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Ad Hoc at Home
By Thomas Keller
Artisan - 2009
This is a pretty golden rice flavoured with saffron, sautéed onion and the stock it’s cooked in.
The cooking method used is a cross between making risotto and steaming rice: it doesn’t require the constant stirring of the former, but you can’t put a lid on it walk away from it either. After the onions, saffron and rice (I used Calrose) are sautéed, a fair bit of stock is added and a parchment “lid” is placed on top. Apparently this lid allows some evaporation but prevents the liquid from reducing too quickly. The rice needs to be checked periodically and stock added to keep it moist and simmering until it’s cooked.
The flavours are subtle so it matches well with a host of other foods – a great alternative to plain rice.
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Website: All Recipes
Fiddleheads are here! This is one of the foods I look forward to every spring and this simple preparation is my favourite way of eating them.
After removing the brown papery husks and thoroughly washing them, the fiddleheads need to be parboiled or steamed until they’re tender. This is an important step as they should never be eaten raw or undercooked. A quick sauté in olive oil with garlic and a squeeze of lemon juice to finish allows their delicate flavour to shine.
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Website: All Recipes
Chewy oatmeal cookie base and a creamy, chocolate-y filling topped with a crispy oatmeal streusel - if you love oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, you’ll love these.
They start with a standard oatmeal cookie dough of butter, sugar, eggs, flour (you can use whole wheat, no one will ever know) and oatmeal. Part of the dough is pressed into the bottom of the baking pan and the balance is sprinkled on the top of a chocolate filling made of sweetened condensed milk and melted chocolate chips. It bakes in only 30 minutes and can yield up to 63 bar cookies.
Apparently this bar cookie was popular in the 60’s…….I’m not sure why it ever went out of style…..it’s faster and easier than baking 5 dozen individual cookies (can you tell I’m not a fan of doing that?) and just as delicious.
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Anne Lindsay's Smart Cooking
By Anne Lindsay
Wiley - 1996
I used to make this cake on a regular basis and found myself revisiting the recipe when I needed to produce something quickly that would appeal to a lot of people ie no nuts, no fruit, no chocolate…
The cake is relatively low in fat – only ¼ cup butter and 1 egg for a 9” square pan – relying on yogurt to provide moistness. In the past, I’ve used 1% or 2% plain yogurt but I only had zero fat Greek yogurt on hand. It worked.
The cake was as moist and tasty as I remembered it with a caramel flavour and a crunchy cinnamon-sugar topping.
May 24
Though the cake does work (is moist, tastes good) with Greek yogurt, the regular plain yogurt the recipe calls for is the better choice as the crumb is much lighter and fluffier.
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Apples for Jam: A Colorful Cookbook
By Tessa Kiros
Andrews McMeel Publishing - 2007
This felt like a cheater’s sticky bun…it certainly was an easy way to make a quick treat with ingredients I had on hand.
A blend of butter, honey and pecans formed a sweet topping that was applied to a loaf of bread and baked. You do need an unsliced loaf of bread that gets sliced horizontally to start – the author suggests her white bread recipe but I had a loaf ofthis whole wheat challah in the freezer.
Warm from the oven, it did taste very much like a sticky bun though much less sweet. Once cooled, the bread base was crispy and chewy and with the sweet, nutty topping, was still very good.
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This method of oven frying worked extremely well resulting in crispy croquettes with soft, moist centres. With only salt, pepper and some Parmesan cheese as seasoning, the flavour wasn't particularly exciting but that’s easily fixed. They were popular with children and adults alike.
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The Art Of Polish Cooking
By Alina Zeranska
Pelican Publishing - 2003
It’s not my mother’s recipe but it’s close.
Babka is a brioche-type yeast dough that’s rich in butter, sugar and egg yolks. Its texture is more cake-like than bread-like; it’s even flavoured like a cake with the addition of vanilla and almond extracts and lemon rind.
It’s made somewhat like a brioche as well, with all of the ingredients except butter and raisins kneaded for several minutes before the butter is incorporated into the dough. The raisins are kneaded in at the very end.
I’ve made many egg breads and babkas over the years and this one is still the tastiest …..something to look forward to again next year.
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This soup has great flavour and is very quick and easy to make.
It has just a few ingredients – onion, fresh cabbage, tomatoes, broth – but because of its simplicity, relies on a richly flavoured broth to be successful. The recipe calls for beef but I used homemade vegetable so vegetarian daughter could enjoy. Veal stock is a good choice but my favourite is the variation my mother makes with broth made from a ham bone.
This was a very comforting soup to have on a wet and extremely windy (remnants of hurricane Sandy) fall day.
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Today is Fat Thursday, the last Thursday before Lent and the day Poles are supposed to empty their larders of goodies by making these jelly doughnuts.
The yeast dough is very rich in eggs, yolks in particular, giving the doughnut its characteristic yellow colour. Milk, oil and sugar – but only a small amount as the doughnut depends on the filling and powdered sugar finish for most of its sweetness – are included in this sticky dough that’s flavoured with vanilla and lemon zest. Vodka or spiritus is also added, presumably to help inhibit gluten formation and keep the doughnut tender.
And tender, light and airy is just what these doughnuts are…far better than anything I’ve had from even the best Polish bakeries. I filled them with raspberry instead of the more traditional prune jam.
Fabulous though these pastries are, I’m deducting a star from the rating because the recipe instructions are quite poor, omitting crucial information about rising and cooking times and a description of the dough when it’s been kneaded enough; I relied on my brioche-making experience for this. (8 minutes by machine or when the dough comes away from the sides of the bowl).
A half recipe makes 30 smallish doughnuts.
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Baked Elements: The Importance of Being Baked in 10 Favorite Ingredients
By Matt Lewis, Renato Poliafito, Tina Rupp
Stewart, Tabori and Chang - 2012
Fantastic tart with a chocolate crumb crust, salty-sweet caramel-nut filling topped with a layer of glossy chocolate……a candy bar may have been its inspiration but this sophisticated tart bears no resemblance to any dime store treat (I’m showing my age here…perhaps I should say “dollar store treat”) I’ve ever had!
I noticed an erratum in the instructions for making the crust: you’re told to preheat the oven but not instructed to bake anything. I sent an email through the Baked site asking for clarification and received a reply from one of the authors shortly after – bonus points! You have the option of blind-baking the crust until set or simply refrigerating it. I chose to bake it.
The filling is an easy to make caramel combined with toasted walnuts and the topping of melted butter and chocolate is even easier. A little chilling is required between steps but apart from that, the tart is very quick to make.
I made this for the chocoholics at my Thanksgiving dinner but it was a hit with everyone.
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Crispy, crackly crust, chewy interior, this snickerdoodle is definitely a cinnamon-lover’s dream cookie and with the added nuttiness from the brown butter, this recipe elevates a rather plain cookie to new levels.
The recipe is fairly standard in that it includes cream of tartar and is leavened with baking soda, but is non-traditional in its use of the browned butter, which I didn’t bother to strain, brown sugar and cinnamon in the dough. The shaped cookies are rolled in a cinnamon-sugar mixture, which is quite heavy on the cinnamon, before baking.
I made mine smaller than the recipe directs, about the size of a walnut, so my yield was 5 dozen cookies. 10 minutes of baking produced the crispy/chewy texture I prefer; an additional 2 minutes produced a crisp cookie.
My new go-to snickerdoodle recipe!
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This is one of the best tasting angel food cakes I’ve ever had, all because of the addition of a lime juice syrup. The cake is subtly flavoured with lime zest but it’s that tart-sweet syrup that’s applied warm to the cooled cake that captures the essence of the fruit. The pistachios added a wonderful crunch, and the finishing drizzle, additional sweet lime flavour.
The cake itself is a standard recipe; it baked up light and airy but I wish I had drawn a thin knife through the batter to eliminate air bubbles before baking as I ended up with some air pockets in the cake.
I made the full recipe of the lime syrup and glaze but ended up using only half of each; I decided to put the pistachios on the top of the cake only, so I syrupped only the top. It was still enough to add that wonderful bright, tart flavour of the lime to every bite. I’m not that fond of confectioner’s sugar glazes so applied only a light drizzle.
I usually only make angel food cakes when I have a plethora of egg whites on hand but for this cake, I would make an exception and crack open the eggs for the whites only and worry about the yolks later!
This recipe was previously published in Bon Appetit magazine…I’ve included the link.
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Pretty little shell-shaped sponge cakes with a nutty, milk chocolate flavour.
The batter comes together much like a sponge cake batter and though it takes only minutes to make, it’s required to rest 1 hour before baking. The recipe says that it yields 24 madeleines; unfortunately, there’s no indication what size they are or what size pan you should use. My pan produces 16 rather large ones so that’s what I made. It turns out that I did overfill the pan and I should have made at least another 4.
The finishing touch is a dusting of cocoa and malt powders….2 tsp weren’t enough for all of the cookies so I added some powdered sugar.
Recipe issues aside, we really enjoyed these…..they were tender with a crisp exterior and a delicate flavour…..very nice with coffee.
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The authors describe this as a “scone/cookie hybrid”; it does taste like a peanut butter-chocolate chip cookie, and a good one at that, but with the moist and tender texture of a good scone.
I didn’t have crunchy peanut butter – something that was apparently very important for texture – so I used a scant ½ cup of creamy and added about 2tbsp chopped, dry roasted peanuts. I made them the night before and baked them from a frozen state; they took just a few minutes longer than the time in the recipe.
They were a huge hit…dense, but quite delicious warm and still good hours later. I particularly liked the crunchy sugar topping which added a little extra to the not-too-sweet scone.
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Silky milk chocolate buttercream sandwiched between mini banana cakes....
The “cake” portion is a relatively thick oil-based batter that bakes up into a tender banana-flavoured cake with a hint of cinnamon. It was very easy to mix together by hand.
The filling is a little more involved. I didn’t make the Swiss meringue buttercream in this recipe as I had a batch of this Italian meringue buttercream (unflavoured) in the freezer that used the same ratio of egg whites to butter but 1/3 less sugar. I added the 6 oz of milk chocolate from the Baked recipe and found it too sweet, so added an additional 2 oz of unsweetened chocolate. It had good chocolate flavour, a little more intense than milk chocolate but not by much.
I made these sandwich cookie size, using a #70 (a scant tbsp) scoop for the batter. Baking time was 10 min. and the yield was 84 cookies, 42 pies. I used the same scoop to portion out the filling.
They’re not the prettiest looking sweets I’ve ever made but that didn’t stop people from being drawn to them….. they were a huge hit!
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This is one of the best pumpkin cakes I’ve ever had – it’s moist without being dense and oily and is wonderfully spicy. (I especially liked the kick from the ginger).
It’s made with butter instead of the oil that’s often used and owes its light and airy texture to ingredients like ground almonds (which really can’t be detected) and buttermilk.
The frosting is an American buttercream that has some of the butter replaced with almond butter. It had a wonderful spreadable, consistency but, even though I used the lesser amount of sugar listed in the recipe, it was too sweet (for me) and had that unpleasant (to me) gritty mouthfeel that comes with powdered sugar. However, the almond flavour was a very nice complement to the spiciness of the cake. I think I’ll borrow this idea and try adding almond butter to a different frosting…perhaps the cooked milk buttercream that the authors favour.
An easy and delicious cake that I'll definitely make again.
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These were a very pleasant surprise – I was hoping for a sweet, lemony muffin and that’s exactly what I got. They were tender, a little crumbly because of the cornmeal, a little tangy from lemon juice and sour cream, and were topped with crunchy, toasted pistachios.
The recipe doesn’t indicate what grind of cornmeal to use and I had both very fine and medium in my pantry. I went with the latter which was a mistake; the cornmeal doesn’t have an opportunity to soften in liquid so the larger pieces were obvious, adding additional, but unwanted crunch! I used some of the sugar from the recipe to process the nuts that were to be added to the batter so I would end up with pistachio powder, not butter.
Apart from having to deal with the pistachios, the recipe comes together and bakes up quickly. They did firm up considerably by day 2 but it was nothing a little re-heating couldn’t fix. The recipe made 14 regular muffins.
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Don’t ever let your university-student son, or your husband for that matter, get their hands on this book or you’ll end up making recipes like this one ;)! Though no worse than some commercial granola bars, breakfast food they are not…… but try convincing someone of that with that recipe name and the fact that you’ve used whole wheat cereal in it!
They’re no more difficult to make than Rice Krispie Treats but you do have to work quickly as the hot sugar-peanut butter mixture that’s combined with the cereal and peanuts firms up quickly, especially in a relatively cool kitchen.
These were actually very tasty with good peanut flavour and crispy, chewy texture and, according to son, travel well in care packages.
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This bundt cake with poppy seed filling is a surprisingly “Old World” recipe for these authors – though I suppose adding cream cheese to the batter and glazing the cake with a brown butter icing makes it much less so.
The vanilla cake was dense, moist and very rich with a whisper of orange flavour and a little tanginess from the cheese. The poppy seed filling was moist and not too sweet……. the cake itself was delicious.
I wish I could say the same for the glaze, a confectioners’ sugar based icing with melted browned butter, orange juice and rind. I had to add more liquid than the recipe called for to make it pourable, I suspect because my kitchen was quite cool and the butter was firming up in the glaze. Of course I ended up taking it a little too far and making it too thin. I used it as is rather than adding more sugar and was quite happy that most of the glaze ran off the cake because I didn’t like it at all…..I don’t mind using browned butter in my baked goods, but I really don’t like it poured on top. Other family members didn’t mind it, but it definitely wasn’t a hit.
I would give the cake 4 stars, but the glaze drops it down to an overall rating of 3 stars.
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This rather impressive cake (it’s very tall!) includes 3 of the authors’ favourite elements, bananas, peanut butter and chocolate, and each are well represented. Creamy peanut butter and chocolate fillings are sandwiched between layers of light, fluffy banana cake, frosted with milk chocolate ganache buttercream and glazed with intense, bittersweet chocolate.
The cake is made with the usual creaming method and the layers bake up quite level with the use of cake strips. It’s moist and has a good banana flavour.
The peanut butter filling is a simple blend of peanut butter, butter and confectioners’ sugar. The photo in the book (and on the cover) is misleading as the recipe makes only enough for a scant half cup per 8” layer ie a very thin layer. You would have to double the recipe to achieve the thickness pictured.
The chocolate ganache buttercream has a lovely, creamy, melt-in-your-mouth quality when eaten and tastes exactly like the chocolate used so make sure to use a favourite. When assembling the cake, I used the same amount for the filling as I did the peanut butter so the layers would be even.
The final touch is a thin chocolate glaze that’s the perfect consistency to cover the top of the cake smoothly and drip part way down the sides. It’s applied in 2 stages; I preferred the appearance of the cake after the first application so next time, I’ll just make a half batch. Made with bittersweet chocolate, it has a rich, intense flavour…..this will be my go-to chocolate glaze recipe from now on.
There are quite a few components to this cake but each one is easy to make. I made it a 2-day project, making the filling and ganache one day, and baking, assembling and glazing the cake the next day.
Serves 16 (any smaller, and the cake slices start to fall apart….believe me, I tried!)
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Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented
By Matt Lewis, Renato Poliafito, Tina Rupp
Stewart, Tabori & Chang - 2010
Sweet, buttery and gooey, this probably is what most people expect caramel sauce to be; it's not my personal favourite as I prefer a more intense flavour (like the caramel I reviewed from The Pie and Pastry Bible).
The ingredients are very basic (why is water not listed among the ingredients when it's required to complete the recipe?) and the directions are quite clear up to a point; they should have included that the mixture must be stirred over low heat after the addition of the cooler ingredients - butter and cream - as the caramel seizes.
I would have given only 2 stars but my family quite liked it - 3 is the compromise.
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Light and crispy with a nutty, complex flavour, these waffles passed the ultimate taste test in my house – they tasted great without any embellishment.
The batter was very easy to put together, wet ingredients were folded into dry and mixed gently until combined. It was a fairly thick batter so I used a spatula to help spread it evenly onto the waffle iron.
The recipe made 24 small rectangular waffles. The ones that weren’t eaten immediately were just as good as fresh after a light toasting in the toaster.
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The famous Baked brownie is taken to new heights with the addition of a layer of salted caramel and a sprinkling of coarse salt and sugar. It has a rich chocolate flavour and is neither too fudgy nor too cake-y, though it does lean towards the moist and fudgy side of the spectrum.
The brownies are amazingly easy saucepan brownies that rely on a lot of quality chocolate, butter and cocoa powder for their flavour. The recipe recommends chocolate with a 60-72% cacao content. I find that the less intense chocolate holds the greater appeal.
But, before one starts the brownie, the salted caramel must be prepared and cooled. The recipe is fairly standard (water sugar, corn syrup, cream) but also includes sour cream, and salt, of course. I had some leftover salted caramel from the Sweet and Salty Cake I made, so was able to put this together quickly when my son requested something sweet for a party.
The book is worth the cost for this recipe alone!
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This is a lovely tasting cake, nutty with a hint of orange, with a perfect chiffon texture: moist and spongy, but not rubbery, with a fine, tight crumb.
The praline flavouring comes from the use of brown sugar and pecan liqueur in the recipe. Almond extract is suggested as a substitute for the liqueur, but I used hazelnut oil and a little vanilla. The mixing method is standard for a chiffon cake in that most of the eggs need to be separated; the yolks are mixed with oil, water and the dry ingredients, and whites are whipped and folded in at the end. It’s important not to over mix at any stage to ensure a moist cake. (Pet peeve about the recipes in this book: they don’t include the water in the list of ingredients.)
Delicious and definitely a keeper!
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My husband bought me a deep fryer. I hate deep frying. However, in celebration of the spirit in which the gift was given, I made these doughnuts.
These are lightly spiced cake doughnuts leavened with baking powder and soda. The ingredients and the mixing method are simple, tossing wet with dry, so the dough comes together very quickly and easily.
The cake is tender and quite flavourful; of the chocolate and cinnamon sugar toppings I made, I preferred the cinnamon. I didn’t try the vanilla glaze.
My 1 complaint (apart from having to fry them) is that I wish the doughnuts were taller; they developed a rather thick crust when fried so there was less tender cake inside. Of course, this may just be a reflection of the fact that I don’t know how to deep fry anything : ), but I do think patting the dough into ¾” thickness instead of ½” may give better results.
The family liked them but weren't excited enough about them for me to try making them again.
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Chewy oatmeal cookies with golden, crispy edges, jam-packed with all sorts of delicious add-ins.
The buttery, caramel-flavoured cookie base bursts with chocolate chunks and, because it’s a recipe from those “Baked” boys in Brooklyn, malty, salty pretzels instead of the usual chopped nuts. A little espresso prevents the cookie from being too sweet and enhances the chocolate.
Though the dough comes together quickly, it must be refrigerated for at least 4 hours before baking. I find that dough is often too hard to work with straight out of the fridge and requires additional warm-up time. I really don’t have the patience for that when it comes to cookies so I portioned the dough onto cookie sheets first and then refrigerated them. I was able to just pop the sheets into the oven straight from the fridge.
The recipe made 48 (instead of 36) delicious, good sized - but not monster - cookies.
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Creamsicles have always been one of my favourite frozen treats and this tart captures the flavours perfectly….a buttery cookie crust filled with a tart orange curd made with orange cream soda(!), topped with cool, whipped cream.
Like most tarts, this has a few components but the work can be spread out over a few days. The crust is a standard sugar cookie crust with some added orange rind. The dough is easy to make and work with and I followed the authors’ suggestion to coat the baked crust with melted white chocolate before filling to prevent it from getting soggy – this tip worked beautifully. The curd is made using a standard method, though it does start with a reduction of cream soda and orange juice. I used agar agar instead of gelatin to stabilize it. A swirl of lightly sweetened whipped cream flavoured with the soda is the finishing touch.
Creamy and refreshing…this is one of my favourite tarts!
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Well, my dog loved them.......
Family of the non-canine variety didn't. The only reason these "I can't decide if I'm sweet or savoury" muffins got 2 stars is for ease of preparation and good texture (and they smelled pretty good while they were baking). They probably would have been edible with just a tbsp or 2 of sugar.
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Baked: New Frontiers in Baking
By Matt Lewis, Renato Poliafito, Tina Rupp
Stewart, Tabori & Chang - 2008
Tender, cheesy, delicious and the best cheese biscuit/scone I've ever made.
The ingredients are basic: all purpose flour, butter, sharp cheddar cheese (I used white), buttermilk......They get an added kick from black pepper and smoky chipotle chile pepper which you can adjust according to your taste.
The dough comes together easily in 1 bowl using the standard method: blend dry ingredients, rub in butter, add cheese, toss with wet ingredients. The dough is wet and sticky so just scoop and drop on the baking sheet - no kneading required.
I recently reviewed the cheddar-scallion scones from Flour and, though they were very good, I only gave them a 4-star rating - these biscuits are 5-star worthy!
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This cake is one of the signature cakes of the Baked bakery in Brooklyn, NY. A combination of moist chocolate cake, salted caramel and rich caramel ganache frosting, it is not for the chocolate faint of heart.
It’s rather labour intensive as it’s composed of several elements. The cake portion is a sturdy cocoa-based cake with good chocolate flavour made by the usual creaming method. I was pleased with how high and level the layers baked - they made for a very tall cake.
Caramel is another of the components, one which must be made twice! The first is the salted caramel that is used to syrup each layer. Unfortunately, it wasn’t absorbed by the cake as the authors indicate even though I poked holes in the cake. I ended up using half as much, but leftovers of this stuff are welcome here…it’s delicious.
The second batch of caramel is used to make the ganache frosting; it’s poured over chocolate to melt it. Once cooled, butter is beaten in. This frosting is only as good as the chocolate used and has a silky, melt-in-your mouth quality.
Assembly of the cake was frustrating…..the ganache frosting is extremely temperature sensitive and 70F, the temp. of my kitchen, was too warm. The cake and frosting required frequent refrigeration between steps (filling, crumb coating, frosting and decorating) - I was thrown off by this and forgot to sprinkle salt between each layer so though my cake was sweet, it wasn’t quite so salty : )
Frustration aside, the finished cake, made for my husband’s birthday, was really delicious and was a huge hit with birthday boy and guests. I don’t think I’ll make it again though, as I’m a big fan of the Sweet and Salty Brownies that appear in the authors’ 2nd book and offer the same flavour profile for a fraction of the work (and cost!).
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One of the sweets that helped put the Brooklyn bakery on the map. It’s dense, a little fudgy, very chocolate-y and absolutely delicious - definitely worthy of all of the accolades!
It’s an easy saucepan brownie that can be assembled quite quickly: sugar, eggs and dry ingredients are added to a mixture of melted butter and chocolate (make sure you use a good quality chocolate), spread in a pan and baked. The authors caution against both over-mixing and over-baking in order to achieve their trademark moist, fudgy texture.
I made these to take to a barbecue, and after chilling, was able to cut them into small squares. My yield was 63 from a 9”x13” pan. They were a huge hit – the first item to disappear from the sweet table.
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A vanilla butter cake with a whipped, white chocolate buttercream.
I decided to bake this recipe as confetti cupcakes, adding multi-coloured jimmies to the batter. A sidebar in the recipe suggests adding an extra egg yolk to give the cupcakes more structure so I did that. The method used is the standard creaming of fat and sugar with the addition of dry alternating with wet ingredients after the eggs are beaten in. But there is one big difference with this recipe and I don’t quite understand the science/purpose of it: the egg whites are whipped separately with cream of tartar and folded into the batter at the end. The batter is so thick, that whatever air has been beaten into the whites is lost during folding. I’m not sure this step is necessary, especially since there is leavening included in the recipe.
The finished cake had good vanilla flavour and a nice, fine crumb but was a little dry and crumbly. There was no baking time given for cupcakes so I may have over baked by a minute or 2. The recipe made 24 cupcakes and baked in 22 minutes.
The buttercream is a cooked frosting made with flour, sugar, milk and cream with butter and melted white chocolate beaten in. The texture is light, airy and creamy and not as buttery as Swiss or Italian meringue type buttercreams. With the addition of white chocolate, I found it to be a little too sweet – I would reduce the sugar by ~1/3 cup next time – but it did work well with the cake.
Though the cupcakes were a resounding success with the under-8 set, I’m not sure I’ll make this white cake again as I prefer Rose Levy Beranbaum’s white velvet cake, but the frosting is definitely a keeper.
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There’s a lot going on with each bite of this cake and every bit of it is delicious! It’s a moist vanilla cake with a cinnamon-cocoa swirl and a crunchy, nutty streusel topping.
There are 3 components to prepare, so a few dishes get dirtied in the process, but they are easy to make and each one comes together fairly quickly. The most time consuming part of the cake is the assembly: the batter, which is added to the pan in 3rds alternating with a sprinkling of the dry swirl mix, is very thick and difficult to spread. I used the suggested offset spatula to help with this and wet it frequently so the cake batter wouldn’t stick to it.
I cut it into 24 (it bakes in a 9”x13” pan) but could have easily cut 30, and possibly even 35 pieces as the cake holds together very well and not much of the streusel topping is lost during slicing. Excellent for feeding a crowd.
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I’ve always found that the flavour of maple syrup in baked goods is so subtle, it often can’t be detected so I was happy to see that this recipe used maple extract to flavour the scones, and saved the precious liquid for a finishing glaze.
As a result, the scones had a good maple flavour, which was nicely balanced with cinnamon and toasted walnuts. As the authors warn, the texture was quite dense and hearty, not light and delicate.
The scone is sprinkled with sugar before baking, then finished with a maple syrup glaze. I thought this might be overkill, but the scones weren’t very sweet and could handle both.
I find I do prefer a lighter, flakier texture in my scones so, though I liked many things about this recipe, I didn’t love the finished product. I’m still giving this a high rating as they did taste very good and my family didn’t mind the texture.
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A perfect summertime dessert and a very pleasant way to consume a healthy dose of antioxidants!
I’ve always thought that melons seem to perfectly complement the flavour of green tea so it was no surprise that this combination of fresh honeydew melon and matcha powder with milk (I used 1% regular milk instead of soy milk) and frozen vanilla yogurt was delicious. I'm not sure how potent my matcha is but the drink tasted a little grassy so I added extra milk and honeydew. By the time I was done with it, the recipe for 2 made 3 generous servings :)!
Very refreshing on a hot summer day.
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Wow, is this cake good! It’s a little bit of a twist on the standard yellow cake/chocolate icing combination with the addition of malted milk powder to the cake and a silky whipped ganache buttercream as frosting.
After my experience with the whiteout cake, I decided to ignore the step that had you whipping egg whites and folding them in at the end. Instead, I beat them into the creamed butter and sugar. The cake didn’t appear to suffer at all….it had a soft, moist, airy crumb that tasted subtly of malt…no one could identify the additional flavour in the cake, they just commented on how different and delicious it was. The recipe made 30 cupcakes.
The buttercream is a chocolate ganache with added butter. Confession: I did not use the high end, quality milk and bittersweet chocolates that are called for; instead, I used the Hershey’s semi-sweet chocolate chips that melted into a congealed mass in my pantry with the first heat wave of the season a few weeks ago. Perhaps the flavour wasn’t as milky as it should have been, but it was still very good.
I decorated the cupcakes with red maple leaf “quins” instead of Maltesers/Whoppers in honour of Canada Day.
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Most of my banana muffin and bread recipes call for 3 bananas, so when I found myself with 4 particularly sad looking ones that needed to be used, I turned to this recipe. This turned out to be a very moist muffin with good banana flavour with a hint of espresso.
It uses the quick and easy quickbread mixing method though this recipe does call for the extra steps of mashing the bananas and melting butter.
Though they were a big hit, I thought there were too many chocolate chips in them; I’ll cut back on them next time. This recipe seems to be a good candidate for some substitutions….whole wheat flour instead of white and oil instead of butter. I’ll try that the next time I have 4 bananas on hand.
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Very good bar cookie that’s like an upscale Twix candy bar. It's easy to make, especially if you cheat and use store-bought dulce de leche, but involves long chilling times so plan accordingly.
Flavour-wise the recipe deserves 5 stars but it loses 1 for the method of making the shortbread which involves extra and superfluous steps: adding all of the flour to the mixing bowl instead of kneading some in by hand would have resulted in the same cookie texture provided the dough wasn’t over mixed.
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Website: BakeNoir
My mother-in-law is famous for her Croatian Honey cake, a rich, 7-layer confection of light as air honey cake, creamy, sweet filling off-set by tart preserves. Her recipe has been in her family for generations and she very kindly passed it along to me several years ago. You can imagine my surprise when I recently found a very similar version online! When I made it for Easter at my husband’s request, I stayed true to the family recipe: no rum and no cocoa layer…the latter is replaced with a layer of Croatian red plum preserves….and wildflower honey is the honey of choice!
There are only 2 components to the cake: a thick batter that is spread thinly on a cookie sheet (4x) that bakes into a soft cookie, and a filling composed of butter, icing sugar and cooked cream of wheat cereal. (No one can ever guess what the filling is!). Assembly is a little tricky as the cake layers are fragile; I’ve learned to bake them on parchment for easy release.
This cake needs to be made at least a day before serving to allow the baked layers to soften and the honey flavour to develop.
The finished cake is 12” x 15” and once the edges are trimmed, can easily be cut into 80 pieces – great for a crowd. The cake freezes beautifully and I find that the texture and flavour improve after thawing so I usually make it weeks before it’s needed.
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Baking for All Occasions
By Flo Braker
Chronicle Books - 2008
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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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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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 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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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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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 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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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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