| From: 101 Cookbooks (reviewed 23rd March 2012)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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| From: 101 Cookbooks (reviewed 2nd April 2012)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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| From: Ad Hoc at Home (reviewed 29th September 2012)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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| From: All Recipes (reviewed 4th May 2012)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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| From: All Recipes (reviewed 12th June 2012)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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| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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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| 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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| 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. |
| 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! |
| 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. |
| 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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| From: BakeNoir (reviewed 31st March 2013)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. |
| 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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| 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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| 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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| 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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| 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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| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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 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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| 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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| 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). |
| A crisp, chewy topping, and tender, juicy baked Fall fruits combine to make a delicious, comforting dessert.
The topping starts with the usual pantry ingredients of rolled oats, flour, sugar and spices combined with butter. Though uncommon, coconut is also included, adding a subtle flavour and great, chewy texture. I don't usually pull out the food processor to make the topping but just combine the dry ingredients in a bowl and rub the butter in with my fingers.
The filling is simply diced apples (I used apples and pears for this batch), fresh and dried cranberries, sugar and a little flour to thicken the juices. Simple, but a very good balance of sweet and tart.
The topping is perfect with the fruits, the spices complement without overwhelming them. It tastes fabulous with Fall fruits but also works well with Summer berries and peaches. The crisp can be served with ice cream etc, but it's so good as is, it needs no further embellishment. |
| Sweet, tender, buttery cookie filled with tart ruby fruit, this is a visual as well as a taste sensation.
The vanilla cookie dough contains the basic ingredients of flour, butter, sugar and egg, with an additional egg yolk for tenderness. After mixing the dough, it's divided in half, shaped into discs and chilled briefly. Each piece is then rolled to fit a 9" springform pan. The bottom crust is layered with the filling (cranberries simmered with sugar, orange juice and rind) followed by the top crust. After a sprinkling of sugar, it's ready to be baked.
I've made this a few times as written but did take a shortcut with this latest version. I skipped the chilling step and merely pressed slightly over half the dough into the bottom and up the sides of the pan and crumbled the remaining dough on the top of the fruit filling.
The cake is a little more rustic looking as a result but still tasted as delicious as it usually does. |
| A taste of the tropics in the middle of Winter! This oil-based quick bread is chock full of juicy mango and flavoured with ginger and lime.
The loaf comes together quickly using the standard muffin/quick bread mixing method of combining wet with dry ingredients. Chopped mango is then folded in. This is an exceptionally thick batter but it loosens up considerably when you add in the juicy bits of fruit. I omit the raisins as family is not fond of them. Also, I do find that the batter quantity is too much for a 9" x 5" loaf pan, so I make 1 1/2 batches and make 2 - 8 1/2" x 4 1/2" loaves.
Delicious freshly baked but equally good the next day as the loaf stays moist and the flavours mellow over time. |
| This is one of my favourite cake recipes for a fruit-topped coffee cake for a number of reasons: it’s made with brown sugar so has a lovely caramel flavour that complements all fruits; the batter is thick enough to support the fruit on the top; it’s made with oil and butter so the cake is soft and moist even straight from the fridge.
I did make it with the recommended plums this time, but I’ve also made it with nectarines, pears and apples, usually without peeling them. You just need to keep in mind that the fruit should be tender after 35-40minutes of baking and cut the piece sizes accordingly.
Easy and versatile cake.
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| Best tasting chocolate cookie ever!
Many wonderful things have already been said about these cookies, all of them well deserved. I’ll just add that they are very easy to make….. just roll the dough into logs, (refrigerate), slice and bake.
I’ve always had success with the recipe using the volume measurements in the book but noticed recently that Dorie has provided ingredient weights on her website so I’ve included the link.
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| Delicious cinnamon-scented muffins with a flavour reminiscent of cappuccino and a soft, cake-like texture.
The batter is put together in typical fashion with wet ingredients mixed gently into dry. A cup of coffee and a tbsp of instant espresso give the muffins their flavour; melted butter keeps them moist. I used half whole wheat flour and added some mini chocolate chips.
These baked in 17min in my oven.
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| This delicious dessert is Dorie Greenspan’s take on key lime pie with a traditional condensed milk-lime juice filling, topped with fluffy meringue. What sets it apart is a hidden layer of chewy coconut goodness beneath the filling. Coconut is also supposed to be added to the meringue but I forgot when it came time.
The components are easy to make - and Dorie says you can use a store-bought crust so it must be okay - and there is a little waiting time while things bake or chill, but the most taxing part of the entire recipe is squeezing the juice from those wee limes!
You're instructed to freeze the finished pie a maximum of 3 hrs before serving but I’ve made a similar dessert that can be kept frozen for weeks (well wrapped of course) so I made the pie the day before and kept it in the freezer until 1 hour before serving without having any quality issues. It sliced easily with a warmed knife while still partially frozen.
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| This cake has great flavour and is not overly sweet but it's surprisingly dry and crumbly considering the amount of butter and cream cheese in it. |
| Like a muffin, they're made by mixing dry with wet ingredients, are lower in fat than cupcakes and not overly sweet. Also like a muffin, they dry out easily.
They're neither my idea of a breakfast food nor something I would make if I were looking for a chocolate treat. |
| This recipe lends itself well to changes: reducing the sugar by 1/3, using oil instead of butter (and reducing that quantity as well) and replacing ½ the flour with whole wheat flour still results in a deliciously spicy, moist muffin. |
| Very light and fresh tasting 1-pot pasta dish.
Most of the flavour comes from the parsley-garlic-lemon gremolata that’s tossed with the cooked pasta and asparagus at the end. Though raw, the garlic isn’t overwhelming in this application. I did find that the pasta was a little dry so added some of the pasta cooking water to it.
Would be delicious with broccoli as well.
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| We really enjoyed this stir fry. The tofu in particular had great flavour, having first spent the night in a simple marinade and then absorbed more from the garlic, ginger and (optional) chili pepper during cooking. However, there wasn’t enough of the marinade to form the sauce so I mixed up a second batch and added it to the water-cornstarch slurry.
I appreciated some of the cooking techniques used to make this dish: sweating the mushrooms first in a hot pan with a little salt meant they didn’t absorb much fat, and blanching the asparagus ensured that it remained crisp and bright green.
Delicious as is but would also be great with broccoli instead of asparagus.
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| Excellent for packed lunches (if you put the arugula on the top and mix it in only when it’s time to eat), this flavourful salad was easy to put together. I liked the use of some of the seasoned cooking water from the peas in the dressing, replacing most of the oil. |
| This is one of my youngest daughter’s favourite breads and I don’t mind making it …..it’s light, airy, chewy and cheesy.
The dough is enriched with milk, egg, and sugar, and cheese of course. It’s relatively stiff and very easy to handle and braid. No preferment is required so it can be made in just a few hours.
I love the versatility of it…..it’s fabulous for sandwiches or on its own when it’s fresh, but it’s great toasted or made into savoury French toast the next day, if there's any leftover, that is!
Delicious! |
| From: Bon Appetit (reviewed 14th October 2012)Anticipation for this dish was high based on its mouth-watering aroma during cooking but it was quite a let down in the end.
The ground pork is simmered for hours in white wine, chopped tomatoes and chicken stock after first being formed into large meatballs, browned and cooked with (lots of) minced fennel and onion. The meatballs are broken down into smaller pieces just before serving. I suppose if it’s important to you to have different textures of meat in your sauce, soft, moist pieces from the meatball interior and crispy, chewy bits that are browned, then this technique makes sense. I would have been quite happy either leaving the meatballs intact or not forming them at all and just browning the ground meat at the start as you would for a slow-cooked Bolognese.
The major disappointment involved the seasoning: even though I used less salt than the recipe called for in the meatball mix, salt-free tomatoes and low-sodium stock (as per the recipe), the ragù was extremely salty. I was glad that it was a little thick towards the end …I added water instead of more stock.
The combination of ingredients worked: the pork had that deep, rich flavour that comes with slow cooking and the sauce was a meaty gravy that tasted only mildly of fennel and tomatoes…if it weren’t for the salt, I would have given it an extra star.
I served it with (whole wheat) penne.
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| A little more cake-y than some, this is a fantastic version of the French dessert. The blueberries and yogurt prevent it from being too sweet even though there’s a fair bit of white chocolate in it. This would also be delicious with raspberries. |
| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 11th November 2012)Taste and texture…excellent! Appearance…..not so much. These were so light, moist, and delicious, I forgot I was eating a bran muffin. However, every muffin had a crater in the centre.
I was meticulous in weighing all of the ingredients (including baking soda and powder) - and there are a lot of them - but I did make some substitutions: I used regular instead of toasted bran and germ, orange flower instead of clover honey, and fancy molasses instead of blackstrap. I also made 12 regular muffins instead of 6 jumbo. Craters are often a sign of over-leavening…..were the honey and molasses I used that much lower in acid content than the original ingredients that there was too much soda? Or was it the change in muffin size?
I liked these enough that I’ll make them again but I’ll have to find a substitute for the 28g of poached pear (~1/8 of a whole)….I included it this time as I had leftover from a dessert I made, but it’s not something I would normally have.
The authors recommend you start with something easy before progressing to more challenging recipes in this book…..if I can’t even make a muffin, then I’m in big trouble ;!
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| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 17th November 2012)“Bouchon”, meaning “cork”……the characteristic shape of these little brownies if you happen to own this specialty pan, which I don’t. I baked these little chocolate cakes in a mini muffin tin instead.
The batter comes together quickly, but as with most of the recipes I’ve come across in this book, this is not a spur-of-the-moment brownie as the batter needs to rest for a few hours before baking. The upside is that it’s an excellent make-ahead recipe as the batter can be stored for a few days before using.
Given how detailed this book is, I’m surprised that internal temperatures aren’t provided as a determination of doneness of baked goods, especially with a small brownie where a minute or 2 too long in the oven is enough to change the texture dramatically. My brownies were smaller than the bouchons are – the recipe yielded 24 – so I kept my eye on them and relied on a clean toothpick to tell me when they were done (12 minutes).
These moist, rich, intensely chocolate-y little cakes are delicious but not to everyone’s taste as the flavour leans towards the bittersweet but I'll definitely be making these again.
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| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 18th November 2012)Buttery and lightly sweetened, these are one of the flakiest, most tender scones I’ve ever had/made.
Of course, these results don’t come without some time and effort, though most of it is merely waiting time and effort is minimal. The dough is quite standard but is made in a stand mixer with the paddle attachment which has the effect of flattening the butter pieces instead of cutting them up, ultimately creating layers in the baked pastry. After shaping, the dough is refrigerated until firm, then cut and frozen before baking.
I made them the day before they were needed and served them baked fresh in the morning. Half of the dough was used for these cinnamon honey scones.
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| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 18th November 2012)Cinnamon bun flavour in a flaky, tender scone.
These fantastic pastries start with a batch of this plain scone dough. Small cubes of a cinnamon-honey-butter mixture are added just before the initial shaping of the dough.
As with the plain scones, this recipe needs to be made in advance; not only is there the refrigeration time of the dough and the freezing of the scones before baking, but the cinnamon-honey mixture needs to be frozen before it’s even added to the dough.
They’re definitely worth the wait…..finished with a honey-butter glaze, these made a delicious brunch treat. A half recipe makes 6 scones but they’re very rich so next time I’ll cut them smaller.
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| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 23rd November 2012)Luxurious peanut butter buttercream sandwiched between crispy, chewy peanut butter oatmeal cookies with peanut chunks…these are a peanut lover’s dream cookie!
The cookie dough is easy to make but softens very quickly and needs to be refrigerated until firm before you can hope to roll it out. The cookies are then baked from a frozen state so there’s a fair bit of waiting time with this recipe. Because of the oatmeal and chopped nuts, the cookies don’t cut cleanly but they do spread during baking so the rough edges smooth out a little. I used a 2 ¼” cookie cutter so my cookies were much smaller and the yield higher than the recipe states – 18 sandwiches instead of 6.
The cookies are not very sweet but delicious enough to stand on their own; filling them definitely takes them to another level. They were filled with this basic buttercream flavoured with peanut butter.
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| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 23rd November 2012)Light, airy and silky, this versatile frosting has all of the qualities typical of a well-made Italian meringue buttercream.
One of my daughters, whose only experience is with American buttercream, wanted to try her hand at making this recipe so I left her alone with the book, a scale, a thermapen and a stand mixer. The directions are very thorough and clearly written so she had no trouble making the sugar syrup and the Italian meringue, and when the emulsion in the buttercream broke as the butter was added, she knew exactly how to fix the problem.
This is a base recipe that requires flavouring of some sort before it’s used. We flavoured the entire batch with peanut butter, used a portion for the better nutter cookies and the rest to decorate my son’s peanut butter birthday cake.
I gave the recipe only 4 stars as I think it’s too sweet, calling for over 80% more sugar than this recipe, which is the one I normally use.
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| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 29th November 2012)This recipe for Bouchon’s “all-purpose” brioche dough produces a beautifully textured, buttery bread.
4 recipes are provided, each with a different yield, each intended for a specific baked item. All of them make very small amounts of dough, which my stand mixer doesn’t like very much; I chose to make the Nanterre (loaves) and the Tropézienne so combined the ingredient amounts.
The method is typical for making brioche with the butter incorporated gradually after the dough has been kneaded for some time. No sponge is required. After a period of fermentation at room temperature, the dough is refrigerated overnight.
As with the other recipes in this book, this one is written with much attention to detail. However, it’s also written for a KitchenAid Artisan mixer, which I don’t own, so I had to make some alterations to the kneading time/speed setting.
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| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 29th November 2012)This is not so much a recipe as it is instructions for shaping and baking this brioche dough after it has been refrigerated overnight.
The dough is divided into small portions, rolled into balls and placed in greased loaf pans, 6 pieces per pan. As with other brioche doughs, it’s very easy to work with while still chilled from the fridge but it does soften and become slightly sticky as it warms up.
After a long proofing time and a relatively quick baking time, you are rewarded with 2 beautiful golden brown loaves. The bread is light and airy, yet buttery and rich tasting. I’ve decided that I prefer the less buttery Ottolenghi recipe but this is still an excellent loaf.
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| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 3rd December 2012)This dessert will forever be remembered by family and friends not as la Tarte Tropézienne, but as the Ginormous Nutella Sandwich!
The bread portion is made by rolling this brioche dough into a thin circle and proofing, then baking it in a 9” cake ring – or in my case, the ring from a 9” springform pan. I made, shaped then froze the dough days in advance of baking it. The dough rose unevenly during proofing and ultimately baked up that way as well….not sure if it had something to do with the freezing or the way I rolled out the dough.
The filling, a blend of this pastry cream and nutella, tasted primarily of the spread but had the silky consistency of pastry cream and went very well with the brioche.
It was delicious but it was a lot of time and effort for what was, in essence, a nutella sandwich, even if it was the best one anyone had ever had! I think I’ll make the orange diplomat cream filling next time ; )
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| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 3rd December 2012)This is a silky egg yolk-rich pastry cream with a lovely colour and good vanilla flavour.
The method is quite different from the standard in that all of the ingredients are combined at the start and heated together. The recipe calls for custard powder or flour as thickener; I went the flour route and it gave me a bit of difficulty….though my mixture looked well blended and smooth when it went into the pot, the flour did clump a little. Vigorous whisking eliminated most lumps and sieving the custard kept the final few out of the finished product.
The flavour and texture were good but not particularly different from other pastry cream recipes that don’t require a stand mixer and use cornstarch, which dissolves more easily than flour. I made this to fill the tropézienne.
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| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 2nd January 2013)I thought this would be a great recipe for using up small amounts of assorted nuts leftover from holiday baking. I used a combination of macadamia nuts, Brazil nuts, hazelnuts and almonds. I don’t have an 8” x ¾” tart ring, only a 9” tart pan so I scaled the recipe up to fit the larger pan (it’s ~26% larger).
Given the detailed nature of this book, it always surprises me when I come across what seems to me an obvious oversight. For this recipe, it’s the lack of direction on how to toast nuts! I did them one type at a time as I knew the toasting time would differ with each nut variety.
Assembly of the tart was quick once the elements were made: the toasted nuts were arranged in a prebaked pâte brisée tart shell and drizzled with some caramel jam.
I sliced the tart into 12 small pieces (with a chef’s knife with a heated blade that cut through the caramel easily) as I suspected it would be very rich. Everyone else was fine with it but I was done after 2 bites….it was just too much like eating candy. The nuts and the pastry shell prevented the tart from being too sweet and helped to reduce the stickiness of the caramel but most tasters thought it could use some chocolate. They gave it a rating of 4 stars but I won’t be making it again.
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| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 2nd January 2013)This all-butter crust is made in the stand mixer with very basic pantry ingredients. It takes only a few minutes, starting with mixing the butter with some of the flour until well blended. The remaining flour is added and finally, the water. This is not a typical pie dough where visible streaks of fat are desirable….in fact, you’re instructed to mix it further if you find distinct pieces of butter in the dough.
The chilled dough is an absolute dream to work with…..it doesn’t stick at all even with only the lightest dusting of flour. You’re asked to roll it out to just under ¼” thickness, much thicker than I normally would do. As a result, the crust takes over an hour to bake.
The baked crust is buttery and melt-in-your-mouth tender, and is suitable for savoury as well as sweet tarts as there’s no sugar in the dough. I used it for the caramel nut tart.
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| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 2nd January 2013)This caramel contains the usual ingredients of sugar, butter and cream but also calls for glucose, a product I’d never worked with before. Because of this ingredient, the method for making the caramel differs from the norm. The first step is to boil the glucose and add the sugar gradually. There were a few moments there when I thought I’d end up with a crystallized mess and have to start over but the sugar eventually dissolved. Once the butter and cream are added, the mixture must be brought to a temperature of 248F while being stirred constantly. The recipe stresses the importance of reaching this temperature and I know now that that’s to encourage the cook to keep at it because this step takes a loooong time. The “jam” is lightened with a little extra cream for use in the caramel nut tart.
The caramel ended up a beautiful dark amber colour but didn't have a deep, rich flavour to match. It tasted good, not as sweet as some, but I’ve made better and I didn’t care for the stick-to-your-teeth quality that I think was caused by the glucose.
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| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 5th January 2013)Excellent bread, excellent instructions (in the sections preceding the bread recipes).
I didn’t have all of the equipment called for in the recipe – no peels, definitely no hotel pan filled with river rocks and metal chain to create steam – but still managed to make this bread without much difficulty. It called for a soaker and a levain (sourdough starter) and had reasonable fermentation and proofing times and a short baking time. The bâtards were on the small side so next time I’ll make only 1 large.
This was a really fantastic bread…..nutty and wholesome but with a very light texture.
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| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 9th January 2013)Being a newbie at candy making, though there was ample warning in the recipe, I still wasn’t prepared for the reality of how quickly things happen. The instructions have you prepare a mise en place which includes a hot, oiled bowl (in which to mix the hot caramel and popcorn), oiled spoons for mixing (which were actually quite ineffective….my gloved hands were far more efficient) and hot peanuts.
The caramel started to cool and harden as soon as it was removed from the heat. In the few seconds it took to stir in the soda and salt and add the roasted peanuts, it became too firm to pour over the popcorn. I returned the pot to the burner and the residual heat did soften it somewhat but by that time, the mixing bowl had cooled to room temperature, ~18C. The result of all this was popcorn that wasn’t evenly coated with the candy.
I’m not a fan of caramel corn but it was a huge hit with those that are…they particularly liked that the coating was a salted caramel.
Just a final note….weigh your ingredients! In making the recipes from this book, I’ve been comparing volume against weight measurements, using the weight as the final measurement where possible; I haven’t come across any major discrepancies until this recipe, which calls for a substantial amount of kosher salt. Clearly there are huge variations in crystal size among brands….had I gone with the volume listed in this recipe of the brand I use, I would have added twice the weight of salt required and this treat would have been inedible!
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| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 25th January 2013)The instructions are excellent and the photographs provide a helpful visual of the process, and if all goes well, you’re rewarded with buttery pastries with crisp outer layers and light, tender interiors.
This recipe starts with a poolish preferment; it takes just a few minutes to put together but must rest for 12-15 hours – perfect timing for making it the night before and continuing with the dough the next morning.
The dough (détrempe) also comes together easily and uses the authors’ low and slow kneading technique ie kneading at the machine’s lowest power setting for a long period of time.
After the dough has fermented and chilled, the lamination process begins. I used a European-style butter with a higher fat content as recommended which seemed to be more malleable and less prone to cracking than my usual lower fat brand. Envelope folds and 3 turns are required before the dough is rolled and chilled for the last time before shaping. With only 20 minute rests in the freezer and just a few minutes needed to roll the dough each time, this can be done in less than 2 hours. However, if you need to stretch it out as I did when I had to step out unexpectedly, leaving it in the fridge for an hour instead of the freezer works well and you can pick up where you left off. My kitchen was very cool so I had ideal conditions for rolling the dough….everything remained cold so there was no sticking or risk of butter melting and the authors’ “fluffing” technique helped relax the gluten making it easier to roll.
Though the instructions expect you to continue with the shaping, proofing and baking on the same day, I didn’t want to be baking at midnight so I refrigerated the dough overnight after the 3rd turn and continued the next morning, making a half batch each of croissants and pains au chocolate.
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| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 25th January 2013)Crisp, flaky exterior layers that shatter and a light interior characterize these buttery pastries. This “recipe” actually just provides the instructions for shaping and baking the pastry made from this dough.
I had refrigerated the dough overnight after the 3rd turn so completed the rolling and chilling of it the following morning before proceeding with shaping the croissants. Though the dough making process benefitted from my cool kitchen, the proofing of the pastries didn’t…..even though I moved them to a warmer room, they were only ready for baking after 3 hours.
This was my first attempt at making croissants so was quite pleased with the results but attribute this success to the detailed instructions and photographs in the book.
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| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 25th January 2013)As with the croissants, the resulting pastry has crisp outer layers and a tender interior but this time they envelop a luscious chocolate filling. Also as with the croissants, this “recipe” just provides the instructions for shaping, proofing and baking this dough.
The recipe calls for cacao barry chocolate batons, 2 per pastry. I used Callebaut bittersweet chocolate callets that have slightly higher cacao content instead. I’m not sure if the batons are 3g or 5 g each but I used ~14-16 callets (~7-8g), which is the number that fit comfortably inside the dough; the ratio of chocolate to dough worked out well.
The finishing touch before proofing and again before baking is an egg wash that’s first put through a strainer. I hesitated but ended up doing this step…..what was another 2 minutes when I’d already spent 3 days making these ; )
These were a huge hit.
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| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 3rd February 2013)Cream puffs are one of my sister’s favourite treats so I decided to make a more special version of them for her birthday in lieu of a cake.
Using this pâte à choux recipe, the heads and bodies are piped and baked. The instructions for piping/shaping are clear but I did find drawing the swan’s beak out with a toothpick worked better for me. I used all of the tips mentioned (chilling the dough, misting piped dough with water) and followed the baking instructions and times given for a conventional oven and they worked perfectly – though I had a moment of panic when all of the head/necks deflated when I opened the oven door to turn them over (they did re-inflate) – resulting in crisp pastries with dry, hollow interiors…..perfect for filling.
The filling is a light, silky, ethereal blend of pastry cream and Italian meringue buttercream topped with lightly sweetened vanilla whipped cream…..I find the book’s versions of these recipes too complicated and/or sweet so used this vanilla pastry cream and this vanilla buttercream instead.
The recipe says it makes 8 swans but mentions that there will be leftover batter; it’s actually enough to make another 8 swans….so I did. There’s enough of the pastry cream/buttercream mixture to fill all 16 birds if you don’t mound it too high but I did need a double batch of the whipped cream.
My sister loved them, as did the rest of the family. Like most of the recipes in this book, they aren’t difficult to make but they’ve been relegated to very special occasions only as they are very time consuming.
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| From: Bouchon Bakery (reviewed 3rd February 2013)This dough, once baked, has a beautiful golden crisp exterior with a perfect hollow interior that begs to be filled with something sweet and creamy.
The recipe is as easy to make as any other I’ve seen and though it calls for a stand mixer to beat in the eggs, this step could be done by hand (or food processor, which is my preference). The dough is a little stiffer with a slightly higher proportion of flour than most but that makes piping it to make these swans (or éclairs) that much easier.
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| An interesting and uniquely flavoured sourdough rye bread.
This is a 2-day bread that starts with a sponge made of barm, rye flour, water, and molasses that’s been heated with cardamom, anise, fennel and orange (I used orange oil). Bread flour and the balance of ingredients are mixed in after an overnight rest and the dough is kneaded briefly and left to rise. I’m accustomed to sourdough breads taking a long time to rise, which is why I don’t make them often, but even with yeast added in, the first proofing took 3 hours; I allowed the shaped loaf 2 hours to rise but it still wasn’t where it should have been. I took a chance and baked it anyway hoping for a huge oven spring.
I didn't get that but the resulting loaf actually had a very nice crumb, though I’m sure it would have been a little fluffier if I'd allowed it more time to rise. I really liked the complexity that the spices and orange added but I would have preferred the bread to be less sweet.
I’m glad I tried it, but I don’t think I’ll make it again.
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| This is fantastic bread that bears no relation to the dense, chewy, gummy whole wheat bread I’ve made in the past. The crumb is soft, light and airy with a delicious, nutty flavour.
Of course, you do have to invest a little time to achieve these results, though most is just waiting time. This is a 2-day bread that starts with a soaker of whole grain flour and water, and a poolish of whole wheat bread flour, water and yeast.
On day 2, these are combined with the remaining ingredients and kneaded. I included the optional egg and oil as I thought this bread would need all the help it could get. Next time I make it, I’ll exclude these to see what the difference is. After kneading, the dough is left to proof. I set aside lots of time (recipe says 2 hours) for this but it only took an hour. I shaped it into 10 buns as I was planning to serve them with grilled turkey burgers. The buns only took 45 minutes to rise and 22 minutes to bake.
Definitely a bread I would make on a regular basis.
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| I put off making this bread as I didn’t have all of the recommended ingredients and I’m usually a little wary of breads that rely on wild yeast alone. I finally decided to try it using my recently resurrected starter, “Vlad”, and ingredients I had on hand and I’m so glad I did.
It’s a 2-day (or more) bread that begins with a firm starter. On day 2, the flour (I used whole wheat bread flour which I didn’t bother to sift) salt and water are mixed together with the starter and the dough is kneaded. I made a half recipe so was able to use my stand mixer for this step. The recipe indicates that fermentation and proofing time is 6-7 hours – “Vlad” responded admirably to the current heat wave so these steps took only half the time.
I was very happy with the results: it’s a delicious, dense, chewy whole wheat bread with a definite sourdough tang and a lovely crispy crust. Definitely a recipe I will make again.
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