Life, as usual, is busy.  I’m learning a lot in my EMT course, which gives me peace of mind.  In a previous post, I mentioned that I had signed up for a 12 week EMT training class, and I’m also looking into CERT training, which is available in a lot of jurisdictions.  CERT responders are citizens who go through special training to assist in the case of a major disaster.  After 9/11, and after seeing what happens when a natural disaster strikes (the 2004 tsunami, Katrina, Haiti, Chile), I decided to do something about a fact of life:  bad things happen to good people in places they thought were safe.

Needless to say, the 14-hour per week time commitment, plus LIFE, have interfered with a lot of the baking and cooking that I like to do.  I did, however, manage to bake these Rustic Walnut Horns from one of my favorite cookbooks, Great Coffee Cakes, Sticky Buns, Muffins & More: 200 Anytime Treats and Special Sweets for Morning to Midnight.  These pastries call for a versatile dough that you can whip up and freeze, to be pulled out the night before you want something freshly baked for breakfast.

After you make the dough and let it rise overnight, divide it in half, freeze one half, and use the remaining half for these horns.

The recipe for the dough is below, and I’ll post the rest of my adapted recipe by tomorrow, ’cause I forgot where I left my cookbook.  May be in the car because, you see, sometimes I cart cookbooks with me to my EMT class.  Just because.  To see what others have made in their kitchens this week, be sure to check out Susan’s weekly YeastSpotting!

continue reading "Rustic Walnut Horns"

I’ve baked quite a few things from Carole Walter’s fabulous book, Great Coffee Cakes, Sticky Buns, Muffins & More: 200 Anytime Treats and Special Sweets for Morning to Midnight, but if I had to pick one favorite so far, it would be a particular dough. A dough that takes literally minutes to make. A dough that freezes exceedingly well, and can be used to make many different pastries. And a dough whose taste and texture approach or exceed that of homemade Danish pastry, with a fraction of the time and effort.

Sound interesting? It’s Walter’s rich sour cream dough, or simple sweet dough, which can be used interchangeably. The difference between the two is that the former uses milk, while the latter uses sour cream. The end result is a rich, tender, flaky, and flavorful yeast bread that can be used to make braids, tea rings, buns, kuchen, sticky buns, cinnamon rolls, etc. If I have some milk or sour cream that need to be used up, I make a batch of this dough (or two), and freeze it. It is phenomenal.

A few weeks ago, I made the Dimpled Sugar Cake. I suspect that dish will make rare appearances in my house, BECAUSE WE ATE THE WHOLE THING IN ONE DAY. No wonder I have to spend so much time at the gym. For a great picture of the cake, and a review of Walters’ book, check out Ivonne’s blog. Ivonne describes the Dimpled Sugar Cake as “heaven in a pan.” To be honest, I was too busy eating the buttery, brown sugary creation to try to stage a decent picture.

Recently, I decided to try the crumb buns. These are little pillows of warm, yeasty goodness, sprinkled with a streusel topping (I used my own recipe). I pulled the dough out of the freezer the night before, and let it thaw in the refrigerator. In the morning, I shaped the buns, let them rise for an hour, and baked them. If you wanted to, you could shape them the night before and keep them in the refrigerator overnight, ready to pop in the oven the next morning. Is that great, or what? Note: the streusel topping that I made is not terribly sweet – if you like it very sweet, add a bit of white sugar to the mix.

These buns are my entry for this month’s Bread Baking Day #12, created by Zorra, and hosted by Aparna of the wonderful vegetarian blog, My Diverse Kitchen. Her choice this month was “small breads.” Be on the lookout for her roundup of everyone’s entries. And be sure to check out Susan’s weekly YeastSpotting roundup at Wild Yeast Blog. Recipe after the jump . . .
continue reading "Delicious and Easy Crumb Buns"

One of my favorite cookbook authors is Carole Walter – her books are filled with recipes that are usually tasty, well-written, with clear instructions. Great Cookies: Secrets to Sensational Sweets is no exception.

One day, I decided to try her recipe for Chocolate Shortbread Nuggets, mostly because one of the ingredients is rice flour, and I have a bunch that I need to use up. I also love the idea of bar or refrigerator cookies, because drop or cutout cookies are some of my least favorite things to bake. The fact that I adore shortbread, and that the recipe contains chocolate had nothing to do with it – that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

I was not disappointed. They were so rich that I had to nibble them bit-by-bit. Straight from the freezer, there is an almost fudge-like quality to them. I used a top quality imported butter in the recipe, and I think that made a huge difference, particularly in the texture.

They were so good. Yes, past tense – they’re all gone. Sigh.
For the original recipe, see here. For an adaptation, as well as great tips on making shortbread, check out Anita’s blog, Dessert First. Happy baking!

I’ve been pretty busy, but decided to jump into Bread Baking Day for the first time by making a delicious cheese kuchen from Carol Walter’s wonderful book, Great Coffee Cakes, Sticky Buns, Muffins & More: 200 Anytime Treats and Special Sweets for Morning to Midnight. Bread Baking Day #10’s topic is Breakfast Breads, an excellent choice by Melissa of Baking A Sweet Life.

One of the recipes in Ms. Walter’s book yields a versatile sweet dough that you can make with either cream cheese or sour cream, and then you can use the dough for a variety of other yummy baked goods, such as crumb buns, sticky buns, or the cheese kuchen. The dough is easy to make, easy to work with, and it freezes well. If you’re as busy as I am, that is an unbeatable combination. And, of course, the kuchen also tastes very good: it tasted like Danish pastry, but without all the work! The cheese filling was phenomenal, even with the raisins, which I usually don’t care for, but loved in this. In fact, I had to restrain myself from eating the filling with a spoon. I will be using this dough a lot! Keep reading more after the jump . . . .
continue reading "Cheese Kuchen"

Looking for something to make with the abundance of limes that flood the markets in the winter months? Look no further – here is a recipe for lime cookies, courtesy of Carole Walter, that actually taste like lime! Imagine that!

I am a big fan of citrus, so when I was looking for something to bake with all my limes, and happened across this recipe from Great Cookies: Secrets to Sensational Sweets, I decided to give it a try. Carole Walter builds the lime flavor via three sources: lime juice, lime zest, and lime oil. Needless to say, these refrigerator cookies have a lime taste that actually comes through. And they are so easy to make: roll them into a log, slice, and bake. This is great if, like me, cookies are not your most favorite thing to bake, but you sure like to eat them.

I adapted the cookies slightly by using ground almonds instead of pistachios. The cookies are crisp along the outside, and tender and slightly chewy towards the middle, with a pronounced but not overwhelming lime flavor.

Sorry the photo above isn’t too good – the others mysteriously disappeared from my hard drive. After shelling out $600 last year to “repair” our desktop, we are coming to terms with the sad reality that we are going to have to replace it. The good news? We are going Mac!

Now, about the strudel. Pulling my own strudel dough has mesmerized me for years, the way making macarons has affected other bloggers. I read a ton of cookbooks, and even watched videos on You Tube (this one is humorous and instructive). The night before I made the dough, I dreamed all night that I was making strudel. I practically worked myself into a tizzy. Finally, I turned to Carole Walter’s fabulous book, Great Coffee Cakes, Sticky Buns, Muffins & More: 200 Anytime Treats and Special Sweets for Morning to Midnight.

Unlike Ivonne, of Cream Puffs in Venice, I did not have much luck pulling the dough, despite my best efforts (but I’m not giving up!). Instead of a twenty-inch strudel, I ended up with a ten-inch stump:

Note the filling explosion on the bottom, left.

This little strudel endeavor triggered the loss of my baking mojo, much to my dismay. I tore the dough repeatedly, and finally decided to stop while I had something left in which to roll up the tasty filling. And tasty it was, folks: a cherry cheese filling from Ms. Walter’s book, a filling that I made using sour cherries that I had pitted and frozen last year. I was eating the stuff with a spoon, and had to restrain myself. Luckily, the horizontally challenged strudel was too short to accommodate all the cheese filling, so I was able to eat that for breakfast the next day. What’s a few thousand calories among bakers?

Needless to say, I’m going to tackle this again, but with a different dough recipe the next time. If any of you are interested in making your own dough, here are some books that have recipes and instructions: A Baker’s Tour: Nick Malgieri’s Favorite Baking Recipes from Around the World;A Baker’s Odyssey, includes DVD: Celebrating Time-Honored Recipes from America’s Rich Immigrant Heritage;A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking;Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague;Indulge: 100 Perfect Desserts; and Desserts by the Yard: From Brooklyn to Beverly Hills: Recipes from the Sweetest Life Ever.

Sour Cream Black and White Coffee Cake

Like many of you, two of the reasons I started this blog were to give me the incentive to use my many cookbooks, and to document what I do. The good news: it’s working! The bad news: I’ve had to increase my cardio workouts at the gym.One of the items that I decided to bake is a Sour Cream Black and White Coffee Cake from Carol Walter’s fabulous new book , Great Coffee Cakes, Sticky Buns, Muffins & More: 200 Anytime Treats and Special Sweets for Morning to Midnight. This is quickly becoming one of the favorite cookbooks in my embarrassingly large collection. I’m not going to write out the recipe – the directions to get the swirl pattern are quite lengthy, and I’d rather spend my time cooking!

When I notified Master Chow that I had just just baked the aforementioned coffee cake, a look of mixed joy and horror crossed his face: he loves coffee cake, but he squeaked: “What! Before my reunion?!” You see, he has a Major Reunion coming up this June, he’s looking fit, and he doesn’t want to blow up into a blimp before then. “Master Chow,” I said patiently, “it’s February. You don’t really expect me to stop baking for the next five months, do you?” He promptly realized the futility of any such argument. He and I tasted a little piece, and he took the rest to work. A happy compromise!

I learned a couple things from this recipe: do not substitute low fat ingredients, even it that’s all you have on hand. The recipe calls for bittersweet chocolate, but I highly recommend you use semisweet – the cake is not overly sweet, and really benefits from a slightly sweeter chocolate. Now, you ask, how did I discover that? Why, I burned my first batch of chocolate, that’s how! I tasted a wee part that hadn’t turned into charcoal, and promptly realized that I need to use a sweeter chocolate, so I did. But that’s another story. For those of you who have never burned chocolate, and might be tempted to use it anyway – don’t. I learned that many years ago, the hard, nasty-tasting way. Ugh.

Now, the interesting thing is that, even though I loved the taste of the cake, it was a bit drier than I would have liked, because I used low fat sour cream (all I had on hand). As it sat out in my husband’s office, he said it became even drier. And you know what? Folks told him that it was the best or one of the best coffee cakes that they had ever had! They also said that the chocolate was “really good,” so use a good one if you decide to make something like this – it makes a difference.

All this made me realize, once again, how little most people cook, and that their access to baked goods is usually limited to Aisle 4 in the grocery store. Good eggs, fresh butter, and premium chocolate make a difference.

I recently heard that Julia Child once said that “people have forgotten what food is supposed to taste like.” So true. And that’s one of the reasons I cook so much – I love the idea of keeping a tradition of “real food” alive, even if a cake comes out a little drier than expected.

Update: there was a typo in the recipe – it called for 11 1/2 teaspoons (!) of baking powder, when it should be 1 1/2 teaspoons!