Madam Chow is out of town and visiting family in an undisclosed location. But I’ll be back soon, with lots to tell you! Meanwhile, go check out the luscious strawberry tart by other bakers. You can find the blogroll here.

Boris, my rye sourdough starter, had an affair. Well, about 2 cups of him did. When he thought I wasn’t looking, he had a fling with some King Arthur Unbleached Flour, instead of staying true to rye. A tale as old as time. The flour always looks better on the other side of the fence, doesn’t it, Boris?

I took Boris’ offspring and made a rosemary olive oil loaf out of it. I mean, really, what else could I do? When I told Master Chow what had happened, he shrugged and made a turkey swiss panini out of it. A calm and sensible man is Master Chow.

This dough came together remarkably easy, and was soft, smooth, and silky. In fact, the dough was so lovely that I almost didn’t want to bake it. Almost. Heh, heh.

In this step, I mixed in the rosemary (I wouldn’t use more than the recipe lists – in my opinion, the flavor balance was perfect):

Here I took its temperature. Eighty degrees F – on the nose!:

continue reading "Rosemary Olive Oil Sourdough Bread – In Pictures"

And neither does cream, that is why I was compelled, compelled, I say, to make some milk chocolate pecan scones. Woe is me!

My favorite type of scone is a cream scone, and I like them flaky, not cakey. Scones are a great way to use up buttermilk or cream, fruit, zest, and of course, chocolate. You see, chocolate doesn’t last forever – you have to use it up, especially white chocolate, which has a shorter shelf life. Dorie Greenspan’s scone recipe is wonderful, and I have used variations of it several times, but I wanted to try something different.

So, I found myself with several large hunks of milk and white chocolates left over from my voluminous Christmas baking, and a pint of cream which was screaming that its expiration date had just passed. I got to work, and after consulting several books, I came up with the following recipe.

I decided to live on the wild side and used Buttery Sweet Dough Flavor from King Arthur Flour for the flavoring instead of vanilla extract. The scones were fantastic, with rave reviews from Master Chow, a die-hard walnut fan! Will wonders never cease? The great thing about scones is that the raw dough freezes really well, so you can make and shape them, then pop them in the freezer (well wrapped), to bake whenever the urge hits you.

A couple of hints/thoughts: (1) Don’t overwork the dough. (2) If you don’t have a food processor, a great way to incorporate the butter is to use a box grater and grate the frozen butter into the dough. (3) You can make 6 or 8 scones. I flattened out the dough a bit more than I normally would, and made 8 because our sugar intake has risen alarmingly between Tuesdays with Dorie and the Daring Bakers.   Recipe after the jump . . .
continue reading "Chocolate Doesn’t Last Forever"

One of my friends tells me that my blog is blocked at her job because of “adult content.” ADULT CONTENT?! After I thought about it a bit, I realized that some pictures that appear on this blog, like the one above of Daisy, do involve doggie nudity. I am unrepentant, and will remain so. Gus approves:

On another note, yesterday my area was hit by a series of extremely severe thunderstorms, including tornadoes. We were without electricity for over 11 hours. We are also getting ready to go visit family, and that combined with the loss of electricity, last minute medical visits, etc., has left me unable to respond to all your wonderful comments, and to visit your blogs as much as I’d like to, but I promise that as soon as I can visit all of you, I will!

Life hands all of us some big challenges, and just when I’m feeling sorry for myself, something snaps me out of it. Brownies help. This past weekend, it was the news that fellow blogger Briana Brownlow’s breast cancer has returned. She is 30.

Today, June 3, is the 10th anniversary of my father’s death to lung cancer. On July 11th, it will be 4 years since I lost my mom to endometrial cancer. I think about them and miss them both every day.

Please consider helping Bri in her battle. For a moving post on the effects of this disease on a patient and her family, please read food blogger Jen Yu’s (of Use Real Butter) post, here. There will be information on how to help Bri at the bottom of this post.

Now, after all that, shall we talk about brownies? This week’s selection was French Chocolate Brownies, courtesy of Di of Di’s Kitchen Notebook. Brownies, like chocolate, I think, are proof that there is a benign force in the universe. They just make you feel good. I approached these with trepidation, because they have both raisins and cinnamon. Now, raisins are not my favorite, and cinnamon is not something I put in my brownies. But there are 12 brownie recipes in Baking: From My Home to Yours, so I thought, go for it! Live on the wild side! FOLLOW THE RECIPE AND PUT RAISINS AND CINNAMON IN YOUR BROWNIES!

So, I did. And it was good. I skipped the water and soaked the raisins in 30 year old rum, then flamed them. I could not taste the rum, but Master Chow could. I could taste the cinnamon, and it was a surprise – it provided a warm depth of flavor that brownies don’t normally have. But Master Chow couldn’t taste the cinnamon. Tastebuds are interesting things, indeed. Some people mentioned getting a thick crust, but that didn’t happen with mine.

Straight out of the oven, the brownies were extremely moist and bordered on fudgy, but were also cake-like. Overnight, they “fudged up,” and the flavors melded. I served them with a dollop of whipped cream and some pineapple, because I like pineapple and because it cancels out all the butter and chocolate. Didn’t you know that? Check out the Tuesdays with Dorie blogroll for more!

continue reading "Tuesdays with Dorie. Have Some Brownies, and Help Out a Fellow Blogger."

**Update 7/20/08 – this cake got a whole lot better in the freezer – the flavors really blended and developed! **

I can’t tell you how many times I pulled the eggs and butter out of the refrigerator, only to put them back a bit later, because life got in the way and I didn’t have time to bake May’s DB challenge, Opera Cake, brought to us by Daring Baker founders, Lis and Ivonne, and co-hosted this month with Fran of Apples Peaches Pumpkin Pie and Shea of Whiskful.

Finally, I was able to tackle the Opera Cake, a multi-tiered confection of joconde (an almond cake), syrup, buttercream, a glaze, and a mousse (optional in our challenge). I halved the recipe, and decided on two primary flavors: passionfruit and vanilla, rounded out by a bit of lemon.

I love passionfruit. If I were on a desert island (or do I mean dessert island?), and someone offered me chocolate or passionfruit, I would take the latter.

But back to my cake. Since you’re probably like me and have 700 + challenges to read, I’m going to give you the abridged notes of my baking adventure.

The joconde:
I made the almond joconde, and put a couple drops of lemon oil in the batter. Of course, in my harried state, I added the flour too early and over-developed the gluten, so the cake was slightly tough, but it was still tasty. I also had one too many layers of cake, as you can tell from the pictures! Even though I brushed on a lot of syrup, the cake was still a bit on the dry side – good lessons for next time.

The syrup: I reduced 12 oz. of frozen passionfruit pulp by half, and used that as my flavoring element throughout the cake. I made the syrup as directed, with vanilla bean, and flavored it with an additional 3 Tbsp. of the reduced passionfruit. I brushed each layer of cake with the syrup and with pure reduced passionfruit juice.

The buttercream: I am not a cake person (except for Bundt and pound cakes). I don’t remember having buttercream until 1998, when Master Chow made me a cake for my birthday, covered with orange buttercream. It was sooo good! I used the original recipe in the challenge, but I was rather nervous about making this type of buttercream, because so many people have trouble with it. I didn’t have any problems at all. To flavor it, I added 1/4 cup of the reduced passionfruit – my liquid gold!

The mousse: I melted the white chocolate over a bain marie, and was very careful not to let it get to hot. In the end, the whole thing turned into a grainy mess, and I had to toss it. I had one square of chocolate left, so I melted that and mixed it into the whipped cream, along with a couple tablespoons of the reduced passionfruit, and a drop of lemon oil. This was my hands-down, most favorite part of the cake. Please pass the whipped cream, folks, hold the cake!

The glaze: Since I was out of white chocolate, I re-read the directions and realized I could make any glaze, as long as it was light-colored. I turned to The Professional Pastry Chef: Fundamentals of Baking and Pastry, 4th Edition, and adapted the recipe to make my own glaze:

1 Tbsp. powdered gelatin
1/2 cup reduced passionfruit pulp
1/2 cup passionfruit-vanilla simple syrup

In a bowl that can fit over a double boiler (bain marie), sprinkle the gelatin on the reduced passionfruit and let sit until softened. Heat gently until dissolved – do not overheat, or the gelatin will lose its ability to gel. Remove from the heat and stir in the simple syrup. Let cool, and when it starts to thicken just a bit, pour over your very cold, well-refrigerated cake. Don’t try this unless the cake has been cooled for a good three hours.

The glaze was fantastic. I learned a few things about working with it. First, it’s like a ganache coating, in that once you start to pour it on the cake, don’t stop, just keep going, or you’ll end up with the lumpy look that I have. Second, do not cover with plastic! I did that, and when I took it off, the entire glaze came off with it. I had to piece together the topping on the cake!

Putting the cake together: No problems here, but I have a construction tip to share with you. If you want to use both buttercream and jam (or curd) in between a layer of cake, this is how you do it – put the buttercream on the top of a layer, and the jam on the bottom of the layer that you will place above it. I did this with one layer of my cake, and used passionfruit jam:

In the picture, the top piece of cake is my bottom layer. I spread it with buttercream. The layer at the bottom of the picture has jam on it. I will sandwich these fillings together by laying the jam side on top of the buttercream. One more thing: refrigerate the cake as you construct each layer. That will keep the layers from sliding all over the place.

Bottom line: great challenge – I tried new techniques, learned a lot, and confirmed what I already knew (do not over beat the flour!) Thank you Ivonne and Lis, for a great challenge. Check Ivonne’s blog for the original recipe.

Check out the Daring Bakers blogroll to see what everyone else did! And along with many other DBs this month, I’d like to dedicate this to Barbara of winosandfoodies.com. Barbara is food blogger and strong supporter of LiveSTRONG, the Lance Armstrong Foundation. As part of her efforts for LiveSTRONG Day, Barbara hosts A Taste of Yellow, which is an event that unites food bloggers everywhere in the fight against cancer. Thank you, Barbara!

Like I’ve said before, we do eat something else besides baked goods around here, and the roasted spaghetti squash and orzo salad above are an example. I made this about eight weeks ago, using a bunch of little pastas I had laying around, as well as a squash that I’d found for a good price at the market.

I roasted some garlic and mixed it in with the squash, which worked out well, inasmuch as raw garlic would have completely overwhelmed the vegetable. A little olive oil, salt and pepper, and a wee bit of parmigiano reggiano, and that was it – a lovely and healthy little vegetable side dish.

My post will be late, due to a pair of knees that are scheduled to get MRIs.  In the meantime, why don’t you go check out the lovely Opera Cakes that Ivonne and Lis chose for this month’s challenge?

Oh, I’ve been wanting to make these every since I got Dorie’s book, and I’m so excited that I was able to pick them for my turn. Thanks to all of you for visiting my blog (I love visitors!), to Laurie of Quirky Cupcake for creating TWD, and particular thanks to Dorie Greenspan for writing her many wonderful cookbooks, and for giving me permission to reprint her recipe for Honey Pecan Sticky Buns.

Now, I like cinnamon buns, but I LOVE sticky buns. So much so that – are you ready? – I only have them once every couple of years. Yep, you read that correctly. First, because most sticky buns aren’t worth the calories, and second, because I tend to lose control when good ones are around. The operative word here is “good,” and these are very, very good. Even Master Chow, a cinnamon bun devotee, thought these were outstanding, and particularly enjoyed the honey flavor that came through. The caramel was perfect – it did not break by teeth, nor attempt to pull out my fillings.

I used a clover honey, and coarsely chopped 1 cup of the pecans, but left the other 1/2 cup in whole pieces. I had a tablespoon of raisins left over from another project, so I threw those in. I ended up with 11 buns (that little nub you see is an end piece), not 15 (and I ended up eating four of them, or was it five?), so I baked them in a 9-inch Pyrex pie plate, which worked out perfectly. They did take a lot longer to brown than I expected – about 20 minutes longer, in fact.

The brioche dough was fabulous. Other recipes that I’ve tried had a very strong yeast flavor, but these rolls had a perfect balance of flavors and textures. Lordie, these were good. Gooey, sticky, crunchy, buttery . . . I could go on, but this IS a family blog. Definitely on the repeat list, and the beauty of the brioche recipe is that I can make a batch of cinnamon buns for Master Chow, and a batch of Honey Pecan Sticky buns.

To see how everyone else faired with their sticky buns, check out the TWD blogroll. For next week, Di of Di’s Kitchen Notebook has chosen French Chocolate Brownies. Recipe after the jump . . . .
continue reading "Tuesdays with Dorie – Sticky Buns! Yeah!"