I have now joined the Daring Baker blogger challenge. This is a community of people with baking/food blogs, and every month, one of the participants hosts that month's challenge and gives everybody a recipe that they have to bake and write about on their blog. Thus, hopefully this should ensure that I produce some more content for this blog (at least one post per month).
I should find out what the first challenge by the beginning of next month (but you are not allowed to tell anyone what it is before the "reveal date" of the 27th in the month.
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
Pico de gallo and guacamole
It's been way too long since I wrote something here, so even though this doesn't deal with baking, but other food, I hope that's OK with you all. A few days ago I found the Pioneer Woman's cooking blog. I initially found another recipe on her site, but after a while I became quite intrigued by her recipe (and most importantly, the pictures) of pico de gallo and guacamole.
I started with this:
I couldn't find jalapeño in my grocery store, so had to go for another kind of chili. I don't have as many pictures as the pioneer woman of the work in progress, but this is the result:
Not a great picture, but the result was really really good. I'm normally not much of a guacamole enthusiast, but this one was really good. And since it's all vegetables, it should be fairly healthy as well (apart from the tortilla chips to eat with it).
I started with this:
I couldn't find jalapeño in my grocery store, so had to go for another kind of chili. I don't have as many pictures as the pioneer woman of the work in progress, but this is the result:
Not a great picture, but the result was really really good. I'm normally not much of a guacamole enthusiast, but this one was really good. And since it's all vegetables, it should be fairly healthy as well (apart from the tortilla chips to eat with it).
Thursday, 10 April 2008
Four Nut Brownies by Delia
Last night I made a first attempt at one of the recipes from the Delia Smith recipe book that I received for my birthday. I decided to start off with a brownie recipe. I don't really have a good brownie recipe, and this was something that is fairly easy to make and is likely to be good. The brownies turned out really well. A slight crust on top and very moist and chewy inside, just like brownies should be. Picture and recipe below.
Recipe:
Recipe:
100g mixed nuts (macadamia/brazil/pecan/hazelnuts)
50g dark chocolate
110g butter
2 large eggs, beaten
225g granulated sugar
50g flour
1tsp baking powder
1/2tsp salt
Preheat the oven to 180C.
Chop the nuts roughly and place on a baking sheet and toast them for 8 minutes in the oven.
Chop the chocolate and put it together with the butter in a heat-proof bowl over a saucepan with simmering water. Let the chocolate and butter melt and stir until well mixed.
Take off the heat and add all the other ingredients and mix well.
Pour the batter into a 15*25.5cm greased baking tin and bake for 30 minutes. Let cool for 10 minutes before cutting into squares.
Monday, 7 April 2008
A final birthday cake
As this past Wednesday was my actual birthday, I did have to make some kind of cake for it.
I wasn't really in the mood to do something extremely complicated, so once again, I went back to my new go-to-cake. This was the fifth cake I made for this birthday. At least, this time I have a picture of a slice of the chocolate cake with ricotta cheesecake swirls in it:
I wasn't really in the mood to do something extremely complicated, so once again, I went back to my new go-to-cake. This was the fifth cake I made for this birthday. At least, this time I have a picture of a slice of the chocolate cake with ricotta cheesecake swirls in it:
Thursday, 3 April 2008
The latest addition to my library
Here is my latest addition to my baking library.
A friend gave me "The Delia Collection - Chocolate" by Delia Smith as a birthday present. A very good gift indeed. I've only had time to browse through it quickly yet, but there certainly seem to be many recipes that I need to try out (and I will make sure to report the results here).
A friend gave me "The Delia Collection - Chocolate" by Delia Smith as a birthday present. A very good gift indeed. I've only had time to browse through it quickly yet, but there certainly seem to be many recipes that I need to try out (and I will make sure to report the results here).
Monday, 31 March 2008
Another year, another birthday
In a couple of days it is time for another mid-life crisis as I turn 30. I have however already had some birthday celebrations as I spent Easter and last week back home in Sweden, so I took the opportunity to have an early birthday party for my friends back home (granted, before this I had already had two previous smaller birthday celebrations - one for friends who couldn't make it for this one to which I made the Cloud forest chocolate cake (no pictures) and one for family for which I made my old trusted favourite described in a previous post here).
Given that I had already done a fair amount of baking I wasn't really in the mood for anything overly complicated for this party. The photos below show the two cakes that I had. The one to the left is a traditional Swedish "gräddtårta" and consists of three layers of genoise with a mixture of mashed bananas and strawberrys between the layers, and coated with whipped cream. Very simple and very good. The decoration was made by my sister and is a portrait of me back in the days when I used to have a beard. :)
The other cake is a bittersweet chocolate charlotte. I've been looking at this recipe for a while, wanting to try it, so I figured this was a good occasion to give it a go. Once again, I received some help from my sister in stacking the ladyfingers in the bottom and around the sides of the pan. We didn't have enough ladyfingers to cover the top of the cake as well, so I just put some white chocolate shaving on it. I probably won't make this cake again. Everybody liked it and thought it was very good, but I was not thrilled. I didn't really like the texture of it, and given the amount of effort it after all required, I could probably do something better. The pictures also shows some cookies that my mother had made previously that I retrieved from the freezer.
Oh, I just remembered, that while not on the pictures, I also made a last minute batch of these chocolate and almond meringues from foodbeam that are very good.
Given that I had already done a fair amount of baking I wasn't really in the mood for anything overly complicated for this party. The photos below show the two cakes that I had. The one to the left is a traditional Swedish "gräddtårta" and consists of three layers of genoise with a mixture of mashed bananas and strawberrys between the layers, and coated with whipped cream. Very simple and very good. The decoration was made by my sister and is a portrait of me back in the days when I used to have a beard. :)
The other cake is a bittersweet chocolate charlotte. I've been looking at this recipe for a while, wanting to try it, so I figured this was a good occasion to give it a go. Once again, I received some help from my sister in stacking the ladyfingers in the bottom and around the sides of the pan. We didn't have enough ladyfingers to cover the top of the cake as well, so I just put some white chocolate shaving on it. I probably won't make this cake again. Everybody liked it and thought it was very good, but I was not thrilled. I didn't really like the texture of it, and given the amount of effort it after all required, I could probably do something better. The pictures also shows some cookies that my mother had made previously that I retrieved from the freezer.
Oh, I just remembered, that while not on the pictures, I also made a last minute batch of these chocolate and almond meringues from foodbeam that are very good.
Wednesday, 5 March 2008
Coeur Velours
Ever since I saw the post about the Coeur Velours (Velvet Heart) over at Foodbeam, I have been looking for an occasion to make it. Given that it's a Pierre Hermé creation it is from the offset guaranteed to be a great recipe. Add into the equation that this is basically an entrement version of a Plaisir Sucré, and you can hope for nothing less than total bliss.
Yesterday was my friend's birthday, and one can hardly find a better excuse than that to try out a recipe like this. It's a win-win situation - I get to try out a recipe that I've wanted to try for a long time (and, not to forget, get to eat some of the cake), and she gets a nice birthday cake like she deserves.
The cake has the following layers:
A disk of hazelnut daquoise
A layer of praline feuilleté spread on this
Three thin sheets of milk chocolate, with a milk chocolate ganache between each of the sheets
A fairly thick layer of milk chocolate chantilly
Another hazelnut daquoise
The entire cake is then covered with a milk chocolate coating and sprinkled with toasted hazelnuts for decoration.
Comments:
While the resulting cake is quite impressive, just like the Plaisir Sucré, the recipe is straight-forward to work with and has the benefit that most of the different components can be made separately ahead of time and kept frozen until it is time to assemble them. This certainly makes it easier to find time to make a fairly ambitious project like this or the PS. Each component is reasonably simple to make (but it certainly doesn't hurt to have some baking experience - this probably shouldn't be the first cake that you attempt to make, with one notable exception (which is the same thing that was a hassle when making the PS) - the chocolate sheets. While the recipe allocated a total of 15 minutes for the tempering of the chocolate and the creation of the chocolate sheets, I fortunately have enought insight into my abilities in this area to expect this part of the process to take slightly longer. After about two hours (and a fair bit of chocolate pieces on the floor), I was done. First of all, tempering chocolate is a bit of a hassle in itself, as it is a very delicate process where the temperature ranges for the chocolate are very precise and it is easy to overshoot the target temperature when reheating it (if you are not aware of what tempering of chocolate is, it is basically a process in which the chocolate is first melted and brought up to a certain temperature, then it is cooled down to a lower temperature, and then reheated again to a temperature in-between to two others... this is done to make the crystals that make up the chocolate re-arrange themselves in the proper way to make the chocolate have the right "snappy" consistency). Once the chocolate is tempered, one has to work quite quickly to spread it on sheets to create the thin layer of chocolate that will make up the three circular sheets that go into the cake. Finally, there is the process of removing the chocolate from the plastic without breaking the chocolate sheets (this is even more difficult here than for the PS, as each sheet is much larger for this cake).
My cercle à pâtisserie was also larger than the 19cm prescribed in the recipe. I scaled up the amount of praline I made, but not the chantilly and ganache, which I probably should have. I think that the amount of chantilly was still enough, but it would have been good to have some more ganache to get a larger distance between the chocolate sheets (especially when you are cutting the cake, the trio of chocolate sheets will be a bit compressed in some places).
Just as expected, the cake was very good. One of the best things with making cakes and dessert is to watch peoples' faces as they take the first bite of what you have made. When you have made something good, that expression says so much more than words (though the words of the birthday girl and the others who tried this cake were also very positive), and that is what I strive to achieve with all the things I bake.
While the cake basically is mostly milk chocolate presented in different ways, it is very interesting with several different textures that combines together wonderfully. It has the smoothness of the chantilly and ganache, the chewiness of the daquoise, the crunch of the praline, and the snap of the chocolate sheets.
Finally, here are the pictures of the cake. (Yes, I know... I need to start putting more effort into the pictures and have nicer backgrounds.)
The cake under construction:
The assembled cake in the sunlight:
Waiting to be eaten:
A slice:
The remains:
Yesterday was my friend's birthday, and one can hardly find a better excuse than that to try out a recipe like this. It's a win-win situation - I get to try out a recipe that I've wanted to try for a long time (and, not to forget, get to eat some of the cake), and she gets a nice birthday cake like she deserves.
The cake has the following layers:
A disk of hazelnut daquoise
A layer of praline feuilleté spread on this
Three thin sheets of milk chocolate, with a milk chocolate ganache between each of the sheets
A fairly thick layer of milk chocolate chantilly
Another hazelnut daquoise
The entire cake is then covered with a milk chocolate coating and sprinkled with toasted hazelnuts for decoration.
Comments:
While the resulting cake is quite impressive, just like the Plaisir Sucré, the recipe is straight-forward to work with and has the benefit that most of the different components can be made separately ahead of time and kept frozen until it is time to assemble them. This certainly makes it easier to find time to make a fairly ambitious project like this or the PS. Each component is reasonably simple to make (but it certainly doesn't hurt to have some baking experience - this probably shouldn't be the first cake that you attempt to make, with one notable exception (which is the same thing that was a hassle when making the PS) - the chocolate sheets. While the recipe allocated a total of 15 minutes for the tempering of the chocolate and the creation of the chocolate sheets, I fortunately have enought insight into my abilities in this area to expect this part of the process to take slightly longer. After about two hours (and a fair bit of chocolate pieces on the floor), I was done. First of all, tempering chocolate is a bit of a hassle in itself, as it is a very delicate process where the temperature ranges for the chocolate are very precise and it is easy to overshoot the target temperature when reheating it (if you are not aware of what tempering of chocolate is, it is basically a process in which the chocolate is first melted and brought up to a certain temperature, then it is cooled down to a lower temperature, and then reheated again to a temperature in-between to two others... this is done to make the crystals that make up the chocolate re-arrange themselves in the proper way to make the chocolate have the right "snappy" consistency). Once the chocolate is tempered, one has to work quite quickly to spread it on sheets to create the thin layer of chocolate that will make up the three circular sheets that go into the cake. Finally, there is the process of removing the chocolate from the plastic without breaking the chocolate sheets (this is even more difficult here than for the PS, as each sheet is much larger for this cake).
My cercle à pâtisserie was also larger than the 19cm prescribed in the recipe. I scaled up the amount of praline I made, but not the chantilly and ganache, which I probably should have. I think that the amount of chantilly was still enough, but it would have been good to have some more ganache to get a larger distance between the chocolate sheets (especially when you are cutting the cake, the trio of chocolate sheets will be a bit compressed in some places).
Just as expected, the cake was very good. One of the best things with making cakes and dessert is to watch peoples' faces as they take the first bite of what you have made. When you have made something good, that expression says so much more than words (though the words of the birthday girl and the others who tried this cake were also very positive), and that is what I strive to achieve with all the things I bake.
While the cake basically is mostly milk chocolate presented in different ways, it is very interesting with several different textures that combines together wonderfully. It has the smoothness of the chantilly and ganache, the chewiness of the daquoise, the crunch of the praline, and the snap of the chocolate sheets.
Finally, here are the pictures of the cake. (Yes, I know... I need to start putting more effort into the pictures and have nicer backgrounds.)
The cake under construction:
The assembled cake in the sunlight:
Waiting to be eaten:
A slice:
The remains:
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