Daring Croissants

The Daring Bakers' Challenge this month was croissant ala Julia Child.

Yippy, yeah!

I was excited to get all up in making laminated dough. That's what they call layering butter with flour dough. There's puff pastry which isn't yeasted and danish which is and has eggs and is a little sweeter, then there's croissant. It's kind of the Mac Daddy. Do people say that anymore? There are few more obscure laminated pastries out there too like Kouign-Amann which is sugary and caramely. It's on my list to make at some point soon.

This was my first attempt.

Croissant trial No. 1 
Delightful!

I thought I'd give it one more go. My boss was full of stories about pain au chocolat and days as a college student in France. I just thought it would be an opportunity to make a good impression.

As I work in kitchens I made the dough at home and baked it off during my break.

Aren't I lucky to be working with ovens just outside my office door? I think so.


Pain au chocolat. Croissant dough cut rectanular wrapped around dark chocolate


One might say my colleagues are the lucky ones. I shared the croissant buttery goodness with them. I think that's what you might call influence.

"Hello, would you like a warm croissant?"
"Why? It's a hobby, this Bakers' Challenge thing. Don't want them all to myself."
"Oh, I'll just shut up while you enjoy...."

Before proofing

Baked and lovely

I really should have taken pictures of people eating them.

Really, I'm not so much self congratulatory as I am genuinely surprised at all the fuss. The peoples were really very happy while they ate them.

As for the challenge piece, I used to make them professionally twenty some years ago-dear lord-I was but a pup. And please know they aren't hard to do so much as it takes planning. A few minutes over the course of 12 hours or so depending on how much you want to wait. 

Here is a video of Julia Child making them if you are so inclined. I love her.

With Plum Preserves on Melamine
Extra pretty

Frankly, I'm not the biggest fan of fresh plums. But there are these hard little Italian pruning plums one only finds this time of year. I love them. Well, not fresh but cooked. I grew up baking them into a flat cake, done on a jelly roll pan, ala Gisela, my German step mother. Well, I bought some for a cake which I made and share, but alas too many, so I cooked the remaining down into preserves.

(I've since gone and bought 4 more quarts and have made a literal gallon of plum preserves.)

I served them up to to colleagues as well, on melamine, the institutional serving wear of choice. 



Candy Licious

For years I've wanted to participate in the Daring Baker's Challenge. It's a fancy pants baking group that montly post a challenge and then participants do their take on the it and blog about it. The blogs come out on the 27th. Hence today I'm blogging.

I'm so excited.

What I like about it is that I learn something that I otherwise might never have reason to know and I get my baking juju on.

The challenge for August was to temper chocolate. One had to mold chocolate or enrobe something and make a different candy.

Candied Mint

My first attempt was candied mint. I eggwashed and covered the mint leaves with superfine sugar. After that dried I coated it with tempered (seeded method) bittersweet chocolate. They were knock your socks off in flavor. The crunch from the sugar contrasted with the melty chocolate in your mouth.

Green Tea Coconut Truffle

I then made a green tea ganache and rolled that in toasted coconut. It made a lovely little candy.

Lilac jelly from the spring.

Lastly, I really wanted to make a molded candy. What you have is a peppered white chocolate filled with lilac jelly.

White Chocolate Black Pepper Lilac Candies

My process could have been better finessed, but the flavor was rocking.

There's plenty for me learn about candy making, but all in all, I'm pretty proud of how this challenge worked.

I'll be back in September!

Bacon Eclair

Maple Bacon Eclair- Winner!

Today is going to busy on the blog. Feast or famine, eh?

I need to celebrate that I won for a second year in a row at the Bacon Camp Throw Down, here in Columbus.

It's a cooking contest where the ingredient of choice is bacon and there are categories, sweet, savory, homemade and fake bacon. There wasn't a fake bacon entry this year. But the sweet category tends to get petty heavy with competition. Well, I took the prize; a nifty bag of bacon theme swag.

What did I do?

Pate a chou with rendered minced bacon. That was filled with a maple pastry cream (not pudding) topped with milk chocolate bacon ganache and then a sprinkle of crunchy turbinado bacon crunch. It took a fair amount of trail and error to get this just right. I'd go all Cook's Illustrated on you. Why the bacon needed rendered. How tasters liked the maple better than vanilla or elderflower filling. How bittersweet and semi-sweet chocolate overpowered the bacon flavor, so milk chocolate was the go to flavor. And the topping...it took 4 tries to get what I wanted.

Minis for the attendees. They were so cute!

But I get bragging rights. And yeah, I'll talk you through it if you really want to make them yourself. Hit me up.

I have to blog about my first Daring Bakers' Challenge candy making endeavors shortly too. That's been keeping me occupied this month too.

Cooking? Not so much...

Egg Day happened in April, but not in May because it would have fallen on Memorial Day.

Sadly, I've not been cooking much. I've been busy though. I suppose I did make Lilac Jelly again this year which turned out lovely.

I am now part of a group called Life(dot)Next, and there's incredible community building there. I also brought the movie, May I Be Frank to Columbus a second time this spring. Lastly, my Deaf and Blind kids are graduating so this time of the year is busy.

I think the biggest challenge to me getting into the kitchen is just some fair amount of stress about finding a new job. Mind you I'm in kitchens for work. That piece of my job I love! But it's not enough. The problems I solve are the same problems I've dealt with for decades. I want some new challenges. It makes a girl sad to think about leaving. Actually, I've only just recently wrapped my head around the fact that I really MUST leave. Not that it seems like a good idea or something I should investigate. There's been some relief in that, so I think the muddy cloud is lifting.

So there, the blog isn't dead or dying. Community and cooking are still key for me. Should  be fun to see it unfold.

Halla!

Green! I've Been Making Green Sweets!

Pandan Cake with Coconut Frosting

I work with a very young woman whose  people are from Thailand and Laos. She's a cook in one of my kitchens so I've been teaching her how to do that while she's sharing her some of her family's recipes with me.

It is so fun. 

Anyway along with durian (YIKES) she has had me try pandan.  I've fallen in love with the crazy green color and the subtle flavor. It's delightful. I have some leaves frozen, waiting to be beaten into paste. 

I also make cakes, or desserts actually, for all my staffs' birthdays. I came across an pandan cake mix at an import grocery. Yeah! I know! The directions weren't in English, but the numbers and pictures were enough for me to figure it out. She had a lovely birthday with a delicious crazy green cake. 

Green Tea Fudge

Green Tea Fudge

Then there was the recipe I came across for Green Tea Fudge at Not Quite Nigella. It needed Matcha-powdered green tea. It was amazing! I put that out by the coffee pot at work with a little sign because really, who's going to eat green fudge without being told it's tea? It was a hit! 

Green Tea Roll

Since I had the Matcha in the house I made a Green Tea Rolled Cake for a dinner party last week.  

A basic sponge filled with stabilized whipped cream and a strong green tea syrup to moisten the cake. Again, it was great. I loved how elegant it looked and my guests gobbled it up. 

Here are all the pictures. I've been having fun, but I've not had time to blog about it. 

Do you ever get on a jag? You know an ingredient or a technique you riff on? If so what? I've had meatball and peanut butter phases. How about you?  

Girl Scout Thin Mint Stuffed Cookie

I'm the mom who isn't the troop leader but who likes to participate, particularly when there's a call to cook something.

You see the daughter's troop is going to be doing the famous Girl Scout cookie sale outside a store tomorrow. There was a request to use cookies as ingredients so we can sample them to the folks coming by and hand out recipes. We are such over achievers where my daughter goes to school.


So I volunteered like I always do.

I also sit in the front of the class and actively interact with leaders at seminars. I'm that person. I'm okay with it. What I came up with were 4 recipes- A cookie, a pie, a salad (if you can call pudding a salad) and a soup.

The pie is peanut butter pie with Tagalongs mixed in and sprinkled on top-nothing crazy.

The salad is pudding, cool whip, canned oranges and crushed pineapple. Add Samoas for Tropical Samoa Salad.

The soup is pureed honeydew. Add whole blueberries and crumble Thank You Berry Much Cookies on top. I know a little weird and simple, super duper simple.


But the Thin Mint Stuffed Cookie? That was my brain child. A simple vanilla cookie dough that is slightly leavened wrapped around a thin mint. Taste? Awesome! 


2.5 cup butter
2 cup sugar
3 eggs
.25 cup milk
2 tsp vanilla (use mint flavor for a more minty cookie)
8 cups flour
4 T. baking powder
1 tsp salt

2 package Thin Mints

Sugar for sanding.

Cream the butter and sugar. Add 2 eggs, mix. Add milk and vanilla. In a separate bowl combine dry ingredients. Mix them into the butter. Will be a very dry dough.

For each cookie form two balls. One using 1 tablespoon of dough, the other using .5 tablespoon of dough. Flatten both. on the bigger round place the Thin Mint cookie upside down. Put the littler round on the bottom. Squish the dough around the Thin Mint evenly.

Scramble the remaining egg for egg wash. Brush each cookie, top with sanding sugar. Bake at 325 for 24 minutes.

So what kind of volunteer things do you do? Anything where you get to be creative? Let me know.

Oatmeal Cookie Goodness

They were wrapped for transport before
I thought to snap a shot.

If you work for me or with me there's a pretty solid chance I'm going to bake you some kind of deliciousness for your birthday. 

I'll let you pick what you'd like and I'll happily do my best to comply. I was asked for oatmeal cookies, or anything old fashioned, just to avoid chocolate. I know! Craziness. Who doesn't like chocolate? But your wish is my command or so it is when it comes to birthday treats.

I did what I do, which is I get on the internet and look up 3 or 6 recipes and see what works for me.

I made these jumbo cookies, from Cook's Illustrated, which you'd think would be perfect because it's Cook's Illustrated and they just weren't. I think they were as advertised, but they weren't what I was looking for. Too puffy, too domed.

You see once upon a time I baked at a bakery.

I did other things at that shop too, because they had pizza and subs and vegetarian soups (a bit of an identity crisis if you ask me-but it continues to work for the joint). At said joint I created THE best oatmeal raisin cookie. But for the life of me I couldn't find a similar one on the internet.

You may ask how can a girl know which recipe is which especially after 11 years away from the ovens?

There was a unique technique for these cookies that I'd never seen in other recipes. You mix the baking soda with water then mix it to the creamed butter and sugar. Well, hours on the computer looking and getting distracted I had an epiphany.

Wait for it.....

I looked in a cookbook on my shelf and BOOM there it was. I've gotten rid of many cookbooks over the years but this one is great. It's The Wooden Spoon Dessert Book by Marilyn M. Moore. I will have it in my home forever. I took her recipes as written below and made it my own back in the day and again this week for Andrew.

OLD FASHIONED OATMEAL COOKIES

1 c. shortening
1 tsp. vanilla
.75 c. granulated sugar
.75 c. brown sugar
.75 tsp. salt
.75 tsp. cinnamon
2 eggs
1 baking soda, dissolved in 1 tablespoon water
1.5 c. flour
3 c. rolled oats (old fashioned, not instant)
1 t. sea salt

Cream shortening with vanilla and sugars. Add salt, cinnamon and eggs. Blend well. Add baking soda which has been mixed with water. Add flour. Combine well. Add oats until mixed.

Scoop onto cookie sheets. Flatten with the bottom of cup and sprinkle with salt.
Bake @350 for 9-13 minutes until the edges are light brown.

If you want raisins add 1 cup with the oats.

These are perfectly chewy in the middle and crunchy on the edges. They have cracked tops and are pretty as can be.

What recipe have you been with obsessed with recreating or finding from your past?