Baking With Dorie: Brown Sugar Bundt Cake

Chaya saved me the effort of making myself a birthday cake tomorrow by choosing this recipe for the BWD challenge this week. It's just what I wanted: simple, non-fussy and, judging by the deliciously caramel-sweet aroma of brown sugar and apples infusing my house, deeply comforting and flavorful. 

I'm afraid I can't say much about the flavors because I haven't sliced into it as yet - I'm doing what Dorie suggests and keeping it on the kitchen counter, tightly-wrapped. Till tomorrow. So that I can have myself a birthday cake. And I'm so sure it's a winner, like every recipe of Dories' that I've baked so far. 

You can find the recipe on Chaya's blog or on Page 179 of Baking: From My Home To Yours, by Dorie Greenspan. Be sure to check out the other BWD bakers here and here. This week we were joined by two new bakers - welcome Laurie & Rebecca! 

Our next challenge, coming up on August 30th, is Milk Chocolate Mini-Bundt Cakes on pages 188-9 of Baking: From My Home To Yours and has been chosen by Jennifer. If you'd like to join us, please drop me an email at needfulthings at ymail dot com. We'd love to have  you bake along with us!

Baking With Dorie: Mango Crumb Cake

I'm back. The hiatus is over. And I've discovered yet another delicious way to incorporate mangoes into a BWD challenge. This week Tina of My Domestic Bliss chose the Blueberry Crumb Cake and I had no choice but to play around with the recipe.

I have to admit that I didn't plan this one. It happened quite simply because I'm back home after days, had no time for grocery shopping and mangoes and pecans were what I had on hand. I love mangoes. I love streusel toppings. And I love pecans. It couldn't go wrong.

And I was right. This cake is light and super-moist; the buttery, sugary, streusel adds a nice crunch. The flavors from the mango in the cake and the cinnamon in the crust came together to form a complex flavor instead of overpowering each other. For me - the streusel is the super star in this recipe. There is nothing I didn't love about this bake!

Thank you for choosing this recipe, Tina! You can find the recipe on Tina's blog, My Domestic Bliss, or on Pages 192-3 of Baking: From My Home To Yours by Dorie Greenspan.

Please check out the blogroll here to check out the other BWD bakers. Our next challenge will be posted on August 16, and it is the Brown Sugar Bundt Cake, chosen by Chaya of Chaya's Comfy Cook Blog. If you'd like to join us, please drop me an email at needfulthings at ymail dot com. We'd love to have you bake along with us!

Baking With Dorie: Creamiest Lime Cream Meringue Pie

I'm speechless. Really. 'Sublime' doesn't quite cut it. 

This cheek-puckering, silky lime cream with its' hint of ginger surpasses the velvety deliciousness of the lemon cream we made for the Extraordinary French Lemon Cream Tart.

One of my favorite things about baking is the element of surprise - nothing really matches the fun of trying out a new recipe and then being bowled over by how much you love it. And so I have to admit that the lime cream was a delicious surprise. Combined with Dorie's sweet & flaky pie crust and the cloudy meringue, that does nothing to fight the zingy flavors at play, this pie is awesome. Awe-some. I played around with Dorie's suggestions (but you already knew I would) and added a layer of ginger and lime-infused mango cubes underneath the lime cream, but the flavor from the mango was barely discernible. I didn't mind. Didn't I already explain how the lime cream makes this a sublime pie?

A *huge* thanks to Elizabeth of Gluten-Free Baking 101 for picking the recipe this week. For gluten-free versions of this pie, please head over to Gluten-Free Baking 101. And please take a look at the BWD blogroll to check out everyone else's scrumptious pies. 

Our challenge for 2nd August is the Blueberry Crumb Cake and has been picked by Tina of My Domestic Bliss. If  you'd like to join us, please email me at needfulthings at ymail dot com. We'd love to have you bake along with us!

You can find the recipe for the Creamiest Lime Cream Meringue Pie on pages 337-339 of Baking: From My Home To Yours by Dorie Greenspan, or right here after the jump: 

Baking With Dorie: Lemon Cup Custard

If you've read my previous blog posts about BWD challenges, you'll know that I try to play around with these recipes - taking my cues from the alternative suggestions in the book. So, even though I chose the recipe for this weeks' challenge, I already knew I'd end up making anything but the Lemon Cup custard. 

And how glad I am that I tried other variations. In fact, I tried two: the espresso-cinnamon cup custard and the orange-star anise version. I'll eat anything with cinnamon in it (I even eat fruit with a generous sprinkle of cinnamon), so I knew I was going to love the espresso custard. And I did. 

The most enjoyable part of this challenge was baking these custards. I used espresso cups to bake my espresso-cinnamon custard and halved the recipe because I wanted to try more versions. The custard came out slightly jiggly after 20 minutes and I felt I might have under-baked it just a little.

I had plenty of custard left over but own only 3 espresso cups (don't ask me why). Since I was obsessed with the idea of making it in small cups, I baked the remaining amount in my daughters' tea cups (from Ikea). I loved how cute they looked:

This time I baked for 20 minutes again and it seemed just right. I cooled the custards overnight and dusted with cocoa powder right before taking these photos. I know it looks like specks of chocolate here but it's actually cocoa powder that just turned strangely solid, speck-like as soon as it came in contact with the very cold custard. 

Regardless of how strange it looked, the espresso custard was lovely - the texture was that of a classic baked custard but there was no eggy taste because of the strong flavors from the espresso and cinnamon (I think I may have used a lot of cinnamon - but I did say I love cinnamon, didn't I?)

Since I'd made the Espresso Custard a week back, I still had plenty of time to do another version but it was hard to decide which one. I almost discarded the idea, but then Tina sparked my curiosity by talking about the 'egginess' of the custard and how bakers from TWD had been generally unhappy with this custard because of the eggy factor and the lack of strong lemon flavor. 

I knew then that I had to do another version and find out for myself. I'd been partial towards the idea of Orange and Star Anise quite simply because I've never had a dessert flavored with star anise. Where I come from, star anise is used primarily in meat dishes, and then also, sparingly. The closest I've come to having it in something non-savory is green tea. So I was skeptical but too curious not to try it out. 

Again, I halved the recipe and used the zest of 2 oranges instead of 1. I had a star anise with just 3 points so I threw the whole bud into the milk instead of removing 3 points from it. After the milk came to a boil, I removed it from the heat and then let everything infuse for about 45 minutes (or a little more) instead of 30.

This time, I baked the custard in a bowl instead of ramekins so I wasn't sure about the baking time and may have over-baked it just a little because the center jiggled only slightly. The custard smelled slightly eggy & I couldn't be sure the orange flavor had really come through because once again, I refrigerated the custard overnight before finally tasting it the next morning. 

Let's just say it was simply wonderful! It took a few minutes for my taste-buds to adjust to the idea of star anise in a dessert, and then there was no looking back! It was slightly over-baked, but still very flan-like in texture with a wonderful burst of citrus flavor and the surprising warm undertone from the star anise. This recipe was, for me, a winner in every way and I may never go back to making custard with short-cut instant mixes when it is so simple to make it from scratch, and that too, with so many variations.

Do check out the BWD blogroll here and here to see the other versions of this dessert by my fellow BWD bakers. If you'd like to join us for our next BWD challenge on June 21 (Summer Fruit Galette, chosen by Elizabeth of Gluten-Free Baking 101), drop me an email - we'd love to have you bake along with us.

You can get the recipe right here, after the jump:

Baking With Dorie: Hidden Berry Cream Cheese Torte

Dorie Greenspan: where were you my entire life? 

My husband and I love a good cheesecake & so I've attempted to make it a couple of times in past years and always found it to be one of those elusive things that I just can't quite get right. Either I would burn the crust, under-bake the filling or the filling would split in the middle - making a very messy looking cake. In fact, I've never been able to make a cheesecake with a filling that didn't crack. And I've always found the recipes I've tried to be too sweet, too heavy.

When Elizabeth of Gluten Free Baking 101 chose this recipe for this weeks' Baking With Dorie challenge, I was prepared for cheesecake-fail. But then I thought: so far Dorie hasn't let me down & so maybe this time I would finally succeed in making a good & smooth-looking cheesecake!

The ingredient list called for cottage cheese which isn't available locally where I live & Ricotta is prohibitively expensive, so I told my baking partners Susi and Elizabeth that I would be making my own cottage cheese. 

That is easy enough. But then I couldn't come up with cherry jam and decided to make my own jam as well. I used David Lebovitz's directions for making cherry jam using two pounds of cherries; half fresh sour cherries and half frozen, dark & sweet ones. The directions are available here. Since I wanted a very thick jam, I used only enough water to cover the cherries, added the zest of two whole lemons and followed the rest of David's directions. The jam was ready in around half an hour & I've had a very, very hard time restraining myself from eating any of it before I could use it for the baking challenge today. It is so good & I like it even better than my homemade strawberry jam. 

Susi joked that I've turned this week's challenge into a Daring Bakers challenge by making all the ingredients by scratch. It's been a bit of work in that sense & I've stretched it over a couple of days like I did with the lemon tart we made for the last challenge, but I enjoyed it so much. 

I finally got around to baking the torte this morning. Dorie's instructions are easy to follow, and I thought I got everything right. . . 

But: my cake split again :( 

I got past my disappointment, waited for the cake to cool slightly and dusted with icing sugar. 

I released the sides of the pan but didn't try to remove the base of the spring-form pan that I baked in - just in case I broke the bottom of the crust and I didn't want to deal with that kind of disaster at this point.

Then I cut myself a slice of not quite-as-yet-cold-cheesecake. Pure heaven. I can only imagine how much better it will taste when completely chilled.

I think I finally succeeded in making the perfect cheesecake: perfect crust, smooth filling (except for the cracks) that wasn't too sweet. or too heavy Simple to make. Thank you Dorie! I've gotta tell you: I really love you!

For the recipe, check out Susi's page & do go over to Elizabeth's blog and see how she made a Gluten-Free version of this torte. 

Our next challenge is Tender Shortcakes on Pages 423-424, picked by Susi. If you would like to join the challenge, please drop me an email.

Baking With Dorie: The Most Extraordinary French Lemon Cream Tart

I have been more than ready for BWD Monday: this has been the longest, most exhausting and emotionally draining week for me. And so this recipe for Lemon Cream Tart, chosen this week by Elizabeth of Gluten Free Baking, was just what I needed to help me unwind. 

I turned it into a weekend project, and let me tell you: making this tart was a real labor of love. I started by making the lemon cream a day in advance. Now I love all things lemon - and any desserts with 'lemon' in the title sound wonderfully light and refreshing. Which is why I gawked a little when I read the recipe and discovered how much butter just the lemon cream requires: 21 tablespoons!! Yes, you read that right. 21. And 9 more in the tart. Did you just feel your arteries clog up upon reading that? I did! 

This was a tough one: I had to decide whether to play around and reduce the amount of butter or just go ahead and make it the way it is. But since this was my first attempt at making any kind of tart, I didn't want to mess it up. So, I chose the latter option, and decided to make mini-tarts and spread the love, so to speak, instead of making one large tart. 

The lemon cream: let's just call it extraordinary and leave it at that. Because I can't find a better word to describe how lovely it is: less sweet than lemon curd, tangy and silky with a burst of citrus flavor. In short: the stuff MY dreams are made of. 

Now if only it contained less butter! 

It took me just a little over 10 minutes to prepare the cream. I don't own a double boiler so I prepared it in a stainless steel bowl placed over a pan of simmering water. I wasn't really sure if I was getting it right - my candy thermometer crept up to almost 180F but the cream didn't look very thick to me. So I left it on for a few more minutes and then strained it into my food processor. My butter was very, very soft so it got incorporated pretty quickly. And my food processor didn't even protest, like Dorie had predicted it might. 

I still don't have much of a sense of smell and can only catch faint whiffs of stuff. Most of the time it is undertones that other people can't smell at all which makes me a freak of nature, so all I could smell was the eggs in this cream while I prepared it. I couldn't smell the lemon at all. While pouring it out into a jar for refrigeration, I decided I was going to give all the tarts away because I was definitely not going to like eating something that smelled so egg-ish. 

And then I licked my spatula. Oh my. 

I decided right then: I'm not sharing! 

And I also decided that I had to do one better than just simple Sweet Tart Dough and make it with either pecans or almonds. The lemon cream really deserved that little extra attention to detail.

So I reduced the amount of flour and made the Sweet Tart Dough with ground pecans like Dorie suggests. And I wasn't disappointed. I really loved the hint of nuttiness they lent to this tart.

Once again, the dough was easy to make and I didn't need to knead it at all because I figure I over-processed it and it formed a ball of dough right there in my food processor. I didn't have mini-tart molds with removable bottoms so I lined my mini tart pan with foil, which I greased lightly, pressed the dough in and froze the pan for half an hour. 

Since I have never made tarts before, I wasn't sure how thick the shells should be. And I had been warned by Susi that the dough could get flaky, so I kept them on the thicker side and made just 6. 

I ended up over-baking a little because I forgot that I was using a dark pan and should have reduced the temperature. No harm done: the tarts came out great. They were a little puffy in the middle so I pressed them down gently with the back of a spoon as soon as I got them out of the oven. I didn't put them back to bake longer even though the middles looked like they might be a little under-baked - I was too afraid I'd burn them because the edges were brown already. 

The only problem I had with this recipe was that when I took out the lemon cream out of the fridge the next morning the texture was not soft and pillowy as I had imagined, but a little on the harder side. I figured, I must have added a little more butter than called for: that is the only explanation I could come up with. Our sticks of butter here are not marked with tablespoon measures so we really  have to eye-ball it. 

Leaving the cream out on the counter for a short while solved the issue - it softened up and then I simply whipped it a little before adding to the tarts. The whipping seemed to have done the trick because I refrigerated the filled tarts, and hours later the cream was still soft. So it wasn't the quantity of butter after all. 

Will I make this again? Yes : but only if I can find a way to reduce the amount of butter in the cream. I really, really loved the lemon cream and artery-clogging it might be, but I am still going to save the leftover cream in my freezer and think up other uses for it. I dipped some gingersnaps in it & I loved the combination of flavors so it could be great as a filling for gingersnap sandwiches. Or something. I'll find a way to use it.

I'm beginning to think that every recipe in this book is extraordinary & I'm loving Baking With Dorie.

Check out what my fellow bakers Susi and Elizabeth have done with their Extraordinary Lemon Cream Tarts. 

For the recipe, follow me . . 

Split Level Pudding: Baking with Dorie

This week's Baking With Dorie challenge was selected by Susi of Susi's Kochen und Backen. She chose Split Level Pudding which is a vanilla pudding that has been layered over ganache.  

I have never made pudding from scratch before, and I honestly expected something to go horribly wrong. Amongst many other doom-filled scenarios; I envisioned myself whisking away at a lumpy, stubborn mess that would refuse to relent. Or a slippery, slimy one that wouldn't set up after hours of refrigeration.

But my pudding was almost perfect. I am saying 'almost' only because, for the Ganache layer, I used Lindt's dark chocolate with 70% cocoa and somehow, the bitterness from the chocolate really stood out and didn't blend well with the flavor of the pudding itself.  

But that being said, this pudding does taste dreamy. Had I used semi-sweet chocolate chips instead; the pudding might have tasted even better.  

It is a little labor intensive because you first make the pudding in a saucepan and then blend it in a food-processor, returning to the saucepan yet again to cook the pudding till it thickens. Dorie recommends processing it one last time to ensure a uniformly smooth texture.

And the texture is smooth, though it firms up a little after refrigeration. The ganache layer didn't harden at all while the pudding was cooling in the fridge (I had assumed that it would), but you do have to work at digging it out. 

I still can't believe I made this wonderful pudding and am secretly very impressed with myself! I would make this again & again with other variations suggested by Dorie Greenspan and a twist that I've thought of myself. 

The recipe can be found on Pages 384-385 of Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home To Yours. Or on Susi's blog. If you would like to join the challenge, please email me at needfulthings at ymail dot com. We'd love to have you bake along with us.

Blogging Break

I am finally moving today!

Catching a break now while I watch the movers spin their magic and condense our entire life into a bunch of boxes.

I have activated Blogger Mobile but it doesn't publish my posts, even though they show up as published. I'm hoping to get my internet connection back up and running by Monday so I can post the 2nd BWD (Baking With Dorie) Challenge on time. This week we're making Dorie's Split Level Pudding. I can't wait to see the other participating blogger's posts.

But for now, I'm going back to my herbal tea . . ;-) 

 

Baking with Dorie Greenspan

I've been feeling completely bummed.

Imagine my disappointment when I found out, right after ordering Baking: From my home to yours by Dorie Greenspan, that the original Tuesdays with Dorie baking group is now a closed group and no longer accepting new members.

While I support Laurie's decision to close the group and understand how challenging it has become to handle a group with so many members, I needed to get past my disappointment and find a way to bake along with the group any way. Especially since I ordered the book & know that I would end up not using it enough otherwise. 

So, Susi from Susi's Kochen und Backen and I got talking and decided that we would get together and start making recipes from the book & blogging about them. We decided to call our baking challenge 'Baking with Dorie'.

We won't be following what the TWD group is doing since they are already halfway through the book & Susi and I are just starting out. We will be posting our recipes only twice a month. Anyone who couldn't make it on the TWD group is welcome to join us as we start our baking adventure.

There aren't many rules: 

- Participants would have to own the book 'Baking from my home to yours' by Dorie Greenspan

- We'll be posting on alternate Mondays of the month so that gives everyone time to bake, document and take photos. 

- Participants would have to have a blog to share their baking experiences and photos on

- We're starting with the Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins on Page 10 & 11 of the book on March 1st. 

Please email me if you would like to join the challenge. 

See you there!