almond chocolate biscotti . . . or chocolate toffee cookies.

Posted on July 3, 2012 by hilary924

i don't really understand biscotti. i like a gooey cookie. a chewy, melty chocolate chip cookie. i can handle a crispy cookie . . . a ginger snap or crumbly shortbread. but biscotti. what, my friends, is the point?

this isn't to knock the joy of dunking. i very much enjoy a good milk-soaked oreo or graham cracker. but the biscotti doesn't do it for me.

i tried here. the baking with julia recipe was for hazelnuts. but i decided to pull a total hilary. i used almonds. and rather than buying frangelico, i made amaretto.

that's right. i have two mason jars of boozy almond goodness in order to put two teaspoons of almond liqueur in these bad boys.

but neither the homemade amaretto or the judicious addition of chocolate could save the biscotti from their inherent hard as a rock biscottiness. they were lovely biscotti, easy to make (even with the exceptionally unnecessary step of homemade liqueur, a recipe for which you can find at shutterbean) and were munched down by italian and spanish fans alike at my euro cup party.

but still. if i'm going to eat a cookie, friends, biscotti will not get the job done. my newest cookie obsession will: chocolate toffee cookies, courtesy of smitten kitchen.

yeah, that's the stuff. the perfect slightly gooey center, crisp and chewy edges, intense chocolatey goodness with the crunch of slivered almonds and caramely, toothiness of the heath bar crumbles. dunking optional.

if you insist on enjoying biscotti, check out the recipe at tuesdays with dorie.

berries & cream cake

Posted on June 20, 2012 by hilary924

it was a good weekend, full of family, sunshine and good food.

also, many photos in extreme variations of lighting and camera source. brace yourself.

everything tastes better when eaten with your fingers and an endless supply of raspberry sauce.

goat cheeses and cherries . . . summer berry season is officially in full swing.

you know it's a good weekend when it includes more than one birthday cake.

berries & cream was my contribution.

chocolate on chocolate. purty.

my cake talked a good game. a light genoise, layered with macerated berries and whipped cream frosting.

my execution? well, it looks pretty. and i learned an important lesson about how long you really, really, really need to whip your eggs for a genoise.

the bottom layer did not raise. my generous father-in-law may have called it a tasty crust.

that's love, right there.

but, also? fresh summer berries, macerated in a little booze, plus whipped cream frosting? made for a very special birthday?

that's also love.

for the recipe – french strawberry cake - visit tuesdays with dorie. make extra whipped cream frosting and macerated berries. and whip your eggs!

twd: baking with julia: oasis naan

Posted on June 5, 2012 by hilary924

sometimes, i feel like fine dining is totally wasted on me when i would be perfectly happy just consuming the bread basket. sometimes (see friday night, to the somm's horror) a loaf of good crusty bread is dinner. add butter, cheese, maybe some honey. call it a day.

since the somm was in town and would prefer not to consume only carbohydrates, i decided to go ahead and try a few new indian recipes to go with the naan.

there was a half-hearted attempt to find friends to come share the mountain of food, but it ended up just being us.

no complaining here.

more easy chicken masala, caramelized cumin-roasted carrots, green bean, corn and coconut stir fry and raita for me.

every one of those recipes was easy and super delicious. light, and summery, not what you might think of when you think indian food, and worth sharing … or keeping to yourself.

but back to that naan. this recipe did not turn out the way i expected naan – which is usually soft, and chewy, and little charred. instead, i got a yeasted, crispy flatbread.

i tried baking them two ways: on my pizza pan that has lots of little holes that encourage crispness, and on the back of a cookie sheet, as recommended by the cookbook. no real noticable difference.

the problem was probably too much flour in the dough, which was necessary since the recipe called for TEN WHOLE MINUTES of hand kneading. which i handled like a champ, thanks to my fabulously gay drill sergeant of a weights class instructor. no master courvoisier, i wasn't whining. i just think a traditional naan dough should be wetter. and maybe involve yogurt.

while i don't think these were really naan-enough, and i probably won't make them again because my go-to bread recipe involves no physical exertion whatsoever . . . the bread was tasty and eargerly consumed by both the somm and myself. and just as good smothered in raita as butter. the big crystals of salt made them reminiscent of pretzels.

which are still so totally on my summer bucket list.

for links to the recipe, visit tuesdays with dorie.

baking with julia: strawberry rhubarb “shortbread”

Posted on May 30, 2012 by hilary924

summer has arrived. with a vengeance.

luckily, we can temper the crankiness brought on by heat and humidity with the sweet pucker of strawberries.

i love the classic sweet tart of strawberries and rhubarb. i like my food with balance. not too much one way or the other.

the way a sprinkle of sea salt on dark chocolate brings the sweet and bitter together a little more harmoniously on your tongue.

if it is pink, all the better.

i learned a new technique with this recipe. you put together the dough, chill it, and then grate it into the pan.

the grated dough sandwiches homemade jam of the strawberry rhubarb vanilla bean persuasion. don't be tempted to add something sweeter. it needs a bit of the sour bite of the rhubarb. and the vanilla bean deepens the flavor a bit. i love the almost woody caramel flavor of a real vanilla bean.

grating the frozen dough keeps the butter cold but brings a lightness to the finished cake. because, let us be clear.

if you are looking for the crisp crumble of a walker shortbread cookie, this is not your recipe.

this is cake.

have a bite!

For the recipe, visit Tuesdays with Dorie or buy the book!

twd: baking with julia: lemon bunny cake

Posted on April 17, 2012 by hilary924

there are two food traditions in my life: grandma's stuffing at thanksgiving and a bunny cake at easter.

i'll be honest, my earliest memories of this cake are more related to stealing jelly beans from the bunny decorations than the actual cake.

and then lying my pants off about it. i'm pretty sure my mom didn't buy it.

but i'm also pretty sure she's forgiven her sweet-toothed baby girl, because she still sends me an easter basket every year full of goodies . . . and always a dark chocolate bunny.

you're never too old for a dark chocolate bunny.

also?

you're never too old to fall for the homespun charm of the bunny cake. coated in coconut "fur", nestled on a bed of that insanely irritating easter basket grass, sprinkled with easter egg jelly beans.

the relatively tart flavor of the lemon pound cake and cream cheese frosting helped cut the sweetened coconut a little, but let's be real. this is a seriously sugary proposition.

in previous years, i've gone with a carrot cake for the bunny. it felt so meta . . . bunnies eat carrots, but we're eating the bunny, the bunny made out of carrots . . . why is this so entertaining to me?

one year, i tried to go a little more healthy by buying an actual coconut, smashing it open with a hammer, and then decorating the bunny with toasted brown freshly peeled coconut curls. it was amazing and wrong all at the same time.

and this is the other thing about my easter bunny cake tradition . . . it's supremely adaptable. easter, for the non-christian christians, is a holiday without a lot of baggage or rules. it isn't the holiday you'll fly across the country to visit the family for. it's the holiday you celebrate with the family you've created wherever you are – or the family you borrow for a weekend or egg-toss-filled brunch.

Lemon Easter Bunny Cake

You can find the recipe for the lemon loaf cake at Tuesdays with Dorie. I took the whole loaf recipe, but baked it in a 9 inch round cake pan instead. I also baked this Thursday night for serving on Sunday, and has happy to find the cake stayed moist and yummy wrapped in plastic wrap in the fridge.

To assemble, take a 9 inch round cake. slice in half so you have two half circles. Stand one up, and coat the flat side with thick frosting. (I used Joy's recipe.) Stand up the other half circle and press the flat side into the frosting so you essentially have half a layer cake standing upright on your cake stand or platter. If you have time, give the outside a thin frosting crumb coat and then refrigerate for 20 minutes or so to let the frosting set before adding your final coat. This helps make the bunny truly white white, but since you're adding coconut, it isn't completely necessary. Then lightly press coconut all over the bunny to create the fur. I like to add a ball of coconut as a tail. Eyes and nose are jelly beans, and I cut ears and whiskers out of paper. You'll need to cut little slits in the cake to insert the paper.

twd: baking with julia: pizza rustica

Posted on April 3, 2012 by hilary924

this baking challenge is certainly going to get me to make recipes i never would have otherwise.

take this "pizza" rustica.

i approached the recipe with extreme caution. i knew i could get behind the ingredients in the filling: prosciutto, ricotta, cheese, more cheese.

but baked in a sweet pie crust?

with a fancy-pants lattice top?

i mean, julia and dorie, are you for real?

i cut the recipe in half and baked the pie on a sunday and waited (waited! me!) until tuesday when i would have friends over to help me judge and consume what i feared would be calorie-bomb without much of a payoff.

well, i take it all back.

this was a delicious recipe. i mean. ricotta. mozz. parm. prosciutto. done. and the salty filling contrasted really nicely with the sweet crust. which – and we all know my fear of rolling pins – was easy to put together in the food processor, did not require time to chill, and was reasonably forgiving when it came to assembly.

the recipe omits an egg wash for the crust, which i added when i reheated because who wants a pale pie? it ended up a little toasty around the edges and a little pale in the middle where the filling sunk during the first and second trip to the oven.

twd: baking with julia: soda bread

Posted on March 20, 2012 by hilary924

how was your st. patrick's day? did your neighborhood turn into a green-tinged frat party like mine? the gloriously summer-like weather brought out all kinds of leprechauns.

after downing more than my fair share of a pitcher of strawberry margaritas, i felt old in the best possible way heading home at about 8 pm to continue celebrations on the couch with ryan reynolds, a bottle of bubbles and the yogi.

this soda bread came together in a snap for lunch the next day.

never one to leave a perfectly delightful, four ingredient recipe alone, i added cheese.

gloriously vibrantly orange sharp cheddar. i wish i could say it was of irish origins, but my corner grocery really just doesn't have that type of selection. all their irish cheddar was white.

and as far as we're at it, cheddar isn't really proper cheddar if it's from anywhere other than somerset england.

and their cheddar isn't usually orange anyway. you have to dye it to get it that bright.

but then, traditional soda bread isn't supposed to have cheddar cheese in it.

not even currants and caraway. that's totally american.

kind of like st. patrick's day.

wait, where was i?

non-irish cheddar. at least it lowered the bread's carbon footprint, right?

anyway, i threw tradition to the winds, added orange cheddar for those lovely streaks and then a bit of caraway for a pop of anise flavor. i'd recommend the combination, but if i made this again i might be tempted to veer even further off the usual soda bread path and add onions and maybe even poppy seeds for crunch.

as an added bonus, i think the fat and moisture of the cheese helped the bread stay fresh a bit longer than advertised by the recipe, which promised the bread would go stale within hours.

i had some for breakfast and dinner the following day and it remained delightfully rich and dense, made even better by toasting to firm up the crumb. and then i finally pitched into the freezer to save myself from eating nothing but soda bread for the remainder of the week.

all in all, a winner of a st. patrick's day weekend.

for the recipe, and to see lots of other lovely blogs featuring this soda bread, visit tuesdays with dorie, my culinary mission, or chocolate moosey.

twd: baking with julia: rugelach

Posted on March 6, 2012 by hilary924

as a kid growing up in southern california, rugelach were not abundant. we were an oatmeal cookie kind of family. as an adult, the cardboard specimens i ran across left me unimpressed. they always seems so dry. the filling wasn't gooey or rich enough.

this recipe CHANGED MY MIND. for serious. it was a multistage process, but it was worth every moment.

there was rolling. slash beating of that mighty hunk of dough with a rolling pin.

there was chilling. more rolling. slicing, dipping. way too much eating.

but these rugelach were some of the best cookies i've ever had. rich and buttery, coated in cinnamon sugar that gets crisp, caramelized, chewy.

i made two types – apricot and dried cherry, with homemade apricot lekvar, and dark chocolate with nuts and cinnamon.

lekvar is a type of jam made from dried apricots. the flavor is deep and rich.

i think maybe my secret was an excessive amount of filling. i did not manage to create much of a spiral effect, and that is even after i scooped a bunch of filling out of the way post first attempt, which, by the way, was fantastic over greek yogurt. no homemade lekvar went to waste here!

i'm pretty sure this isn't what the rolls of deliciousness were supposed to look like.

the dough kept melting and needing to be rechilled, making me curse the concept of rolled pastry, but silently, so the somm wouldn't think i was going too crazy.

the result was cookies that are almost like slices of pie – rich, chewy centers of dried fruit or chocolate, surrounded by the tender cream cheese crust.

just because it was a novel trick for me, i'm going to say that rolling the crust out with a dusting of powdered sugar instead of flour helped keep the crust so light and tender despite my repeated mangling attempts to get it to behave.

they aren't pretty, but man were they good.

this recipe made a lot of cookies. i tried foisting them off on friends, neighbors, coworkers, but still ended up freezing about a dozen.

and discovered a whole new way to love rugelach. oh, good lord. frozen, they are even chewier and more satisfying.

i really felt initiated into the community of rugelach lovers when describing my triumph to a friend's mother who seriously knows her way around good pastry and she whispered . . . have you tried them frozen?

yes, barbara. yes i have. there's no going back now.

seriously, if you have a free weekend, do yourself a favor and make these cookies. just be sure you have a distribution plan, or you WILL end up eating them all yourself. find the recipe in this book, or at tuesdays with dorie, including this week's hosts jessica of my baking heart and margaret of the urban hiker.

and here's this week's gratuitous shot of manchego, the cat who is too cool for rugelach.

twd: baking with julia: chocolate truffle tarts

Posted on February 21, 2012 by hilary924

this tart is truly decadent. chocolate crust. chocolate filling. it's bursting with chopped milk and white chocolate and biscotti.

naturally, i took it as dessert to a dinner party featuring about eight types of cheese.

at this point in meal planning, you just have to give up and embrace overindulgence as the theme of your evening.

as beautiful as the tarts came out, they were pretty simple to put together. instead of many individual tarts (which is too much tart for one person anyway) i made one regular sized tart and one smaller "for two" tart.

well, it should have been for two, but the somm was away, so i enjoyed it myself. in several sittings. so as not to go into sugar shock.

first, a note about crusts. my crust dough did not come together the way the recipe described.

i failed at the task of smearing it together with the heel of my hand. thus, when i went to attack it with the rolling pin, i mostly succeeded in scattering crumbs about my rollpat. slash all over my kitchen.

just pressing it into the tart pans worked out great. and i love any excuse to avoid the rolling pin. it stresses me out.

and i am NOT in the kitchen to get stressed out.

this is also the reason i prefer graham cracker crusts to traditional pie crusts. fruit crumbles to fruit pies. they taste better and there is less anxiety about your butter staying cold in order to flake appropriately.

maybe baking with julia will help me overcome my fear of rolling in desserts.

see how lovely and scalloped and only slightly "rustic" that edge is? my crust was a total winner. like a cookie. not too buttery.

the filling also set up firm. maybe it was those eight (eight!) egg yolks. the best way to separate eggs is to crack them into your hand and let the slipperly slimy egg whites fall through your fingers. it feels so wrong, but works perfectly. way better than shuffling the poor yolk back and forth between raggedly egg shell halves.

there are nearly equal parts chocolate filling and mix-ins. i thought the biscotti was a strange ingredient but it kept a nice crunch in contrast to the harder bite of the chocolate chunks and silky smooth filling.

check out those chunks in action.

despite my previous admonishment to simply embrace the excess of this tart just as it is, i will now caution you to back away from the thought of serving it a la mode.

i was tempted. i had visions of overly complicated homemade ice cream flavors.

but really?

all it needs is a scoop of light as air, soft whipped cream. maybe with a hint of almond extract to pick up the anise of the chopped biscotti.

so good. to seem more lovely tarts and find a link to the recipe, check out tuesdays with dorie.

twd: baking with julia: white loaves

Posted on February 7, 2012 by hilary924

today is the start of a fun new project for me: tuesdays with dorie. i'm one of more than 300 food bloggers who are going to bake their way through a cookbook: baking with julia by dorie greenspan.

i've been wanting to up my baking game, and this is goign to be a great way to try recipes i never would have picked out myself – sweet and savory.

enter this lovely white loaf.

despite my brief flirtation with challah, i've been in a serious monogamous relationship with jim lahey's no knead bread for the past year or so. it truly is everything i want in a bread. crisp, chewy crust. a french bread-like crumb, but dense and moist.

i was worried this white load would turn out too much like sandwich bread – soft, soft, soft. but it's more like the farmer's loaves ate my year abroad in england, sitting at the table in the student flat's shared kitchen, hoovering down slice after slice with nutella or honey or jam.

yes, yes i did gain 15 pounds that year. this would be why i ended up chucking most of this loaf in the freezer. save me from myself. amen.

the jim lahey bread is still my go to – including for a friend's cheese tasting party this weekend. it's just so easy to make.

but these loaves have a nice crust on them, a firm dense crumb. they were nearly as easy to put together (although you need either a very serious kitchenaid mixer or arms of steel for the kneading). the bread was tasty straight up, excellent toasted, and maybe even better a day or two later as french toast when the crust starts getting a bit stale.

i went a bit crazy with the photo shoot. i'm sparing you the process shots of dough magnificently rising to the ceiling, taking over my kitchen like the pillsbury dough boy. there's just something so satisfying about a bowl of dough rising like a muffin in the bowl, isn't there?

manchego got in on the action. you know he likes to be in the mix. also, he's a camera whore.

pensive kitten contemplates the wonder and joy that is freshly baked bread.

kitten decides bread is overrated as it is not roasted chicken, turns to magical january tulips.

although, maybe not so magical given this spring-like winter which has duped the daffodils to poke their sunny yellow heads out months early. lovely, but wrong, wrong, wrong.

good thing there's nothing like a slice of toast with orange marmalade to bring you back to the proper season.

for the recipe, or to check out all the other great posts, visit tuesdays with dorie.

Manchego's Kitchen

it's his kitchen. i just cook here.

Tag Archives: Baking with Julia