Yeasted Banana Waffles and Gingered Orange Macarons

"We've gained weight! NO MORE DESSERTS!" were the words coming from A's lips that brought horror to my ears.

Now that the Christmas party is over and we are diving into the new year, A has decided that I shall be banned from baking desserts (with the exception of my monthly daring bakers challenges... I managed to get a pass for those). Fine. We have gained some weight. We should probably start the diet now. But no more desserts??? Can't I just make them? I don't have to eat them.

To be honest, I don't really love eating them anyway. I am sure that many bakers would agree when I claim that I like baking for the joy of seeing what I can create and the pleasure of watching others enjoy what I have created. I don't bake so that I can eat sweets every weekend. Quite the contrary - if you knew how many times I asked A if I could just throw my latest creation away so that we wouldn't have the sugary calories tempting us on the counter.

Let's see how long this ban on sweets lasts. I have already managed to get around it for this weekend as we have guests arriving from out of town. (A said I could still bake for guests, just not for us!). Next weekend is the antiques fair, and he has asked me to prepare macarons for all of the generous dealers who have set aside tickets at the front door. So I guess the moratorium starts in February?

Having out of town guests for us means a tremendous amount of advanced planning on our part - whether it is one guest or four (I should add that this is something we love doing!). I spend the weeks before pouring over recipes and restaurant reviews and concocting an itinerary around home cooked meals from a carefully selected menu, as well as a number of meals out at our favorite restaurants. As New York has no shortage of excellent restaurants, A and I usually lean heavily on brunches at home that will keep stomachs satisfied until dinner so that we can avoid expensive NYC snacks during the day.

So the menu for this weekend includes 3 brunches, and of course some sort of welcome cake to nibble on arrival. In addition to some of my go-to brunch items (quiche, scones, etc), I decided this was the perfect excuse to try a recipe I had been eying for awhile - yeasted banana bread waffles served with a fresh fruit salad. Waffles are sweet, but not dessert, right?

I originally found the recipe that I used on Seven Spoons. It caught my eye for two reasons - first, it was a recipe that could be prepped the day before, and second, it offered a new twist on an old favorite. The scent of spiced banana bread wafting through the air was enough to make this recipe worth it. The waffles themselves were delicious. Light, fluffy and not too sweet.

Finally, for our guest's wife who was left back in LA, a batch of gingered orange macarons packed for the plane.

Recipes after the jump!

Easy Weekend Breakfast: Cinnamon & Oatmeal Scones

There are few things I love more than lazy weekends at home with nothing to do but relax on the couch and enjoy the break from work. These are the days that I would love nothing more than to indulge in a home-cooking breakfast with fresh-out-of-the-oven baked goods. Of course, who wants to wake up in the morning and pull out the mixer first thing? Ok, me on occasion, but not usually. The answer - baked goods that can be prepared in advance and go straight from freezer to oven. To avoid giving in to an unsatisfying but effortless bowl of cereal, I like to keep my freezer stocked for bouts of laziness or mornings where lingering over coffee isn't really an option.


Scones are the perfect answer when I can't be bothered to cook a real breakfast or brunch but still want something a little more gourmet than cereal. The dough freezes beautifully, and frozen scones can be popped directly in the oven from the freezer. A few times a year, I like to mix up giant batches of dough so that I always have some on hand. I cut the dough into mini-scones and freeze it in zip-lock bags. When it is time for breakfast, I pull out what I want and put them on a cookie sheet into a pre-heated oven for about 20-25 minutes. A spot of jam, and voila, breakfast! 

The secret to this recipe is the cinnamon chips. I used to think that a chip is a chip is a chip... boy was I wrong. A few years ago my mother-in-law introduced me to Wilbur Chocolate and their wide array of chips or "buds", ranging in flavor from milk chocolate to butterscotch. I picked some up and started baking with them, using them as a substitute for Nestle, my previous go-to brand. While there was a noticeable improvement in the flavor of the stuff I baked, I did not realize just how much better the Wilbur buds were until I ran out and had to temporarily switch back to Nestle. A and I, spoiled, found the Nestle version nearly inedible. Now I order the Wilbur buds in bulk to ensure that I always have some on hand. 


There are several recipes for scones that I rotate through, but I think this one is my favorite. These pair well with blueberry jam and a hot cup of coffee. Brushing the tops with buttermilk and sprinkling them with a little demerara sugar will give the scones the slightest crunch - just like the scones from your favorite bakery.
 The recipe is pretty simple - mix all of the dry ingredients together in a food processor...

Add the oats and pulse a few more times. Then add the butter and pulse until you have a fine meal. Transfer the mixture to a large bowl and mix in the buttermilk and cinnamon chips. Mix until  the dough begins to come together. Turn out onto a floured surface and pat the dough into a large rectangle. Cut dough into desired size and shape. For this recipe, I like to cut bite-sized triangles.

Brush the tops of the scones with buttermilk and sprinkle them with demerara sugar. At this point you can either freeze the scones to eat later or bake them to enjoy immediately. Frozen scones will keep for months. I think I have cooked scones that have been frozen for up to two months with no deterioration in quality. If you plan to bake them immediately, stick them in a 425 degree pre-heated oven for about 20 minutes, or until the tops are golden.

If you have a sil-pat, I recommend using it to line the baking sheet while the scones cook. I have noticed that the cinnamon chips have a tendency to cook quickly, and occasionally burn if the scones are cooked on parchment paper or directly on the baking sheet.

Cinnamon & Oatmeal Scones
Adapted from Gourmet


8 oz all-purpose flour
3 oz brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tbsp baking powder
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
5 oz old-fashioned oats (not instant)
6 oz butter
2/3 cup well shaken buttermilk (plus extra for brushing)
6 oz mini cinnamon chips


See above for baking instructions.

Christmas in Salem: How to Prepare a Dessert Party for More than Twenty People

The Christmas party in Salem has come and gone in a flurry of flour and powdered sugar. Months of planning and stress resulted in a near picture perfect event for my "catering debut". The menu consisted of nine different desserts presented in bite-sized servings for twenty-five people.

Menu

Pear and Hazelnut Tartlettes

Apple Tartlettes

Flourless Chocolate Cake

Cheesecake with Blueberry Compote & Pomegranate

Coffee Macarons

Citrus Macarons

Marzipan Cupcakes with Bittersweet Chocolate Ganache

Salted Vanilla Cupcakes

Buttermilk Pudding

Overall, a tremendous amount of organization prevented party preparation from being too strenuous. A's family had worried that I would spend our entire stay cooking. While I didn't leave the apartment for three days (whatever, it was cold and snowing), I still had enough time for Christmas dinner and a few rounds of Scrabble. The plan worked seamlessly and all of the cooking and preparation was actually finished hours before the party started. The guests ate until they could not eat anymore, and thankfully, nobody fell into a sugar coma.

Here is what my plan looked like. When pulling together the menu, I made sure to select a number of items that could be partially, if not completely, prepared ahead of time to prevent unnecessary baking on the day of the event.

One Month Before

Prepare crusts for tartlettes and freeze

Prepare hazelnut frangipane and freeze

One Week Before

Poach pears and refrigerate

Bake macaron shells, store in an air-tight container

3 Days Before

Prepare dough for cannoli shells; refrigerate

Prepare white chocolate ganache filling for coffee macarons

Prepare compote filling for apple tartlettes

2 Days Before

Fry cannoli shells

Prepare meyer lemon/cream cheese filling for citrus macarons

Fill all macarons; refrigerate

Prepare and bake flourless chocolate cakes; refrigerate

1 Day Before

Bake marzipan and vanilla cupcakes

Prepare bittersweet chocolate ganache and refrigerate

Prepare buttermilk pudding, refrigerate in serving glasses

Unmold and plate chocolate cakes

Bake cheesecakes

Day of

Assemble and bake apple tartlettes

Assemble and bake pear tartlettes

Cook strawberry sauce for puddings; assemble and garnish puddings

Prepare vanilla cream cheese frosting

Frost all cupcakes

Unmold and garnish cheesecakes

Prepare cannoli filling; assemble cannolis

Prepare fresh whipped cream

... and this is what everything looked like:

 

 

 

 

 

Off to Whistler for some New Year's skiing!

The Daring Bakers December 2009 Challenge: Gingerbread Houses

The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.

I really should have opted out of this month's challenge. Gingerbread houses?? More arts and crafts than baking. December has been such a busy month, between changing jobs and preparing for the holiday party in Salem... the last thing I needed to do was spend hours slaving away over an edible house. So what did I do? I decided to invite my friends over for a Gingerbread House party... because when you don't have time to make one house, you should make three or four. What a mess. The party itself was fun, but this challenge was so labor intensive that I am going to have to opt out of future decorating-focused challenges. Much to my embarrassment, this challenge kicked my butt.

For the gingerbread, I opted to use the recipe from Good Housekeeping. I had all of the ingredients on hand, and the lack of butter and eggs made it feel like a cheaper option. I doubled the recipe and had enough dough to make four houses and some accessories. I was too tired to make the accessories or the fourth house - but if I had wanted to, there would have been enough dough.

The gingerbread dough was pretty stiff and difficult to roll out right when it was pulled out of the fridge. I had better results (and my wrists were much happier) with the chilled dough that had sat out of the fridge long enough to return to room temperature. A number of daring bakers complained that shrinkage during baking was a problem. Once I had rolled out my dough, I chilled it in the fridge for 30 minutes before baking and did not really have any problems with shrinking. Problems with the dough itself? That is a whole other story.

I don't know if it was an error in the Good Housekeeping recipe or the weight conversions that our hostess used when reprinting the recipe, but my dough was a mess. A crumbly, dry mess. It took about a half cup of water and several tablespoons of cream to get it moist enough for rolling... and at that point the dough had been kneading so much that it was nearly unworkable. At about 2am the night before the gingerbread party, I had to call it quits... sweaty and tired with wrist cramps... I just could not roll out any more cookies.

Instead of making my own template, I borrowed a basic one from Martha Stewart. I chose the template because it had a pattern for a chimney, which set it apart from other patterns I found on the internet. After two days of rolling out and baking gingerbread, I decided not to make the chimney. So much for the cute pattern.

In terms of mortar or cement, I stuck with royal icing and passed on the simple syrup glue. For royal icing, I used a basic recipe - 3 egg whites beaten to a medium meringue. 1 1/2 pounds of powdered sugar were gradually mixed into the meringue and beaten until the mixture was stiff and fluffy, stiff being the operative word. When I first started to think about how I would attack this challenge, I had visions of beautifully decorated homes dancing around in my mind - homes with perfectly piped icing, precisely placed candies, and possibly even some fancy marzipan or fondant modeling. Yeah. Right. The icing was a mess. Thick... heavy... and not pipe-able. It squeezed slowly out of the tip in thick globs that were so messy that after a few tries, I resorted to slopping it on the house with my fingers.

On top of all of that, our gingerbread houses also had structural issues. Somehow I put them together incorrectly which meant that the roofs were too small. We had to resort to an elaborate support system (using chewed gum as cement) to get the roofs to stay up. Ugh.

And voila - our gingerbread village. I wish I could say that a small child decorated mine, but alas, it is my own clumsy icing work. I can ice a cupcake with my eyes closed, but gingerbread houses are just not for me.

My recap of operation gingerbread makes it sound like I slacked off on this challenge. The sad thing is, that could not be further from the truth. I WISH I had slacked off. Instead, I spent WAY too much time on this with little to show for it. I told A that if our unborn children wish to build holiday gingerbread houses, they will have to visit a friend. This is the first, and last time that I would be doing anything like this.

Here's to hoping that the January challenge is more up my alley.

Pear & Hazelnut Tart, Citrus Macarons

I noticed that a number of people are stumbling across my little blog because it is coming up in google search results for "macarons" and "air-pockets"... I am assuming from people who are struggling to solve the problem of air-pockets in their home baked macarons. Since google seems to think that my blog should provide that information, I decided I should probably share some of what I have learned on this subject over the past few months of trouble-shooting recipes.

It took about 3 or 4 months of experimenting for me to find a reliable recipe. As mentioned in a previous post, I started working with a "french" method recipe, but ultimately settled on the Italian method, which seems more complicated at first glance but is actually much more forgiving. See this post for more information on the difference between the french and italian methods. Syrup and Tang also has an excellent explanation of the two.

With the french method, I never solved the air-pocket problem. I tried every oven temperature variation... I tried baking with two sheets to insulate the shells... I tried over mixing and under mixing... each time my shells looked beautiful but the texture was completely off. The exterior shell would crunch when bitten, revealing a large interior air pocket between the softer "cake". A combination of patience and Pierre Herme's italian method helped me fix this problem.

I noticed that even with the italian method, the air pocket problem still exists if you try to eat the shells fresh out of the oven. The air pocket also remains if you try to eat the shells immediately after filling them. Interestingly, if you fill the shells and then refrigerate them for about 24 hours, the air pocket disappears and the macarons have the delicate texture of those you find in a professional bakery. I think it has something to do with the shells absorbing some of the moisture from the filling - it softens the interior and just helps the whole thing come together. Moral of the story - macarons can't be rushed!

Moving on to this week's baking... as the Christmas party in Salem rapidly approaches, I find myself trying to squeeze in a few last test runs to make sure that everything comes out alright. We had a dinner party on Friday night, and as usual, I volunteered to bring dessert. I had a ton of leftover hazelnuts, so I thought I would give the pear frangipane tarts another go. The first time I experimented with this recipe, I did a straight walnut frangipane. It was okay... A loved it... but I did not think that the walnuts were flavorful enough when paired with the poached pears. Hazelnuts did the trick, giving the tart a more interesting flavor. Whipped cream or vanilla ice cream adds a nice touch. A miniature version will be added to the Christmas menu.

And of course some macarons to accompany the coffee. Now that I can make them, I will gladly jump on any excuse to whip up a batch. Leftover meyer lemon curd meant citrus macarons were on the menu.

Recipes after the jump!

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I am a macaron master: Hazelnut, white chocolate and coffee macarons

I have finally mastered the macaron. Okay, so maybe I haven't exactly mastered it, but I am close enough that I can pretty much make a batch of decent cookies on demand, whenever I want. Music to A's ears... my phone call on Friday afternoon announcing that I would no longer need to make macarons every weekend. I had finally found the right recipe and honed my technique to the point that I can produce reliable macaron shells at any time. Other home bakers out there who have tried to make macarons will understand just what a triumph my success was. (This funny write-up describes the macaron obsession accurately.)

A few weeks ago, my Pierre Herme macaron cookbook arrived from France. After a few days studying and translating the recipes, I had decided that it was time to pull out the mixer and start separating some eggs. At first, I found his recipe a little intimidating due to its call for the use of a thermometer. All of my past attempts at macarons had involved the French method, while Herme recommends using the Italian method. The difference is that the French method involves whipping egg whites and sugar into a stiff meringue and then incorporating the dry ingredients. With the Italian method, it is necessary to prepare a hot sugar syrup that is then poured into the meringue to produce a stiff Italian meringue that almost has the texture of marshmallow.

The Italian method involves a few extra steps, but it yields much more reliable results. Perfectly smooth shells with fluffy feet and, most importantly, no air-pocket inside. Another bonus - overmixing is not as much of a problem as it is with the French method. In fact, in my trial and error, I found myself undermixing more often than overmixing. If the batter looks lumpy, keep mixing. If you see beaks forming on the tops of your shells as you pipe them out and those beaks refuse to sink into the shell after a few seconds, keep mixing.


You might ask after seeing the photos... why do they have a funny blueish-green tint? Honestly, I was so convinced that I would fail yet again, that I thought this would be a good time to play with food coloring. I added some blue dye just to see what would happen. Of course this would be the time that the batter cooperates, leaving me with beautiful, but oddly tinted cookies.

A little hazelnut garnish on top gives these a little something extra.



Here is the recipe I used, adapted from Macaron, by Pierre Herme:

Macaron Shells
yield: approximately 36 sandwiches or gerbet

60 grams hazelnuts
110 grams egg white, aged
300 grams powdered sugar
150 grams almond meal
37 grams water

Preheat the oven to 360 degrees. Spread the hazelnuts on a baking sheet. Toast in the oven for 15 minutes. Remove hazelnuts from oven. Place nuts in a plastic bag and crush them with a rolling pin.

Whisk the almond meal and 150 grams of the powdered sugar together in a small bowl. Add 55 grams of egg whites to the top of the mixture. DO NOT mix in the egg white. Set the mixture aside.

Mix 150 grams of powdered sugar and the water in a small sauce pan. Put 55 grams of egg white into the bowl of a mixture and begin whipping to create a stiff meringue. Begin heating the sugar/water mixture on medium high heat to create a simple syrup. When the syrup reaches approximately 245 degrees, remove it from the heat and slowly add it to the meringue by pouring the hot liquid down the side of the mixing bowl as the mixer is still running. Continue to beat until the mixture cools.

Fold the almond/sugar/egg white mixture into the meringue, using firm strokes at first to incorporate all of the dry ingredients. Continue to mix carefully until the mixture has the texture of cold honey. If you lift the batter up with the spatula, it should fall off slowly in thick ribbons.

Transfer the batter to a piping bag and pipe onto a parchment or silpat covered baking sheet. Sprinkle hazelnuts over the tops of the shells. Let the piped shells rest for approximately thirty minutes, or until they are dry to the touch. Bake in a pre-heated over at 345 degrees for 15 minutes, or until the shells show slight color.

Remove from the oven and let the shells cool for a few minutes, then slowly remove them from the parchment paper and move them to a rack to cool completely.

Coffee Ganache
200 grams white chocolate
200 grams heavy cream
10 grams coffee

Melt the white chocolate over a hot water bath. Meanwhile, bring the cream to a boil over medium-high heat. Once the cream is boiling, add the coffee and remove the mixture from the heat. Cover and let steep for a few moments until the coffee has infused some flavor into the cream. Strain through a fine mesh sieve and mix into the melted white chocolate. Pour the chocolate mixture into a glass dish and cover with plastic wrap so that the plastic is touching the surface of the chocolate. Refrigerate until the chocolate has a firm yet creamy texture.