Savory Brioche Pockets - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - 33rd Installment.  The recipe is Savory Brioche Pockets.

Believe it or not, I think all this scheduled baking is actually improving some of my skills!  I found myself handling the Brioche dough and thinking it was no big deal.  I've also started planning ahead more, so that I expect baking projects to take two days, and then when they don't, it's a pleasant surprise :-)
These were quite yummy, and I can see the many possibilities - looking forward to seeing what my fellow TWD bakers have stuffed in their pockets.  The potato/goat cheese mix is a good base, and I used both asparagus and roasted red pepper on top of it.  I like the flexibility of having the dough in the fridge overnight, and maybe I'll try putting some in the freezer sometime.  It would be good to pull dough out and make some of these.  
I baked them a little too quickly - had the oven up too high - so they were slightly darker than desired, but there were delicious anyway.

Roasted red pepper strips

Asaparagus

Fresh Rhubarb Upside Down Baby Cakes - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - 32nd Installment.  The recipe is Fresh Rhubarb Upside Down Baby Cakes.

Whipped cream mandatory, rather than optional :-)

Yummy!  This was one of the recipes I had made before, and written "Stupendous" in the book.  It was just as good the second time.  The directions for this recipe are very clear - plenty of detail to guide you, which is especially important when dealing with caramel, which I never quite feel I have mastered.
I had to use a combination of various small pans (since I don't have official "baby cake" pans).

Caramel and rhubarb in pans

I set them all on a jelly roll pan for ease in moving in and out of the oven.  Both the caramel and the batter were easy to mix up (actually had my ingredients at room temperature this time).  

Batter on top of rhubarb caramel

We don't quite have local rhubarb yet, so this was made from out-of-town rhubarb :-) 
The smaller pans cooked more quickly, and I took them out first. And best of all, most of the caramel and rhubarb released from the pan.  I just had to scoop a little of it out of the bottom of the pan and replace it on the cakes.  A success, and pretty low-stress over all!

Madeleines - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - 31st Installment.  The recipe is Madeleines.

OK, so they're not exactly Madeleines....

I had to take the ladyfinger option, since I don't (yet) own a Madeleine pan.   I didn't realize that they are the same batter.

The subtitle of this post really should be 'Don't Forget to Set the Timer'!  They were not quite done, so I put them back into the oven for just one more minute, and didn't kick off the timer to remind me to pull them out.  Five minutes later....eeeeek!  You can see the result above - at least they were edible, if drier than I really wanted.

This was definitely a bit fussy, but that was OK - they're not called 'Rustic Madeleines' after all :-)  I followed the directions, and they went pretty well - interesting method, whipping the eggs and then folding the butter in at the end.

After gently folding in the butter

The batter spread out/flattened a bit more than I thought it would.  I ruled the lines onto the parchment, and piped the ladyfingers at the prescribed distance apart, and a number of them merged into their neighbors, which was OK because the recipe then told me what to do in that situation - cut them apart with a pizza cutter (well written recipe, as usual!).

I made a half batch, since I knew we didn't have enough people to eat an entire batch, and the recipe said they don't keep very well.  Next time maybe I'll make a whole batch and use part of it for Tiramisu or something like that.  

Looking forward to seeing the TWD group's variations on this one....

Rustic Potato Loaves - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - 30th Installment.  The recipe is Rustic Potato Loaves.

Here I am, running to catch up with Tuesdays with Dorie...I was so caught up in my day-to-day living that I didn't check the site to see that our first recipe was 'due' in the very first week of April - by the time I looked at the site, I had missed the 'deadline' - oops!  So I squeezed this project into last weekend, and was so glad I did.  I loved this recipe, and so did my family. 

They just fit on the baking stone

 Any kind of potato bread tends to draw raves around here, and this was no exception.  And it was SO EASY and SO FAST.  I couldn't believe the short rising times (20 minutes?!?) produced such a delicious result.  I love the way the seam on the bread turned into a big slit in the top of the loaf - I was surprised I didn't have to slash the bread to make that happen.

It helped to have a Kitchen Aid for the lengthy kneading, and a baking stone, to enhance the crusty texture.  I appreciated the specific directions in the recipe about the texture of the dough - it seemed too dry initially, but the mixing worked its magic.  I think it might have to do with the moisture in the potatoes gradually making its way into the dough over the course of mixing.  

Mocha Chocolate Chip Cookies - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - 29th Installment.  The recipe is Mocha Chocolate Chip Cookies

Wow!  This was yummy, and just as easy as it looked.  Thanks to the tips people provided before hand on the TWD chat, I used Starbucks Via decaf instant coffee, so people wouldn't have to be caffeinated just by eating a cookie.  It gave very good flavor.
Some household members were horrified at the thought of dried fruit 'contaminating' their chocolate/coffee flavor, so I made half of the batch without the apricots.  For the other half, I used dried cherries (from Traverse City, MI - Cherry Capital :-) and it was a delicious combination.
(I actually made this recipe on time for the deadline, but life was so busy I didn't get to post until now!)

Croissants - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - 28th Installment.  The recipe is Croissants.

Loved this recipe - delicious result and it is quite a project!  I had made croissants from a different recipe before, so I had a little bit of prior experience.  It was very helpful to watch the video from the TV series to see some of the techniques for the initial step of adding the butter and flattening the dough to embed the butter inside.  I mixed first thing on Saturday, took all day Saturday as the eight hour rise, did two turns on Saturday evening, and then the last turn, plus shaping and final rising on Sunday, ending up with the first batch coming out of the oven at 11:00.

I made 3/4 of the recipe as plain (actually they're anything but plain) croissants, and 1/4 as chocolate.  It seemed essential to stick with the times to keep the dough very cold, and it was good to prepare this in the winter, since it didn't warm up much when I worked on it at each stage.  The dough really seemed durable to me, rather than fragile - really not to hard to work with.

The last phase, where you shape them (an hour or more of work) and then they rise for 3-4 hours seems problematic - how does one have croissants for 9:00 am breakfast?  Clearly the workers in those patisseries are chronically sleep deprived :-)  I got up at 5:30 a.m to get the last turn in, and we ended up eating them in the late morning and then the chocolate batch in the late afternoon.

I felt the results were fairly authentic (I'm sure with more practice, they would be even better), but I will be on the lookout for how to manage this without it ending in the middle of the day - I'd really like to eat them first thing in the morning.
Here's are the chocolate croissants - one ounce of chocolate per croissant made these quite chocolatey (in a good way). 

 I used Girardelli semisweet bars.  I tried chopping the chocolate as described in the recipe, but in the end, the best technique seemed to be cutting the squares into thin sticks and piling them up before rolling the dough over them.   The chopped chocolate was more likely to ooze out during baking than the larger slices did.  Here's  a photo of chopped versus sliced, before rolling:




I did have one mishap, so here's my warning for everyone: don't put them to rise in an overly warm oven!  I heated the oven a bit, and then turned it off and left the door open, thinking it would then be good for the formed croissants in their last rise.  When I opened the oven after an hour of rising, there was a lake of butter on the cookie sheet and the croissants were looking melted and deflated.

Sad sack croissants from rising in an overly warm space

I soaked up some of the melted butter, put another sheet of parchment underneath to try and sock up even more, and then baked them anyway.  We decided they were kind of like fried bread, because all the butter was on the outside making them kind of crunchy.  The best failed croissants around :-)

Sad sack croissants after baking - still edible!

Boca Negra - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - 27th Installment.  The recipe is Boca Negra.

 

I'm starting to think these posts should have subtitles.  Subtitle this one "I'm not sure Jack Daniels is my favorite choice for baking"!

This recipe went EXACTLY as described in the book.  I used the food processor for the white chocolate cream, and then used it again for the cake batter - talk about speedy.  I liked pouring the sugar syrup on top of the chocolate and blending it - it worked well.   I remembered to have butter and eggs at room temperature, and then I baked it exactly 30 minutes, and it did, indeed have a firm top, and then I took it out.

Just after baking

We ate it warm, and it was pretty yummy (see note on bourbon below...).   The texture is amazing, and it's very intense.  The rest went into the fridge, so we'll eat that chilled.

This recipe calls for bourbon in both the white chocolate cream and the cake.  I'm not so savvy when it comes to liquor, so when I looked in the cabinet, and found Jack Daniels, I asked Richard (my husband) "Is this bourbon?"  It's whiskey, but we weren't sure it was bourbon, and we thought probably not.  (Some of you are laughing at me right now for my ignorance :-)  We decided that it was close enough, so I used it in the cake.  I don't think I would do that again - it seemed to make it kind of harsh, even after baking, although perhaps that's just my lack of sophisticated taste for whiskey.  Richard thought it tasted pretty good, so maybe just a matter of personal preference.  I left it out of the white chocolate cream, and was glad, since I think it would have been overwhelming in that topping.  I am going to check out what my fellow BWD bakers did with this recipe, since someone is sure to have done something creative with the liquor component of this (Grand Marnier, anyone?).    I did like the fact that this recipe was SO reliable and simple - exactly as advertised.