Chocolate Mascarpone Cheesecake - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - 51st installment. The recipe is Chocolate Mascarpone Cheesecake.

Wow!  This was amazingly good, and not very difficult at all.  The family raved about it - we had it for our Valentine's Day dessert.  Talk about rich...cream cheese, sour cream, mascarpone cheese (why do we all seem to pronounce it 'marscapone'? :-)

After baking, before cooling

I followed the directions and it all went as described. I baked it in the evening, let it cool overnight, and then took it out of the pan in the morning.  I was glad I read ahead to see that it needed to cool completely and then chill completely after unmolding - it needs plenty of time for all that before serving.
It was interesting that the recipe has you bake the cake without any crust, flip over the unmolded cake, press the cookie crumbs onto the bottom, and then flip that onto the plate.  I used chocolate wafer crumbs.  The bottom was very loose because it was just crumbs, rather than a crumb crust.  We ended up liking that, and it kept it simple.  I always think of cheesecake as a big deal to bake, but this has me thinking I might make it more often in the future.   This is definitely a recipe I will make again.

Onion Bialys - TWD: Baking with Julia

 Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - 50th installment. The recipe is Onion Bialys.

  

 

This recipe was very straightforward, and we liked the results a lot.  I was happy that I could start it in the early morning and still have it ready before noon - often breakfast yeast breads create a scenario where you're mixing them up the night before. We split and ate them with smoked salmon, cream cheese, capers and onions (yum!)

I used bread flour, and my pizza stone for baking - great crust.  The second batch baked quite quickly - the stone seems to get hotter as time goes on.

 With all that yeast in the dough, it had no problem rising.

These are the onion-topped rounds before baking - I am still wondering if they would be better if given a chance to rise before baking.  It would also be good if the recipe provided direction on what size circles to make - I think I may have stretched mine a bit thinner than was ideal. 





I sliced and froze the leftovers at the end of the day, as suggested by the recipe. We have since then pulled out a couple of them and toasted them in the toaster - they were quite good that way too!

(Someday I will become more proficient at layout of the photos in these blog entries ;-)

Vanilla Chiffon Roll - TWD: Baking with Julia

 Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - 49th installment. The recipe is Vanilla Chiffon Roll.

Chocolate walnut mousse!  Candied walnuts!  Soggy cake (?!?).  

This recipe seemed straightforward, and I think I followed it correctly...but something was definitely wrong with the cake.    I thought it was done, and got it out of the pan, spread on the mousse,

and then rolled it up. When I had rolled it up, and then trimmed off the ends, I noticed how dense and soggy it seemed to be.  It was wet, or maybe greasy, rather than cakey.  Possible explanations I came up with: 

1. I took it out of the oven too soon.
2. The layer of non-stick cooking spray (per the recipe) was too heavy and greasy, and it had a bad effect on the cake.

Boo hoo...although the mousse filling was fantastic, and I really liked the candied walnut topping, I actually disliked the cake so much that I threw the leftovers away after we all tried it.   Very disappointing.  Looking foward to seeing how others in the TWD group managed with this....