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....

Country Bread - TWD: Baking with Julia

 Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - 48th installment. The recipe is Country Bread.

This bread is great!  It took all day (6 hours for the sponge, and then two rising periods) but we really liked it.  I baked it on the pizza stone, and the crust had a great texture.  The inclusion of some rye in the sponge and whole wheat in both the sponge and the dough give it a good flavor.  The directions were clear and easy to follow.  I did wonder if it needed to rise in a flour-covered towel inside a colander, but it did make the loaf a nice round shape.

The salt-free dough

This recipe had so much potential, I made it twice, in an effort to get it right. The first time around, I forgot to include the tablespoon of salt that goes into the dough when you mix flour into the sponge.  I never knew how essential salt is to the taste of bread - it was tasteless.   I really wondered why the dough exploded out of the bowl when it rose, but I have read that salt counterbalances the yeast, keeping the yeast growth under control, so maybe that's the explanation.  The loaf rose and baked just fine, but alas, needed a thick layer of salted butter in order to make it taste like anything.  Even without the salt, the texture and crust of the loaf was quite good - it looked amazing, but just didn't have any taste. 

 

 

I refused to be defeated, and tried again, and was glad I did, because it's definitely a recipe I will prepare again.

The salt-free loaf

Gingersnaps - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - 47th installment. The recipe is Gingersnaps.

Mmmm...ginger...something to cut through the fog of holiday preparations and food overload.  I had made these once before, because I had notes in my cookbook about the dough being soft and rather fragile, but I have no recollection of actually cooking them! (got to start putting dates on these notes...)

I'm glad I reviewed the advice on Tuesdays with Dorie from people who had already prepared this recipe, and increased the spices - I quadrupled the ginger and doubled the cinnamon.  These cookies are very tasty, although the dough was not easy to work with - I used a lot of flour on the board, and still some of the cutouts wouldn't really come up without getting smushed.  The dough didn't firm up much despite a couple of hours in the refrigerator.  I put the scraps of dough back into the fridge to see if prolonged chilling will help with this.  I was interested that the recipe included water - not usually a cookie ingredient.

The recipe was simple, and easy to mix up. As stated in the recipe, they didn't spread much on the cookie sheet, which is nice because I could bake many at once and they kept their shape:

I'm not sure about the molasses glaze - maybe it's not necessary. I will try the later batch without it to see if I notice any flavor difference.  

Challah - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - 46th installment. The recipe is Challah.

This recipe was very easy, and the bread is great.  We really love challah at our house. I don't know if there will be any left for any French toast!  I even prepared this after work yesterday evening.  I had a sudden panic during the day when I realized that it was time for the first recipe of the month, stopped to buy eggs on the way home, and although I did get to bed a bit late, the bread was done that evening.  What a wonderful aroma in the house. 

There were no real tricks to the technique, although I had one loaf that was smoother than the other.  It seemed harder to roll the smooth long pieces from the second half of the dough - maybe it was saggy from having sat while I rolled out the first one. There was a lot of yeast, so it rose well, even without any kind of warm spot to sit in as it rose.  I used my Kitchen Aid to do the kneading while I worked on other things in the kitchen.

Before braiding

Before rising - having short hair, I never have learned to braid very neatly :-)

My loaves look a little dark partly because of the lighting when I took the photo - I did let them brown before putting a foil tent over each while they continued baking.  It's tough to fit two loaves in my oven - it always feels like one is too high (and thus browning too much in the hotter part of the oven) and one is too low (and thus too close to the lower element and browning too much on the bottom).  I set the timer for smaller intervals and kept swapping the loaves top to bottom, and turning the pans back to front, to help them cook evenly.

I would definitely make this recipe again - very simple, and rewarding.

Double Chocolate Cookies - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - 45th installment. The recipe is Double Chocolate Cookies.

 

These cookies are really rich and chocolatey.  They have 12 ounces of bittersweet chocolate and four ounces of unsweetened - a pound of chocolate in one batch of cookies?!  Some of the chocolate is melted into the dough, and some chopped and thrown in as chunks. They have just enough flour to hold them together...kind of like a chocolate chunk brownie in cookie shape.  You can see the shiny surface in the photo.  It was important not to overbake them - I did overcook one batch, and they turned slightly black on the bottom and got a little dried out.  (Of course we ate them anyway!).

The cookies were easy to make, and I had no problems following the recipe.  I really like the fact that the recipes in this book are clear about when you can hold things in the fridge, and for how long - I baked some of the cookies, and then kept the rest of the dough in the fridge until a few days later when I had more time to bake the rest.  Everyone loved them - we ate them slowly, since they were so rich and dense...they were quite popular with the afterschool snack audience ;-)