Dorie’s Cocoa Linzer Cookies

April 19, 2017 By Korena in the Kitchen 2 Comments

I should really bake more cookies.

They are basically the perfect baked good: portioned as a single serving (not that it stops me from eating five in one sitting), endlessly variable in flavour, texture and shape, and they can be a simple or as complicated as you could possibly want. Yet other than the annual Christmas cookie madness and the occasional (and necessary) batch of chocolate chip, I don’t actually bake cookies very often. So I set out to remedy this, and my solution was these pretty little cocoa linzer cookies.

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Decorated Swiss Rolls

October 27, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen 9 Comments

This month I hosted the Daring Kitchen challenge and invited the group to make decorated Swiss rolls, aka “deco rolls”, in the style of Japanese food blogger and cookbook author Junko, who has taken the internet by storm with her adorable “kawaii” versions. This concept is a standard French pastry technique with the use of décor paste to create a pattern on a joconde sponge (which was tackled by the Daring Bakers back in 2011), and making it into a Swiss roll is an obvious next step, so when I was preparing this challenge, I decided to try it the French way. Unfortunately the results were not stellar – the décor paste cracked and the filling escaped when I rolled the cake up, because the décor paste was harder and less flexible than the surrounding sponge cake.

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Homemade Wedding Cake, Part III: Assembly and Decoration

June 7, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen 9 Comments

At last, we are at the end of the Homemade Wedding Cake saga! To recap thus far, we’ve made vanilla butter cake, and we’ve also made vanilla buttercream, blackberry compote, chocolate ganache, and vanilla-bourbon syrup. Now it’s time to put them all together and make that wedding cake!

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White Chocolate Grapefruit Poppy Seed Cake

February 14, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen 5 Comments

This is not technically a Valentine’s Day post – February 14th just so happens to be the day I’m pressing “post” on something I’ve been working on veeeeeeeery slowly for the past 2 week. The only thing vaguely Valentine’s-y about it is that the inside is a little bit pink, but the point of today’s post is this: If you’re looking for a cake to put underneath your white chocolate peony, look no further. Without the peony, this cake looks plain on the outside but it is actually anything but – starting with the fact that it is flavoured with grapefruit. Lemon, orange and lime usually get all the citrus attention in baking, but replacing the lemon in lemon poppy seed cake with grapefruit and pairing it with white chocolate mousse frosting is pretty brilliant.

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How to Make a White Chocolate Peony

January 27, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen 18 Comments

This month marks a new direction for the Daring Bakers, who have now joined forces with the Daring Cooks in a single monthly Daring Kitchen Challenge. Shillpa of Cakeline the Journey kicked off this new format by setting us all the challenge of cake design – specifically the use of “edible clays” such as fondant, gum paste, and/or modeling chocolate to create fully edible cake decorations. I hardly need an excuse to bake a cake, so I was right into this challenge.

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Chocolate Peppermint Pinwheels

December 23, 2015 By Korena in the Kitchen 3 Comments

I took these photos at 8:30 pm on December 21, literally the darkest day of the year. It’s awfully difficult take take natural light photos when you never see your house in the daylight during the week. Blogging is such hard work!

I plunged into the Christmas cookie madness with both feet last week and spent every evening after work baking cookies. I think I was averaging two recipes a night in preparation for our annual pre-Christmas trek to Vancouver to see family, which coincided this year with my remarkable grandfather’s ninety-eighth (!!) birthday. These cookies in particular are a re-make of a childhood favourite that I remember asking my mum to make every year. Something about the spiraled layers of different coloured dough mixed with the flavour of peppermint and chocolate makes me feel all nostalgic.

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Daring Bakers: Lamingtons

May 30, 2015 By Korena in the Kitchen 7 Comments

Classic Lamingtons | Korena in the Kitchen For the May challenge Marcellina from Marcellina in Cucina dared us to make Lamingtons, an Australian delicacy that is as tasty as it is elegant.

The story goes that these little treats came about after a serving maid dropped some squares of sponge cake in chocolate icing, and her boss, Lord Lamington, Governor of Queensland, suggested that rather than throwing them out, she roll them in coconut “to avoid sticky fingers”. I’m not entirely sure that this story is water-tight, however, as the Lamington is also claimed by New Zealand and is known as cupavci in Bosnia. But regardless of who came up with them, they are a good idea.

Classic Lamingtons | Korena in the Kitchen

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The Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie

May 5, 2015 By Korena in the Kitchen 13 Comments

I’ve been looking for the “perfect” chocolate chip cookie for about as long as I’ve been baking cookies. What I wanted was a fairly straight-forward method that didn’t involve a complete re-design of the chocolate chip cookie or an overnight rest in the fridge (because when I want chocolate chip cookies, I want them now, not tomorrow). I’ve tried the original Toll House recipe, dabbled in thin/crispy versions, large/cakey versions, changed baking times and temperatures, and tried different flours, all of which promised to give the “perfect” cookie but just… didn’t.

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Chocolate-Dipped Vanilla-Almond Sourdough Biscotti

April 20, 2015 By Korena in the Kitchen 5 Comments

Chocolate-Dipped Vanilla-Almond Sourdough Biscotti | Korena in the Kitchen

After making a chocolate-hazelnut sourdough biscotti a few years ago, I concluded that sourdough biscotti was just a novelty and not actually a practical way to make biscotti or use sourdough. So I’m not sure what it says about me when I decided to participate in this month’s Sourdough Surprises project, which was – you guessed it – sourdough biscotti, AND decided to use the same recipe as the base. I guess maybe it says I’m drawn to novelty and prone to impracticality. But whatever: I have biscotti.

Chocolate-Dipped Vanilla-Almond Sourdough Biscotti | Korena in the Kitchen

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Cocoa Cardamom Crunch

April 4, 2015 By Korena in the Kitchen 4 Comments

Cocoa Cardamom Crunch | Korena in the Kitchen My daily breakfast is Greek yogurt with fruit and homemade granola, and I look forward to it every morning. However, my last few batches of granola have been a little lackluster, so I was pretty excited to discover a new kind of yogurt-appropriate topping called “nutmeg crunch“, a combination of oats, almonds, honey, coconut oil, and a hefty dose of nutmeg blitzed in the food processor, the resulting crumbles of which are spread on a cookie sheet and baked until toasty and crisp. These little oatmeal clusters are totally delicious, not to mention incredibly addicting. One recipe makes enough for a week’s worth of breakfasts, but my first batch only lasted about three days because I was eating the stuff by the handful. I immediately began thinking of all the variations one could make to the recipe: vanilla bean and almond, cinnamon and pecan, cocoa and cardamom…

Cocoa Cardamom Crunch | Korena in the Kitchen

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