Big announcement time: Nate and I bought a house!!
We moved in the middle of August and have settled in pretty quickly – we love it here. We are in Shawnigan Lake, about 40 minutes from Victoria where we both still work, but we traded up for lots of privacy and green space. 🙂 Plus the Cowichan Valley has a seriously thriving local food scene, which I am very much looking forward to exploring!
…
Kat of The Bobwhites was our August 2012 Daring Baker hostess who inspired us to have fun in creating pâté à choux shapes, filled with crème patisserie or Chantilly cream. We were encouraged to create swans or any shape we wanted and to go crazy with filling flavors allowing our creativity to go wild!
Challenges like this are the reason I joined the Daring Bakers: ridiculous, whimsical, finicky, cream-filled pastries. I LOVE IT!
Seriously though, why NOT make cream puff swans? They are super tasty and anyone who sees them will be very impressed. They won’t be able to help it….
I have a banana bread weakness. Whenever I see a new and interesting recipe, especially one that has been raved about, I can’t help myself: I have to make it. I stockpile over-ripe, frozen bananas in my freezer (I think that’s a form of enabling) just so that I can bake banana bread whenever the mood strikes me, as it did the moment I read about this sugar-topped coconut version.
I had most of a can of pineapple in the fridge and thought it would be a good addition to the loaf. It was. And while the coconut and pineapple add texture and sweetness, the sugar on top adds crunch, and the dark rum adds a bit of luxury, my favorite part of this banana bread is the hint of nutmeg in the batter. Somehow it brings all the flavours together and makes them sing. I know this sounds awfully flowery for a loaf of banana bread, but MAN is it ever good!…
This is the second post in a series of three – click to read Part I and Part III.
As promised, here’s the follow-up to my last post on Danish pastries: how to shape and fill the Danishes. So fun!
I got really excited about the different Danish shapes I was going to make, so I tried a whole bunch of them. They were all pretty successful so I’m confident that I can pass along my skillz ;). I only used half the batch of dough to make these (I couldn’t justify making sixteen Danishes for only two of us) so I will be experimenting with the rest of the dough sometime soon… stay tuned for Part III! ;)…
This is the first post in a series of three – click to read Part II and Part III.
In my last post, I was extolling the virtues of making something simple from scratch. Now I am going to extol the virtues of making something rather complicated from scratch: Danish pastries using sourdough starter. Yes, we are doing this!
At the end of April, I wrote a list of stuff I wanted to make for this blog over the summer, and Danish pastries was on it. I had my first taste of making laminated dough when the Daring Bakers made croissants a while back, and I wanted to try it again. But I was kind of putting it off because it’s a lot of butter and a lot of work: all that rolling and folding and rolling and folding and resting and waiting. Then, during the Daring Bakers reveal last month, I came across Sourdough Surprises, which is another baking group that a few Daring Bakers members have created to bake together once a month using their sourdough starters. And their recipe for May was sourdough Danishes! Well, it seemed like fate. I was in….
It is finally strawberry season here, and by that I mean that there are local strawberries in the stores. They are a bit more expensive than the ones trucked up from California (which seems so totally backwards!) but they taste amazing because they are so perfectly ripe and fresh.
I knew I wanted to make something special with these berries but I couldn’t decide what until I remembered the strawberry banana bread I’d seen on Joy the Baker a while ago. I wanted to jazz it up even more so I added a cream cheese swirl. The result is an incredibly moist, decadent, not-to-sweet bread with a pleasant strawberry flavour and cheesecake-y tang. The banana is not overpowering at all and mostly just contributes sweetness, and the hint of cinnamon in the batter goes really well with the strawberries….
A few months ago I was asked if I would write a review of Shelley Adams’ newest cookbook (her third so far), Whitewater Cooks with Friends. I jumped at the chance, because 1) free cookbook! Yay! and 2) my Mum has Shelley’s first book, Whitewater Cooks, and has very good things to say about it, so I was pretty sure I would enjoy this one. However, I’ve been putting off reviewing it until now, when I’m off work for the summer and actually have time to do a proper job of it. Also, the whole tone of the cookbook is so summery that I couldn’t face concentrating on it too much while it was still grey and dreary outside – not when it was taunting me with its fresh, sunny flavours, colourful pictures, and outdoor potluck-worthy recipes….
The Daring Bakers’ April 2012 challenge, hosted by Jason at Daily Candor, were two Armenian standards: nazook and nutmeg cake. Nazook is a layered yeasted dough pastry with a sweet filling, and nutmeg cake is a fragrant, nutty coffee-style cake.
Armenian baking is not something I had ever contemplated before this challenge, which may ring true to many (have you ever contemplated Armenian baking?). However, Nate’s paternal forebears came from Armenia several generations ago, and he has a very Armenian last name, so it does surprise me just a little bit that, me being me, I never looked into it. That’s totally something I would do….
Once again, the start of spring and the approach of Easter mean that it’s hot cross bun season. I had pretty good success last year making hot cross buns, so I gave them another try – but this time I added chocolate, because almost anything is better when you add chocolate. Prior to this, I had never actually had a chocolate hot cross bun, but I have seen them in bakeries and heard wonderful things about them (apparently they are very popular in Australia). There doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of recipes available on the internet, so I decided to come up with my own. I added cocoa powder and chocolate chips (plus dried cherries and apricots) to my existing hot cross bun recipe, along with a healthy dose of cinnamon and cardamom, with which I have recently become enamoured and which happens to go very well with chocolate. And for the cross on top, white chocolate….
