Every Easter I see these pretty speckled robin’s egg cakes pop up all over the food internet, and I’ve been wanting to make one myself for a while. I’ve also been wanting to make a coconut layer cake, so I combined the two and here we are!
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Mendiants {How to Temper Chocolate}
Mendiants are a French confection of chocolate topped with dried fruit and nuts, the name being derived from the Latin word for “begging” in reference to begging for alms by monks or friars of religious orders who have taken vows of poverty. The fruit and nut toppings are supposed to represent the four Roman Catholic monastic orders who partook in this activity. But beyond the history lesson, mendiants are a delicious and easy way to make chocolate candies – the only challenge is that you have to temper chocolate, which, if you’ve ever watched an episode of Bon Appetit’s Gourmet Makes when Claire has to temper chocolate, you might assume is an impossible task. Every time she hauls out the vacuum sealer and sous vide immersion circulator thing I cringe, because tempering chocolate is NOT THAT HARD, I swear!
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Double Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake
I made this cheesecake several months ago (yes, I’m terribly behind on posting) to mark the retirement of a colleague. When I asked her what her favourite kind of cake was, she promptly answered either chocolate cake or cheesecake. I love it when people have a ready answer to that question, and also, how can you go wrong with either option?
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Pistachio Petit Four Cake
Every year I carefully plan what kind of birthday cake I’m going to make myself, and this year I was imagining some kind of over-the-top creation with chocolate and peanut butter. But my chocolate cake craving was satisfied when I made a Devil’s Food Cake with Marshmallow Frosting (OMG) for a co-worker’s last day potluck, and then I changed tacks completely when I came across this little pistachio layer cake beauty, boasting not only pistachio sponge but also apricot jam, thin ribbons of marzipan, chocolate ganache, and flowers. And as a cake project lover and general fussy-pastry enthusiast, it seemed like the perfect birthday present to myself.
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Dorie’s Cocoa-Tahini Cookies with Sesame Crunch
I first made these cookies back in October and couldn’t wait to post about them because they were so delicious: a double chocolate cookie (cocoa powder plus chocolate chunks) amped up with nutty tahini paste, and then kicked over the edge with the addition of candied sesame seed brittle. Then when I sorted through all the photos I’d taken (long after all the cookies were gone, unfortunately) I wasn’t happy with how any of them turned out and decided against posting them. But I couldn’t stop thinking about these wonderful cookies, and so when I made them again this weekend, I not only kicked myself for waiting eight months to do so, I also looked through my old photos and realized that they were actually fine. So here we are! Sorry for taking so long 😉
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BraveTart’s Homemade Oreos
It’s been years since I ate a real Oreo, but I can say with 100% certainty that BraveTart’s Homemade Oreos are BETTER!
In the summer, I joined the Food52 Baking Club on Facebook, and every month we all bake out of a selected baking book and share our results and experiences with the recipes. It’s pretty fun, especially for a baking nerd like me, however I’ve fallen a little behind (a new book to bake from every month gets a bit overwhelming) and had committed to working my way through some of the past month’s cookbooks that were already on my shelves (including Dorie’s Cookies, Classic German Baking, and Tartine). Then November’s cookbook came around: the recently released BraveTart by Stella Parks, a trained pastry chef who writes a blog of the same name and is also an editor at Serious Eats, where she shares her knowledge of food history, baking science, and pastry technique. Basically, she really really knows her stuff – case in point, these Oreos, which are phenomenal. I wasn’t going to buy this month’s cookbook, but after making these cookies from the recipe posted on Serious Eats, it is now on my list (and no, this is not a paid advertisement).
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Swedish Kanelbullar and Chokladbiskvier
To make up for the fact that I’ve been a slacker these last few months with Around the World in 12 Plates, I’m bringing not one but TWO recipes to this month’s party. Sweden was November’s destination, and similar to their Danish neighbours’ appreciation for hygge – enjoying simple pleasures and general coziness – the Swedes have a serious appreciation for fika, which you could sort of think of as coffee break hygge. But fika is not buying a to-go coffee and inhaling it in your car on the way to somewhere else – it is intentionally slowing down to drink a cup of coffee (or tea), eat some kind of delicious baked good, and enjoy yourself – either alone or with friends. It is so much a part of Swedish culture that workers have fika breaks built into their work days.
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Chocolate-Covered Digestive Biscuits
You know when you go to the store to buy cookies, and come home with said cookies plus ingredients to make other cookies? Yeah, that’s how these chocolate-covered digestive biscuits came about (in line with my resolution to bake more cookies), but because they are made with nothing but regular pantry staples, the only ingredient I had to buy was the chocolate (which is normally a pantry staple for me, but I’d eaten it all).
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Dorie’s Cocoa Linzer Cookies
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
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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