Almost-No-Knead Bread

I love perusing food blogs and encountered one that extolled the virtues of a recipe for bread requiring no kneading. I personally don't mind kneading dough and waiting for it to rise several times but I thought I'd give it a try. After all, it does do all the work itself, right? A few days after downloading the recipe, I received an updated version from Cook's Illustrated. Theirs looked just as easy and I had all the ingredients so I set to work.

Flour, salt, instant yeast, water, beer, and vinegar. All I had to do was stir it together, let it sit for 8 to 18 hours, knead it for a few seconds, let it rise for two hours and pop it in the oven. The most important part is what you cook it in. A cast iron dutch oven that's been preheated in the oven for 30 minutes with the lid on at 500 degrees. Very important! Because the dough rises on top of a parchment sheet, it's pretty easy to lift and plop into the hot pan. Put the lid on, reduce the oven temperature to 425 degrees and bake for 30 minutes. Take the lid off and bake for another 20 minutes.

Out comes a hot, crusty, golden loaf of bread that is irresistable! It is perfect with butter or maybe dipped in some olive oil. The only drawback to this recipe is that the bread's texture doesn't withstand time. It really is best eaten the day it is made. But then that's never a problem in our house.

Devil’s Food Cake for an Angel

I attended my first post-birth baby shower today for a good friend in our neighborhood. I had high hopes for making petit fours for the special event. As you can see from the picture, the petit four making did not go well. My first attempt was a sponge cake baked in a jelly roll pan. I wanted to go the traditional route and sponge cake recipes looked more appealing than genoise. The sponge cake was delicious, but inconsistent. In my attempt not to over stir at the end and ruin the airy egg composition, I did not fully incorporate my ingredients. So, parts of my sponge cake were delicious and others were just egg whites cooked. So, I thought maybe pound cake might be safer and possibly more predictable. I didn't have any recipes for chocolate pound cake, so I ventured to the internet. I found what I thought would be a good recipe, but the batter would have filled my 9 x 5 loaf pan to the top. Nervously, I split it between two and then proceeded to under cook the cakes when my toothpick came out clean. Sigh. Determined to make some sort of cake, I turned to my Cooks Illustrated baking cooking book and chose the Devil’s Food Cake recipe. It promised to be a decadent chocolate experience. Thankfully, this cake turned out nicely and tasted wonderful. Perhaps a bit less stable than most cakes I have made, but delicious and almost brownie-like. I will try again someday, but three cakes in one weekend is more than I ever care to do again.

Snickerdoodling

Snickerdoodles are a new cookie to me. I did not grow up eating them, so I don't really have any preconceived notions of what they should be. When I discovered they were a favorite of a dear friend of mine, I decided to add another cookie to the repertoire. To my delight, these were tasty and easier to make than traditional sugar cookies that require rolling out dough. I searched several sources for my recipe and decided on one from allrecipes.com that got high marks from over 1800 people (http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Mrs-Siggs-Snickerdoodles/Detail.aspx). Coming off my success with chocolate chip cookies, I substituted half the flour in the recipe with bread flour. I also sifted my dry ingredients (minus the sugar) together to help keep the cookies light. I was leery of the shortening in the recipe, but I decided to let that one slide this time. Using my small cookie scoop, I squeezed 5 dozen cookies out of this recipe. They were light, chewy, and delicious. The perfect size for eating 6 in a row without thinking. Sweet tooth beware!

Apple Pie

Two weeks ago we went apple picking with our four-year-old. Cameo apples were ripe. They were so good that we picked two baskets full of them, munching on fresh apples as we went. Since we have a 7-month-old baby in the house, I cooked up some crock pot applesauce and froze it in cubes for him. The rest of us enjoyed homemade apple pie - three of them so far! I make my pie crust with butter. It tastes great and is easier to roll than one made with shortening. Then I fill it with six cups of apples, 1/2 cup sugar, juice of one lemon, 2 tablespoons flour, 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg, and a heaping teaspoon of cinnamon. To top it off, I make a crumb topping of flour, brown sugar and butter. Served with ice cream, there is no better dessert.

Chocolate Mousse Cake

Friends were coming for dessert a few weeks ago and I wanted to impress. So I pulled out my copy of Nigella Lawson's How To Be a Domestic Goddess and began flipping through the pages. I knew chocolate was a favorite so I flipped to the section conveniently marked "Chocolate." And there it was . . . Chocolate Mousse Cake. Basically it is a flourless chocolate cake taking its structure from eggs instead of flour. Using Callebaut chocolate and organic eggs I set to work. It was really very simple. All I had to do was melt the chocolate with some butter and sugar. Whisk that together with egg yolks. I whirred the egg whites to soft peaks and then folded in the chocolate mixture. I poured it into a springform pan wrapped in foil. Dunked it in a water bath and pushed it in the oven. An hour later, out came this dreamy cake. So yummy. And they were impressed. Very.

Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

As an avid cookie baker, I'm always looking for a really great recipe for the classics. I enjoy venturing out into new treat territory, but with Sam requesting chocolate chip cookies most often, I have been on a quest for the perfect recipe. I have found it! Tonight I baked my personal best batch of chocolate chip cookies thanks to Alton Brown.

After scanning the Food Network search results from my cookie query, I noticed a cookie listed as “Chewy” with a 5 star rating based on 485 reviews. This I had to try and it did not disappoint.

Thankfully, I had a bag of bread flour waiting in the pantry and kosher salt on hand. These appeared to be the only out of the ordinary ingredients. The dough had to be chilled for a bit and then, using an ice cream scoop, I plopped out 6 “gimantic” (as Sam would say) balls of dough on my parchment lined cookie sheets. Just 14 minutes in the oven and I pulled out the large, beautiful cookies that turned out perfectly chewy, but not under done. There was also a nice golden crisp to the cookie exterior that combined nicely with the chewy interior.

This recipe is a must for any chocolate chip cookie lover you know: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/the-chewy-recipe/index.html.

Makin' Whoopie

Nine years ago, before my husband and I were married, we took a drive through Lancaster County in Pennsylvania. I was enthralled with the Amish people at the time and gawked at their quilts, their clothes, their buggies. We stopped at a little bakery to have a snack and bought a two Red Velvet Whoopie pies. It was love at first bite!

Now I know I can't recreate the same romantic mood we had nine years ago during our courtship. But I'm determined to recreate a Whoopie pie that takes us back in time. So far, I've tried three recipes; this is my fourth attempt. My husband says I'm getting closer. Obviously, you can tell these are not Red Velvet but that's nothing a bottle of red food coloring can't fix. Basically, though, this is a Devil's Food Cake recipe plopped onto parchment in 1/3 cup portions. It makes separate little cakes that get smooshed together with a creamy filling. It's the filling that I'm having a hard time with. This filling was made from powdered sugar, butter, vanilla, and Marshmallow Fluff. He thinks it tastes too marshmallowy but I like the light texture it imparts to an otherwise heavy buttercream frosting.

Don't worry. These Whoopie pies are disappearing fast, leaving me free to look for another recipe and start makin' whoopie again!