Artisan Caramels 1.19.12

I received a beautiful gift from a baker who makes these homemade caramels.  They were wonderful.  There are three different types in this package.  They are made with butter, sugar, heavy cream, vanilla bean, salt, corn syrup, and chocolate ganache.

These are individually hand wrapped!

Here are the chocolate caramels.  The sea salt is subltle, but adds a good balance of flavour.  The chocolate topping is actually thinner than it looks in the picture, which gives a good proportion of chocolate to caramel with caramel as the dominant flavour.  They are ooey, gooey delicious caramel heaven.

  

Simon's coffee house

Simon's coffee house, 1736 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA

I got a bear claw, which was filled with apple jam  Looks like puff pastry.  Simon's gets these from Danish Pastry House in Medford.  The claw was topped with powdered sugar and sliced almonds.  For some reason I had to eat the claws off one by one, then eat the palm.  Here's what the interior looks like.  You can see the chunks of apples inside, which were very yummy.

Ten Tables 1.18.12

Ten Tables, 5 Craigie Circle, Cambridge, MA

Iggy's Bread - missing that crisp crust, served room temperature.  The flavour and crumb was fantastic.

Sticky toffee pudding with banana ice cream - I tasted the pudding.  It was sweet and rich, but not my favorite dessert.

Lemon tart with torched meringue topping and mint sauce.  The meringue topping was great.  The lemon tart was good, very lemony.  The mint sauce was very strange and tasted strange too.

Practicing laminations 1.18.12

I've been thinking all week about laminating the croissant dough in my freezer.  I finally got to it, and yes I need a lot more practice.  The dough was very elastic and difficult to roll out (unless it was because my rolling pin wasn't warmed up - not literally!)  If I had more time I could have rested the dough more between folds.  I was waiting 20-30 minutes for this dough.

Here's some pictures of the dough rolled out.

Here's a cross section to show the laminations. I used three 3-folds for this dough.

The butter started to break when I was rolling it out.  Next time I'll try mixing the butter with some flour to prevent the cracking.  I suppose I could also try getting some butter with high butterfat, but I'm not even sure where to get that or how much more expensive it would be.

I ran out of time and didn't make crescents, I ended up making pockets, basically folding the dough over once like a pain au chocolate...well, kinda.

They turned out looking very pretty, but they were too heavy as I had problems proofing and baking.  But here they are.

Brewer's Bread 1.17.12

I'm so lucky to have coworkers who make amazing things and then let me eat them.  These sandwich rolls have a beer flavour and are made with Newcastle Brown Ale, toasted barley, and millet.   The beer flavour in the bread was subtle, which I liked since I'm not a huge fan of beer tasting bread.

Newcastle Brown Ale

Here's the dough resting after being preshaped.

Here's the finished bake! - round and plump!

A thin, crisp crust and a nice crumb.

Great for Pulled Pork or Meatball Sandwiches!

Ginger Snap Molasses Ice Cream 1.16.12

Toscanini's, 899 Main Street, Cambridge, MA

Ginger Snap Molasses Ice Cream

This ice cream was really good.  It had nice chunks of soft ginger snap cookie.  And the molasses flavour came off to me like sugary caramel, so maybe a little too sweet for every day ice cream.  But it was very good.

At Toscanini's website, the first words about the store bring attention to the charities that the store regularly supports.  I wish the food industry would have more press recognizing the charitable efforts of most businesses.  About Toscanini's

When I was in the store I was also thinking about their burnt caramel flavor, and if there's really any difference between caramel, burnt caramel, and burnt sugar ice cream flavors.  From browsing some internet articles, it seems that burnt caramel is similar to caramel.  But when the sugar is cooking, it is taken to beyond dark amber and almost black.  But the flavor is subtle and wonderful when the caramel is diluted in the milk and made into ice cream.

I should also mention that Toscanini's has some Hydrox flavors.  But I didn't try any this round.

Gus Rancatore is the owner of Toscanini's.  How fun to be part of an ice cream family! Rancatore's and Toscanini's are both fabulous.  Are there more?

QBC Banana Bread 1.16.12

Quebrada Baking Company, 208 Massachusetts Ave, Arlington, MA

Fresh, all natural Banana Bread

I'm not a huge fan of banana bread, but this was delicious.  It was very moist and not too sweet.  The banana flavour was not too concentrated.  I would eat this again!

The Franklin Hotel 1.14.12

The Franklin Hotel, 301 S James St, Rome, NY

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake

Tiramisu

The lady fingers on the side were quite crunchy, and I usually like the entire cake to be soaked.  You can see that the coffee is soaked into about half of the cake here.  I could also tell that the creamy frosting inside was make with shortening.  I suppose I was expecting a buttercream (with butter), but I could feel the waxy shortening sticking to my tongue.  This version of tiramisu is pretty far from my version that I make.  And my version is not as good as the one I had at Bacco, which is the best tiramisu I've ever had.

Whole Wheat Bread 1.13.12

It's so exciting to see bread recipes being developed.  Here's a new formulation for 100% whole wheat (or whole grain) bread. (100% whole wheat means that the three parts of the wheat kernel (bran, germ, and endosperm) are present and included in a specific relative proportion.)

The braiding on the top is subtle and beautiful.  This specific loaf contains grano.

Floating bread!

Christmas Cookie Reprise 1.13.12

It's wonderful to celebrate Christmas with your friends.  But sometimes you can only get together in mid January.   So it's even more important to be festive!  Here are Christmas cookies I made for the celebration.

I was short on time, so I only used one color (green) and one stencil (the tree).  I tried to add some quick variation using sprinkles.  I did better and remembered to weigh the volume measurements I used, so that I don't have to keep bringing out the measuring cups every time I make these.

Here are the unbaked cookies

Here are the ingredients:

12 oz butter
6 3/4 oz granulated sugar
1 egg
2 T milk
1 t vanilla extract
1 lb 5/8 oz AP flour
1 t baking powder

Porter Bread 1.11.12

Porter Bread

A coworker of mine made this bread which contains a Porter beer, millet, and toasted barley.

Here's the dough before baking

Here are the baked loaves

Happy Anniversary 1.10.12

I started this blog on 3 January 2011.  I had just started taking classes at Le Cordon Bleu in Cambridge as part of the program in baking and pastry.  I experimented with recipes using Splenda and enjoyed studying plated desserts at many local restaurants. I took pictures of every dessert I came across and recorded all of my baking products.  I'm planning to start this next year developing some gluten-free dessert recipes.  Hopefully, I can develop soft pretzels, black and white cookies, and bagels using chia seeds.

Happy Anniversary, blog!

This is a boston creme cake.  The frosting is a chocolate ganache which I started using 1.25:1 ratio of chocolate to heavy cream, but the frosting was too thick.  So I added more hot cream.  The cake is filled with pastry cream.  The pastry cream is actually gluten-free because I use cornstarch to thicken the creme instead of flour.  I used an eggy genoise recipe that has 150% baker's percentage of eggs.  I didn't like this one as much as the yellow butter cake, but I'd still like to use a light cake next time.  So I think I will use my white layer cake recipe next time I make BCP.

The writing is a white chocolate coating, which had a terrible consistency when I melted it to use in piping. If I had some extra cocoa butter, I could have tried thinning out the chocolate.  I could have also used vegetable oil or another thinner.

Quebrada Baking Company 1.10.12

Quebrada Baking Company, 208 Massachusetts Ave, Arlington, MA

The name and decor of this bakery is south american influenced, but the products are all american. Here is the   outside of the Arlington store.

The bakery is  charming inside. Here are some croissant pics.

Raspberry Croissant

L'espalier 1.8.12

L'espalier, 774 Boylston Street, Boston, MA

I am a very lucky girl to have been taken to this most lovely restaurant in Boston.   And even luckier to enjoy the dessert tasting.


Breads: Pretzel roll and rosemary focaccia made in house.  Both were very good.  The pretzel roll crumb was more bready than I wanted, but I am in love with NYC pretzels which are more doughy inside.  I could have mistaken the focaccia for bread from Clear Flour Bakery, if I was blindfolded. It was that good.

First Course: shrimp cru (this item is not described on the sample menu posted on the website, so I don't have a full description).  It was a ceviche with a lot of fruit and shrimp.  I'd stick to posting baked goods, but this plate was so pretty. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the melon it's served in, but it looks like a horned melon or kiwano.

Intermezzo: Grand Marnier elixir with concentrated orange flavors.  There was a pearl, similar to a tapioca bead in the bottom.  The plated dessert is a lime sorbet with a Bergamot cream and Muscat (sweet dessert wine) gelee.

Dessert #1: Compressed Asian pear with white chocolate, tonka bean meringue, bergamot custard, and Earl Grey ice cream


Included a table-side smashing of the white chocolate shell by the pastry chef Jiho Kim to reveal the pears.  There was a white bar in the top left that had the texture of a marshmallow that I thought was great.

Dessert #2:  Mont Blanc; chestnut and Chantilly crèmes, vanilla ice cream, and pine nut croquant


I really liked the pine nut croquant (a type of tuille used as the cup holding the base of the mountain).  

 Dessert #3: Milk chocolate caramel soufflé with caramel financier, and Gianduja ice cream

This plate came paired with the second plate shown below.  I'm not sure why we didn't get two souffles.
I'm used to Clear Flour almond financiers, so the financier here didn't impress me.  The personalized touch of the candle brownies was nice though.  And the quenelle in the bottom picture is a saffron frozen yogurt.

Liquid nitrogen table-side presentation: Lychee foam

I love lychee and anything frozen, so this was fantastic for me and I loved it.

Cookie plate: espresso dark chocolate, black currant jelly square, Gianduja biscotti

Cookies to go:  Madeline-shaped ginger cake

I got to take this picture at home, so finally got some good lighting.

What amazing food.  I loved all the flavors.  How lucky that I get to experience something like this even once in my life.  It was very modern for my taste and probably couldn't handle any more gelatinous desserts for a while.  The abstract, artistic plating designs also throw me for a loop, as I prefer a more rustic style.

Caramel Ice Cream 1.5.12

Sweet Cream ice cream.

Let's review the difference in some ice cream flavors:

Sweet Cream - strictly just cream and sugar, but maybe eggs are okay too
Vanilla - sweet cream flavored with vanilla bean steeped in hot milk, or vanilla extract added
Caramel - make caramel (cooked sugar) to flavor sweet cream; add salt for salted caramel
Dulce de leche - caramelize the sugar in the milk (you could also add sugar to milk, but they must be cooked together) to flavor the base.  You can also use condensed milk if you don't want to caramelize the sugar yourself.
Burnt Sugar - same as caramel

Galette des Rois 1.4.12

Galette des Rois at Clear Flour Bread.  Each one has a different design.  This is a cake made of puff pastry and frangipane with a porcelain figure hidden inside. The person who gets the porcelain bird, is the king for the day.

This cake is reminiscent of the pithivier I made previously in culinary school (minus the porcelain bird).  Pithivier is one of my top three favorite items I made last year (the other two being fruit tarts and napoleans)

Here's a picture from March 2011