Rather Be Baking

Chocolate Meringue

2011-04-28T19:05:00.006-04:00

I'm playing with macaroons because these things are things I'd like to get good at making. The most popular, so far, has been the chocolate-almond macaroons with white chocolate-orange ganahce filling, but I am trying some meringues right now with melted chocolate folded in.

Take 1: one egg, 1/2 cup icing sugar, 1/3 cup couverture wafers (chocolate chip size).
French meringue method while the chocolate melts then cools, then a little meringue added to the chocolate and mixed in, then that folded into the rest of the meringue. Piped little spirals, baked at 350F for 10 minutes after the tops dried a bit in open air. Turned out OK but a little too crisp, the feet flew out like mad, which I think is mostly to blame on the oven being too hot for a meringue without almond flour in it, and that the oven seems to go a mavericky 50 degrees over what I ask it to.
Cookies were scrumptious, the tops stayed gorgeously smooth and round, but the bottoms falling out were an issue. Will re-try later with lower temperature and a little more pre-drying time.

Take 2: one egg, 1/3 cup icing sugar, 1/3 cup chocolate chips.
Same as above. Man, chocolate chips are nowhere near as smooth as couverture! I have used nothing but the good stuff for ages now. The chocolate got a little separated and grainy when I folded it in, so that is not ideal. Piped these into sticks and dried them in the oven. They are forming delicious little cookies but I think the weight of the chocolate is causing them problems with being light like meringues. I think it's got to be good melting chocolate here or nothing.

To do: Re-try couverture macaroons, more drying time, lower temp (like 250F probably).

ps did I mention how delicious the raw meringue is once you've folded melted chocolate into it? my lord!

Apple Chicken Pot-Pies

2010-10-03T17:38:00.003-04:00

So I bought too many apples. Ohno apples.

Basically, tiny chicken pot-pies in a muffin tin, plus apples, added raw to the filling just before it went into the shells.
Came out pretty delicious, but I am pretty goddamn flexible with my palate by now. I do not think I would necessarily serve it as a main, but it makes a nice hor-deerv. Probably would want to just go all the way and make little puff-pastry things out of them instead, in that case.

Crackers!

2010-05-19T12:04:00.005-04:00

Crackers are pretty exciting to me! You can get them in boxes and they are OK, but there is something about how they are a factory-made kind of thing that makes me want to make remarkable crackers by hand. Just kind of saying 'hey look I can make stunning crackers I am as good as a machine'.
Anyways, I made my first batch of crackers today after reading up a couple recipes. Predictably, I added rye flour and buttermilk to the mix because I am all crazy for rye and buttermilk. Basically, you want to cut some flour with butter shortening as if for pie, then mix it with enough water/milk to make a dough. Also, you want some baking powder in there too to puff it up.

1/2 cup white pastry flour

1/2 cup rye flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 cup butter

1/3 cup buttermilk

Mix your dry stuff, set your butter to "Coarse Meal", turn said meal onto a clean counter, sprinkle the buttermilk over top, and toss together until you've got a dough. Lightly flour your counter and roll out the dough into a big rectangle (1/8 inch thick or less), and trim the edges. Cut crackers, prick with fork a bunch of times, and bake at 350ºF for 7-10 minutes.

I made two batches, being the first batch and the 'scrap trimming' batch. The first ones stayed mostly flat and have a nice crumbly texture but didn't puff up much, the second ones got worked a little harder as they were rolled and re-rolled, and they puffed up a couple large pockets. I'm not sure exactly how done I want these to be. One thing with rye flour is that it cooks much darker than wheat, in that where wheat would be golden-brown, rye looks burnt-brown. Some of my crackers are still pale, some of them are dark and crisp, and I'm not sure which I like better. Warm, I'm loving the paler, softer ones with goat cheese and shaved smoked brisket, though the crispy fellows will probably keep better.

Will certainly make more crackers later, these are pretty simple!

Peanut Butter Chocolate Cookies

2010-04-26T19:03:00.003-04:00

WHAM BAM HEY HO LOOK IT'S MORE COOKIES

TAKE: 1/2 cup butter, 1/4 cup smooth peanut butter, 1/4 cup chunky peanut butter, CREAM TOGETHER on high in a mixing bowl.
ADD: 1/2 cup white sugar, 1/2 cup packed brown sugar, BEAT until combined
BEAT IN: 1 egg, dash vanilla, 2 dashes baking powder.
---PARTITION BATTER IN HALF---
--FIRST HALF
INCORPORATE: 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 cup chocolate chips
MIX, SET ASIDE
--SECOND HALF
INCORPORATE: 1/2 cup cocoa powder, 1/2 cup flour
MIX, SET ASIDE
ROLL OUT the chocolate dough (should be stiff) on parchment paper, to 1/6 inch thick. DUMP the chocolate chip dough on the chocolate dough, and spread it around. USING THE PARCHMENT PAPER AS AN AID, ROLL UP both dough together. Form the resulting log into a ball, as you would to shape a loaf of bread, by pulling it down and pinching it together in the back. REPEAT this motion a few times, until you've got some nice marbling happening.
PLACE neat little balls of dough onto parchment which is itself on a baking pan, then bake at 350ºF for seven minutes if you flattened the cookies, nine minutes if you left them as balls.

Mail-Box Cookies

2010-03-29T13:52:00.009-04:00

Things need to have names. I can't just call everything utilitarianly descriptively 'oatmeal chocolate chocolate cookies w/buttermilk and coffee'. In this high-paced world of aggressive market branding, I need to name things with catchy, memorable, distinctive names, lest I be swept up in the latest wave of Pepsi-Chip Super Sweet Biscuit Snacks or something.
So, since these cookies are designed for optimal mailability (spell check has not called me on that, I can not believe mailability is a word!), they are called mail-box cookies for now. Maybe I will think of something better later, I am not totally pleased with that name, but moving on, recipe time:

3/4 cup butter

1 cup packed brown sugar

1 tbsp coffee (espresso, strong stuff!)

1 tbsp buttermilk

dash vanilla

2 egg

3 cups quick oats

1/2 cup cocoa

1/4 cup flour

1 cup chocolate chips

1 tspn baking powder

This recipe is just a modification of the recipe off the bag of oats, but I have made it better by killing the raisins and adding exciting things like chocolate and chocolate chips and coffee. I discovered the outsides made nice-ish crispy shells that kept the insides soft for a notably long period of time, hence my desire to mail them to people.
In bowl the first, cream your butter and sugar together with beaters at medium-high, then add the rest of the wet stuff and beat until creamy.
In bowl the second, mix all the dry stuff.
In bowl the third, combine bowls the first and second and mix until combined (bowl the third should be a symbolic pointer to either bowl the first or bowl the second).
Form into balls the size of the balls inside of golf balls, put on a cookie sheet w/parchment paper, and bake at 350ºF for twelve to fifteen minutes, until they firm up.
The differences between this and the recipe on the bag that I based this on are that I scrapped raisins, cinnamon, white sugar, and most of the flour, increased the brown sugar, added cocoa, chocolate chips, coffee, and buttermilk. As well, I made the cookies larger and formed them into balls so that the insides would hopefully stay soft as they travelled in the postal system.
Essentially, they are either buttery chocolate cut stuffed with oats, or oats cut with buttery chocolate.

If you are lucky, maybe these will show up in your mail box.

Buttermilk Brownies

2010-03-21T19:50:00.006-04:00

I love brownies and I love buttermilk, so I thought I'd try and combine the two. Also I am hungry and wanting brownies and no cafes are open past 8:00 PM in this nutty little town.
Anyways, here's the first take:

1/2 cup butter

150 ml cocoa powder

1/4 cup coffee (espresso)

1/4 cup bttrmlk (my first rock album will be titled 'BTTRMLK', I have decided)

1 cup sugar

1 egg

1/2 cup chocolate chips (actually I forgot these but you shouldn't)

1 cup flour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

OK go go go MELT the BUTTER in a pot over medium-low heat. When melted, add the COCOA POWDER, mix well, remove from heat. Add SUGAR, mix, add COFFEE and BUTTERMILK, mix, add EGG (sans shell), mix just until combined. That reads a bit like one of those old-style text based adventure games, doesn't it? Weird. Combine the flour and baking powder in a big ol' bowl, add wet ingredients plus chocolate chips, mix just until combined (but do make sure you haven't left any flour clumps in there, those are unpleasant.
Portion batter into a greased muffin tin, bake at 350ºF for fifteen minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean when stuck in the middle of the biggest of those suckers.
You could go ahead and use a brownie pan or something, but then you've got to cut them and things, whereas a muffin tin gives you delicious, good-to-go little servings.

Post-analysis: These are a little cakey. There must have been too much fluid in the batter, and there wasn't enough chocolateyness too them. Taste pretty nice, but they are not what I was going for.
Not terribly sweet, which I like (and mom likes, apparently), and you can't really pick up on the buttermilk flavour too much. I think the simplest thing might just be to stick with cream-cheese if I want to the cultured dairy flavour in brownies, because buttermilk brings too much fluid to the stage.
I may try a brownie recipe with strained yogurt later.

Pita Bread Photos

2010-02-05T20:38:00.001-05:00

Don't think I ever posted pictures of pitas in the oven before, but they are one of the more interesting things I've baked. They swell up like balloons with steam and look ridiculous!

Look at that ridiculous one in the back! He is like, standing on his tippy-toes or something!

On Updates:

2010-02-05T00:28:00.003-05:00

So bi-daily was a nice idea but I found myself scrambling or dredging through the kitchen sometimes when I didn't want to be. I would like to have a regular schedule, and when possible I will endeavour to do such, but I think a much more useful meter will be to set out some targets and try to get those done within the month.
To that end, my immediate goals are makowiec, hot cross buns, and pizza pops. For makowiec, I'd like to do a bunch of reading and do a write-up with sources and references and what I changed and why. Hot cross buns I will try a few different things with, like icing cross versus pastry cross or yeasted dough versus baking powder. The hot cross idea that sounds the best in my head right now is just making little brioche rolls and putting a sweet pastry cross with a hint of almond on top. Man I am looking forwards to that.
Also, pizza pops! The samosa dough I just used should work fairly well for that. It'll definitely take some work to perfect the filling, though, and I think I'd let the yeast get up to speed a bit more and let them rise a bit before baking so we get a lighter, pizza-ier dough pocket.
Also I'd like to make some 'healthier' (not full of butter) breakfast muffins, but I so completely non-stoked for baking muffins without butter that that is definitely lowest priority in my mind right now.
That's mostly what I hope to get up to before march, and I think it's very doable. I'm aiming to get those things done well and have some simple updates like 'pastry scraps:' or 'baked in buttery pastry in a ramekin'. Ten posts in February will be my minimum goal, assuming I don't leave town for a week again!

Samosas!

2010-02-03T17:27:00.002-05:00

We are kind of living an exercise in frugality right now, so the question of the day was how to feed two people with the one chicken breast left in the freezer. The answer: samosas! These are essentially dough packets, stuffed with a fairly dry potato & chicken curry. None of the samosa recipes I referenced called for either eggs or yeast in the dough, but I love the yeasty taste in dough and I thought an egg would give us a richer pastry, so that's what I did. Samosas, as I interpret them, are just some sort of curry dish stuffed in some sort of pastry, and this is what I came up with.
Dough:

1/2 cup warm water

tspn sugar

tspn yeast

1/4 cup oil

1 egg

2 cups all purpose flour

OK, proof the yeast in the warm water with the sugar in some sort of proofing vessel (like a bowl!). When it's floated up from the deeps, add 1/2 cup of the flour, mix well, cover, and set aside for an hour in a not-cold place. When that's done, it should be bubbly and alive, so add the oil and egg and mix well. Add a cup of the flour, mix until it forms a raggedy messy mass, then work in the rest of the flour until you've got a nice feeling dough. Knead well for at least ten minutes, because you do want this dough to be stretchy, strong, and workable. Form it into a ball, and let it rest & rise while you fix the fillings.
Filling:

oil

1 tablespoon mustard seeds

2 medium-small potatoes

2 cloves of garlic

1 tbspn fresh ginger

1 tbspn garam masala

1 tspn crushed chili peppers

1 onion

1 carrot

1 chicken breast, chopped small

1/4 cup stock (whatever kind)

Cut the potatoes into 1/4 inch cubes and parboil them for five minutes. Put the oil in your cooking pan, add the mustard and heat it up. When the mustard seeds are crackling and popping, it's ready for the garlic and ginger, which should be minced together, and, if you have it, mashed up in a mortar and pestle. Fry the garlic and ginger for about thirty seconds, then add the garam masala and chili flakes. Toss in the chicken and onions, and when the chicken looks cooked on the outside, through in the chopped carrot and potatoes. Fry a little longer, then add the stock and let cook uncovered. Once the stock has all cooked away, it's ready to go! Let this stuff cool while you prep the dough.
Defleat then divide the dough into six equal portions. Form each piece into a ball and roll out into a big circle, about an eighth of an inch thick. Keep the rolled circles covered to prevent them from drying out, as this makes them more difficult to handle. When they're all rolled, Cut them in half, place stuffing on half of each half, leaving a border and fold over, stretching the top flap as necessary to fit over the filling. For those of you in Waterloo, this makes them in the style you get at Farah's foods. I have an certain fondness for those ones because of all the times I've wandered from the MC to Farah's at 4:00AM looking for matlab fuel. Diagram (grey is filling, fold from left over right):

Bake in a greased pan or just on parchment paper at 350F for 20-25 minutes, until the pastry is cooked.

I did two sizes to see how they'd go. I ate three of the tiny ones for lunch, mum had two. The bigger ones might be good for a breakfast or lunch on their own. I'm having one of the big ones for breakfast tomorrow, and the other big one is in the freezer, and mom will eat it for lunch on Saturday. Part of this experiment is to see how well these things freeze for re-heating, so I'll update when the frozen ones are consumed.
Post-analysis on the samosas has determined that the filling could have been a bit tastier. Maybe more spices would of helped, or more garlic or ginger. If you think that you can make a better curry than me, you probably can. I am OK at curry but not great. If you deviate, just remember that you want your filling to be fully cooked and edible before baking. Mom thinks they'd be better if they were a little wetter inside, so perhaps it might be an idea to add a bit more stock and then thicken it up with some starch or flour.
The dough is also a little cakey in the crumb. I'm OK with this, it is the product of my yeasting and egging it. The dough would be OK without those, though, if you don't like the texture.

"Marzipan" Muffins

2010-01-28T22:48:00.005-05:00

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this weird thing the bulk barn has that's labeled 'almond paste', which appears to be some sort of cheap approximation to marzipan. It is yellower than marzipan, it handles a little stickier, and I think they might of even slipped some vanilla in there to make up for its deficiencies in the almond department. Anyways, it's about a bajillion times cheaper than actual marzipan and given my love of marzipan yet limited budget, I like to pick some of the stuff up when it's on sale (which is always, for some strange reason).
I'm almost out of muffins again, so it's muffin time again (again!). I think I might be going a little nuts on muffins, this'll probably be the last time for a while that I make them. Basically I'm just doing chocolate chip muffins plus chopped up almond paste, with honey for to go with the almond with. OK that last sentence had something weird going on but I like the way it sounds if I say it, so redundant words remain.

2 cups all purpose flour

1 cup wheat germ

dash salt

shake of baking powder (look I don't measure it that would dirty a spoon come on now)

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup milk

1/2 cup honey

2 eggs

1cup chocolate chips

1/2 cup chopped "almond paste"

I started by setting the oven to 350ºF and using the heat from the oven exhaust to melt the butter, then I combined the flour, wheat germ, salt, and baking powder. The almond paste was chopped up to bits about the size of the chocolate chips and then added, with the chocolate chips, to the flour bowl.
The butter was melted by now, so that hit the milk and the honey and the vanilla, got mixed, and then the eggs joined the party and got beaten up.
Everybody together now! Mix just until combined! Put it in a muffin tin, let it go, 18 minutes hey-ho!

They came out pretty tasty, but way too sweet for my everyday breakfast muffins. That almond paste stuff is pretty sweet. They are too heavy to be cupcakes, but they seem pretty cupcakey, what with the vanilla, the almond, and the sweetness. Perhaps the honey could be halved next time. ALSO! If I do this again, I will use little paper cupcake liners, because the almondzipaste baked and bubbled and gummed everything up pretty good.
Not what was I going for, I guess I'll have eggs for breakfast tomorrow or something. Still pretty tasty!
I guess the room for pondering here would be in what flour variations would work. I think barley could work but I always think barley could work. The only non-wheats I have on hand right now are rye and buckwheat, though, which I don't think would work.

Baked Egg Update

2010-01-26T13:11:00.002-05:00

Baked eggs in pastry again, this time with chopped fresh spinach and grated cheddar. Baked only 25 minutes this time, got semi soft but I think there will always be a problem getting these things to have soft yolk but cooked whites when it's two eggs in one ramekin. When I finally have a reason to do a dozen I'll post the times from that.
Spinach and cheddar and eggs are a solid combo.

Plantain Chocolate-Chip Muffins

2010-01-24T18:22:00.005-05:00

So I'm a muffin addict and I've been using up some plantains I bought, so here are plantain & chocolate chip muffins.

2 cups white flour

1 1/2 cups wheat germ

4 tspns baking powder

dash salt

1 cup chocolate chips

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup milk

1 cup chopped plantain

1/4 cup brown sugar

2 eggs

Take your plantain, chop it up, and toss it with the sugar to soften. If you're on top of the game, do this a half hour or more before you start the rest of the stuff so they have time to soften in the sugar. Start by mixing your dry ingredients together in a bowl, then put the butter, milk, and plantain in a food processor or blender and zap it up smooth. Mix the eggs in with the wet stuff (pulse quickly or just mix in with a spoon), then dump the wet stuff in with the dry stuff, and mix just until combined. Portion out into a greased muffin tin, makes 12 muffins. Bake fifteen minutes or so at 350ºF or until a knife/toothpick comes out clean when inserted in the center of a muffin.

Honey Cookies

2010-01-22T14:10:00.003-05:00

Honey is pretty awesome. I don't know if it has any health benefits, and I'm purposefully not looking it up because I want to maintain my delusions that it somehow makes me well to eat lots of honey. I mean, it's a natural organic local product, right, it's got to be good for me?
Anyways, I made some honey cookies because I wanted to make some tasty cookies. Here goes!

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup shortening

1 1/2 cups honey

1 tablespoon fresh ginger

2 1/2 cups flour

1 cup wheat germ

1 teaspoon baking powder

chopped nuts or chocolate chips for topping

Cream the butter and shortening together, then beat in the honey and eggs. When that's good and mixed, add the flour, wheat germ, and baking powder. Mix until you've got a good cookie dough, then form them into balls on the size of two tablespoons, dip in the chopped nuts or chocolate chips, and bake at 350ºF for 9 minutes. If you want smaller cookies, make 'em smaller and cook a minute or two less. I like big cookies.
I also forced myself to make cookies without chocolate chips in them but decided to top the last batch with chocolate chips anyways because I am a fiend for chocolate chips.

P.S. Serve with black coffee! They are pretty sweet and simple in flavours but pair well with strong simple flavours like espresso.

Baked Eggs

2010-01-21T18:29:00.008-05:00

I was thinking about cute breakfast foods the other day and thought that baked eggs with pastry might be a cool thing to make. Ideally, I'd like to make a dozen baked eggs in a muffin tin, but whereas I do not have a dozen eggs worth of egg-eating people around, I've just done two eggs in a ramekin instead. The recipe is actually set for four of these things, but you can always make as many as you actually want and leave the leftover pastry for scraps for later, or even use them to make a sweet breakfast pastry for after the eggs. I've added in some fried mushrooms, onions, and garlic because I'm eating it for supper, but you can augment these with whatever you might put in an omelette (cheese, chives, roasted red pepper, whatever).

Anyways, TO MAKE:
-mix one cup pastry flour with a dash of baking powder and a dash of salt
-cube one half cup butter, then cut it through the flour
-sprinkle three tablespoons water on a little at a time, mixing gently
-turn onto a floured work surface and work slightly until it is just cohesive
-cut into quarters, place in fridge
-fry up half a portabello, two cloves garlic, and half an onion, all minced
-remove pastry from fridge, roll the quarters into circles, then place them in greased ramekins
-portion the fried business into the ramekins, then crack two eggs per ramekin on top, and season with salt and pepper
-bake at 350ºF for half an hour

I've seen another recipe online that calls for putting in one egg, then the bits and bobs, then the other egg, and that gives a cool effect too, but I just prefer the bits on the bottom of the egg.
Also, I like my yolk hard, so take a few minutes (five or so) off the bake time for runny yellows.

Also, in retrospect, the pastry might still be OK with only a third of a cup or butter. Having an eighth of a cup of butter per serving can't be a good idea.

Plantain Pie!

2010-01-18T21:20:00.005-05:00

My objective is to be updating this blog every other day now. I didn't keep up while I was away this past half-week, but I've got two things to type up that I baked but didn't blog while living with the vegan kitchener crew.
Keeping up with regular posts means some of these posts will be cool, some will be 'hey bake this in pastry scraps', and some will be 'so this didn't work, but I think I can fix it'. This plantain thing is a bit of all three.
Peel and slice two plantains and toss them in a bowl with one quarter cup sugar and one tablespoon ginger. Cover and set aside.
If you're making fresh pastry, make enough for a two crust pie or so, and add a quarter cup cinnamon for kicks. If not, that's cool.
Say 'Plantain Pie' a couple times aloud in optional assorted accents. Southern drawl is an obvious contender but british paper-boy is also pretty good.
I think 'flat pie' is going to be a theme of mine for a little while. I rolled this out as a pastry braid again, but if you wanted to do a flat-ish pie that's cool too. I just think they're pretty fun and easier to eat. What you're going for is to be able to layer the plantain pieces two slices thick, cover in pastry, and and bake until the pastry's done and the filling is soft, about forty minutes. Before baking, though, brush the top with water and sprinkle with sugar, and maybe more cinnamon if you're feeling reckless.
It is better hot than cold but it is a passable packable lunch-time snack leftover.

Pastry Scraps: Cream Cheese Braid

2010-01-12T00:01:00.004-05:00

Another pastry scrap idea, this time doable with a smaller amount of dough. This is using the scraps from the two pies from lunch today, but it's a fairly scaleable idea.
Quick and simple, I rolled the dough out into a rectangle about six or seven inches across and then as long as it would go. To form the braid, I trimmed the edges so this was a proper rectangle, then cut diagonal strips on the sides as per the following diagram:

The grey areas are to be cut off as scrap, the middle rectangle is where the filling goes, the top flap on the rectangle fold down and then all the little flaps on the side fold over the top, alternating sides. Sorry I didn't illustrate this on the picture, but you only cut off the grey areas and between the flaps on the side, the rest of the lines are just scored for reference. When you do this it should become self-evident when you're looking at it. The first time I made such a thing I did a paper cut-out first and folded it to make sure I understood what was going on.
The filling was about a quarter cup of cream cheese and two tablespoons of honey, creamed together and spread on the rectangle, plus a line of jam down the middle. Make sure to leave room around the edges as it'll spread out when you start folding!
When it's been filled and folded, back it at 350F for twenty minutes or so, or until it's done. Whereas this is a scraps project, the type of pastry you're using or the thickness of the pastry really depend on the circumstances, so just bake it till it's done.
You can glaze it with egg white and sprinkle it with sugar before you bake it, or brush it with sweet glaze when it's done, or, what I did was use up the leftover chocolate sauce from previous adventures and top it with that. Slice it into strips cross-ways (not lengthwise!) and enjoy!

Pastry Scraps: Pears & Jam

2010-01-10T23:36:00.000-05:00

So I've made four pies this week, which has left me with a nice pile of scraps that weren't quite enough to make a full pie, but I needed to use them up, so I've made this kind of semi-pie thing which is a pretty decent snack.
I took all my scraps, made a ball, and cut it in half, rolling each half thin until I got two pieces that'd just cover the bottom of a pie shell. I then sliced a pear, tossed the slices with three tablespoons of blackcurrant jam and two tablespoons of honey, and put the slices on one of the two pastry pieces (which was now in a pie tin). The edge of the pastry got wetted by some dabs of water, then the other crust went on top, got liberally slashed for steam vents, and it all baked at 350F for 35 minutes.
In the last ten minutes of baking, I stole my mom's idea and put a little pyrex measuring cup on the stove where the oven vents it's heat, and used that to melt some chocolate chips and butter.
When the pastry was done, I took it out, slid it onto a plate, and drizzled chocolate over top. Scrumptious and pretty low-labour for twelve o'clock at night!
Wish I had a camera...

Chocolate-Chip & Buttermilk Muffins

2010-01-08T16:51:00.004-05:00

I am lazy. Very lazy. Especially when it comes to breakfast. Most days of the week I am just like 'ughhhh sunshine ughhhh I don't care wait what you expect me to slice bread, put it in the toaster, then spread stuff on it and get my hands sticky with jam and then crunch my way through breakfast'. Sometimes, it is fun to cook breakfast/brunch but most of the time I just do not care. That is why I bake muffins! Make a batch of one or two dozen at night, and you've got breakfast for a couple days to a week!
The requirements for these muffins was that they be fairly heavy and not too sweet, so that I can eat two or three and feel full but not bad.
Here goes!

1 1/2 cups white flour

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 cup wheat germ (not toasted!)

4 teaspoons baking powder

dash salt

2 cups chocolate chips

1/2 cup buttermilk

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup honey

2 eggs

Cut up the butter and cream it with the honey, then add the butermilk and eggs and mix that together. Combine all the dry things in a bowl, form a well in the middle, then dump the wet things in and mix just until combined. Don't mix too much, but do be sure to scrape the bottom of the bowl for floury pouches.
Plop the batter into a buttered muffin tray, and bake at 350F until done. Uh, I think that's, like, twenty minutes? I just wash dishes and clean up and check the oven until they look done and a toothpick/thin knife come out clean when inserted into a muffin.

YUM.

Apple Custard Rhubarb Pie

2010-01-07T16:17:00.001-05:00

Here's a summer time recipe I never wrote up but quite enjoyed. I had apples and rhubarb, but didn't want to just throw them in a shell and make the same old rhubarb pie. So, I pulled up a custard recipe, blended some apples with it, then put chopped rhubarb on that and baked it. Turned out pretty much exactly as I wanted, so, from memory, more or less, here it is!
Need:

3/4 cup cream

1/4 cup flour

3 eggs

4 apples

4-8 stalks rhubabr

1/2 cup sugar

two pie crusts

So the pastry needs to be two half-baked pie shells. Grab any two crust pie recipe, put in two pie shells, prick each shell a half dozen times on the bottom, and bake at 400F for 20-25 minutes, until the crust is browned. Some people like to use parchment and pie weights, but I think that's unnecessary as long as you check ten minutes in to see if the bottom is swelling, and, if so, you just poke it to make it deflate, and then there's no need for parchment or weights. You can pre-bake these while prepping the filling.
Before baking the pies though, prep the fruit. Peel and core your apples, chop them up and toss them with 1/4 cup of the sugar, then chop the rhubarb and toss it with the other 1/4 cup of sugar, then set them aside (covered) to macerate. The apples need to sit for at least half an hour before you use them in the next step. Once your pie shells are in the oven, whisk well the cream, flour, and eggs. Add the chopped apples plus their juices and sugar to the custard mixture, and zap it with an immersion blender, stand blender, or food processor, whatever gets the job done. The apple should be soft by this point and should just blend away without leaving any chunks in the custard.
Now comes a quick choice for you to make. Basically, I wanted the custard to be strictly apple flavoured, butyou might like the idea of mixing the flavours. So, if you want your filling to taste of both apple and rhubarb, toss the chopped rhubarb plus it's juice into the custard mixture and pour it all into the shells. If, like me, you want segregation of you flavour states, pour the custard into the shells pour off and reserve your rhubarb juice (I made mango-rhubarb lassi with it!), and toss the rhubarb over top of the custard.
Bake in a 350F oven for 25-30 minutes, until the custard has set.

So, as this is from memory, there are caveats. I have no idea how much rhubarb I used, just use what you want and what you have on hand. I scarcely buy it and instead just get bundles of it from people who have it and have too much (rhubarb is like a weed). As well, I might have used four eggs, I might have used three. Feel free to use as many eggs as you want if you have a better idea.
It fulfilled my objectives pretty much to the letter, by having a very apply custard plus chopped rhubarb. The custard was a bit soft/watery, though, so it might be a thought to either not add the juices from the apples or to reduce that juice first. I was fine with it as it was, but you might have a different opinion after making.

Brownie Pie: Vegan Blue Ribbon Edition!

2010-01-03T11:31:00.006-05:00

I took four of these pies to the Toronto Vegetarian Association's annual Totally Fabulous Vegan Bake-Off, and I walked away with a blue ribbon for taking the Judge's Pick award, plus the six pounds of organic sugar which were the prize. I may have been bragging about this a lot since then, so here, finally, is my recipe for Vegan Brownie Pie.

Pie:

1 3/4 cup white pastry flour

1 cup barley flour

1/4 tspn salt

1/4 tspn baking powder

200 ml shortening

7 tbsp water

1 tbspn cider vinegar

Bronie:

1/2 cup oil

1/4 cup malt syrup

4 tbsp chocolate soy milk

1/4 vegan cream cheese

1/2 cup white sugar

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup white flour

1/2 cup whole wheat flour

1/2 cup cocoa powder

1/2 tspn salt

1/2 cup chocolate chips

1/2 cup crushed walnuts

To assemble the crust, start by combining the water and vinegar and refrigerating them. Then mix the flours, salt, and baking powder, and cut the shortening into tiny dice-sized cubes. Cut the shortening through the flour with two knives or a pastry blender, then sprinkle the water/vinegar over top, tossing the dough lightly until all the flour is wet. Form up into a ball, and refrigerate.

To start the brownie batter, combine your dry ingredients in one bowl and your wet ingredients in another, and mix each bowl well. Form a well in the dry bowl, pour the wet bowl into the dry, then mix until combined, making sure to scrape up the bottom and sides of the bowl so no pockets of flour remain.

Take your pastry out of the fridge, and roll your bottom crust and fit it to the pan. Put the brownie batter in the pie crust, then roll your top crust out and cover the pie with it. This dough is a little finicky, so if you get tears, just moisten damage areas with water and patch it up.

Bake at 350F for an 50 minutes, or until a knife/toothpick comes out clean when inserted in the middle.

While deliciously tempting to eat while still warm, I usually offer this pie cold for ease of serving.

ENJOY!

Tourtiere!

2010-01-02T20:19:00.008-05:00

OK I love tourtiere. It is a pretty amazing dish. I made it for the first time this past New Year's Day, and it received compliments from a genuine French-Canadian, so hey, here's the recipe! It uses equal parts pork and lamb, simmered in turkey stock plus the necessary spices and a minimal compliment of sauteed veggies, packaged in a flakey butter crust because butter makes the best pie crusts and you are not going to sell your tourtiere short.

Fillings:

500g ground lamb

500g ground pork

3 cups turkey stock

2 stalks celery

2 small onions

4 cloves garlic

1/4 cup bread crumbs

1 tspn nutmeg, 2 tspn allspice, 1 tspn cinnamon, black pepper to taste

butter (for frying)

2 tbsp corn starch or flour

Crusts:

4 1/2 cups pastry flour

1/2 tspn salt

1/2 tspn baking powder

220ml water

30ml cider vinegar

1 3/4 cups butter

For the filling, start the meat frying (feel free to fry it all at once, but my pan could only really take one pound at a time). You want it to be all broken up, so mix it and prod it. While that's going, start chopping your vegetables. As the meat is done, drain it and dump the meat into a bowl, and continue frying the rest of the meat. When all the meat is done, melt some butter in the pan to fry the veg and put the stock in a pot and bring it to a boil so it's ready when you want it. When the vegetables are all good and soft, combine the meat, spices, and vegetables with your stock and bring it to a boil. Let this simmer gently for an hour or so uncovered. The juice can reduce and get everything good and tasty.

While the filling is cooking make your pastry! There is nothing special here, so you can skip this bit if you know how to make pie already. If you are still reading, combine the water and vinegar and put them in the fridge to keep cool. Mix your flour, salt, and baking powder together in a large mixing bowl, then cut the butter up into cubes maybe half the size of the last segment of your left-hand pinky finger (it helps to bring the butter out of the fridge back when you started cooking so it is workable now). Toss the butter in the mixing bowl, and cut it through the flour. This involves using a pastry blender or just slicing it double-time with two knives kind of like scissors through the flour. Keep cutting it through until you've got a bunch of pea-sized bits of flour/butter.
Spread this stuff over a large work surface, and sprinkle the water/vinegar over it. Gently toss it around then work it together into a big ol' raggedy mass (you may need to scrape some of it off the counter). Put the dough in the fridge to chill while you wash some dishes or something.
When your kitchen's clean again, crack some black pepper into the filling that's cooking on the stove (I have heard pepper is best if you add it only for the last ten-fifteen minutes of cooking). Back to the pastry, roll out and fit two bottom crusts to pie tins, then roll out two top crusts. Back in the fridge again until you're done with the filling!

So, now you've got two pie bottoms and two pie tops ready to go! Time to finish the filling! Hey, you were mixing that stuff on the stove semi-regularly while you were making the pastry, right? Right, OK. Oh you could probably turn your oven on to 375F now too.

Strain the broth from the meat, dump the meat in a mixing bowl and put the broth back on the stove. Mix the meat and the breadcrumbs together, then mix the flour/starch in a quarter cup of cold water. Dump the starch-water in the broth, and cook over medium-high heat until it's thickened up and bubbly again. Turn heat to low and get your crusts out of the fridge.

Half the filling goes in each pie, then the tops go on, then you get four radial steam vents, and they're ready for the oven. Forty minutes or so and the pastry should be done, and you've got two delicious tourtieres!

Afterthoughts and concerns!
I used about a liter of broth because that is what I had. It gave me about a cup too much broth after cooking so that is why I have said to use three cups. Alternatively, use a litre of stock and you'll get some tasty tourtiere gravy out of it, too. Which you might want, so hey, maybe use an extra cup
My 'stock' was about the bare-bonesest of stocks possible, in that I just boiled all the bones plus gibbly scraps of one roasted turkey in water and reduced it to about a litre. I think the pies benefited from this simple stock because I do not think tourtiere needs busy flavours, it just needs simple, strong, delicious flavours mixed together in proportion. Use what you want but if you've got turkey bones, boil them and use that.
I also don't know how long they cooked for, because I put them in then got lost in a book. Just bake them till the pastry's done and brown, as the insides are already OK.

Cookies: Coffee, Orange, and Barley

2009-11-05T23:56:00.005-05:00

OK so I've got a massive backlog to type up including my experiments with chocolate chip muffins (I've got some pretty great ones), my adventures with my now award-winning brownie pie, and my new take on apple-rhubarb pie.
Anyways, here are some cookies I just made. I was shooting for biscotti but I very cleverly failed entirely and ended up with cookie squares instead. Whatever, it's been a while (years) since I last made biscotti. These squares are pretty delicious anyways. Quick and dirty type-up because I've got to go prove some things about graphs and things.

the stuffs:

1 cup butter

1 cup brown sugar

1/3 cup white sugar

1/3 cup espresso

1 egg

1 3/4 cups white flour

1 1/4 cup barley flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

zest of one orange

chocolate chips

Beat that butter and sugar together. If you start with milk fat and sugar you can't really go wrong. McDonalds figured this out, which is why their burgers are equal parts ground beef product and refined corn syrup extract, deep fried in butter. If you've got your fat and your sweet you're good to go.
OK, now throw in the egg and the coffee. Mix it up some more. Zest the orange into that and mix it up some more some more. Then pre-mix your flours and your baking powder and then throw that in with the wet stuff, dump in some chocolate chips, and mix it up a some more some more some more.
I refuse to measure chocolate chips. Just add a bunch. If you lack the capacity to understand chocolate chips and how awesome they are, just, you know, add a cup or two I guess?
Spread the dough out on a greased pan, bake in your oven at 350º for between 20-30 minutes, depending on if you prefer gooey or firm.
I rolled it all up and put it on the middle of a pan, but this dough did not have nearly enough ability to keep itself together under heat, and just kind of spread out over the whole pan, so I got a very uneven bake, but hey, they're so good I don't care. I just needed study food and I got it.
CAVEAT: I hodge-podged this together so I fudged some figures. I actually used a 'splash-dollop' of espresso, 1 1/3 cup white flour + a dump-full extra, and a splort-dash of baking powder. Also your cooking time may in fact be less. Mine took half an hour but it was not spread thinly or uniformly at any point of the process, so, rotate your pan at ten minutes and check it at fifteen minutes to be sure, OK?

More to come! Within a week! For Reals! I'll bake muffins this weekend to pay off debts and feed friends, and I'll post that recipe.

Oh god what have I done cookies

2009-01-06T23:36:00.003-05:00

I wanted to bake something to deal with my rampant uncertainty in life, so I decided to make cookies. I knew there were no eggs in the fridge since neither of us have been shopping since we got back in town, so I figured I'd just use some flax seed. Then I got in the kitchen and realized that there is no flax in the house. I was too far along in the process at that point to pull out, so I looked around for substitute ingredients. Yogurt was moldy. Nothing was in the house. Then I opened the last cupboard and saw the instant oatmeal.

-1 cup butter
-1 thingy oatmeal in half the ration of boiling water
Cream together once the oatmeal has cooled to just being 'warm'.

1 cup cocoa
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup rye
1/2 cup white bread flour
Mix above together with the buttermeal, until a cookie dough is formed. Shape into cookies and bake.

I have decided the above shall be called 'delightfully unpleasant cookies'. The inside is just just underdone, the lack of egg means they're a bit crumbly to the touch, and they are a world of bitter. Quite enjoyably so in fact.
Colin liked them with maple syrup, I think a drizzle of maple syrup plus a raspberry cream would go wonderfully. Whatever you do, though, do not pair them with grapefruit juice. That is an awful idea.

Super Weird Milk Bread

2009-01-03T11:16:00.001-05:00

Cheeseless Cheesey Coffee Rye Bread

NEED to start:

1 1/2 cups cold milk

4 tspn yeast

4 tbsp + 1 tbsp + 1 tspn sugar

-Mix milk, yeast, and the 4 tablespoons of sugar together and stir well in preparation for making forty croissant for new years day
-Realize that the milk is too cold to proof the yeast, and that you don't have time to let it warm up, and you're worried about microwaving yeast
-Pour mixture into a glass, cover with saran wrap, start over with warm milk
-Make croissant for the three family new-years-day brunch, consume much delicious food
-24 hours after mixing the yeast milk, give it another tablespoon of sugar, mix, and leave in the fridge still
-12 hours after that, give it another teaspoon of sugar, and set in a bowl on the counter to warm up and come alive

NEED to continue:

1 cup warm coffee

4 cups rye flour

2 1/2 cups white flour

~~1 tbsp yeast~~ a quarter-jar of yeast

4 tspn coarse sea salt

-Add the warm coffee to the milk to bring it up to heat and come alive sooner
-While the yeast is coming alive, mix the flours together in a bowl, forming a well in the center
-Become worried about your milky-yeasty business when it bubbles up but there is only minimal yeast-mass floating on top of the fluid
-What could of gone wrong, yeast and milk both live happily in the fridge most of the time. It can't have gone bad or anything!
-Get out some more yeast from the fridge, get a tablespoon of yeast ready
-Set the table spoon of yeast down to pick up a clean spoon with which to taste the milk to make sure it's still OK
-Mmmmm! A little sweet, but mostly milky and slightly alcoholic! Excellent!
-Add the yeast
-Realize that you put the tablespoon of yeast down meaning that instead of putting a tablespoon of yeast in, you actually just dumped the remaining quarter of a jar of yeast into your milk
-oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit
-Let proof
-Mix the sea salt in with the flour to try and intercept the rampant yeast monster you have made
-When proofed, add the yeast and sweetened milk to your dry ingredients, and knead until it sticks together (should be a sticky, wet dough)
-Form into a ball, cover, and let rise several times, watching to punch it down as soon as the dough peaks it's rise
-Preheat your oven to 450F with a pan of water in the bottom for steam
-Form your dough into an attractive loaf, let rise one last time for half an hour
-Bake in the oven for an hour and ten minutes or so, turning the heat down to 375F after the first five minutes

This is actually one of the tastiest things I've baked. A very strong, charactered bread, it's heavy in texture just as I like it, and has a complex, slightly cheesy taste to it.
Will definitely be baking this again.

Pork & Apple, Pork & Apple, and Apple Bread

2009-01-02T12:40:00.006-05:00

It's December and I'm back home and I have been baking! Three things to write about today: some apple-pork tarts, an associated pastry braid, and a revisitation of 'pie bread' from this summer.

So, Andrew Lockhart came over one night after going out for coffee, and as he is wont to do, he immediately went to our fridge looking for leftovers which he could consume. We had just left a coffee shop with the intent of baking something with the apples I had at home, and so when Andrew saw the leftover pork roast from supper, he immediately went 'we are baking apple-pork something', I said 'definitely not' and he said 'too bad, we have to'.
So, I peeled seven apples and tossed them with sugar, pulsed the apple peels in a food processor with the congealed pork drippings, chopped-then-processed the pork, tossed all the above together along with an eight-teaspoon of nutmeg, allspice, and cinnamon. This all got put in a twelve-muffin pan that had been lined with pastry dough, then topped with little pastry leaves my mum cut out for us.
Baked in a 350 oven for 55 minutes, end product was a semi-sweet tortiere like tart that was quite delicious. We should have chopped the apple a little smaller and more consistently (my initial plan was to apple-sauce the lot, but we decided to leave them for texture), and mom thought they needed a little bit of salt to bring out the flavours.

This only used slightly more than half of the filling so today I made a batch of croissant dough, rolled it out to a 10" by 16" rectangle, and made a danish braid with it. I'm doing a write-up on croissant for the next issue of the zine (if anyone reads this and wants a copy of my zine, just leave a message and I can mail one), so specifics on how that works are forthcoming. The filling was much tastier in this, and when surrounded by flakey buttery pastry people were more agreeable to it's ridiculousness.

Brother-Andrew's girlfriend Crystal is in for christmas again, and she saw the picture of the danish braid I was using for reference and got excited at the prospect and then disappointed when she found out I was stuffing it with the pork and apple (which she was afraid of), so I made up some pie bread, slightly modified, which I intended to stuff with the pork, but later decided that the pork belonged in the pastry braid, so the bread just got apples. Consequently, there were savory spices in the pie bread that made for a very peculiar loaf.

3/4 cup warm water

1 teaspoon sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons of yeast

2 1/2 cups flour

1/2 cup shortening

4 apples

1/2 teaspoon oregano and thyme (DO NOT USE THIS)

1/4 cup honey

Peel, slice, and core the apples, toss the slices and peel in a bowl with the honey to sit. Mix the yeast with the sugar in the water to proof, and cut the shortening through the flour and herbs as if for pastry.
Put the apple peel in a food processor, along with most of the fluid from the apples, process fine, and then combine the processed peel, yeast-water, and shortening-flour and knead with cold hands until it sticks together. Set aside to rise for about forty-five minutes (you could do two rises on this like regular bread but I was lazy and short on time).
Briefly zap the apple in the food processor, then roll the dough out between two pieces of wax paper to about a quarter of an inch thick and not wider than a loaf pan. Lay the apple chunks out on top of the flat dough, then, using the wax paper to help, roll the whole thing up, and drop it in a loaf pan. Let it rise again for about half an hour, before baking at 350º for an hour or so.
Again, this bread was slightly under-done on the inside, and the herbs were a mistake (this was originally intended for the pork and apple). Again, makes amazing french toast, so that's what this bread is for. It makes super-amazing french toast. This is the best french toast bread ever. For real.

Bread

2008-11-28T23:38:00.002-05:00

Well after being a cripple and incapacitating myself with capsicum I might be ready to bake again.

It was just my birthday and I had a bunch of people over for top-your-own-pizzas, for which I used about 14 cups of flour to make four delicious pizzas which my friends brought toppings for. Ashley might win the topping award for bringing components of and making fresh pesto, though Druker is for sure a close second with that awesome ham. It was about twelve cups whit flour, one cup rye, one cup barley, with the rye and barley getting the pre-ferment treatment I usually use, except no yogurt because about half of my friends are vegans, apparently. That made a pretty good crust.

Now sitting on my counter is a cup of rye flour, a cup of barley flour, half a cup of delicious porter, half a cup of water, and 1/3 teaspoon of yeast. I wanted to make bread for my godmother who is coming in for birthday lunch with me tomorrow, but I don't have time to let it ferment as long as I'd like so I gave it a bit more yeast just for fun. I'll make it into bread tomorrow morning.

Sorry

2008-11-11T14:54:00.001-05:00

Sorry I haven't done anything recently. My knees have been hurting something fierce since two weeks ago, and I really can't stand up long enough to clean the kitchen, let alone bake something.
Hopefully I will be better soon and then I will make Kyle's cookies for him. Hopefully that will be tonight.

Stupidly Busy, Arguably Vegan Bread (banana-honey-corn-rye-apple)

2008-10-28T19:12:00.003-04:00

"James, why is this bread so stupidly complicated?"
"I don't know, why is your face so stupidly complicated?"
"..."
"Whatever."

Banana-honey-corn-rye-apple loaf:
Stuff to have:

3 cups rye flour

1 cup cornmeal

1 cup corn flour

1 slightly heaping tablespon baking powder

1/3 cup oil

1/3 cup honey

two bananas

1 cup warm water

1 apple

Pre-heat your oven to 350ºF
Combine dry stuff in a bowl, mixing till it's mixed.
Combine wet stuff in a separate bowl, mixing and mashing until mixed and mashed.
Make a well in the dry stuff, add the wet stuff to it, mix it until it forms a moderately thick batter-dough hybrid.
Scoop one cup each of the batter into two loaf pans, then peel, core, and slice the apples. Stick a layer of apples on top of each of the loaves, making sure to leave some room around the edge of the pan so that the apple slices aren't touching the pan directly. Split the rest of the batter in covering the two loaves, then bake for thirty to forty-five minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.

I had bananas and honey I needed to use, and a dish I needed to return to a friend that I didn't want to send back empty. This is kind of a re-hash of the banana-corn-rye, just a little bit sillier and done on a larger scale. Probably best for sweet breakfast stuff or a snack in the evening.

Zine!

2008-10-24T02:08:00.000-04:00

So I am going to be at the zine fair at the starlight Saturday. Doors open at 1PM. Be there if you want a zine and/or a croissant.

Croissants

2008-10-21T16:50:00.002-04:00

So I made croissant on the weekend. I didn't really follow the recipe as I was lazy and didn't have that much time, but they came out OK. A little dense on account of not letting the yeast get up to speed, and they didn't puff perfectly because I got sloppy and some butter took emergency evasive maneuvers all over the counter, but all in all, a delicious success. If I have time I will make some for the zine fair.

CGRUCOOKIE

2008-10-20T23:47:00.000-04:00

Take one on chocolate ginger roll-up cookies:
-use chocolate dough, not just chocolate chip cookie dough so as to make it noticeable that they are swirly
-don't even bother with chocolate chips, it makes them harder to slice
-use more ginger! 1tbsp fresh ginger is not enough!

Zine fair. Saturday. Noon. Starlight.

2008-07-19T22:38:00.002-04:00

Nearly a month since my last post! Whoa!

I have just mixed a sponge which will hopefully turn into something tasty in a day or so. It is: 2 cups barley flour, 1 cup water, 1 tablespoon malt syrup, 1 cup sourdough starter.
When I wake up I'll add some more flour/water and update.

...

10:30 PM - 11:30 AM => that sponge sat for thirteen hours. I added two cups whole wheat flour, one half cup water, and around a half a cup of white flour. That was kneaded, and has now been sitting for just over an hour and a half. I'm going to punch it down, make it into loaves, let it rise again, then bake. Updates when delicious.

CANADA BREAD

2008-07-01T13:14:00.004-04:00

I started a sponge for a loaf of what was going to be an all rye-flour loaf with cilantro and parsley from my garden. While I was away at work, I realized that it was, in fact, Canada day tomorrow (today). So, here's what's rising on my counter right now:

3PM, day before: proof 1/4 teaspoon yeast in 1/4 cup warm water, combine with 2 cups rye flour, 1 teaspoon salt, and 3/4 cups yogurt. Cover and let sit in a medium warm/cool place for 12-18 hours (18 hours means I'd wake at 9:00 AM the next morning and start baking).

Midnight, day before/of: get home from work and see that your cute little sponge hasn't really sponged too much. Proof another quarter teaspoon of your other yeast with a teaspoon of maple syrup and a quarter cup of water. Mix that in.

Noon, day of: proof two teaspoons of yeast in a half cup warm water, separately mix together a half cup warm water and three-quarter cups of maple syrup. Add the maple water to the sponge, squish it up and mix well, then add the yeasty water. Mix well, then add to five and a half cups rye flour (I used four and added about one and a half while kneading) and knead well. Don't be afraid to flour while kneading, you will probably need it.

Rise twice and bake.

Honey Apple Mk. III

2008-06-25T13:07:00.007-04:00

I used to bake lots of bread with yogurt but kind of got out of the habit gradually. I bought some yogurt Wednesday so I could make some bread to give to my aunt & uncle for staying with them this past weekend, and now that I've got some lying around, I wanted to make a pie with it.
A two-part yogurt ordeal, I've presently got four apples, peeled/cored/sliced, sitting in a bowl with a half cup of honey and a half cup of yogurt, and for the crust I figure I'll do the regular but I'll leave out the vinegar (because the yogurt is sour/acidic and because it is a milk product) and instead of gradually adding nine tablespoons water, I'll whip together six tablespoons yogurt six tablespoons water and add until moist.
My previous experiments with flavouring crusts with fluid have been just kind of lackluster since nine tablespoons is nothing to three cups, but I'm at least as interested in the texture anyways.
Also, since I don't want to reduce the apple fluid with the yogurt in it, I'm just going to make this a lattice top pie and hope it works out.
Updates when applicable!

Update the first: Pie is in oven. The crust was

2 cups stone ground whole wheat flour (white would have been better but I am out)

1 cup shortening

dash baking powder

5 tablespoons yogurt

5 tablespoons cold water

Rolled out the bottom crust, put the filling in. Rolled out the rest of the dough, cut lattice strips, assembled the lattice on the pie, put the pie on a baking pan to catch drips, and covered the pie with foil. It went in the oven five minutes ago and will spend a total of twenty minutes (somewhat arbitrary) covered in foil so as to steam/bake the apples properly, then the foil comes off so the excess fluid can evaporate through the lattice and not leave too soggy a pie. I'm considering leaving the foil on for longer, because apple pie should be juicy, but whatever.
Oh and I meant to sprinkle brown sugar over the apples in the pie before putting the lattice on but forgot! Whoops!

Update the second: Should have left it without foil the whole time, if anything, it looks like the volume inside the pie has increased. Hopefully it's just bubbling/swelling because of the heat. It's going to be a little messy to bike with...

COOKIES

2008-06-20T18:05:00.003-04:00

So I made some pretty sweet cookies for my friends from the internet. I can't recall the precise recipe, I will post it when I get home, but the basic premise was, mix up cookies dough, but before adding the flour, split the soft stuff (1/2 cup butter 1/2 cup shortening 1 cup packed brown sugar 2 eggs dash vanilla 1 tsp(???) baking powder) in half, and give one half white flour (1.5 cups?) and a half cup of cocoa powder, and the other a cup and a half rye flour (1.5 cups) and a cup of chocolate chips.
Place the chocolate cookie dough between two pieces of wax paper, roll it out. Place the chocolate chip dough between two pieces and flatten. Place the layers on top of each, and roll it up. If you want, flatten again and fold to marble, or, if you've rolled it long side up, you may be able to just slice spiral round cookies off of the roll.
Enjoy!

Pita Mk. II

2008-06-18T15:54:00.007-04:00

My friend gave me some delicious curry this morning, so I figured I ought to make something to give back. My first thought, then, was pita bread again.

Same procedure as last time, except ingredients were:

2 tsps dry yeast

1/2 cup warm water

1 tbsp malt syrup

6 cups white bread flour

two cups corn flour

2 1/2 tsps salt

3 cups warm water

They are not done yet, though I have high hopes. The problem, though, is in the naming! What do I call corn pitas? Tortilla pita? Torpita? Portittia? Portilla? Torpilla? Tortita?

P.S. dough to wet to roll, cut back by a quarter cup water next time. Rolling in coarse cornmeal made the outsides too crispy/crunchy, I think I'll stick with flour and just dust them off when they're done with a brush.
Corn taste not too prominent, I'll try a higher ratio next time.

Pie Bread!

2008-06-10T13:16:00.005-04:00

So now that I've acquired some measure of skill in both pies and bread, it is time to commence work on the unholy bastard spawn of both foods!

First attempt:

1 1/2 cup warm water

1 tablespoon malt syrup

3 teaspoons (heaping) of 'dead' yeast

5 cups flour

1 cup shortening

1/2 cup sugar

I proofed the yeast (which had been given to me by a fried who said it was possibly dead after not being properly refrigerated) with a half cup of the water and the malt, cut the shortening (which was slightly more than a cup) through the flour, added the rest of the fluid, and mixed until it was doughy/stretchy. That rose, then I rolled it out flat, poured on some thick smoothie like substance (some apples and strawberries, that had been sitting in a plastic tub in my fridge for a while and were promptly blended last night), and rolled it like what I assume a jelly roll would be like. This rose again in bread pan, and was then baked for about an hour.

I really should have split the dough into two batches and made two loaves, but oh well. It didn't bake through because it was so dense and I didn't let it rise very long in the bread pan. However, I sliced the under done loaf this morning after it had sat/set overnight, then baked them again for curious results. Kind of a dense, slightly chewy fruity thing, which retained enough of the crumbly texture I was going for.

Not a perfect success, but a good first step on my mad adventure. Would make excellent french toast.

Experimental Bean Bread

2008-06-03T15:59:00.004-04:00

I've just tried to come up with a decent bean bread recipe, I'm not sure how it's going to turn out, but here's the recipe (reimagined after having made it up while making it) that I used:

seven cups flour

two cups water

one can (~2 cups cooked?) black beans

2 1/4 teaspoons yeast

2 teaspoons molasses (not sure if that was a good idea or not)

Proof the yeast with the molasses and a quarter cup of the water. While that's doing it's thing, drain and rinse the beans, then put them in a blender with the rest of the water (I only put them in with one cup, but I think using all of it would give better blending). Put the flour in a bowl and make a well in the middle, then when the yeast is done, pour the liquified beans in the bowl along with the yeast. Mix and knead, rise twice, shape, rise if applicable, and bake.
~~Will update when done!~~

Bread has good texture, no particular black bean taste. If you want a curiously coloured bread with some protein, this recipe works, but I think I'll try using a cup less water and three cups less flour as a starting point (my initial plan, before I decided to add a cup of water to help blend the beans after I'd already mixed the water and yeast with the flour) and see if that gives more black bean flavour.

Special Summertime Beverage Edition!

2008-05-26T14:04:00.001-04:00

This has kind of turned into a place to post things for people to use as well as a place for me to record my notes, so, in that spirit, here is a specialtime-summerdrink edition! I posted this on some forums a few years ago, and it initially came from a little (jalapeno) recipe book my mom bought my brother. I make this every summer and love it dearly
Simmer one and a half cups sugar in a half cup water, mix constantly till dissolved (clear). Remove from heat
Add 6 cups water + 3/4 cup lemon juice (feel free to throw some lime juice in there if you want as well). Mix briefly.
Toss in two Jalapeno peppers, diced, but large enough to be removed later. Let sit in fridge for anywhere from an hour to a day, then remove peppers.
CAUTION: Do not boil the mixture with the peppers in it! That will make it way too spicy.Stir and test it maybe every hour or two after the peppers have gone in to gauge it. If making it for a barbecue when you think it'll all be consumed in one day, feel free to leave the chunks in. Remember to sip the drink, don't gulp. Mixes well with gin, if that's your thing.

Honey Apple Revisited

2008-05-14T21:59:00.001-04:00

Anton had us over for steaks he bought on discount last night, so I figured I could contribute to the meal with PIE.
Assessing my assets, I figured honey apple would be the way to go. This involved maybe four smallish apples and three largish apples, peeled and sliced on my handy peeler/corer/slicer machine, tossed around with the juice of one lemon and maybe just over a cup of honey (all that I had left). This sat for a while, until I strained and reduced the juices, then re-assembled the apples and syrup in the pie crusts.
Now, since honey was going to be a more dominant flavour, I didn't want to heavily spice it with any of the regular apple pie things that might conflict with it. So, thinking honey, I went for a whole wheat and almond crust! The crust was (for two two-crust pies) two cups whole wheat flour, one and a half cups white flour, and one cup fresh ground almonds (topped up with walnuts to make it a full cup), with 500 mL of shortening, two tablespoons cider vinegar, seven tablespoons apple cider, seven tablespoons cold water. The water was a bit too much, as it was measured for flour, not nuts, but the blend did a nice job of letting you taste the nuts in the crust this time. I was pleased.

It was a big hit, we actually ended up eating two pies between four people. Also I managed to create a rig that lets me carry two pies on the back of my bike!

Apple-mango update

2008-05-11T22:12:00.001-04:00

I've just made the third incarnation of the apple-mango pie, and I think I like the filling the best this way. There were two smaller, softish apples and one larger, firmer one, chopped up and tossed with lemon juice. For reasons still not entirely clear to me, I blended yesterpie's leftover apple slices, which had gone brown in the fridge, with some cider and zapped it into sauce. Then I cooked it until it was a nice, thick apple sauce. I don't know why I did this, it just sort of happened.
I used a few tablespoons of that as fluid when blending the chopped mango later. It didn't get as much of a smoothie texture as when I blended mango with cider, but I didn't want it to get too wet. So, the blended mango/apple sauce then went into the frying pan with the apples (which went on while the sauce was cooking), got tossed around and cooked as I rolled the crusts, then went into the shell and baked until the crust was done.

It gave a nice soft fruit filling throughout, which wasn't what I was going for, but I think I actually like it more than an apple pie with chunks of mango. This may make a really good turnover filling. I might grind some nuts and use those to make a little firmer still, but I'm not sure which would be best.

Pita Bread!

2008-05-07T01:22:00.000-04:00

I really actually wanted to write my bastard samosa/fatayers down here before doing something else, but pitas are fresh on my mind so I'll write them down now. The recipe I worked with came from the same book as the first bread I posted, The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book.

NEED:

2 tsps dry yeast

1/2 cup warm water

5 1/2 cups white bread flour

one cup dark rye flour

2 1/2 tsps salt

2 1/2 cups warm water

Dissolve the yeast in the warm water, let it wake up. Duh. Mix the flours and salt together, make a well in the center, pour in the water and yeast and water, mix, then knead well. I went for a full twenty minutes (two brief breaks), to make sure it was well kneaded, as the gluten is essential to the pocketing. I may try doing it next time for only five to ten minutes to see if laziness is OK, but I don't mind kneading, and my soup was simmering so I had to stay near the kitchen but had nothing to do.
This dough should be fairly soft and be just not sticky. Work in more flour if you think it needs it.
Form the dough into a ball, and let rise for about an hour and a half, until doubled, in a warm, draft free place. It is more important here than with regular bread that the dough does not dry out, as steam, instead of yeast or baking soda, is the workhorse in rising this stuff. The yeast gives it texture and some flavour, but the rising is steam-powered.
Punch it down, let it double again (about half an hour to thirty minutes), then flatten it and divide into twenty to twenty-four even pieces, and smooth those into rounds. Set them aside to rest for ten minutes again, well covered and draft-protected, or you'll get no pocket. Start the oven to 450º F and put your baking stone on the second lowest rack.
Once they're rested, roll out four, keeping the rest covered, then toss them on the stone quickly, trying to make sure they don't fold over on themselves. You'll probably need a lot of flour as you're rolling these because it should be a fairly moist dough still.
Start rolling the next batch of pitas, making sure to check on the ones in the oven after three minutes. If all has gone well, they should puff up like delicious bread balloons. Take them out when they look done; a little browning is OK, but if they get crispy, well, they get crispy and that's not useful as a pocket bread. I'd of taken a picture at this stage because they looked really cool, but I was too busy dealing with the smoke detector because somebody used my baking stone to roast red peppers and it still gets smoky from the juice burning on...

Anyways, these turned out wonderfully on the first go! I was out of whole wheat flour, which is why I used rye (original recipe called for six cups whole wheat bread flour). Bread flour is important here, as the pocket is created when the steam trapped on the inside of the stretchy gluten dough is trapped and pushes the two sides apart. Maybe I'll try an all-purpose flour batch with lazy kneading to see how necessary all of that really is, but I would not risk cutting corners if I was cooking them for something.
The finished pitas were definitely a little floury from all the flouring I did to roll the sticky dough, so I think next time I'll dusting them with corn meal instead. And make corn flour pitas as well!
If you're anything like me, you're going to want to tear one of the first ones open to see if it's done, so, if you do, be warned, these things have swollen like balloons because of steam, meaning there is a lot of hot, pressurized steam inside of them. Keep this in mind when using your hands/looking closely. Don't burn yourself on hot steam. That's really lame.

I can't wait to make a good salad thing to stuff these with!

Potluck Part 1: Strawberry Lime!

2008-05-04T15:00:00.000-04:00

A week ago we hosted a vegan potluck at my place, which went fairly well. For it I baked a pizza, made an attempt at fatayers which ended up more like samosas, and constructed two strawberry-lime pies.

The pies turned out too tart because I didn't add enough sugar (I actually forgot to buy white sugar and didn't want the flavour of brown sugar mucking around in there), but they were tasty nonetheless.

For two pies, you need:

Nine cups sliced strawberries

Four cups halved strawberries

One and a half cups fresh lime juice

One tablespoon corn starch

Two tablespoon water

Two one-crust pie shells, pre-baked

A quarter cup of sugar

Throw five cups of the sliced strawberries in a pot with the lime juice, and simmer, mixing occasionally, until you're getting a thicker sort of thing. I'm going to just go ahead and guess that this took about half an hour. Mix the cornstarch in the water well (no lumps!), then add to the simmering strawberries. Add the sugar as well, and whisk that pot all together, and keep on simmering until it's thickened a bit more.
While that's thickening, place the remaining four cups of sliced strawberries in the two baked pie crusts. Once it's done, pour the filling on top of the sliced strawberries, then arrange the layered strawberries on top. Cover and refrigerate until set, ideally at least two hours.

Bigger pictures if you click the images, because strawberries look awesome.

Man, that was a lot of strawberries. All those measurements are measurements after being cut, so I don't even want to guess what the volume would have been before chopping them up.

The filling came out a little too thin/runny, so I think a little more cornstarch might be in order next time. Perhaps less lime juice as well; one cup should have been fine.
I didn't add any sugar to the filling when I made it, so I ran to the store and gave a serious sprinkling of sugar to the filling before laying the halved strawberries down, leaving one pie okay and one still just too tart. A quarter cup is a guess at what would be appropriate based on how much I used and how they came out.
When cutting the strawberries, try and save the nice, regular ones for the top of the pie.

Yes! (Apple-Mango Pie)

2008-04-24T20:49:00.000-04:00

Well, that apple-banana pie I made a while ago had too much banana flavour in it, so I came up with something better: apple mango!
It is pretty much the same recipe as that pie, except:

Use lime instead of lemon for greater synergy

Slice the apples instead of chop them because that's just a better idea anyways

replace the mushed up banana with a very ripe mango.

NO CINNAMON

This worked out wonderfully! Instead of banana permeating every bite, the mango only shoes up from time to time, and it adds it's own texture with the chunks that are still left.
I actually ended up discarding some of the mango, but only the parts near to the outside which didn't mush easily under the force of my hands.

Also, I made the pie crust with the juice of a half dozen strawberries, which made a gleefully pink dough, which tragically did not carry through to the end result.

Busy Night (Turnovers for Real)

2008-04-24T02:04:00.000-04:00

So, tonight I've made stock, soup, and turnovers, and it's been an ordeal. The soups staying warm on the stove right now, and the turnovers are in the oven, so I can finally sit down and type this stuff out.

Strawberry-Banana Turnovers
No longer the exclusive domain of wacky fruit blend punch juice drinks in brightly coloured cardboard boxes, now you too can have this delicious combination in convenient turnover form, made in your very own kitchen!
You'll need:

~3 cups of sliced strawberries (don't measure then slice, it'll be too few!)

~2 bananas

sugar

pastry for a two-crust pie

So, I put the strawberries on the stove with just enough water to cover, and simmered till they turned into jammy-jelly. I let that cool a bit, made the dough (using all purpose flour to try and get a stretchy dough for easier handling), mushed two bananas into the strawberries, realized I didn't have any white sugar (strawberries get tart when you cook them), said screw it, I'm tired and it's late, then cut the dough into circles of maybe five inches, dolloped the stuff onto the middle, folded them (wetting the edges for better adhesion), then put them in the oven (400ºF). They've been in ten minutes, and I expect they'll be out in another ten.

I know we're in the multimedia age and all, but no pictures this time. I don't actually own a digital camera, I just borrow from other people whom I give food too.

I'm going to go collapse and try not to think about how messy this kitchen is. Will update when turnovers are consumed!

First thoughts: Man, put down tinfoil when making turnovers. That's a mess I'd like to be able to forget about.

Second thoughts: They look delicious, but the pastry is too thick, there's not enough filling, and all I can taste is banana. Next time I'll cook the strawberries less, and add less banana. And probably add some sugar.

Turnovers

2008-04-22T23:35:00.000-04:00

I'm making turnovers again, this time out of scraps from leftover pie dough. I need to take a step back from the thought that super-gentle is always the way to go. Definitely the nicest looking one right now is the one which I worked a little harder/longer(/faster/better), so it'll have some stretchy/chewiness from being worked, but that probably won't be a bad thing, as it's rising and forming a nice, curved, pocket shape.
I think when I try making a batch of turnovers, I'll use all-purpose flour instead of pastry.

Banana Corn Rye

2008-04-20T23:14:00.000-04:00

Alright, that's enough pie for now (that's a lie, I'm going to make more tomorrow), so here's some bread again. This is something I came up with not because I wanted vegans to have some tasty bread, but because I've spent enough time behind enemy lines that I know how to use their tricks to further my own dark ends.
Never assume your foe has nothing to teach you, for then your arrogance will surely defeat you!

Banana-corn-rye bread:

Need:

1 1/2 cups rye flour

1 cup cornmeal

2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

3 tablespoons oil

3 tablespoons malt syrup

two bananas

1/2 cup warm water

Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl. That's it. Do a little dance or something. Anything, really, just so I have more than one instruction in this paragraph. Oh! Mound and make a little well in the dry stuff.

Mix the syrup with the warm water, and mix till well dissolved. Add the oil, then mash and add the bananas. Mix the works together, then pour into the dry bowl, and mix just until moistened.

Bake in your magically pre-heated to 350ºF oven for about half an hour, or until a toothpick comes out clean.

This resulted from re-working an already re-worked recipe for corn rye bread. I just swapped up an egg and a cup and a quarter of buttermilk for a cup of bananas and a half cup of water (standard vegan sub is a banana to two eggs). The water is warm only to make it easier to melt the malt.
Regarding the malt, you can feel free to use molasses, honey, or just sugar if you feel like it. I'd go to about half the volume if I was using straight sugar, though.
This is a pretty delicious breakfast bread which I've made a few times now.

P.S. I think next time I'll take it down to just a banana and a half, for flavour reasons. I think the water level won't go up, though.
Also, I'll use a finer corn meal to try and better get that taste out there.

Apple-Banana Pie

2008-04-18T18:43:00.000-04:00

I haven't really had anything I could call a 'failure' for a while, so tonight, I'm trying something silly that I don't think will work. Instead of making another apple-strawberry, I'm making apple-banana pie!
Banana has a way of being a jerk at parties and monopolizing the conversation and talking about it's interests in a really loud voice while everyone else is just trying to chill. I've tried to get around this by skinning one banana alive, then mashing it to little bits. Also, by only using one banana.

Need:

four apples

three tablespoons brown sugar

one lemon, juice of

heavy dash of cinnamon

one ripe banana

Chop up the apple, toss it with the lemon juice, sugar, and cinnamon, let macerate for a while (half hour-three hours). Cook it in a fry-pan over medium heat for maybe five to ten minutes; until they're getting cooked but well before they start to try and be apple sauce.
Strain the apples, and return the juice to the pan, where you'll hit it with medium-low-medium heat, swirling to prevent burning, until it's boiled down to a syrup and smells a bit like caramel. Pour the syrup over the apples and toss them to coat evenly. Then, mash that banana to a pulp, and toss it in with the apples. Let this mixture sit while your housemate is using the oven to make an obscene amount of roasted veggies. Go read a book or update your website or something.
Roll out a pie crust, put the stuff in, and bake until done. I'm guessing this'll be forty five minutes, I haven't actually cooked the thing yet.
Here's what it looks like right now:

(SEXY) RESULTS:
Fairly delicious pie, a little heavy on the banana flavour, but that's what happens when you use banana. Either I didn't add as much cinnamon as I thought, or it got burnt away when I reduced the syrup, because that flavour was lost, when I was hoping it'd help moderate the banana potency.
On the bright side, this did give the filling an excellent consistency and it didn't fall apart at all, making it ideal for on-the-go applications, such as my hopefully more rugged next incarnation of turnovers.

My Apple Pie

2008-04-09T23:19:00.000-04:00

I've just made yet another pie, this time apple. I think I've found the recipe that'll become my signature/standard apple pie, this one was pretty good. I wanted to do apple pie differently but without going way off and adding something that'd change it too much, so I added some honey as a sweetener, which worked out lovely.
Also, I experimented with an almond pie crust, and almonds and honey work great together as well.

Crustin!

two and a quarter cups flour

half cup ground almonds

quarter teaspoon salt

quarter teaspoon baking soda

half cup shortening

seven to ten tablespoons water

one tablespoon cider vinegar

I'm planning on writing up an entry on just making pie crust, but until then, I'll do a quick one here. Mix all the dry stuff together in a bowl, then cut the shortening into cubes and cut it through the flour et al. until you've got a coarse mealy thing. Sprinkle the water on, tossing gently, until just moistened. Form it into a ball, then cover it and put it in the fridge for later.

Fillin!

five decent baking apples

juice of half a lemon

quarter cup brown sugar

quarter cup honey plus maybe an eight of a cup of honey

dash nutmeg

dash ginger

Peel and core the apples, then slice them to slightly thicker than a quarter inch and pi/2 long. Toss them in a bowl with everything except the last eight of a cup of honey, which will be added as an afterthought later. Let this sit for at least half an hour, covered.

Compilin!

the stuff from before

Pre-heat the oven to 425ºF. Drain the fluid from the apples into a pot, and heat it over medium-high until it's reduced by half. Also, add some more honey to the pot because you're worried it won't be prominent enough. Swirl the pot, but do not stir as it reduces.
Take this time to roll out half the dough, fit it to the pie tin, and roll out and cut a top crust. When the fluid's reduced, toss the apples in it, then put it in the pie, put the top cover on, cut steam vents, and put it in the oven for forty five minutes.
So, this achieved my goals of being a delicious yet slightly different apple pie which I came up with myself, so I'm very pleased. The almond crust will definitely also be used again as well. All in all, a good pie, but don't try and cut slits of approximately constant radius like I did, as that makes it hard to serve the pieces without them falling apart in the middle.

More Pie!

2008-04-09T01:16:00.000-04:00

It seems that recently, what I make more than anything else, is pie. Since Pi day, I just haven't been able to get enough of this beautiful substance.
The other night, I whipped one together on a whim in the twenty five minutes after discovering my uncle hadn't prepared anything for desert at my grandparent's house and before his delicious roast and things came out of the oven, using odds and ends about the house. It was pretty tasty.

Though I've made a good few recently, this entry will just be about 6.28.

Strawberry-Apple-Lime pie:
This pie came into being when I wanted to use the strawberries I'd bought a week prior. It involved a layer of softly cooked apples with lime juice and a layer of cooked-till-almost jelly strawberries. I remembered to take notes while making it, so I can actually give the real numbers I used and not approximates made after the fact! I didn't take times, though, so that's a bit iffy.

Apple Stuffs

four medium apples, suitable for baking

juice of one moderately wimpy lemon

juice of one significantly juicy lime because the lemon was so lame

three tablespoons of sugar

Peel, core, and chop the apples to a size of about maybe the same as the biggest segment of my index finger, and toss in a bowl with the juices and sugar. Let sit, covered, for a little while (maybe fifteen minutes to half an hour? At least as long as it takes to get the strawberries on the stove).

That's what apples look like when you put them in a bowl with some other things.

Heat some vegetable oil or butter in a broad sauté pan/frying, and get it up to a medium-low heat, then add the apples. Cook, mixing from time to time (but not too much or they'll break up and turn to sauce!), until they're soft. I'd gander that it was maybe five or ten minutes, but I'm not really sure. Look at the picture later when they go into the pie tin.

Strawberry Stuffs

3 cups strawberries

a little bit of water

something else to make this list a little longer

Slice the strawberries to somewhere between a half and a third of the width of the thickest point of my thumb. Throw them in a pot (ideally wide enough so that they're no more than doubled up) with just a bit of water, and apply medium to medium-low heat until they're done. Let's just say done is somewhere past the point where there's a decent amount of syrupy goodness in the pot, and near-ish to the point where it's becoming jelly.

Something like that.

Tasty Crusts

flakey cream-cheese pie crust for two crust pie

Look, I don't feel like typing out that recipe right now, it's from a book, and I'm tired. Any two crust pie crust will do.
Roll out half the crust when you've got the fruits started on the stove, to fit a pie tin/cake pan. Since using one due to necessity at Colin's place, I kind of like the thicker pie you get out of a cake pan. The first slice is even harder to remove, though, so be wary.
Line the tin with the crust, then roll out and cut a top for the pie.
This is probably a convenient time to pre-heat your oven to 350ºF.
And don't forget to make sure your fruits aren't burning!

The Assembling

Do this:

Then this:

and spread it around even-like. Then:

and

There was a complaint about pictures, so there we go.

It took somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour to be done, I usually wait till the crust is looking nice if the fruit has already been cooked somewhat.

So, the pie turned out well. It wasn't really supposed to be a lime flavoured pie, I just figured there wasn't enough lemon juice in the lemon, so I threw in the full lime's worth when I probably shouldn't have. On the bright side, though, it kind of simulated the rhubarb that I wanted but could not find, so it all worked out anyways.
The one thing I learned, though, was to cut larger steam vents when dealing with goopy stuffing. The syrup just kind of gummed the works up and made the top rise too high, the started escaping from the corners. Not too bad though.

Brownie Pie:
This was another adventure in "what can we make at Colin's place with limited resources", and I think it might be better than the last time.
We had on hand a tub of classy margarine that had partially melted in his car, a pack of brownie mix, an egg, flour, and an overpriced convenience store nearby from which we bought chocolate chips and pecans. Results were better than expected.

Dough:

two cups pastry flour

one cup margarine

half cup finely chopped walnuts

sprinkling of water

Put the flour in the bowl, and then try to cut the margarine throughout, but realize it's not working like you hoped and is forming a dough instead of resembling coarse meal. Sprinkle some water on and feel less than optimistic about your future, then realize you forgot to add the walnuts, so mix those into the dough while doing your best not to ruin it all with too much kneading.
Roll out half the dough and line a cake pan with it, then prepare the rest in lattice strips.

Brownie Batter

brownie mix

one egg

cooking oil or margarine

Combine in bowl.

Assembly

Pour the batter into the pie crust, and remember that you wanted to mix pecans and chocolate chips in the batter. Sprinkle them on to instead, then put the lattice strips on top.
Bake at 350ºF for forty minutes, then remove from the oven and drizzle (splatter) with sauce of chocolate chips melted with margarine.

Ridiculously rich, the fudgy brownie texture contrasted wonderfully with the flaky crust, which didn't turn out nearly as poorly as I thought it would.
Also, you can't eat anywhere near as much brownie as you could pie or cake, this was too much to eat.

Quasi-Beef Wellington

2008-03-31T18:49:00.000-04:00

In my fridge today were two things that I needed to eat today: 1) a 'baseball' steak from the market on Saturday, and 2) four turnovers worth of pastry leftover from my last adventure. Something my little brother made (with limited assistance from me) when I was home in December was beef wellington, so I figured I'd give it a shot. It turned out to be a pretty sweet way to serve a steak for one, without sides.

So.

To recreate, you need:

one little baseball steak

salt & pepper

maybe a third of a pie's worth of dough

four button mushrooms

one shallot

two cloves garlic

oil

First, heat some oil in a pan, and while it's warming, chop the mushrooms, onion, and garlic finely. (Actually, no, first turn the oven on to 400ºF, then do what I said to do first.) Toss the mushroom in the pan, fry a few minutes, then throw in the rest and cook till the onion is translucent. Scrape all that stuff into a bowl, and set aside to cool.

Heat some more oil in the pan (hopefully there is some of the old stuff left there), and when it's hot, sear the steak on medium-high for three minutes a side. If there's still red on the short side and it's too thick, hold it with some forks or something and sear it all around. That's probably horrible form, but it's fun anyways!

While the steak is cooking, roll out your pastry, until it's large enough to wrap the steak. When the fried fungus and vegetables have cooled, spread them over the pastry, leaving a decent border with none on it, and wait for the steak. When it's done cooking, place it on the stuffing on the pastry, wrap it up, and put it in a pan in the oven, and bake for about thirty-five minutes.

Remove from oven, put it on a plate, and devour.

Thoughts after the fact:

I really should not use my extremely flakey pie dough for anything except pies, or at least something that involves baking it in a formed dish. Like the turnovers, the pastry was too weak to deal with being wrapped around something, so it got a little messy and the top was not pretty at all. Beef wellington should be made with puff pastry, which has some stretch and sticks together better.

I should keep butter on hand. I've gotten out of the habit of baking with it, living with a silly vegan and all, but since they're not going to want to eat my steak, it would have made the frying and browning nicer than just with oil.

Really, stop using ultra-flakey pie dough for things that aren't pies.

Turnovers!

2008-03-27T16:12:00.000-04:00

So, Colin and I made a delicious pie last night (mostly his initiative, I just made the dough and the rest turned out great), and I've still got four pies worth of dough in my freezer since I got sick on Pi day, and I've still got an army's worth of apples in my fridge, so, it's Turnover Time!

In a frying pan on my stove right now is some delicious apple filling. Consists of:

Three and a half apples (golden delicious, maybe?)

~eighth of a cup of sugar

~eighth of a cup of honey

Sprinkling of cinnamon

Juice of half a lime

Pinch of cornstarch

Which I let sit for maybe fifteen minutes to half an hour, covered on the counter, before hitting it with medium-low heat in a big frying pan. The idea here is to extract what fluid from the apples as I can now, and reduce it to make a nice, thick filling

On my counter right now, are sixteen roughly equal sized balls of dough, thawing, waiting to be rolled out into rough circles, stuffed with apple goodness, and then baked at 400ºF for twenty minutes or so.

Deliciousness awaits!

P.S. In oven now, first remarks: cut actual circles/rectangles when baking turnovers, it will make them much easier to manage when filling!!

P.P.S. Delicious, if messy. Next time, I'll roll the dough a little thicker, so as to make them easier to handle, both in and out of the oven. These turnovers are by no means sturdy enough to take as a snack for the road, as was the intention.

Simple Start

2008-02-21T20:07:00.000-05:00

Right, so I guess a good first post is just a multi-role all-environment utility bread. I'm going to copy roughly from the Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book, one of my favorite bread books, and add my thoughts.

So.

Make the sponge
Need:

1/4 teaspoon active dry yeast

1/4 cup warm water

2 cups whole wheat flour

6 tablespoons powdered milk (what is up with that?)

1/2 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup cold water

Dissolve the yeast in the water (duh). Combine the flour, powdered milk (powdered milk is creepy) and salt, then mix and make a well in the middle. Pour the yeast and water right on in there, then mix vigorously for something like five minutes.
Cover that, and leave at room temperature for twelve to eighteen hours. If leaving for the full eighteen hours, use very cold water and keep it in a cooler place.

So, when I make this, I've never used the milk powder. That stuff scares me a little bit. If you leave it out, it'll be OK, and if you want to just replace some of the water with milk, that's cool too. Milk powder is apparently popular where using milk would throw off the consistency, but really, if you're adding milk powder and water, just add milk and water.
Personally, I like to use a quarter cup yogurt and just over a half cup of water, or some combination of yogurt and water, since that's given me the tastiest bread.
Regarding flour, I also like to use rye flour here, since the acidity of the yogurt will break down the harsher parts of the rye and let it make nice bread (all rye bread should have a sour element to it to make the flour behave). One cup rye and one cup whole wheat is what I've been doing lately, though always remember that rye absorbs less water (or is absorbed more readily into water, whatever), so the fluid ratio will be a little off. This doesn't matter as much in the sponge, though, since you'll just work it into the bread later.
And in case you're afraid or think you misread that, yes, you leave a yeasty sponge on your countertop for at least half a day. This is totally cool. It should triple in volume in that time, so make sure you've got something large enough. Using a pre-ferment like this makes the bread extra tasty.
Anyways, on with the show.

Make dough

1 3/4 teaspoon active dry yeast

1/2 cup warm water

2 tablespoons honey

1 cup warm water

2 teaspoons salt

4 cups flour

Dissolve the yeast in the half cup water, dissolve the honey in the one cup water. Add the sweet water to the sponge, and mix with your hands. Next, incorporate the yeast.
Mix the salt and flour, then make a well. Pour the sponge mixture into the well, then fold in the flour. Mix all the flour in, and squeeze with your hands for consistency (squish squash!). Adjust water/flour ratio, since a sponge will vary based on how long it's been fermenting, and flour varies itself.
Turn out the dough onto a lightly floured work surface (man you see that line a lot) and knead until silky-smooth. This should only take about ten minutes, because the squeezing and mixing from before has already partially worked the gluten.
Shape the dough into a ball, and place in a bowl, smooth side up. Cover and let rise for around an hour and a half or until doubled in volume. Gently poke a finger into the dough about a half inch in. if the whole doesn't fill in at all, punch down the dough, otherwise, let it rise a little longer. Next, let it rise again until doubled, which should take half as long as the first time.
Punch down the dough again, and divide it in half. Let the dough relax before shaping, then place it in loaf pans or on a baking tray to proof for forty-five minutes before baking.
This loaf benefits from a high initial heat and steamy oven (see page 106). Baking times vary from twenty-five minutes for rolls, to almost an hour for bread at 350ºF.

Well, that's kind of the bulk of the work right there. For adjusting the water/flour, you'll just figure it out in time, but if you can knead it without too much work, and it's not too sticky to handle, you're probably in the safe-zone. Kneading is a bit of a learned skill as well, and there are plenty of things online that ought to be able to do a better job of explaining that than me, such as this semi-reputable looking article. The important part of kneading is to stretch the dough without tearing it (too much), so you work it into nice long sheets of gluten which will trap the gasses from the yeast and let your bread rise. If anyone is unsure about kneading technique, I am totally happy to come over/have you over to make bread sometime. It really isn't that hard, but baking is a fun thing to do with people!
For shaping, I like to make one or two big round things on my baking stone, or just do simple loaves in pans. Loaf pans usually come out in about fifty minutes. As for page 106, well, I brought the book back to the library and didn't copy that page down. I just put an old pan on the bottom rack of the oven with some water in it when I heat the oven, and set the oven to 400ºF for the first five minutes, then drop it down to 350ºF for the rest of the time. When you think the bread is done, the easiest thing to do is to pop a loaf out, and knock it on the bottom. If it sounds hollow, it should be done, but you can certainly reserve the right to take it out before it sounds hollow if you think the crust is getting too dark.

One of the best loaves I've made was this recipe with garlic and olives in it. I coarsely chopped the stuff up, then added it while kneading the dough. The garlic was obviously delicious and the little bit of residual juice on the olives worked through the dough to give it a nice, subtle olive flavour throughout.

Anyways, I am tired now, so I'm off to bed. Happy baking! I'll try to keep this thing up weekly.

MISSION STATEMENT

2008-02-21T19:56:00.000-05:00

Well, this is to be a log of things I have made, thoughts I have had about those things, and possible improvements based upon the thoughts I have had about those things.
Primarily, those things will be some form of bread or bread resmbling entity, though pastries are also expected within the intended scope of recording. Presumably, other forms of foodstuffs may also appear from time to time, if they merit attention.

Allons-y, Allonzo!