mix, mix…stir, stir

Chocolate cream pie is one of David’s all time favorite eats, so this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe caught his interest in a big way. No nuts, no raisins, no coffee, no coconut, no liquor, just pure chocolate cream goodness.

I actually followed the recipe as written, though I did double the salt in the crust. What did we learn from World Peace Cookies? Salt and chocolate are good! Though there is plenty of opportunity to spike the crust with spices, the whipped cream with liquor, or the filling with mix-ins, and I bet some of the other Tuesday with Dorie bakers took creative license to experiment with great results, I stayed true on this one.

The chocolate cream filling is a basic pastry cream made with cornstarch so the filling sets to a nice consistency that doesn’t run or ooze when cut. The flavor is rich and chocolaty and the use of bittersweet chocolate keeps it from becoming overly sweet. The dense rich texture is reminiscent of pots de crème   rather than chocolate pudding, which makes the tart quite decadent. The light whipped cream topping is a perfect contrast to the unctuous chocolate pastry cream.

Behold the saucier pan; essential in my mind if you like to make puddings, pastry creams, and various other creamy dessert items or sauces that require constant whisking. What makes this pan so outstanding for intensive whisking or stirring is the lack of a sharp angle between the bottom and side wall. The rounded transition allows you to whisk or stir the contents of the pan thoroughly and evenly creating a smooth evenly cooked result.

Kim of Scrumptious Photography selected this week’s recipe that was enjoyed by all. If you would like to make someone very happy by serving them this delicious chocolate tart, click on over to Kim’s blog for the recipe, or you can find it on page 352 of Dorie’s book.

I, along with over 350 other baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 71 recipes completed 150 to go!

How often is your dinner plan inspired by a food blog you just happened by? It happens to me all the time and I thought I would share what was served at the Peterman house last night thanks to blog inspiration.

Though this isn’t a blog I just happened upon, I subscribe to the RSS feed for Rouxbe’s Blog and I subscribe to the Rouxbe site so I can access their excellent online cooking school program. This recipe for Chicken Vesuvio  just jumped off the screen and I knew what I’d be making for dinner! Maybe it was the appeal of an entire meal in one dish, or it could have simply been the beautiful photos that got me. Either way, it was delicious and a good choice for dinner.

It’s a simple series of basic steps: browning, deglazing, oven braising, sauteing, and reducing liquid. Though the recipe has six cloves of garlic, it’s not pungent and overpowering because the garlic is émincéd, or thinly sliced. It is remarkable how mild garlic is when it is left in larger pieces. It doesn’t seem logical that biting into a large slice of garlic would be less potent than finely minced garlic, but with a finer chop more enzymes are released from the cell walls and that’s what produces the strong sulfurous flavors and aromas. The recipe also has a link to a great instructional video on how to émincé.

So that’s my suggestion if you just can’t figure out what to cook for dinner tonight.

Bread pudding is traditionally all about leftovers, specifically using day-old bread. I purchased a beautiful loaf of challah bread for this pudding, but honored the roots of bread pudding by incorporating other leftovers.

I haven’t made many bread puddings, so I don’t have much to compare this recipe to in a head-to-head bread pudding sort of way, but as far as a dessert goes, it was really delicious, custardy, moist, and chocolaty. It was also easy. I did “stale” my fresh loaf of challah bread before making the recipe by baking the cubed bread in a 300 degree F oven until they were nice and dried out. This is a technique I use for French toast as well; dried out bread soaks up more of the custard and makes for a moist delicious result. If you haven’t staled your French toast bread, you definitely need to give it a try, and challah bread makes excellent French toast! Enough about toast, back to pudding.

Now that I’m baking every week I seem to accumulate little containers of leftovers like chocolate sauce, spiced sugar, nut filling, and I am always looking for ways to use them up. Bread pudding is a perfect place to incorporate these odds and ends, so I skipped over adding raisins and decided to use up some finely chopped walnuts and pine nuts that were mixed with spiced sugar. After sifting out the sugar I had ½ cup of chopped nuts, so in they went. I used the spiced sugar I sifted out of the nuts and added a different batch of spiced sugar left over from making crystallized ginger to get the ½ cup needed. I wasn’t too worried about what spices were in the sugar because any mixture would be tasty in the bread pudding and I knew it would be a background flavor rather than a dominating element. The spiced sugar worked perfectly, adding a nice subtle hint of cardamom, cinnamon, allspice, ginger and who knows what else. The hint of spice added slightly to the aroma and came through as a finishing flavor to each bite. The nuts also worked nicely adding a little crunchy texture to the otherwise soft cakey, custardy structure of the dessert.

After tasting this custardy-chocolaty-bready delight, I knew I needed to disperse the goods before I found myself standing over an empty pan with a fork in my hand wondering what happened to all the bread pudding. I chilled it overnight and was very pleased that when cut it held its shape really well and after thorough testing determined it was stable enough to be picked up and eaten by hand. To dress up each pudding cake, I dipped the tops in the chocolate glaze left over from the Amaretti torte I made a few days earlier.

Thank you to Lauren of Upper East Side Chronicle for selecting the recipe for this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie baking assignment, and giving me the perfect opportunity to use up three different leftover items. If you have some leftovers just waiting to become bread pudding, you can find the recipe on Lauren’s blog.

I, along with over 350 other baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 70 recipes completed 151 to go!

It really was only 15 minutes to get this torte in the oven! Quite by accident I noticed the time when I started and went about putting the ingredients together at a casual pace and as I popped it in the oven I noticed the clock had advanced exactly 15 minutes – magic!

The reality behind the “magic” of this recipe is the food processor; it’s so darn quick. Don’t worry, the exquisitely rich, dense chocolate result never lets on that it was easy to make. You would think that with a torte that only took 15 minutes to make I would have had this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie result posted in a timely manner, but here it is Wednesday. Let’s just say I was distracted by its deliciousness.

The Amaretti cookies are the flavor backbone of this torte with their distinct sweet almond-apricot flavor really shining against the bittersweet chocolate.  Though good quality cookies like the D. Lazzaroni brand are expensive, they really deliver the unique Amaretti cookie flavor that makes this torte so wonderful.

The biggest risk with flourless chocolate cakes is dryness, which makes for a crushingly disappointing dessert experience. Part of why this torte was so good is because it was extremely moist and tender. The ground cookies and ground almonds also added a nice texture. The torte plates up as an impressive dessert and seems like a fancy thing to serve, but the reality is you can also eat it out of hand because the slices are sturdy. Merging hobbies, I used my triangle cutting skills developed through quilt making to cut parchment wraps for individual slices. I loaded them in a plastic container and passed them out to my kickball team after our first game. Not fancy, but still really tasty!

Thank you to Holly of  Phe/MOM/enon for picking the recipe for this week and rekindling my love of Amaretti cookies. The recipe is posted on Holly’s blog if you have a spare 15 minutes and want to do some baking.

I, along with over 350 other baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 69 recipes completed 152 to go!

I have a bit of a cookbook fetish. For some people discretionary income is directed at shoes, manicures, or jewelry, for me, it’s cookbooks. Though I have some of my favorites listed in Essential References they are primarily spice-focused, so with the creation of a new blog category for books, I will occasionally share additional books that have captured my attention and appetite.

Gale Gand’s newest book, Gale Gand’s Brunch!: 100 Fantastic Recipes for the Weekend’s Best Meal, was just released this month perfectly timed for Brunch season, which seems to kick off with Easter and run through summer in my mind. Immediately taken with the cover photo, I started craving brunch and dove right in and got cooking. I have books that I have owned for years and though I love the book, have only made 2-3 recipes from them. Brunch! has been in my hands for just a few weeks and I’ve already made 12 of the recipes and fully intend to keep up the pace because I have so many pages flagged as “must-make.” Part of what makes the recipes in this book appealing to me is they aren’t complicated, and though I love a good complicated cooking challenge, for the first meal of the day I generally just want to eat and the sooner the better. Brunch! offers the best of both worlds with simple recipes that have a flair of elegance for special occasions, along with casual basics for everyday. Though Gale Gand is the Pastry Chef at the fine dining restaurant, Tru, this book comes from her perspective as a busy mom who enjoys relaxed weekend brunch gatherings with friends.

The menu for our delicious Easter breakfast came right from the pages of this book. Rhubarb just started showing up at the market recently and I immediately added the Roasted Pears and Rhubarb with Orange recipe to our menu. I topped the roasted fruit with the Cranberry-Almond Granola, also from the book, and a dollop of Greek yogurt. It was a perfect breakfast dessert! I do believe this granola recipe has sparked a new obsession and I will be making endless variations of this recipe. The granola is easy to make, delicious, and a beautiful gift when packaged in cellophane bag and tied with a ribbon.

The cover recipe of Baked Eggs in Ham Cups, has been enticing me from the moment I saw it. I have actually made it twice and it’s a great example of the types of simple yet elegant recipes in the collection. I wasn’t able to get particularly large slices of ham and found it worked better to just cook one egg in each cup and roasted red peppers were a fine stand-in for the cherry tomatoes.

The Strata with chicken, broccoli, corn, chiles, and cheese is one of the best recipes for entertaining because it can be assembled the night before and just popped in the oven to bake in the morning. What is more comforting and delicious than a savory bread pudding? It’s creamy and custardy, but hearty and satisfying with a nice little kick from the addition of chile peppers. There are five variations included to illustrate the flexibility of the dish and creativity is encouraged. This is a great example of the types of practical recipes Gand includes that make it possible to entertain despite an overly busy schedule.  Beyond a wide variety of savory breakfast foods Brunch! includes a wonderful collection of recipes that would make a delicious lunch like Apricot Chicken Salad, Farro with Tomatoes and Parsley, and Heirloom Tomato Bisque, all of which are on my “must-make” list. The only dish I didn’t have great success with was the Goat Cheese and Chive Hash Browns, but it was due to a cooking error on my part for trying to cook them on a griddle rather than in a pan that would afford the necessary oil for frying. The flavor was good; I just didn’t get them as crisp and delicious as they should have been.

Gale’s pastry background comes through with a delicious collection of recipes for scones, waffles, muffins, turnovers and coffee cake. I have been drawn to the savory baked goods such as the Bacon-Scallion Scones, yes, bacon scones! I did find that when making only half of the recipe, it is best to divide all of the ingredients in half! The first time I made these I forgot to cut the milk in half and amazingly they still turned out, but I have since made them again and they are better when all the ingredients are scaled back equally.  My favorite way to eat these scones is with a scrambled egg and cheese sandwiched in the middle. It’s a full breakfast in one delicious little package. The Gougères with hints of mustard and cayenne pepper are absolutely addictive!  Each little dough puff is dressed with garlic parsley butter and a sprinkled of parmesan cheese just after they come out of the oven.  After feasting on them at breakfast, that evening I popped the leftovers in the oven to crisp up and served them as hors d’oeuvre for dinner.

There is a nice chapter of festive beverage recipes in the book as well. I love to make a special drink to serve when entertaining and for breakfast my favorite is to serve a smoothie to guests when they first arrive. I think of it as a breakfast appetizer. It gives guests something delicious to enjoy and keeps them from starving while the last bit of cooking is taking place. Brunch! has a Blueberry Pineapple with Mint and a Raspberry Banana Orange smoothie that are both delicious and as simple as pushing the button on the blender. I found them both to be a little thick for my taste and just added a bit of milk to thin them out.

Gale Gand’s Brunch! 100 Fantastic Recipes for the Weekend’s Best Meal, has been a fun book to cook from and has ignited my enthusiasm for inviting friends over for breakfast. In addition to great recipes, it is beautifully photographed and printed making it a great gift for anyone that likes to cook especially if it came with an invitation to brunch!

Tomorrow morning maybe it will be Baked Cinnamon-Apple French Toast and this summer it will definitely be Watermelon Gazpacho with cucumber, apple, bell pepper and pomegranate seeds!

Update: We have been given permission to share the recipe for Asparagus with Poached Eggs and Parmesan. Delicious!

Update: Gale Gand will be cooking two dishes from this new book on NBC’s Today Show, Wednesday April 15th.

Further update: Now it looks like she will be on Thursday April 16th.