mix, mix…stir, stir

Do you remember the TV ads for Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups that involved an accidental collision of two people, one getting chocolate in the other’s peanut butter and vice-versa, only to discover the deliciousness of chocolate and peanut butter together?

The Chipster-Topped Brownies made for this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie baking project could have made for a fun YouTube video spoof of two bakers accidentally mixing brownie and cookie dough batter to create a new taste sensation, but I didn’t have the time to get that creative. I did make the brownie cookies and unfortunately my taste sensation turned out a bit dry. I blame it on over baking them rather than the recipe after reading other bakers rave about the gooey brownie layer. I made half a recipe and really should have cut the baking time down. It was tricky to figure out what the brownies were doing underneath the crust of cookie dough and somehow I forgot the most important brownie making rule – always under bake them!

I need to give this recipe another test before writing it off, but I am incline to just make my favorite chocolate chunk cookies and my favorite brownies and serve them individually so each can shine in its own spotlight.  If you can’t decide between making chocolate chip cookies or brownies, you should give this recipe for Chipster-Topped Brownies a try; just remember to under bake them! Thanks Beth for picking this week’s recipe. You can find it posted on her blog, Supplicious.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 75 recipes completed 146 to go!

Participating in a group and keeping an open mind will no doubt lead to new experiences. The recipe for this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie baking group expanded my world to include mango bread. I had never heard of mango bread and couldn’t really imagine what it would be like.  Well, it’s not so different from banana bread, but with the exotic twist of mango.

When I read Dorie’s comment in the recipe head note about having a neighbor with a mango tree, I thought, “People have mango trees?” Living in the Northwest, the idea of having a mango tree is a completely foreign concept, but enviable.

Fresh pieces of mango stud the bread like juicy sweet gems of flavor, and the nicely spiced batter  gives the mango an appropriate background on which to shine. In addition to a hefty dose of ground ginger and cinnamon, brown sugar adds a warm caramel note tying the flavors together perfectly. The only thing I added was a little extra salt; a quarter teaspoon just seemed like too little to me with such strong spices in play.

My decision to boost the salt comes from baking a lot and knowing what I like – experience. This same experience came into play when I poured the batter in the specified loaf pan, but somehow it was as though I was watching someone cook on TV. My thought was “whoa, this pan is way too full. It’s going to spill all over the oven.” I observed this thought, yet did nothing about it. I have a larger loaf pan, but for some strange reason I was on recipe auto-pilot and just headed for the oven knowing this was going to make a mess.

Not long into the baking process the first glop of batter hit the oven floor. This began a cycle of scooping up dollops of batter off the oven floor about every 5-10 minutes throughout the baking time. It’s a wonder the bread got cooked with the oven door being opened so frequently. The lesson I learned is to pay attention to my experience and put it into action when a recipe seems to be off base. Interestingly, not everyone in the baking group had this problem, so it’s not that this is a poorly written recipe or the pan size listed is a typo. It’s just a good reminder to go with what you know, and I know that a loaf pan filled nearly to the top with batter will overflow in the oven.  

Despite the overflowing batter issue, this bread is addictively fantastic! To me it’s unique and interesting because I don’t have a mango tree growing in my yard.  If you visit Kelly’s blog, Baking with the Boys, you can make yourself a loaf and see how tasty it is. If you pick up Dorie’s book you’ll have hundreds of delicious treats to make.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 74 recipes completed 147 to go!

Things are getting very exciting at TableFare World Headquarters! It has been over two years since we first sketched out the idea for SpiceCare, and in that time we’ve guided it through design, prototyping, tooling, refinement and manufacturing (and let’s not forget about the extensive marketing process that happened alongside all these other activities). It has certainly been a much longer process than we would have ever expected, but at the very beginning we vowed to not cut any corners that could compromise the finished product.

The reason we’re kind of giddy today is because we’re working to coordinate our shipping company and the manufacturer so that SpiceCare can finally be brought stateside. Granted, this isn’t as exciting as it will be when we announce that we have physical possession of our inventory, but this is an important step in the process. We still will not have a solid delivery date until the shipper actually has them on the boat, but oh, it’s close.

After a run of excellent results in the weekly baking group, Tuesdays with Dorie, this week’s recipe fell a little short for me. It is definitely tart and lemony, but maybe just a little too tart for my taste buds. The filling is made with the whole darn lemon!

The entire lemon, peel and all, is processed to a smooth batter with likely companions; sugar, eggs, cream and butter. I am not a big fan of orange marmalade because of the bitter peel flavor, and that is what I picked up with this filling which I think is what made it not so appealing to me. I will admit that I did add my own little twist to the recipe by infusing the cream with fresh thyme. The thyme added a very subtle herby note that I thought played nicely against the lemon flavor, but the lemon flavor was a bit too bitter for me.

The recipe specified 1 ½ lemons, which I felt was a bit ambiguous and I would have preferred to have had a weight to provide some standardization.  My lemons were small so I used two of them, which may have actually been too much. I don’t know.

The other issue I had with this recipe was the mess it made when baking. The recipe warns the filling will bubble up and quite likely flow over the sides of the tart pan, so I baked the tart on a sheet pan to catch any overrun and it’s good I did. The tart does not look pretty right out of the oven with filling overflowing and burning onto the sheet pan below. The complicating factor with the overflow is the tart is essentially seared to the top edge of the tart pan making it rather challenging to release. If the taste had been out of this world, I would happily overlook the mess, but I think this will just be one, of very few recipes in the book, that I probably won’t make again. I suspect anyone who loves marmalade will go nuts for this tart, so if that’s you, you should visit Barb of Babette Feasts for the recipe and give it a try. You can also see the results and opinions of the other bakers by visiting the Tuesdays with Dorie blog roll. The crust for the tart, however, was excellent!

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 73 recipes completed 148 to go!

TGRWT stands for They Go Really Well Together; it’s a monthly food blogging event that Martin of Khymos started as a way to explore unconventional flavor pairings. The flavor pairing concept is based on the idea that if foods share common volatile aroma compounds, they should taste good together even if they don’t seem like foods that would normally be paired. Each month a flavor pairing challenge is selected and anyone motivated to do so can create and share a recipe that illustrates the pairing.

Some examples of past flavor pairings are: banana and parsley, strawberries and coriander, white chocolate and caviar, pineapple and blue cheese. This month is apple and rose selected by Matmolekyler, where I believe a round-up of all the entries will be posted. Though I have read with great interest past TGRWT posts, this is the first time I have participated. I have been fixated on making granola lately and decided to play around with an apple rose granola. My biggest goal was to create something that didn’t make you think you were eating potpourri. I think it worked really well because I can’t stop snacking on it, but the big qualifier is I am the only one who has tasted it, so the data is a bit biased.

The rose flavor is definite, but light. I wish the apple flavor was a bit stronger and I think adding some apple juice concentrate to the syrup might just do the trick, but I haven’t had time to test it. Any spice store should sell dried rose buds, I purchased mine from World Spice. Separating the petals from the buds is a bit tedious, but went much quicker once I spread the buds out on a large plate to work through them. I like to purchase rose water from a Middle Eastern grocery store because they sell large bottles inexpensively.  

Apple Rose Granola

2 cups rolled oats
¼ cup honey
¼ cup rose water
4 Tbsp. dried rose petals, divided (1 Tbsp./3 Tbsp.)
2 Tbsp. unsalted butter
½ tsp. sea salt
¾ cup dried apple, chopped
½ cup large flake coconut, unsweetened
½ cup raw almonds, roughly chopped
¼ tsp. cardamom, freshly ground

Preheat oven to 300 degrees F.

Spread oats on a large rimmed sheet pant (12”x17”) and toast in the oven for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.  Remove from oven and set aside. Leave the oven on at 300 degrees F.

In a small sauce pan, combine honey, rose water, 1 Tbsp. of rose petals, and butter. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes.

In a large bowl combine, toasted oats, dried apples, coconut, almonds and remaining rose petals. Pour the syrup over the oat mixture and stir to combine. Spread granola on a large sheet pan and bake in the oven for 20 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes. Remove from the oven when the coconut beings to take on a toasty color. While the granola is still hot, stir in the cardamom, and loosen the granola from the sheet pan so it doesn’t stick as it cools. Store in an airtight container once completely cooled. Enjoy with milk, as a topping for yogurt or ice cream, or as a snack out of hand.

*The next batch I make I will try adding 1 Tbsp of frozen apple juice concentrate to the syrup mixture to boost the apple flavor.