The seventh recipe for The Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge was Ciabatta. This was one I was really excited about attempting but also pretty apprehensive. It’s probably one of the most complicated breads we’ve done so far and from surveying other BBAers on twitter and the forum it was pretty apparent that “results may vary”. Good Ciabatta is full of big giant holes and that involves having a very wet dough, which you can imagine, is hard to work with. In addition to working with the very wet dough for the first time, making this bread involves some special tools as well as setting up your oven in a very specific way, so there’s quite a bit of prep involved.

There were two different versions, using different kinds of pre-ferments: poolish or biga. These are just mixtures of bread, water and yeast that sit out for a certain amount of time to develop flavor and texture. Later you add the rest of ingredients to make the final dough. I chose the biga because the consensus seemed to be that it resulted in bread with bigger holes. I also switched bread flour for regular AP flour as I read several accounts saying they got better results that way as well.

I honestly thought I screwed the bread up several times. First I let the biga ferment for way too long (it was supposed to be 2-4 hours, I accidentally let it go past 6). Then the next day I measured out all the ingredients for the poolish formula instead of the biga formula, though luckily I caught myself before doing too much damage. When I finally mixed everything up correctly, I added the maximum amount of water called for to create a very watery, sticky dough. It seemed like it would be really hard to handle, but I didn’t find it that difficult. It was sticky but it still stayed together for the most part. I laid it out on a very floured surface and proceeded with stretching the dough out and then folding it over on itself. You do this several times and I actually added a few more as again, my research had said it produced better results. Then I used my homemade couche which was just a bunch of large cotton cloths I had gotten at Target and sprinkled well with flour. I divided the dough in three and placed them on the cloth and bunched it up around the sides of each piece to give the dough support so it wouldn’t spread out while it proofed. Ciabatta means slipper, so that’s the shape I was are going for.

This is the first recipe from the book that involved special preparation of my oven to make it behave more like a real hearth. I already bought a baking stone a few months ago and this was the second time I used it after a disastrous first time, trying to bake a pizza and putting too much cornmeal on the stone (which the directions told me to do) which burned up and starting smoking in the 500 degree oven. I was careful not repeat that again. But in being fearful that would happen again, I really didn’t put enough cornmeal on the pan I used to transfer the loaves from the couche to the oven. You have to be very gentle in handling those loaves or all the gas will come out and you lose your big holes. One of my loaves definitely deflated a lot because I had a hard time transferring it. I think next time, I’ll try lightly oiling the pan instead of putting cornmeal on it. Hopefully that will help them slide off easier.

Beside the stone, I also needed to have a pan in the oven. Right after the bread went in I added hot water to the pan to create a big burst of steam. After that I used a spray bottle to spray water into the sides of the oven at 30 second intervals to create even more steam bursts. The whole thing sounded really complicated when I was reading the instructions beforehand, but actually doing it wasn’t so bad.

As you can see from the pics, I did wind up getting some fairly large holes in my loaves. Nothing like the pic in the book and there were still parts of the loaves that had tight crumb (which I think was all due to degassing in the transfer to the oven), but I’m very happy with my first try. It turned out a lot better than I thought it would. All-in-all, Ciabatta was to easier to make than I was expecting after first reading through the instructions but it’s definitely not a simple bread to make. I’m glad we had the six other breads to prepare us for this one! I can’t imagine that I’ll be making it regularly, but it did come out tasting great (It was a little sour almost like sourdough and I’m not sure if that’s because I had accidentally let the biga ferment for so long or if it’s just supposed to taste that way?), so I’m definitely going to be making it again, if only to try for bigger holes!

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Brandon and I started on a diet a few weeks ago. And not one those “I’m eating more fruits and vegetables” kind of things, like an actual counting calories, keeping a food log kind of thing (though of course we are eating more fruits and vegetables, too). The first week was really scary because I thought it would be impossible to come up with a week’s worth of low-fat meals. But now in week 2, I’m realizing that I was very, very wrong. With the help of a couple of great cookbooks, I’m finding that it’s really not difficult and it doesn’t even take a lot of extra time. In fact, all the dishes I’ve made in the past few weeks take MUCH less time to make and both Brandon and I agree that they’ve been really good and filling. If someone else made these dishes for me, I wouldn’t even think they were supposed to be light. They’re just good recipes and they happen to be low fat as well.

Even though I’m on a diet, this isn’t going to become a diet blog or anything like that. I know I won’t be able to stay away from desserts. In fact, I’m using that as motivation. I’m going to allow myself to make one really sinful dessert a month to reward myself for sticking to my diet. Plus I’m still participating in the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge so there will still be lots of bread. (I could NEVER give up bread, carbs be damned). But I’m definitely focusing on finding really good, simple, lighter recipes and I’ll be sharing the best ones I find along with everything else.

I’m starting with this Balsamic Chicken, which was the first low fat recipe I made on the first night of our diet. I really was surprised at how good this was. I thought it would be kind of blah, but it’s amazing how much flavor a little balsamic vinaigrette can add, especially when combined with the juices from the tomatoes. I could eat those tomatoes all day long, they were just bursting (literally) with flavor. And since I’ll never give up my beloved carbs, I paired it with some very simple but well flavored potatoes. This is everything I love in one dinner and I don’t even have to feel guilty about eating it.

Another thing I like about this meal is that the oven temperature is the same for both parts. I always get confused about how long I should cook things for when one things needs to be 350 and another needs to be 450. But both the tomatoes and potatoes bake at 450 so you can bake them together and start the chicken in the skillet when the potatoes are about half done. This whole meal takes less than 30 minutes to make including prep and cooking time.

Balsamic Chicken with Roasted Tomatoes

adapted from Cooking Light: Fresh Food Fast

Ingredients

• 1 pint grape tomatoes
• 1 tbsp. honey
• 1 1/2 tsp. olive oil
• 1/2 tsp. salt, divided
• 4 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves or cutlets
• 1/2 tsp. black pepper
• 4 tbsp. balsamic vinaigrette (or if you want to be super low fat use balsamic vinaigrette salad spritzer instead)

Process

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees (F).

2. Combine tomatoes, honey and olive oil in a small bowl; pour on a foil-lined cookie sheet/jelly roll pan. Bake for 12 minutes or until tomato skins burst and begin to wrinkle, stirring once halfway through. Transfer back to bowl, making sure to get all the juices and stir in 1/4 tsp. salt.

3. Pound out chicken to 1/4″ thickness (or just use cutlets instead since they are already thin), sprinkle evenly with 1/4 tsp. salt and all the pepper.

4. Heat large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Coat pan with cooking spray or a few teaspoons of olive oil. Add chicken, pour a tablespoon of vinaigrette over each piece (if using the spritzer, omit this and wait to spritz your chicken until AFTER it’s cooked) and cook 3-4 minutes per side. If your chicken is too thick (I had a hard time pounding the breasts down, which is why I’m going to use cutlets from now on) and it’s still not cooked after the outside has been seared, you can transfer to your oven for about 5-10 minutes or until it’s cooked through.

5. Place chicken on a plate and spoon tomatoes evenly over each piece, making sure to spoon some of the juice over each piece as well.

Garlic-Roasted Potatoes

from Cooking Light: Fresh Food Fast

Ingredients

• 1 lb. small red potatoes (about 8 )
• 1 tsp. olive oil
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/4 tsp. garlic powder
• 1/4 tsp. pepper

Process

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees (F).

2. Scrub potatoes and cut into wedges. Place them in a large bowl, drizzle with oil and toss. Sprinkle with salt, garlic powder and pepper and toss again until they are evenly coated.

3. Arrange in a single layer on large rimmed baking sheet coated with cooking spray. Bake for 20 minutes or until browned.

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So I’m still going at a normal pace for the BBA Challenge, but I’m behind on actually posting about it. I keep going back and forth about whether I even want to post about every single bread and that leads to more procrastination. But I think ultimately, I do want written and photographic evidence that I did in fact bake every single bread in this book, in order. I may do these combo posts for bread I have less to say about, but for instance, I have LOTS to say about the Ciabatta I did this week, so that’s going to be it’s own post (hopefully next week).

First up, Brioche. This is an uber-rich and buttery french bread. The book has three different versions of it, the main difference being the amount of butter each one has. I tried the Rich Man’s version first, which has two cups of butter in it. I kind of screwed them up, though. First of all they have this weird shape that is sort of like a cupcake or roll but with a little “head” sitting on top. I didn’t so great with the shaping and then when I was just about to put them in the oven I tripped and almost dropped the pan and they kind of deflated. Blah. So they were pretty sad looking, I didn’t even bother taking pictures. They still tasted good, but it was really too much. To me, they tasted like a cross between a croissant and doughnut. But if I’m going to eat something that is that bad for me, I’d choose a croissant or a doughnut before I’d make/eat this version of brioche again.

Since my first effort was a bust, I decided to try the Poor Man’s version which has the least butter, only 1/2 cup. These turned out better. My shaping still didn’t really work, the heads just sort blended in the with the rest of it making a cone shape, not a distinct ball like you’re supposed to have. Plus I cooked these a few minutes too long, so they were a bit dried out. Compared to the Rich Man’s version these were pretty bland, though they were good with jam. I think if I ever make brioche again, I’d do the Middle Class version which has 1 cup of butter. Rich Man’s was too much and I think Poor Man’s was too little, so maybe those would be perfect. I think this would be a really good kind of dough to make cinnamon rolls with–I saw a few other BBAers that did this–so I may try that some day, but otherwise I doubt I’ll be making brioche in this form again. I’m glad I did it, but there are breads I like much more (and feel less guilty about eating).

Next was Casatiello. I noticed a lot of people on twitter saying how great this bread was, so I was pretty disappointed with it after I made it. It’s a form of brioche, but with cheese and meat added. The provolone cheese I didn’t mind (though it’s not my favorite), but I guess I’m just not into meat in bread. The recipe called for salami, but I HATE salami, so I substituted bacon, which Reinhart noted is also good. But cheese and bacon in an already buttery bread? Ultimately, I just thought it was too much and the bacon really overpowered it. I wish I had just omitted the meat altogether and I think I would have liked this much more. My cats LOVED this bread, though. I accidentally left a piece sitting out and found them going nuts over it. I wound up feeding a lot of it to them and eventually just threw the rest away as I had no desire to finish it. It was a pretty looking bread, though, and was easy to make so I may attempt this again in the future without meat and maybe a different cheese like Cheddar or Swiss.

After my somewhat disappointing adventures with brioche, I wound up taking a week off from bread baking. Last week, I started back up with Challah and that was not disappointing at all. It was fun to make and I was really happy with how it turned out. I had a slightly hard time trying to pass the window pane test with this dough, but really didn’t have any other issues. I was apprehensive about the braiding since I always seem to have a hard time with shaping, but it wasn’t too bad! Reinhart says the shape should be big in the middle and taper down to the ends and I think I did that pretty well. This wasn’t my favorite bread ever, but it tasted fine, if a little boring. It might be fun to make as a gift since it’s such a pretty looking bread. There was another variation called Celebration Challah with a double braid which is a big braid with a smaller braid sitting on top so I’d love to attempt that some day, maybe after I’ve had a bit more practice with shaping dough.

Like I mentioned, I finished Ciabatta earlier this week, but that’s going to be it’s own post. This weekend is cinnamon rolls which I am so excited about. I’ve been looking forward to those for quite awhile. Since I’m almost caught up with posting now, hopefully I can get on a better schedule of updating soon after I actually make these instead of waiting weeks. Also, stay tuned for some other stuff coming up this month. It’s my 1 year blog-iversary so I want to make something fun, plus I have quite a few recipes in the pipeline that I have yet to post.

Have a great 4th of July weekend (or if you’re not in the US, then have just have a great regular weekend)!

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I love chocolate cake. It’s one of my biggest cravings, one that pops up over and over again (almost always late at night). But in the last few years, I’ve noticed something disturbing (to me, at least): I don’t seem to be able to eat it anymore. Take last month, for instance:

Brandon was out with some friends so I was home alone. For some reason when I’m home alone I always want to bake so I decided I would finally indulge my chocolate cake craving and make a cake. After looking though my delicious account, I decided to try Smitten Kitchen’s Peanut Butter and Chocolate cake. So I went to all the trouble of making the cake layers and the two different kinds of icing and after a couple hours finally sat down with a delicious looking piece of it to eat. I took two bites, two bites, and I had to set it down. I couldn’t eat anymore. It’s not a bad cake, in fact, it’s a wonderful cake but it was just so rich that it was too much for me. I thought maybe the peanut butter and chocolate icings were the problem but when I took another bite of just the cake it was still too much.

Sadly, this isn’t the first time this has happened. Despite my love for chocolate cake, I can’t remember the last time I had a whole piece. I don’t know if my tastes changed or what, but I seem to be unable to eat any really rich, uber sweet desserts anymore. I know this a good thing as far as my diet is concerned, but it still makes me sad. Apparently it’s possible to love something, but not really like it anymore. How does that work? What is wrong with my brain or my body that I get insane cravings for chocolate cake and then can’t even eat it?!

But there’s hope! That’s where today’s recipe comes in. These Molten Chocolate cakes? Oh, I can eat these. I can eat a lot of these, in fact. And they are wonderful. They are rich and chocolaty, but not but too much. Maybe it’s the fact that they are cupcake sized and therefore easier to handle than a big slab of cake. Or maybe it’s because they don’t have icing to overpower the chocolaty goodness. Or maybe it’s the addition of a raspberry on top that makes me feel less guilty because, hey, I’m filling my daily fruit requirement, thank you very much.

I also like this recipe because it’s very easy to halve or double depending on your needs. I halved the recipe and got 6 little cakes, which is the perfect amount for our two person household. I get to satisfy my chocolate craving without feeling guilty like I do when I make a whole cake. These are best served right out of the oven, obviously, so that the center will be gooey and warm, but the batter is very forgiving. This recipe is beyond easy to make. If you wanted to serve these after dinner, you can make the batter ahead of time (up to 6 hours), pour it in your cupcake pan and refrigerate. Take the pan out before dinner to bring it back to room temp, then put it in the oven while you’re clearing the table. The cakes are ready in 10 minutes. You can pretty them up with some fruit and a dusting of powdered sugar or serve just as they are. Either way they are delicious.

Molten Chocolate Cakes

adapted from Pam Anderson in an article for USA Weekend

Ingredients

• 1 cup unsalted butter or margarine
• 8 oz. semisweet chocolate chips, or bars, cut into bite-size chunks
• 5 large eggs
• 1/2 cup sugar
• Pinch of salt
• 4 tsp. flour
• 8 extra-large paper muffin cups (or use regular paper muffin cups, which will make 12 cakes)*

Garnish:

• 6 oz fresh or frozen and thawed raspberries
• 1/2 cup regular sugar
• Powered sugar

*The extra large cups make the cakes easier to remove from the pan, you still use a standard size cupcake pan.

The Process

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position; heat oven to 450 degrees (F).

2. Melt butter and chocolate over low heat or in a double broiler; remove from heat.

3. Beat eggs, sugar and salt with a mixer in a medium bowl until sugar dissolves. Beat chocolate into the egg mixture until smooth. Mix in flour until just combined.

4. Line a standard-size muffin tin (1/2 cup capacity) with 8 extra-large muffin cups or 12 regular sized cups. Spray with cooking spray. Divide batter among the muffin cups. Bake until batter puffs but center is not set, 8 to 10 minutes. Remove the cakes from the pan and peel off the paper.

5. Dust the tops with powdered sugar if you want. Roll slightly moistened raspberries in regular sugar (Note: I’m not sure the sugar rolling is really necessary, especially if you are dusting the cakes with powdered sugar, I’ll probably just use plain raspberries next time) and place on top of each cake (the middle will start to fall in, don’t worry this normal, but this is another reason they are best served right out of the oven as they droop more and more as time goes on). Serve immediately.

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The second week bread was Artos or Greek Celebration bread. I really didn’t have any trouble at all with this bread because it was really similar to my King Cake except that Artos has a lot more spices: cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and cloves. The only trouble I had was the shaping, of course. I can tell it’s going to take a lot of practice to get good at shaping things because I’m just not good at that at all. The version of artos I did was called Christopsomos (though I made it plain, it’s technically supposed to have nuts and dried fruit in it), which is shaped into a boule (an oval, the only shape beside a loaf that I can do without much trouble), but then you roll out two strips of dough and lay them on top of the boule in a cross and then you split the ends and roll them up into curls. Why did I even attempt this?! I’ll fully admit to being an underachiever, but that doesn’t seem to apply to baking. I could have just shaped it into a boule and been done, but no I had to go overboard. The main issue was the curly parts at the end. I guess I didn’t stick them back into the dough well enough, so some of them unrolled while they were baking and well—I’m just gonna say it—they looked like little penises. Sigh. My artos was NSFW. You can sort of see it on the left side in this picture, otherwise I tried to take pictures of the bread’s “good side”.

Oh, well, at least it tasted good. It was spicy, but not overpowering. I put on a sweet glaze, which I thought was a bit too much at first, it was way too thick and sticky, but the next day the bread had absorbed most of glaze; it still had a nice satiny sheen to it, but it wasn’t sticky anymore. I think this would be a great bread to give to friends during the holidays, but next time I’m just going to be shaping it into a boule.

Next was bagels. Now, if you had told me a year ago that I would be making bagels from scratch, I wouldn’t have believed you for a second. I know, logically, that people do make bagels, but that just seemed like such an esoteric thing to do, that I couldn’t even imagine it. So what really surprised me was how freaking easy it is to make bagels. I still can’t even believe how easy it is and I’ve already made two batches. It does take two days, but really that’s for the best. You make and shape the dough, then put them in the fridge overnight and the next day you just boil and bake them which takes less than 30 minutes. You can’t beat fresh, warm bagels.

The dough was really stiff, I was actually a bit worried for my mixer, but it made it through. A lot of other BBAer’s seemed to mention having trouble kneading the dough to the point where it passed the windowpane test (so it stretches thin enough that you can almost see through it), but I didn’t have trouble with either of the batches I did. In fact, of all the breads I’ve made so far, I passed the windowpane test the easiest and fastest with the bagel dough. But it was not without trouble at all and I bet you can guess where I had problems…the shaping. There’s two shaping methods: the first is to shape the dough into a ball and punch a whole through the middle, the second is to roll it out into a string and the press the ends together so it makes a circle. The first batch I did I used the punching method because it seemed much easier, but in the punching process I guess I degassed the dough too much which resulted in really flat, sad looking bagels. The second batch I did, I made cinnamon raisin bagels instead of plain and I used the circle method and those turned out much better. They looked like real, actual bagels that you buy at the grocery store!

The only other thing I screwed up on was that you are supposed to add baking soda to the water that you boil the bagels in and I somehow forgot that step in both batches that I did. I have no idea how I missed it two times, but I did. From what I can figure, the baking soda makes the outside of the bagels look more smooth and brown more evenly. Oh well, next time! They still tasted damn good on the inside (even the first sad-looking batch). I especially loved the cinnamon raisin and I know I will be making them a lot.

Next up is brioche. I’m not sure I had even heard of this bread before, but it’s like an uber buttery, rich bread. I actually already started this past weekend, but it was kind of a disaster, so that will be a whole new post because I’m going to attempt at least one of the other versions of it later this week to see if I can get a better result.

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I have a very obsessive personality. It tends to invade all aspects of my life from how I work to the music I listen to and the amount of time I spend on the internet or how much TV I watch. (I’m not a “casual” TV viewer at all, I either have to see every episode of a show from the very beginning or I don’t watch it at all; I HATE missing episodes and I’ll only start watching a show in it’s second or later seasons if I can catch up by watching the DVDs of previous seasons first.)

But my obsessive personality has a really big effect on how I eat. It’s probably one of the reasons I’ve always been such a picky eater. When I decide I don’t like something, then that’s it, I don’t eat it again. Ever. I haven’t eaten a carrot in 20 years because once in elementary school I threw up in the cafeteria after eating them. Recently I decided I should give it another try, but no, it was just as bad as I remember. (I used to tell my friends that I don’t like carrots because they taste like horses, which is nonsensical, I know, but I still stand by this. If I ever ate horse (which I haven’t) I imagine it would give me the same vomit-inducing taste in my mouth. Plus whenever I think of horses I always think of carrots, too. Because they eat them I guess? I don’t know, my mind is strange.)

The opposite is also true, though. If there’s something I really love, then I want to eat it over and over again. I want to eat it every day. I want to eat it forever. Except it hardly ever works out that way because of another aspect of my personality: I get bored with repetitive things. So combining my OCD with this, I tend to be the kind of person who gets crazy obsessed with something for a certain period of time until I find something new to be obsessed with and completely forget about the last thing I was obsessed with. That’s how I am with food and the whole thing is very cyclical, so even if I give up on something one year, I’ll wind up “discovering” it again a year or two later and being just as obsessed with it until I get tired of it again.

So I say all this to explain why I love this granita so much. The past few months I’ve been on a grapefruit kick, which I tend to get on at least once a year. I’ve been eating half or even a whole grapefruit almost every single day since about March or April, so as you can imagine, I’m kinda over grapefruit by now. But I still had a few remaining grapefruits sitting in my fridge that I had no desire to eat. What the heck do you do with grapefruit? Meanwhile, my new food obsession is strawberries, so when I was flipping though my cookbooks and saw this recipe with grapefruit juice I knew I had to make it. The original recipe actually has raspberries, but I figured strawberries would work just as well. It was the absolute perfect dish to transition from grapefruits to strawberries and my remaining grapefruits wouldn’t go to waste.

Have you ever had a snow cone? That’s basically what this is, except you’re using fresh fruit juice instead of sugary syrup so it’s much better for you. It’s really the perfect summer dessert and you can probably substitute any kind of berry or citrus fruit that you want, but I thought the grapefruit and strawberries tasted perfect together. It’s sweet and tart all at the same time and you don’t have to feel guilty about eating it! Plus it’s crazy simple to make, just mix it up and freeze it. The hardest part is waiting the 6 hours it takes to fully freeze.

Pink Grapefruit and Strawberry Granita

Adapted from Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook

Ingredients

• 2 cups pink grapefruit juice (I used fresh squeezed, but store bought is probably fine)
• 2 cups fresh or thawed frozen strawberries (or raspberries)
• 1/2 -1 cup superfine sugar (NOT powdered sugar. See notes for more info.)

Notes:
Superfine sugar (AKA baker’s sugar or castor sugar) is just regular sugar that has been ground up more finely, so if you don’t have this on hand (I didn’t), just take regular sugar and put it in the blender until it looks lighter and finer, about 30 secs to a minute. I recommend you do this before anything else because you need to do it in a completely dry blender.

The amount of sugar you use in this recipe depends on how sweet you want it to be. If you are using store bought grapefruit juice as opposed to fresh, that will probably have sugar added already so you won’t need as much. I used about 1 cup of sugar with my fresh squeezed (and tart) grapefruits. I’d just add the sugar about 1/4 – 1/2 cup at a time to the juice mixture until it’s sweet enough for you.

Process

1. First use the blender to make your superfine sugar if you need to. Pour all the sugar out into a medium bowl (preferably one with a cover).

2. Wash and hull your strawberries and put in your blender (doesn’t matter if there’s still sugar residue left). Blend until smooth.

3. Pour strawberries into the bowl with the sugar, add in the grapefruit juice. Stir well. Pour the the whole bowl back into the blender and blend again, just to make sure the sugar is completely dissolved into the juice.

4. Put a superfine strainer over your bowl and pour the juice through the strainer. This will strain out any last seeds or clumps.

5. Cover bowl with plastic wrap or a top if it has one and place in the freezer. Freeze for 4 hours. After 4 hours, take out the freezer and stir well with a fork (this is to break up the ice and give it the grainy texture). Place it back in the freezer and stir it again with a fork every 30 minutes for the next two hours. It should be ready after about 6 hours total freezing time, but keep stirring it regularly until you are ready to serve it.

If it gets too hard (like from sitting in the freezer overnight), just set it out and let it melt for a bit, then put it back in the freezer and fork-stir regularly until you are ready to serve it again.

Serves 6

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I’ve been on a strawberry kick lately (seriously, I hope you like strawberries because I have two more strawberry recipes coming up). I also finally bought a tart pan last week and I wanted to make something fun and different. This may not sound like such a “different” dessert, but it’s really different for me. The majority of the desserts I make are either cake or cookies (or some variation like cupcakes and brownies). I’ve only make pie during the holidays and as much as I’d LOVE to make my cheesecake all the time I have to force myself to save that for special occasions.

Anyway, I found this recipe in my favorite cookbook and decided to go for it. I’m glad I did because this was damn good but it’s kind of involved. It’s definitely worth the effort to make, but like pies and cheesecake, I think this is a “special occasions” kind of dessert. It’s not difficult, per se, but there’s a lot of steps because you have to make all the parts (the crust, the pastry cream, the glaze) and then assemble them all together. You definitely need a couple of free hours to make this (there’s a bunch of waiting time while things cool), but it would also be pretty easy to make the parts earlier in the day and then assemble them right before you serve because the assembling is the easy part.

A good crust is really important to me because I think a bad crust can ruin a dessert no matter how good the center is and this crust is delicious; it’s really buttery and a little sweet, almost like shortbread. I’ll tell you, though, it was a PAIN to roll out. Since there is so much butter, it got too soft and sticky within minutes, no matter how long I had frozen it beforehand. But I finally figured out a way that worked and I’ve outlined it in the instructions with special notes.

The pastry cream wasn’t hard to make, it’s just one of those things that you have to stand over and stir the whole time, but I think it only took about 15 minutes, so it’s not a big deal. You definitely have to let it cool completely first; I thought it tasted much better after it was chilled, actually. It’s rich and smooth and creamy without being too heavy. It compliments the crust perfectly.

The glaze is totally optional. The cookbook suggested a different glaze, but I really wanted lemon so I looked around and found a different recipe for that. I kind of screwed up and put WAY too much on there, though. I pretty much poured it on there (and I had let it cool too much beforehand as well, another no-no), when I should have just lightly brushed the strawberries. After a few hours it turned sort of gloopy. Brandon said he wasn’t a fan of that, but I didn’t really notice it. Honestly, I’m not even sure this needs a glaze, it would be totally fine without. I thought my strawberries were a little lacking in flavor (that’s what I get for buying strawberries from Walmart), which is why I wanted the glaze on there in the first place. I’ve included the lemon sauce recipe (just use it sparingly!) as well as the glaze recipe from the cookbook (which he also says is optional), so you can try one or the other of them out or just skip that step altogether.

Lemon Glazed Strawberry Tart with Pastry Cream

Adapted from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
View more photos in the gallery

Ingredients

• 2 – 3 cups strawberries, hulled, lightly washed and well dried

Sweet Tart Crust
This is for an 8-10 in. tart pan. Mine is 11 in., so I just doubled this recipe and froze the leftover dough.

• 1 1/4 cups flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3 tbsp. sugar
• 10 tbsp. frozen or cold unsalted better, cut into chunks
• 1 egg yolk
• 3 tbsp. ice water

Vanilla Pastry Cream

• 2/3 cups sugar
• 2 tbsp. flour
• 2 tbsp. cornstarch
• Pinch of salt
• 2 eggs or 4 egg yolks
• 2 cups cream, half and half or whole milk
• 2 tsp. unsalted butter, softened
• 2 tsp. vanilla

Lemon Sauce (optional)

• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp. cornstarch
• 1/8 tsp. salt
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 1/2 tsp. finely gated lemon peel
• 1 tbsp. fresh lemon juice
• 1/2 tbsp. unsalted butter

Alternate glaze (optional)

• 1/2 cup strained raspberry, apricot or currant preserves
• 1 tbsp. water or liqueur

Process

Sweet Tart Crust

I had A LOT of trouble with this dough because of how buttery it is, but it tastes damn good, so it’s worth the effort. I’ll outline what worked for me when rolling this out. I’ve included the food processor directions if you have one of those. It sounds a hell of a lot simpler with a FP, but alas, I don’t have this modern marvel, so I had to do it the old fashioned way.

1. Combine flour, salt and sugar in a bowl or food processor. Stir or pulse once or twice. Add in all the butter. If working by hand, use a pastry blender to cut/mix the butter until the clumps of butter are all about the same size (pea/bean sized) and the mixture looks uniform. Or in a food processor, process for about 10 seconds. Add in the egg yolk and cut in with the butter mixture for about a minute or process for a few sections.

2. If using a food processor, pour mixture into a bowl. Add 3 tbsp. ice water and mix with your hands until you can form the dough into a ball. You can add a little more water if necessary or a little more flour if it’s too wet. Wrap tightly in plastic and freeze for at least 15 minutes or refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

3. Put down a large sheet (or several overlapping sheets) of wax paper or parchment. Put your silpat on top of this if you have one. I may not like silpat much for cookies, but it’s AWESOME for rolling/kneading dough on. Sprinkle with flour (yes, even on silpat). Place the dough on it, sprinkle with flour and roll out the dough. You need to get it so that it’s about 2 inches bigger around than your tart pan. But you don’t want to roll too thin or it’s just going to be impossible to get off the counter. I was very glad I doubled the recipe for the crust because it made this easier and I got a nice thick crust.

4. At this point you can try to lift the dough off the counter, the best way is to drape it over your rolling pin and lay it out over your tart pan. Maybe this will work for you if you had extra cold butter and used a FP and rolled it out really fast. But for the rest of us, it’s probably going to be too soft and sticky (mine stuck to my silpat and I’ve never seen anything that sticks to that thing). If that’s the case, then get a large cookie sheet (if it has a rim, turn it over and use the back) and slide it under the wax paper to support the dough. Place this in your fridge or freezer for 10-20 minutes until the dough has hardened up again. Take it out and it will be easier to move off the wax paper/silpat (you may need to use a thin spatula to separate it). Lay it over your tart pan and press down. If the dough splits at the bend or isn’t quite high enough to go up the side of the pan, it’s simple enough to patch with extra dough from the edges. Press it into the pan well, but try not to press too hard with your fingers since the heat will just make it stickier. After the dough is pressed into the pan, take a knife and slice the jagged edges off the top. Refrigerate for about an hour.

5. After the crust is properly chilled you need to prebake it. Heat oven to 425 (F). Sufficiently prick the entire bottom of the crust with a fork. Take a large piece of foil and butter one side, press the buttered side into the crust and up along the sides. Weigh the foil down with a few cups of raw rice or dried beans. Bake for 12 minutes.

6. Remove from oven and reduce the temp to 350 (F). Take off the weights and the foil and put the crust back in and bake until it’s a nicely browned, 10-15 minutes. Take out and cool completely on a rack.

Pastry Cream

You can start this while the crust is baking.

1. Mix together eggs/yolks and cream. In a medium saucepan, combine the sugar, flour, cornstarch and salt. Whisk the egg mixture into the saucepan over medium heat. Whisk every minute or so at first, but as it heats up and starts to boil and thicken, you will need to whisk constantly. This should take about 10 minutes.

2. Turn the heat to low/medium-low so that mixture bubbles gently and cook until it coats the back of a spoon, or when you can draw your finger through it and the line stays there. Stir in the butter and vanilla.

3. Strain through a fine-mesh sieve/strainer. It’s possible I cooked mine until it was too thick, but I had trouble getting it through. I wound up using different strainer (less fine) and pushing it through using pressure from the back of a large spoon.

4. Set aside and let cool to room temperature. You can refrigerate it for a few hours if you make this ahead of time, but make sure to lay plastic wrap directly on top of the cream or else a skin will form on it.

Finally, Make the Tart (This is the easy part!)

1. Spread the cooled pastry cream inside the cooled tart crust. You may not need all of it if you have a smaller tart pan, but it was the perfect amount for my 11 in. pan. Arrange the strawberries on top of the cream in whatever configuration you like, just try to get as many on there as you can.

2. It’s ready to serve now or you can add a glaze if you’d like. (I liked it after it had been chilled in the fridge for a few hours, but that also resulted in my glaze getting kind of gunky, so if you chill it first, you may want to wait and put the glaze on right before serving. )

Glazing (Optional)

I’m including the lemon sauce I made as well the glaze suggested in the cookbook. You can use either one or choose not to glaze at all.

Lemon Sauce

1. Combine sugar, cornstarch and salt in a small bowl. In a saucepan, boil 1 cup of water. Add the sugar mixture to the water.

2. Cook, stirring constantly, until mixture is thick and clear.

3. Stir in lemon peel, lemon juice and butter.

4. Brush the tops of the strawberries with the sauce.

Alternate glaze

1. In a saucepan, warm the strained preserves with the water or liqueur over medium-low heat until thinned.

2. Brush the tops of the strawberries with the glaze.

8 servings

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So I decided to do something a little crazy. The awesome Nicole at Pinch My Salt started a group to make every single recipe in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. When she first announced it on Twitter, I was interested but ultimately decided it would be too much work. But then more and more people started joining with her and I kept thinking about it until she announced she was closing the group to new members. As soon as I heard that it made me realize how much I wanted to do this, so I emailed her immediately to join the group.

I would definitely call myself a bread person. The only reason I like pizza is because of the crust, most of the time I even take all the cheese off before I eat it (I HATE greasy cheese). My favorite restaurants are the ones that give you bread and if it’s a choice between finishing that bread and finishing my entree, well, I can always get a doggy bag. I gave a waiter a HUGE tip a few weeks ago just because he gave me a whole new loaf of bread to bring home with my leftovers.

Despite my love of bread, I’ve never done any bread baking. I’ve always loved baking cakes and cookies, but yeast bread just seemed so complicated. Anyone can make a cake, but to me, bread always seemed like something only trained professionals could do: the kneading and rising and all that. And the yeast! That word is just scary. Plus I take almost all of my cooking cues from my mother and I can’t remember her ever making bread. Quick bread like banana bread, yeah, but never any kind of yeast bread. I don’t even remember either of my grandmothers making fresh bread. We were definitely a frozen roll kind of family.

But I decided to take the plunge last Thanksgiving and I made fresh rolls and discovered that bread baking really isn’t that hard. I made some more rolls at Christmas. Then there was the King Cake. A few months ago I attempted a sour dough loaf, which was pretty good (though I never posted it here because I thought I could do better) and a few weeks ago I had a lot of fun making Smitten Kitchen’s Black Bread. Had Nicole started this challenge last year, there’s no way I would have attempted it, but I felt I had learned enough basic knowledge of bread baking to do it. And I definitely like the challenge aspect of it. We’re not competing with each other or anything like that, but how great will it feel to say I made every recipe in the book? And how much will I have learned by the time I get through the whole book?

Just from reading the first few chapters, I feel like I’ve learned a ton already. I highly recommend it for bread baking beginners like me. Peter Reinhart goes through the entire process of bread baking from beginning to end in amazing detail and he explains the science behind what is happening in each stage and why kneading and rising and all that other scary sounding stuff is necessary to create amazing bread. Plus there’s tons of great tips and tricks and a helpful list of tools (I just bought a baking stone and kitchen scale).

The first recipe in the book is Anadama Bread which is a really delicious sandwich bread. It takes two days, but the first day was just mixing some cornmeal with water and letting it sit overnight, so it’s only one day of real work. Then you mix that, which is called a sponge, with flour and molasses and other stuff. It’s all about the molasses. That gives the bread a nice color and a slightly sweet taste. It’s so good. Especially toasted and slathered with butter or jam. It’s my new favorite bread.

I’m letting my wonderful kitchenaid mixer do much of the mixing work, but I’m doing all the kneading by hand. I wound up having to knead this dough for 15 minutes before I passed the “windowpane test” (where you can stretch out the dough enough to create a thin, almost see-through surface) and if you’ve ever kneaded dough for that long you know that can work up a sweat. I honestly never understood why “no knead bread” was so popular until that day.

If you are interested in this book and want to make this bread, the first few chapters up to this recipe are available for preview on Google Book Search (though a bunch of the pages are obscured, maybe on purpose?). Here’s the Anadama Bread Recipe. If the first (and probably easiest) recipe in the book is this good, imagine how good the rest must be?

So. The goal of the group is to make one recipe per week (and even at that pace we won’t be done until next Spring!), but we’re all free to work at whatever pace we want. The main goal is just to finish the book, no matter how long it takes. I’m going to try to keep up with the one a week as best I can, though. Nicole has asked that we not post the recipes on our blogs, which I understand because hundreds of people posting all the recipes in the book is pretty unfair to the writer. I’m not sure I’ll be posting about every single bread I make here, but I will definitely be updating regularly with my progress and what I’m learning, what I’m struggling with, etc.

If this challenge sounds like fun to you, too, buy the book and bake along with us! While Nicole isn’t adding new members to our group (it’s already past 200 and she doesn’t want it to get unmanageable), she’s inviting anyone who wants to to participate with us. There’s a flickr group and a facebook group and a bunch of us are on twitter, so there’s lots of ways to participate and to see what everyone else is doing.

Next up is Artos bread, which looks pretty similar to my King Cake recipe so it shouldn’t be too hard. I’m going to be trying my hand at dough shaping again, which if you look at my lopsided King Cake, you’ll see is not my forte. Practice makes perfect, right?

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I don’t usually post recipes I’ve found on other food blogs (and actually the original recipe is from Recipe Zaar, you see my Delicious account for recipes I like from other food bloggers), but I just had to post this one because these are so awesome. Have you ever eaten a Little Debbie oatmeal cream pie? These are just like them…in fact, they are better. I used to love these when I was kid, but haven’t allowed myself to eat one in years. While these are by no means good for you, you at least know what all the ingredients are and you don’t have to worry about all the chemicals and whatever else crap is in the store bought version. I made a batch for my boyfriend to bring to his office and they were a giant hit with his coworkers who all agreed they liked them better than the originals.

I don’t have much else to add about these other than “OMG-these-are-so-good-you-have-to-make-them-right-now”, but these are the first cookies I made with my silpat baking mat so I did want to talk about that a bit because I thought it had a big effect on these cookies.

Since I got into the whole food blogging world last year I started hearing more and more about silpat and how it was the best thing ever. For those not in the know, it’s a silicone mat that you can place in your cookie sheet and nothing will stick to it (it’s also supposed to be a good surface for kneading bread). I’ve been using parchment up until now and have been happy with the results, but the set-up is kind of a pain. (Having to trim it to fit the pan, getting it to lay flat, etc. Once I shoved my cookie sheet in the oven too hard and the parchment slid off and cookie dough splattered all over the hot oven. That sucked. ) So I finally broke down and bought a silpat last week. I will reserve total judgment until I’ve made more than one type of cookie on it, but my first feelings about it are mixed. When I baked these cookies I switched back and forth between a cookie sheet with silpat and one with parchment and I have to say, the ones on the parchment were significantly better. In fact, this showed me exactly why people love silpat so much, but it also showed me that maybe not all types of cookies should be baked on silpat. You can see the difference between the two cookies:

Silpat on the left, parchment on the right. Which one looks more like the original Little Debbie snacks? Definitely the one on the right. The point of those cookies is that they are really soft and chewy and textured. The silpat baked cookies were much thicker and weren’t nearly as soft and it somehow wound up taking out all the texture of the oatmeal (which is kind of magical in and of itself, but not so great if that’s not the effect you’re going for). But let’s say I was making chocolate chip cookies instead of oatmeal, I would absolutely prefer thicker, firmer, smoother cookies. So it’s not that I dislike the silpat, but I think it’s important to think about the texture you want your cookies to be and how that’s going to affect them. I am definitely going to be making my favorite chocolate chip cookies soon because I do think silpat will make those already fantastic cookies even better.

But in this case, I won’t be baking these oatmeal cookies (or any probably) on silpat anymore. To be fair, I felt the ones on the parchment spread out too much and were a bit thin, so I would recommend increasing the flour by about 1/4 cup if you’re not baking on silpat. I did a second batch with the added flour and I thought that helped significantly with the spreading problem without making them less soft or chewy.

Oatmeal Cream Pies

Adapted from Recipe Zaar. Via The Craving Chronicles.

View more photos in the gallery.

Ingredients

• 1 cup butter
• 3/4 cup dark brown sugar
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 tbsp molasses
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 eggs
• 1 3/4 cups flour (1 1/2 cups for silpat bakers)
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/8 tsp cinnamon
• 1 1/2 cups rolled oats (The original recipe said quick oats but I don’t think it matters that much, my research just said that quick oats are mushier. The general consensus was that you shouldn’t ever use quick oats in baking because they are too soft.)

Cream Filling

• 2 tsp very hot water
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 (7 ounce) jar marshmallow cream
• 1/2 cup shortening (Yuck, I know. I rarely use this stuff. I tried to substitute butter once and it was a giant failure, so you pretty much have to use shortening.)
• 1/3 cup powdered sugar (I might increase this to 1/2 next time, I didn’t think it was that sweet, but I have a major sweet tooth.)
• 1/2 tsp vanilla (will probably double this next time)

Process

1. Combine flour, salt, baking soda, and cinnamon in a bowl.

2. In large mixing bowl, cream butter and sugars. Add in eggs, beating after each. Finally beat in molasses and vanilla.

3. Add to the flour mixture to creamed mixture and beat until just blended; mix in the oats with a wooden spoon.

4. Drop dough by tablespoons (seriously, don’t go bigger than this, they spread out) on parchment lined sheets, with plenty of space in between. (I fit three across on my commercial sized baking sheet, two for a regular sized baking sheet.) Bake at 350 degrees (F) for 10-12 minutes, or until just starting to brown around the edges. They will look moist; don’t overcook (10 minutes was perfect for me). Let sit on cookie sheet for about 5 minutes and then transfer to wire racks to cool completely.

5. While the cookies bake prepare the filling. In small bowl, dissolve the salt in the hot water. Set aside and allow this to cool.

6. Combine marshmallow cream, shortening, powdered sugar, and vanilla in a bowl; mix on high until fluffy (it never really rises like an egg-white based frosting, but you can tell it’s fluffier after 3-4 minutes).

7. Add the cooled salt water and mix well (I thought this made the filling a bit too salty, which is why I’ll either be adding a bit more sugar or a bit less salt next time).

8. Spread filling on flat side of one cookie, press 2nd cookie on top.

Makes 1 1/2 – 2 dozen

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This is just a damn good dinner. I mean, come on, can you ever go wrong with bacon? Bacon makes everything better (Seriously people, you can still eat bacon, virus be damned). Also, sweet potatoes are in my top 5 favorite foods ever. I could eat them pretty much everyday and I think they get a bad rap as being “that stuff with marshmallows that you eat at Thanksgiving”. They are way more versatile than that one dish (see exhibit B another great chicken dish with sweet potatoes and where I got part of the inspiration for this recipe).

I’ve been making this chicken dish for a while and it’s always a treat. In fact, I don’t make it all that often because I think of it as my “special” chicken dish. I think it tastes better when you only save it for special occasions.

While I wouldn’t call the recipe hard, I definitely struggled with it the first few times I made it, but that may have just been my cooking inexperience. If you’re not prepared then it can be really easy to burn or overcook the chicken because it goes by really fast. What has helped me is to get all the ingredients measured and set up on the counter, so I can just add them one step at a time and can concentrate on the chicken and sauce without having to run all over the kitchen and worry about burning things.

The potatoes are super easy compared to the chicken, though. This whole meal can be whipped up in 30 minutes, I just boil the potatoes while I’m making the chicken and mash the potatoes while the chicken finishes cooking in the pan. I pretty much just made this sweet potato recipe up on the fly a few weeks ago. I was thinking about how much I love mashed potatoes and then how much I love sweet potatoes and I just had this flash of “why the hell haven’t I ever made mashed sweet potatoes before?” It’s based on a candied yams recipe I make a lot from my Betty Crocker cookbook and also, as mentioned above this recipe. The end result is delicious, creamy sweet potatoes. The maple part is something new I just thought of this week. It’s not actually mixed into the potatoes, I added maple syrup to the water that the potatoes boil in so they get infused with this wonderful, but subtle, maple flavor. It’s so good! I’m going to be making it a lot from now on, it’s my new favorite side dish.

Bacon and Rosemary Chicken

Ingredients

• 2-4 boneless chicken breasts
• 5 slices bacon, chopped
• 1/4 cup flour
• 1 tbsp. fresh rosemary
• 1/8 tsp. red pepper flakes
• 1 tbsp. butter
• 1 cup chicken broth
• 4 cloves of garlic, crushed (I just use my garlic press)
• 2 tbsp. lemon juice

Process

1. Fry bacon over medium heat until crisp. Drain on paper towels, set aside. Spoon out excess bacon fat, but leave about 2 tbsp. in the pan.

2. Place flour in a shallow dish and dredge chicken though it, shake to remove excess.

3. Add butter to the reserved fat in the pan and heat over high temperature, swirling to melt the butter. When the foam subsides, reduce heat to medium-high and add the chicken. Cook 3-4 minutes per side, until browned. Transfer the chicken to a plate and cover lightly with foil.

4. Reduce heat to medium and add the garlic, rosemary and pepper flakes. Cook for half a minute or so. Try not to let the garlic brown. Add broth and lemon juice and simmer until slightly thick, about 4 minutes.

5. Return chicken and bacon to the pan, simmer, turning chicken at least once until the chicken is cooked through and the sauce is thick and glossy about 3-5 minutes.

Maple Mashed Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

• 3-6 medium sweet potatoes (depending on how many you’re serving, I usually do three medium or 4 small for my boyfriend and me)
• 3 tbsp. maple syrup (this is optional, but I think it really adds great flavor)
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 3 tbsp. butter
• 3 tbsp. milk or cream (I use half and half or heavy cream, depending on what’s in the fridge. I’ve used non-dairy creamer in a pinch.)
• 1/2 tsp. salt

Process

1. Peel and cut up sweet potatoes in large chunks. Place in pot and fill with enough water to cover the potatoes. Add the maple syrup and stir. Heat to boiling and cook for 20-30 minutes or until tender.

2. While the potatoes are boiling, melt the butter, brown sugar, cream and salt in a small saucepan over medium heat. Bring to boil and cook for about 5 minutes, stirring regularly, until it thickens a little. Set aside.

3. Once the potatoes are tender, drain all the liquid and return them to the pot. Mash with a potato masher. Slowly pour in the sugar mixture, a little at a time and stir/mash after each addition. If you made less potatoes you probably won’t need to add all the sugar mixture. Add enough until it gets to a consistency that you like.

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