Lessons in Baking: Charcoal Pancakes

Sooo, this isn't exactly baking, and I don't think it really counts for much since I just used a premade mix, but whatever, here you go.

Our house had to be fumigated so we were in Palm Springs last week (we probably wouldn't have opted to go to Palm Springs in July otherwise) and we brought as much food with us as we could, so there would be less to pack up. Seemed like a nice time to bring out the charcoal pancake mix that I brought back from Hawaii.

It was a typical pancake preparation, but it was interesting to see the black batter.

The whole throw-out-the-first-pancake saying was definitely true here... being black, it was really hard to tell how cooked they were and if they were burnt! But the rest turned out pretty good.

We didn't do any fancy garnishing, but they tasted really good! Some bites were more charcoally than others, but still good and a nice balance with the syrup.

Nice to be back out of the 115 degree weather!

Just a Little Bee

Just Sophie being cute lately...

Wearing my sweater I keep at my
office setup and mimicking me. She's
caught on to things I didn't realize she
noticed, like the way I always close
it by crossing it in front of me

She wanted to change her own diaper!

She's talking a lot more, and starting to put words together to make simple phrases. 

Her words are either English, French or Farsi. (Her daycare caretaker is Persian). So everytime she calls something by a pronunciation or word that doesn't sound anything like the English or French word, we look up the Farsi word for it. She definitely calls shoes her version of the Farsi "cafsh" which sounds like she's saying "capiche!" and she's starting to call oranges "ji's" and the Farsi word is "nerenji" so I think that's where she's going with that also. I love it, although knowing she won't be in daycare forever, I'm sure it's inevitable that she'll lose any Farsi that she picks up right about now.

She also feels heavier than ever, although she hasn't been officially weighed since her 18 month appointment at the beginning of May, but it sure feels like she's doubled since then.

Hope everyone stays cool in this coming heat wave.

Lessons in Baking: (Individual) Cream Cheese Danishes

The recipe for raspberry/cheese danish I made last week made dough for two (huge!) pastries, so I saved half of it, and remembered I still had that dough and needed something to do with it... maybe too late. I decided to try making a few smaller, individual-sized versions.

Despite storing it appropriately (I think?? I'm still new around here) the dough became kinda difficult to work with. It was almost spongey, just really hard to mold, and that's what I blame on how half of these turned out hahaha

Pre-baking

Post-baking

It was fun to try to think of new shapes or way to make them, but they just were not working with the dough being so dough-y and not keeping, so, lesson learned. Any dough saved for later shouldn't be utilized for anything intricate. Only boring old loaves.

Lessons in Baking: Banana Cream Pie

At the end of this most recent endeavor, I realized it wasn't exactly baking, but you would still look for a banana cream pie in a bakery, so it fits.

I was looking up more pies to bake (because I wanted to practice the lattice work on the top again), but found a banana cream pie recipe that I wanted to try, because I don't think I've ever had one, and I love bananas. Plus, it usually came with a graham cracker crust, and I wanted to try that since I had already done a "normal" pie crust.

I started with the graham cracker crust and wow was that easy. I guess I've learned that this stuff that sounds so difficult simply because it's so new to me, is always work taking a crack at.

I did blind bake the crust, which I think helped it harden and set, but I'm not really sure. The difficult part was molding the graham cracker crust against the pie dish, and I either didn't have enough or didn't spread it well. I couldn't get it fully up the sides without it crumbling down, but I got it up high enough to function.

The filling is just banana and a pudding, but making it from scratch was a fun project and it all went really well. I was able to get it to set every time without developing a skin. In the future, I need to remember to have the time to focus on it. A lot of things have to happen at once in different bowls under different heat, and I started it with different things coming up at work and phone calls that were hard to manage, but I was able to get it to work out.

I was nervous about spreading it over the banana layer because it was thick and the banana slices could slide around easily, but if it got really messed up, I didn't really notice.

It feels like most of this recipe is waiting, since the filling has to set for so long, and the real skill is making sure your bananas are just ripe enough to eat well in the pie, and that you have enough of them. (We eat a lot of bananas and avocados over here and yet we still can't master the ripeness schedule), and this took a solid 3 bananas, really closer to 3 1/2, but I used up all 4.

We had just bought a can of whipped cream, so I was planning on just using that to top it off. (When I'm low on calories for the day, whipped cream is an acceptable substitute to top off coffee instead of my usual flavored coffee creamer, at a fraction of the calorie count), but once again, I decided to try the recipe for homemaking whipped cream, it seemed simple enough.

...and it was! You literally just whip heavy cream until it stiffens. This one did include some vanilla extract and confectioner's sugar though.

It was so light and easy to work with, spreading it over the top was a breeze, and I realized I think I'm going to have to work on the artistic parts of baking and decorating. Wasn't sure what else to do with the whipped cream layer rather than spread it around, but that's all I did this time.

I decided to use up the rest of the banana since I had it and it would do something to the top, and then added cinnamon on the top (mainly because I forgot it over that second layer of bananas - oops)

Aaaaand right after I took that last photo, I took it to the dining room table and we cut slices to eat.

This pie just feels like a pile of sugar, and even though I pretty much halved all the sugar measurements, it still kinda hurt my stomach in the end. It wasn't too sweet, I think it was actually a nice balance in the end, but I'm just not used to eating so much sweet stuff at once. But, it's gotten rave reviews so far, from AJ and Debbie. I made AJ take the remainder to work with him today, so we'll see how that goes, but I don't expect too much criticism from a bunch of men in construction and engineering LOL.

It was delicious, but I'm definitely going to have to work on more savory baking because all of these sweets are getting harder and harder to resist... but I do still have half of the sweet dough I made for the danish that needs to get used up ASAP. 

More baking coming up...!

Lessons in Baking: Raspberry Cheese Danish

This recipe I found for a raspberry cheese danish seemed completely innocuous. I thought it was a normal amount (I mean, only 3 cups of flour...) but as a sweet bread, it apparently is a lot lighter and airier with a lot more to go around. It wasn't until the dough was prepared and ready to get into crafting the danish that it instructed me to divide the dough into two and each one would be rolled out to a 10x12 inch rectangle! That's massive! So I set half aside (which I am now realizing that second half probably needs to be baked today, but I am way too tired) and decided to just make one.

Just making one meant that I needed to halve the filling recipe, which seemed simple enough, but I feel like I must have messed it up somehow, because the cream cheese filling ended up very runny, which didn't necessarily ruin it, but it was a bit of a problem. So, next time I think it'll call for more cream cheese than it's asking for.

With how runny it was, it was a bit difficult to evenly spread the raspberry preserves on top, but funny enough the final product seems primarily raspberry preserves.

The way the instructions said to assemble the danish made sense and I could see it in my head, but as I was doing it, it wasn't turning out at all like I was expecting. I was thinking it would be a rectangle with X's across it, but instead it became more of a loaf with a braided appearance. Maybe that's how it was supposed to be. I don't really mind, but it was difficult to work it with the filling spilling out everywhere.

Nevertheless, the finished product turned out nice I think!

It spread out a lot more than I thought it would, so for future reference, I should probably hit the center harder with any pre-baking toppings I use (instead of the vanilla glaze I just used Swedish pearl sugar here).

It is HUGE but I think I'd like to try to make more individual-sized ones in the future rather than this big ol' loaf (at least when it's just three adults here in this house and I am limiting my sugar as much as possible).

This was one of the funnest things to make so far though.

Lessons in Baking: Bagels

I haven't been doing well, and I've been drowning my sorrows in baking. I've always sorta enjoyed it, but lately it has been sparking much joy, and I really look forward to the times I get to work on a baking project. I've gone a little overboard, and made several trips, both online and in person, to Sur La Table, and made the trek to the international food store in south Orange County that has amazing imports from all over the world, but especially the great organic flours from France and pearl sugars from Belgium and lingonberry jams from Sweden. (If I was more into cooking, I would have taken advantage of the paella rices from Spain and pastas from Italy and what am I talking about? See for yourself!)

In France I lived above a flower shop, but across the street from a patisserie, and the woman who owned it handmade everything in there and lived right above it and it seemed like such a dream! I would love to own a bakery but I actually don't want to deal with the business side of things, and I wonder how much the mass baking would suck. So I'll just stick to home projects. And I really want to be able to do more than just sugar cookies and white birthday cake, so I keep finding new ingredients to buy that go into all this other stuff (barley malt syrup is a thing).

I was going to make a separate blog for my baking, but who can keep up with that, so I'll just utilize the magic of digital labels. Unfortunately I didn't think to document much of my previous endeavors, so we've missed my recent attempts with hush puppies (okay, not really baking but still takes skill), challah bread, cream puffs, rosewater baguette and blueberry pie, and I only took one photo of my finished project of the bagels, but here we go.

 

Bagels

I followed a recipe from New York Times Cooking, which, I'm glad that I read through in advance because it essentially requires two days. The bagels are best served fresh (obvi) and considering the dough needs 2 hours to rise at one point, and the formed bagels need a minimum 4 hours to chill in the fridge, it's perfect to do all the prep one day and then make them the following morning, which is what I did.

It was actually not too complicated, just a bit tedious of a process, and the recommendation was to hand knead rather than use a stand mixer because the dough gets quite stiff.

This first go turned out really really well! And most of the imperfections came from the complications of trying to do all of this while simultaneously dealing with a whiny and clinging toddler. For instance: I wasn't able to make them seamlessly round, and you can see where the two edges came together and are barely holding on, but the dough sort of dries quickly and makes it very hard to mold, and that's of course right about when Sophie was getting into things and crying and needing hands-on attention. But they held on enough, so that's good.

Then, I only had sesame seeds for a topping, which are my favorite, but they had also suggested roasted garlic, which sounds amazing but I want to make as much as possible rather than buy, so that'll be a nice side project to learn. But anyway, I tried one of the sesame bagels and sooooo many fell off during the cutting-in-half process, so I learned I need to sorta press them into the dough more before baking (however I was also dipping/coating the bagels with one hand while holding Sophie in the other arm, so what can you do). The sesame bagels lifted perfectly off the baking sheet, but the plain ones stuck a little on the bottom with a slight burn. I think they were cooked just right, so I'll need to remember to add a little flour or something for the plain ones not to stick.

I really liked this recipe because it didn't include any additional sugar and I swear in America they will throw unnecessary sugar into every single crevice, and yes, I saw recipes for bagels that included sugar. (For the blueberry pie I made for the 4th, I made the crust dough in advance, and I tasted it and realized there was absolutely nothing sweet in the dough, it was very not sweet and I worried a little bit, but the pie ended up being wonderful because the sweetness came from the filling and cinnamon put on the crust. You should really start to trust yourself and remove sugar where you can!)

They turned out great! They were wonderfully crusty on the outside and light on the inside and had a great bready taste. I think in the future I'd like to experiment with some variations, like jalapeño bagels mmmm...