We got special dispensation to post late this week, and I’m taking full advantage of it. I’m going to make this amazing-sounding pie for Thanksgiving. Come back Saturday to see how it went!
Category: Dorie
This week’s Tuesdays With Dorie recipe was rice pudding, which I’ve never liked. I’m not sure why, but rice pudding and bread pudding have just never been on my top-500 list, even though regular pudding (especially chocolate, and now, especially Dorie’s) is way up in the top five. But I’m a faithful TWDer (TWDite? TWDian?), and so I made rice pudding.
The recipe gives options for vanilla and chocolate rice pudding, so of course, I made both. The cooking was easy, although it did take about 45 minutes, rather than the 30 the recipe called for. And then I decided to get fancy.
If you’ve read much of this blog, you know that presentation is not my forte. I read other TWD blogs, and those people make things look so pretty. Not me. But this time I was inspired — I guess the chocolate-vanilla combo was just too obvious to miss, even for me.
I was really proud of the way it came out, almost exactly the way I imagined it:
(#2 Son gets the credit for remembering the colored spots.)
Eating it, though, was less fun.
I still don’t like rice pudding. I dislike these versions less than the goopy stuff I’ve had before; the flavor was very good in both. But there were all those little lumps of rice in there; what’s the point of that?
The family partially concurred:
Husband: It was a shame we had to ruin perfectly good chocolate pudding.
#1 Son: Chocolate tasted good, but the texture was odd. Why stick rice in a perfectly good chocolate pudding? But the vanilla was much more like traditional rice pudding, and I adored it. The flavor was really deep, and the texture worked better. I’m not sure why.
#2 Son: I liked the chocolate better than the vanilla. The chocolate had a very nice, almost ice creamy texture. The vanilla was pretty good, but if you make it again I’d prefer chocolate.
#2 Son is out of luck. I can’t see making this again, not when there’s a perfectly marvelous chocolate pudding in the very same chapter.
If you want to check out the hundreds of other TWD bloggers’ versions, here’s the blogroll. And if you want to try the recipe yourself (even after my write-up!), Isabelle of Les gourmandises d’Isa will have the recipe. Enjoy!
This week’s TWD recipe was an unusual one: kugelhopf. Sounds German, but it’s not (at least, not technically). Dorie tells us it comes from Alsace, in eastern France (but on the German border!).
We were going to a party on Election Night, and I was supposed to take food that represented the home cities/states of the candidates. Chicago was easy: Peter Reinhart’s deep-dish pizza. But Delaware proved tougher. And then I worked it out: The du Pont family was a huge influence in the development of Delaware, and where were they from? Bien sur!
So I made it for the party — we didn’t need all that quickly staling bread around here just for us.
It was pretty easy to make, but it did rise slowly. At one point I was worried it wouldn’t come out of the oven in time, but all was well. I loved the finishing touches: brushing the loaf with lots of butter, then sprinkling it with sugar. The sugar melted to form a lovely, very thin crust.
Right before I served it, a couple of hours later, I sprinkled it with confectioner’s sugar.
I had one bite of Husband’s piece, after I photographed it. When I came back into the kitchen 10 minutes later, the whole loaf was gone.
Guess people liked it.
I don’t really have much of an opinion, considering that I had just one bite. So I polled the family, all of whom scored slices of their own:
Husband: It was a good sweet bread. Not that memorable.
#1 Son: I was expecting something with more flavor. I was expecting something more cakey, and because of that, my impression was negative, but as bread, it was good.
#2 Son: I didn’t think it would be like cake, so I loved it. I liked the raisins.
It was basically a sweet challah, but not sweet enough for me. I like my bread to be bread and my cake to be cake, and this was really a cross between the two.
If you want to see what the other TWD bakers did with it, check out the blogroll. And if you want the recipe for yourself, buy Dorie’s book or check out The All-Purpose Girl.
I was really looking forward to this week’s recipe. Over the years I’ve had my share of bakery-made (or, horrors, store-bought) rugelach, and I was looking forward to seeing what they taste like fresh from the oven.
Dorie recommends raspberry or apricot preserves; I doubled the batch to have enough for a potluck lunch on Sunday, and I planned to make half apple and half raspberry. As it turned out, the apple jelly I liquefied for the first half was enough for both, so they’re all apple. But while I was melting the jelly, it hit me: cherry. That was the way to go. Cherry jelly would have been insanely good.
Anyway, apple it was. Needless to say, I left out the currants.
The dough was easy to make and easy to work with. I hate rolling out dough almost as much as I hate fruit in my desserts, so I was worried about that part. But I used the plastic wrap the dough was refrigerated in as a shield between the rolling pin and the dough, and everything worked perfectly. I couldn’t get the dough into a perfect circle, of course, because I never can, but because the circle wound up being cut into 16 wedges, it didn’t matter.
Assembly was easy. Cutting was easy. Rolling up the cute little rugelach (rugelachen?) was easy. Even knowing when they were done was easy; I often have trouble with that part.
Really, the worst part of the whole endeavor was the waiting time; the dough has to be refrigerated for at least two hours before it’s rolled out, and the cookies have to be refrigerated for at least 30 minutes before you bake them. But even that wouldn’t matter if I’d spread the process out over a few days, as Dorie says works just fine.
And so?
Amazing.
The pastry was light and crackly, probably among the best two or three pastries I’ve ever made (or had!). The filling — apple jelly, cinnamon-sugar, and mini chocolate chips — was warm and absolutely delicious. (Oh, but if it had been cherry …)
Sadly, I made them on Friday night, intending them as our dessert. But Friday was also Halloween, and everyone had eaten so much candy by dinnertime that no one wanted dessert. (Well, #2 Son would have happily had some, but he was in another town trick-or-treating with a friend.)
I took them to a potluck Sunday afternoon, and they went like hotcakes, as they say. Everyone raved about them, and they still were light-years better than the bakery ones — extremely moist and flavorful. But they’d lost that lovely crackliness, which was my favorite thing about them.
If you want to try them yourself, head on over to Piggy’s Cooking Journal, where the recipe will be posted (and where you can check out her amazing food photographs). And if you want to see what the other TWD bloggers did with the recipe (and I’m sure there will be some great variations), work your way through the recently expanded blogroll at Tuesdays With Dorie.
For years I made pumpkin muffins from a recipe I cut out of the Philadelphia Inquirer — cut out, with a pair of scissors, and then kept track of on a little piece of newsprint. It’s so archaic. But somewhere along the line I lost my recipe; no more Andrew’s Pumpkin Muffins. They were excellent, by far the best pumpkin muffins I had ever had in my life.
This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe gave me a chance to replace my beloved recipe. And Dorie’s came close to Andrew’s (whoever he may have been) — or, at least, close to my no-doubt-nostalgia-enhanced memory of Andrew’s. We had them for breakfast rather than dessert, so I made them with King Arthur’s white whole-wheat flour. It’s great flour — we really can’t tell the difference in most baked goods — and I feel less guilty about serving it for breakfast.
And then, of course, I had to do something about those raisins. Over the objections of #1 Son (who has developed something of a raisin obsession lately), I used chocolate chips instead. (Breakfast? Who said anything about breakfast?)
So, without any further ado, here are my pumpkin muffins with chocolate chips and pecans:
Family review:
Husband: They were good all-around muffins — not transcendent, but quite tasty. The chocolate chips were a plus.
#1 Son: They were good, very good. There wasn’t a whole lot of pumpkin flavor, just enough to let you know you were eating pumpkin muffins but not enough to really make an impact. Texture was good, chocolate was good. Yay.
#2 Son: Um nom nom nom nom. (Translation: He liked them.)
I will definitely make these again. (Maybe with more chocolate chips. A cup? Two cups? The sky’s the limit!)
If you’d like to try them, Kelly over at Sounding My Barbaric Gulp! has the recipe. Really, go now. Try them. You won’t be sorry.
And if you’d like to see what other bloggers did with and to them (many no doubt much more creative than my chocolate-for-fruit substitution), check out the blogroll at Tuesdays With Dorie.
This week’s TWD recipe was Caramel-Peanut-Topped Brownie Cake. Husband’s birthday was last Thursday, and so this was a perfect ending to our Friday dinner.
I was on my own for this one, and I didn’t start till mid-afternoon. The cake came together pretty quickly, which was nice, and it was out of the oven an hour after I started.
The topping came a couple of hours later, just before dinner, and it too was fairly simple. I’ve had issues with caramel before, but this came together nice, exactly as described in the book.
And when I brought it to the table, it was beautiful. Mouthwateringly beautiful.
Unfortunately, it just didn’t live up to the promise of its name and beauty. It was fine, but not brilliant. It reminded me of a restaurant dessert, one of those that sound incredible when you read the description on the menu but are ultimately disappointing.
From the name, I thought the cake would be more of a giant brownie, but it was actually a cake, and the caramel was a bit bland.
We had vanilla ice cream with it; I think that’s absolutely necessary. It balanced the sweetness and richness of the chocolate and caramel.
Family reviews:
Husband: It was more cakey than I thought it would be, not as chocolatey. It worked as a whole package, when the ice cream was added in.
#1 Son: Not a lot of depth of flavor, and the texture was disappointing. But the caramel and the peanuts were good.
#2 Son: The cake was not the texture of either brownie or cake, kind of in between. Still really good — I like the bittersweet chocolate. The peanuts were good — they added that little bit of salt — and the caramel was awesome. Great with vanilla ice cream!
The next day, two of us liked it more (richer flavor), and two of us liked it less (drier cake).
This recipe was chosen by Tammy over at Wee Treats by Tammy. She’ll have the recipe over there if you want to try it for yourself, or you could go buy Dorie’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours. And if you want to see what tons of other bloggers thought of it, check out the blogroll at Tuesdays With Dorie.
I wasn’t going to do Dorie this week. You know, the whole fruit thing. But yesterday was my mother’s birthday — and the first day of fall — so I figured that was a good enough reason to bake, even if there was fruit involved.
Unfortunately, I decided this after I had been to the farmers market on Saturday morning. Fortunately, I had bought nectarines. So I made Dimply Nectarine Cake. And it was good.
I made it Sunday night, because the recipe said the cake was moister the next day, and moist sounded good.
Because the nectarines were considerably larger than plums, I cut them into quarters rather than halves. Oh, and I left out the orange zest, because I didn’t have any oranges, and the cardomom, just because. Other than that, I made it as written.
Everyone really liked it. My mother and I had it plain, but it was apparently also good with ginger preserves (#1 Son):
and Greek yogurt (Husband):
and raspberry jelly (#2 Son, but no photo).
This was a good buffet-type cake: not too sweet, probably excellent with coffee. It wasn’t anything jaw-droppingly spectacular, but it’s an excellent recipe to have on hand when you need something a little unusual and not too labor-intensive.
If you’d like to try it yourself, Michelle will post the recipe over at Bake-En. And if you’d like to see the myriad variations that all the other TWD bakers come up with, check out the blog roll at Tuesdays With Dorie.
I’m late! I always get these posts done by 8 a.m. on Tuesday (well, usually over the weekend, with an automatic post at 8 a.m. on Tuesday). But it was a rough few days around here. I apologize to my thousands of early-bird readers who were disappointed this morning.
This week’s recipe was Chocolate Chunkers, chosen by Claudia of Fool for Food; she’ll have the recipe (in both English and German, most likely!) if you want to try them yourself.
I made these cookies in a rush, which is never a good way to do anything, on Friday morning before a picnic. There were going to be lots of people there, including lots of kids, and I thought it would be nice to have lots of people to eat these things, because otherwise we were going to wind up eating way, way, way too many.
The recipe calls for raisins. Anyone who has read more than a couple of my posts can predict that I left those out, much to the chagrin of #1 Son. I made half as written (using milk chocolate rather than white, because I forgot to buy white, and because I like milk better), except without the raisins, and added shredded sweetened coconut to the other half. Everything’s better with coconut, right?
Turns out, not these cookies. They were great without the coconut, really amazing, and just good with it.
They taste like little brownies, rich and moist and oh-so-chocolatey. All of four of us loved them, and all four of us preferred the non-coconut version (which didn’t prevent us from eating the coconut ones too, mind you!).
These were by far my favorite Dorie cookies so far.
With coconut:
And without:
Try them both ways. See which you prefer.
If you want to see what everyone else did with these, check them out at Tuesdays With Dorie.
Rough week here. But I couldn’t skip Dorie, now, could I? So I made the batter on Friday, amidst all the other goings-on, and managed to bake one batch of 12 before dinner. But that was it.
We ate a few after dinner on Friday, when they were meant to be our special Friday dessert, but we were all so tired by the time dinner was done that the sense of ceremony was lost.
And I didn’t have time to bake on Saturday, either. Once again, #1 Son to the rescue. He pointed out, quite rightly, that the batter was once again delicious. And that he had not been terribly impressed by the cookies. And that we had most of a carton of vanilla ice cream in the freezer, which had been intended to go with the cookies for Friday dessert.
The logical conclusion: Chocolate Whopper Malted Drops Dough Ice Cream!
The batter had been sitting in the fridge overnight, so it was pretty solid. I portioned it out into ice cream-appropriate bits and froze it for a couple of hours. Then I softened the ice cream in the food processor, Ã la the Chocolate-Banded Ice Cream Torte. Then I combined the two and stuck the result back in the freezer to harden.
It was a very good thing.
Comments on the cookies were as follows:
#1 Son: No depth of flavor — it didn’t taste like a malted-milk cookie. The Whoppers didn’t come through. But the dough was excellent, like chocolate frosting.
#2 Son: They’re just chocolate — you don’t really get anything else out of them.
Husband: I liked the soft and chewy texture, but the taste wasn’t particularly complex or interesting.
But everyone loved the batter in the ice cream, especially with Ovaltine sprinkled on top!
If you want to see what everyone else did with the actual cookies, head on over to Tuesdays With Dorie. And if you want to try them yourself, either as cookies or as batter — complete with raw eggs! — check out the recipe at Confessions of a Tangerine Tart (or, even better, buy the book!).
I’ve been making oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for years, the ones from the Quaker Oats box. Everyone loves them, and I get requests for them from people I haven’t seen for months at a time. They’re really good.
All that is prelude to my saying that this week’s Tuesdays With Dorie recipe was for peanut butter oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, taking mine just a bit further flavorwise. #2 Son helped out this time, making the batter completely on his own.
I refrigerated the batter for about three hours, and then scooped it out with my lovely little cookie scoop. (The batter, by the way, was really good. We ate more than was strictly a good idea.)
Baked them. Ate one. Wow. Warm chocolate chip cookies are one of the little pleasures of life.
But I couldn’t leave well enough alone. All the other TWD bakers have inspired me to push everything just a little further.
So I slapped some vanilla ice cream between a couple of cookies, and let me tell you, that was incredible.
I would have eaten most of the cookies myself, along with most of the ice cream, but luckily I had two extra 16-year-old boys here overnight (in addition to the usual one), and they polished off the couple of dozen cookies and nearly half a gallon of ice cream that were left after dinner.
But I would have.
Check out how far all the other TWD bakers pushed this recipe, and if you want to try it yourself, head on over to Proceed With Caution, where Stefany will have it all typed up for you.