Tuesdays With Dorie: Fresh Ginger and Chocolate Gingerbread

Well, let's try this again and hope for no blue screens...

Firstly, I just have to share and say that the reason I didn't post last week is because I was in Chicago being touristy and enjoying inauguration festivities. See below:

(The shirt says "Obama in the house")

On to the baking...

This week Heather of Sherry Trifle chose the Fresh Ginger and Chocolate Gingerbread. Silly as I am, I had made Dorie's flan recipe the night before I was planning on making this gingerbread, so in order to stave off some guilt I decided to make a half recipe. I love ginger and was excited about all the types included in this one, although I didn't have any ginger in syrup and left it out. This was a pretty straightforward recipe, though after I baked it and got a taste, it reminded me a lot of one of my favorite bakery's pumpkin chocolate chip muffins. I guess the muffins are less pumpkiny and more spicy like the gingerbread. I'm always very happy when Dorie puts in little tips like, "Don't worry if your mix looks curdled here,"which is comforting when you're mixing and mixing and it still looks weird. I followed what I am seeing as general wisdom for halving things with odd numbers of eggs and used 2 eggs, resulting in a very moist cake. I have no problems with moist. (haha though I did have a teacher in high school who HATED the word moist)

The icing...mmm. I think the coffee helped give the icing that something extra. I made the full recipe of icing for my half recipe cake and might have just eaten the rest of it. Hm...where are my workout dvds?


Be sure to check out the blogroll and see what everyone else is up to!

It's not a dessert! (This week's TWD)

As much as I have enjoyed all the delicious sweets we've made in the past couple months, I was definitely looking forward to having a savory item about which I could feel moderately less guilty after I eat half of it. (Thank you Rebecca, of Ezra Poundcake - love the blog name) These corn muffins tasted pretty good despite the fact that my brain was elsewhere while I was making them.

Since my dad just kind of scoffs at cornbready type things that aren't made in a cast iron pan, I decided to forgo the muffin aspect of the recipe and just bake it in my skillet. The amount is just fine for that as well if you like your cornbread nice and thick, especially since everyone seems to be eating chili this week. Though I consider myself a true-blood southerner (also someone who's worked at a "soul food" restaurant that served a sweeter cornbread), I like my cornbread on the sweet side. I think I have literally spat out non-sweet cornbread before because I think it tastes like dirt. There may be a time and a place but I haven't found it yet.

Anywho, the recipe was pretty simple to throw together; this made for a quick dinner with a pot of chili. However, I completely forgot to add the chili powder and I used creamed corn instead of regular corn. To try to equalize the wetness, I cut out about a 1/4 C of buttermilk, especially because I added a little more than the 1/4 C of corn called for. I also had to make do with self-rising cornmeal. For this, I just cut the baking powder to 1 Tsp and only put in 1/4 Tsp of baking soda. It worked out just fine and my cornbread did not have the texture of a brick. Hooray.

I remember some people mentioning in the P's and Q's that their muffins were very crumbly and didn't hold together. I tried to eat a slice about 15 minutes after I took the pan out of the oven and this is what happened. Tasted great though. By the time I went for the next slice it had cooled off more and so held together a lot better. I'm not actually sure if I would want to add the chili powder the next time I make these - I like the sweetness of the corn and peppers.

(I feel like my pictures are outrageously yellow, but I bake at night mostly and the light is not good. )

As Rebecca said, if you want to follow the "Great Corn Muffin Debate of 09" check out the rest of us here. Party on!

Bonne Annee and TWD!

I was so excited to find out the recipe for this week was chosen by Dorie herself! (I'm sure most of us were, really who wouldn't be?) What I found to be ironic is that I immediately realized how the pears were intended to be sliced but yet had some confusion about the almond cream. In my mind's eye it was supposed to be fluffy and smooth, but mine felt like I was spreading soft cream cheese. Next time I will probably process my almonds a little finer; in heeding the advice about not making nut butter I might have stopped grinding them a little early. The dough was delicious. I only had an 11' tart pan but I just pressed the dough out as well as I could and it worked out great. No cracks and no appreciable shrinking.

It's pretty funny that the standard ingredient for this in France is canned pears, but after poaching mine and trying a slice or two, the texture is way similar so I can see why that is the case.

Getting ready to go in the oven:


Here's my baked tart:


If Dorie herself happens to stop by here, I just want to say thank you thank you for providing such great recipes! I've always been a confident baker but the regularity of TWD (thanks Laurie et al) has just made it all the better. I'm a much cleaner baker too now, which probably makes other people more happy that it does me haha. Stop by the blogroll to see how everyone else's tarts turned out!

And now for this week's TWD

Merry almost-Christmas people! Merry Hanukkah as well!

So I had forgotten this week's TWD was butterscotch pudding until like...today. Pudding scares me, especially of the homemade kind. I tried to make it one time and probably stirred and stirred for about 30 minutes trying to get that b**ch to thicken up but it ended up as vanilla soup anyway. Butterscotch isn't really my jam either, but I know my brother and my dad like it a lot.

I did have a nice little adventure to the ABC store where I'm pretty sure I entertained the two guys behind the counter with my absolute lack of knowledge about whisky/whiskey/scotch. Sorry dudes, I have really only branched out to bourbon. I ended up with airplane bottles of Dewars, which I at least recognized the name of because we have it at work as well.

(Apologies for lack of pictures - I have been wrapping presents so haven't had time to get them off my camera yet. I'll edit with them as soon as I can.)

Rather than use and rinse out my food processor 18 times for the recipe, I just sifted the salt and corn starch together and then put in the egg yolks and sugar. Pouring the hot milk mixture in was a daunting task also - this is not a big FP with a big chute to pour things into that I'm working with; it has a tiny little gap. So that made a big mess, but I managed not to scramble my eggs. Then, when I added it back into the pot, after the two minutes it MIRACULOUSLY thickened! I honestly wasn't expecting it to be that easy! I snuck a couple bites of pudding before pudding (aren't I funny) them into the fridge and I was happy with the flavor. Most butterscotch flavors I find way way too sweet and cloying, so I think there's a good chance of me making this again. Good choice Donna! (of Spatulas, Corkscrews & Suitcases) Stop by the TWD blogroll to see what everyone else ended up with!

TWD and a Celebration

Firstly, I just want to share that I am now officially a CAROLINA ALUM! ...that is, once all my library fines are paid haha. Great success!

On to the baking -

This week's TWD selection from Heather of Randomosity and the Girl was another holiday/busytime friendly recipe. The (mostly) weekly baking is getting me into a much more efficient method of baking, which I hadn't really thought would happen. It's a nice little side benefit to doing this I guess. Anyway, these were a snap to throw together and I could see myself making gobs of them with various flavors of jam.

I don't actually own a scooper that would have been useful for these cookies, so I first tried to use two spoons but the cookies were just ugly. Can't have ugly cookies. I ended up scooping out the dough and then rolling them into a ball with my hands and then squashing the tops down with the bottom of a bowl. I think my cookies were a bit biggah (does anyone else think Old Greg when they say that?) since I only got about 3 dozen.

After reading about some people having their cookies turn pretty dark on the bottoms, I only baked for 10 minutes. My oven/pans have been known to burn things within the recommended time so I played it safe. The cookies did spread a bit - I took care not to overmix at the end so that helped for sure.

My parents once upon a time brought back some raspberry cookies from Seattle and the taste of these reminded me of those, so I thought I'd dust some of them in powdered sugar like the ones I remembered.

Both versions are pretty tasty, though I think next time I would add more jam and maybe heat it up a little beforehand so the consistency is easier to mix into the batter. Other than that they were great! My dad is definitely loving this kick of cookies because he prefers ones that aren't so out of this world sweet and these fit the bill.

Be sure to check out everyone else on the TWD blogroll! Thanks again Heather for a great pick.

TWD - Grandma's All Occasion Sugar Cookies

Ah sugar cookies. Can't have Christmas without them. I am also happy that these were a nice easy selection...I am in the middle of studying for two exams at the end of this week and these made a nice study break.

After reading of some people's issues with sticky dough, I made sure to make my dough earlier and refrigerate it overnight. I had zero issues with problematic dough, and it was actually kind of hard to get the sugar to stick to the sides of my first log because it was still pretty cold.

I made the second log with some orange extract in it. It would have been nice to have some orange zest to put in it, but I didn't have time to go to the store. I was trying to figure out how to decorate these and DUH! Orange and chocolate. That's not weird is it? Hopefully other people think it tastes good too. I love using my little parchment sheets to do decorations like this. It takes about 5 seconds but looks like it is professionally done.


Ta-dah! I even broke out mi madre's Christmas china!



Here's a secret glimpse of what my mixer looked like after T-giving. Didn't even realize it til this week. Ah the shame.

As always, check out what the other Tuesdays With Dorie bloggers have come up with!

T-giving Rehash

Yayyyy the semester is almost over save for two more exams! I didn't realize how quickly time had passed since Thanksgiving while I was in the middle of all my end of the semester stuff, so my overview of all the baking I did is kind of late...obviously.

I had the grand idea to make some apple cider caramels from a recipe I found over on Sugarpunk's site. They started out well, but since I have very little experience with candy-making, I'm thinking I might have over cooked it since it never set up. It did, however, make a nice bottom layer/topping for the pumpkin cheesecake I made. This one had a gingersnap crust that was really tasty. I don't think it lasted longer than about 2 days in my house, so it was a hit.



I also decided to make some Pumpkin Challah from Martha Stewart's recipe. Like every other challah recipe I've used, this makes a crap-ton of bread. I envisioned these rolls as sort of post-thanksgiving sandwich bread, but I failed to think about how big they'd be by the time they were done baking.

Other than the obvious ugliness here, the dough was really easy to work with, except I can only braid going one direction and starting from the middle throws me off in a big way.

Like I said, there was so much of this bread. I think I made french toast for everyone at least twice. It wasn't overly pumpkiny, which I think is a good thing since it could go savory or sweet.


I did actually bake the Two-fer Pie the day after Thanksgiving, but due to a misplacement of my camera connector cord, I have only just gotten all of these pictures onto my computer. Alas. Anyway, the dough was way easy to make, but it seemed like 25 plus 8 minutes was a long time to prebake. Mine, as seen in the middle pic below, got kind of crispy at the end of that time.

The filling was also...filling. I managed to get most of it into the pie and there were only a couple spots where I could tell that it had run over and made the crust stick to the pie pan a little.


Overall, I think the pie turned out pretty well. I like the addition of rum in the pumpkin at the beginning, but it got stronger over time which I liked less. I think that, while this pie is tasty, it is too much of a hassle to make any more than maybe once a year.