Bran Muffins with Blackberries
Archive of posts from June 2007
Blueberry Scones
An early morning project on one of the hottest days of the summer. This is a fussy recipe (like many Cook’s Illustrated ones are) that calls for freezing the butter and grating it, and folding the dough similar to doing puff pastry turns. The method ensures that the blueberrie...
Blackberry Financiers
The recipe calls for grinding sliced almonds, but I already had ground almonds so I used: 1 ¾ cups sliced, ground == 124 g ground (based on 1 cup of sliced almonds weighing 70 g). This is very simple to make, as it uses the food processor to combine everything. I was a little ...
Extremely Orange, Orange Muffins
You must skim the entire process of how this muffin recipe was derived: over a dozen trials before he was satisfied! Evidence that this recipe lives up to its name: using orange zest, orange yogurt, orange extract and orange oil in the muffin; mashing the orange zest into the ...
Red Rose Chocolates
Continuing my freezer purge, I had a tiny bit of strained raspberry puree so I tried making another chocolate from this book. The flavour is predominantly raspberry, but the rosewater was too subtle. I used at least 5 drops, but would add even more next time. The raspberry vis...
Mango Cheesecake
I had about 2 cups of mango puree in the freezer so I decided to make this for a BBQ I was invited to. The recipe is pretty simple; my only additions were a bit of ground almonds in the crust and a reduction in the sugar for the filling as the fruit was quite sweet. I also mad...
Chocolate Chili Ice Cream
I did not have the tiny pequín chilies so I took a morita chili and infused the milk and cream with it, then minced it to add to the mixture. My only other deviation was to omit the almonds, as I felt they would compete with the other flavours. And what flavours: when you put ...
Strawberry Cream Cake
I baked the cake in an 8” tin for about 10 minutes longer than indicated. It turned out to be very sturdy indeed and was easy to slice, although there was some egginess and density in the very centre. After putting it all together, I was a little disappointed that the layers d...
Flo Braker’s Pistachio Cake
Instead of making the chocolate genoise, I pulled a package from my freezer labelled, “8” devil’s food cake, Dec 23, 2006”, leftover from this Christmas cheesecake. There was still a lot of work to do, as the pistachios required some preparation: shelling, blanching, slipping ...
Cookies 10: Chocolate and Caramel
A hot classroom awaited us for the final installment of this cookie course. We started with the chocolate cookies, a regular chocolate chip cookie dough loaded with white chocolate chips, chocolate chunks and pecans. Chef told us to reduce the sugar in the recipe by almost hal...
Rugelach
Shh, I have some overdue cream cheese that’s been sitting around in the fridge for too long, some chopped pecans taken home from cookie class a few weeks ago, a jar of jam that I’m trying to get rid of, and leftover chocolate that’s been melted and re-tempered countless times....
Coconut Angel Food Cake
I’m now down to 8 egg whites in my freezer after using 13 to make this cake. The addition of toasted coconut provided a bit of interest in this otherwise boring white cake. My tube pan is 10” across at the top and was completely full; I don’t know how this recipe is supposed t...
Cookies 9: Coconut
Last night’s class was a model of efficiency (or maybe a model of simplicity): we were done in under two hours! Our first cookie was a macaroon, made with a standard recipe plus the addition of a bit of ground almonds and lemon zest. We only had dessicated coconut to work with...
White Chocolate Ice Cream with Toasted Almonds
An interesting note in the recipe says that it’s hard to make an ice cream with a strong white chocolate flavour, as the texture often becomes grainy with the addition of too much chocolate. Their guideline is to keep the white chocolate below 15% of the total ingredients (by ...
Blueberry Cornmeal Cakes
This is the corn blini recipe with the addition of blueberries. I used a mix of lemon yogourt and whole milk in place of buttermilk. Letting the batter sit for about 15 minutes helped to thicken it, as the cornmeal absorbed the liquid. When I scattered berries onto the batter ...