Quarkstollen
Archive of posts from 2005
Roasted Clementine and Chocolate Tart With Macadamia Nut Crust
The crust was a bit too crumbly. I used satsuma tangerines instead of clementines; I prefer to use organic ones when I know the peel will be eaten. The slices were a little on the thick side because I didn’t want them to disintegrate, but they weren’t quite soft enough. The bi...
Vanilla-Hazelnut Cheesecake
The hazelnut brittle never turned into a paste for me, even after adding a bit of Frangelico. I think I cooked the sugar syrup too long so the caramel was too hard. I couldn’t find Neufchâtel cheese, so I substituted with half quark and half cream cheese. This was the first ti...
Almond Apricot Pound Cake with Amaretto
The directions say to grind the almonds in the first step, but don’t mention them in the remainder of the recipe! I incorporated them along with the chopped apricots. I was able to find Odense marzipan at Whole Foods in Oakville. I used peach schnapps: unfortunately, it tastes...
Black Cake
The original recipe comes from Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking who in turn got it from her babysitter, a woman from St. Vincent, who got it from her mother. The main differences are that Colwin’s calls for burnt sugar essence while Lawson uses treacle (molasses). I think the burn...
Persimmon Meringue Stacks
The persimmons (I used Fuyu) are marinated in a wine syrup. It was difficult to whip just two egg whites in my mixer, so I used a trick I learned in school: elevating the bowl slightly by slipping a dishcloth underneath the brackets. The brown sugar meringue didn’t form stiff ...
Golden New-Fashioned Dried Fruitcake with Cashews, Pistachios and Bourbon
A lengthy list of ingredients, and a long baking time, but this fruitcake is worth it. Wonderful rich base flavour from butter, ground cashews and bourbon. The various dried fruits contribute both sweet and tart flavours, without the excess from traditional candied fruit. It’s...
Fruit and Spice Loaf Cake
According to the notes, this cake is in the style of the classic French pain d’epices. The blend of spices for this cake is dazzling: star anise, cinnamon, ginger, black pepper, coriander, cardamom and nutmeg. However, the cake turned out to be a letdown. It was quite dense, a...
Oatmeal Bulgur Wheat Bread
The trouble started when my new mixer groaned under the strain of incorporating the flour into this bread. I took it out of the bowl and kneaded it by hand. The dough seemed very dry and crumbly, and I had to split it into two pieces. It never became elastic and didn’t pass th...
Saffron Cardamom Ice Cream
Here is the text from the Gourmet article verbatim: We asked F. W. Pearce of Ciao Bella Gelato Company in New York for one of his most unusual ice-cream flavors, and he offered the following, which pairs the exotic tastes of saffron and cardamom with pistachio nuts for a cool ...
SHF/IMBB Cookie Swap: Armadillos and Peppermint Pinwheels
For this month’s Sugar High Friday, a joint event with the folks over at Is My Blog Burning? has everyone doing a cookie swap. The roundup features 152 recipes (Part 1, Part 2).My first contribution is Armadillos (recipe). This is basically a chocolate chunk cookie augmented w...
Cake 10: Chocolate Decadent Cake
With the word “decadent” in its name, the last cake of the course promised to be a stunning finale. We began by chopping up 900 grams (two pounds) of semisweet Lindt couverture chocolate. For purposes of comparison, consider that a chocolate bar is typically anywhere from 40 t...
Mozart Cake: Step by Step
For a recent dinner party, I decided to try baking a cake from the book, Desserts by Pierre Hermé by Dorie Greenspan. The recipe was involved, but seemed manageable. Here is a pictorial of the steps:Mise en place for the cinnamon dough. The unusual ingredient is the cooked egg...
Cake 9: Baked Chiffon Cheesecake
The easy part of class this weekend was making the graham cracker crust, a standard base for cheesecakes. To help tie the flavours together, we added some ground almonds into the mix as well. I brought a flat-bottomed ramekin to class which was a useful tool for pressing the c...
Cake 8: Tiramisù
At fifteen minutes past the start of class, my partner was still absent, so I had to go solo on Saturday. We made tiramisù, a popular Italian dessert, and did everything from scratch. First up: ladyfingers, or, savoiardi. These are light, delicate cookies that can often be fou...
Chocolate-Chunk Oatmeal Cookies with Walnuts and Dried Cranberries
This version used quick oats, walnuts, some nice moist dried cranberries and white and bittersweet chocolate (the original calls for old-fashioned oats, all dark chocolate, pecans and dried cherries). You really have to go against your intuition and take these out of the oven ...
Polenta Millet Sunflower Bread
This is a pretty simple bread, containing lots of whole grains. She doesn’t call for soaking the polenta and millet in the liquid, but I would do it for next time. I’m not that fond of crunchy millet. Texture was a bit crumbly (longer kneading next time?) and there’s an “off” ...
Cake 7: Chocolate Mousse Cake
This week was supposed to be tiramisu, but the mascarpone did not arrive on time, so we made the next week’s cake instead. Class started off with Chef demonstrating the japonais biscuit. It’s basically a cookie made from a nut meringue. She beat egg whites until soft peaks, th...
Halloween Ice Creams
I heated 2 cups milk with 1 cup cream and added that to 4 egg yolks, ½ cup sugar and 6 tbsp. of sesame paste. Return to heat until slightly thickened, cool, churn, etc. The sesame paste was made by combining instant black sesame powder with a bit of hot water. For additional f...
Cake 6: Yogurt Mousse Cake
This morning’s session wasn’t a lot of work in terms of baking, but we did spend some time on assembling and garnishing. Chef began by taking the thawed sponge cake layers from last week and demonstrated how to cut circles out of it. She used a 6” cake ring to mark the diamete...
Pâtisserie Walking Tour
This is a journal about what I bake, not what others make, so this entry is a brief diversion from the usual. A friend organized a pastry walking tour in Toronto recently and I jumped at the chance to sample the finest goods from the city’s shops. She has done this before, so ...
Cake 5: Linzertorte
Before working on Linzertorte, a traditional Austrian cake, we started today’s class by preparing a hot milk sponge cake to be used for next week’s class. Chef said this type of sponge cake is not that popular anymore, but she recalled seeing descriptions of it in old recipe b...
SHF #13: Chocolate Mascarpone Tart
This is my contribution to this month’s Sugar High Friday, hosted by Kelli from lovescool, and the theme is dark chocolate.Finding a recipe that uses dark chocolate is never too difficult, but I looked through my cookbooks and nothing really appealed to me. I had a sizeable ch...
Orange Date Muffins
I melt the butter instead of processing it with the orange. Otherwise, the small pieces of fat don’t properly incorporate into the batter. Serious orange flavour without too much bitterness even though the pith is included. The only tricky part is compensating for the size and...
Cake 4: Orange Chiffon Cake
Egg whites were the star of today’s class. We began by mixing the dry ingredients for the chiffon cake: cake flour, baking powder, sugar and salt. After making a well in the centre, we stirred in a mixture of egg yolks, vegetable oil, water, vanilla and orange zest. The Hobart...
Pastry Cream Cookies
Very easy to make, as long as you have leftover pastry cream and cake crumbs (which I did). These aren’t really cookies in the traditional sense, but very moist and cake-like. They aren’t very nice to look at though. I think there’s a typo in the yield for this recipe: I made ...
Deep Dish Apple Pie
I didn’t use the crust recipe from the magazine because it was an all-butter one, I like a combination of shortening and butter to give both flavour and flakiness. The apples used were Golden Delicious (sweet) and Cortland (tart).
Cake 3: Banana Layer Cake with German Icing
(I missed last week’s class which was a carrot cake).We began Saturday’s class by making the cake layers. Creaming the emulsified shortening and cake flour together coats the particles with fat so that gluten doesn’t form as easily, contributing to a more tender cake. After ad...
Two whole grain muffins
Barley muffins: Recipe from Mollie Katzen’s Sunlight Café. Notes: The cashews and sesame produce an incredible peanut-like aroma during baking. The texture is chewy and dense, might be good toasted.
Château Banana Bread
I found a very nearly identical recipe in the link above; the poster says it was obtained from the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. My copy says Canadian Pacific Hotels (now Fairmont) and Château Laurier (I think) so it’s likely from the hotel chain. This is an incredibly fl...
Cake 1: Pound cakes
I had forgotten how early 8:30 am is. This class is taking place in a different, smaller lab than the one I was in before. The makeup of the students is about the same, largely female; with a full class and a smaller room, it will be pretty hectic when we make labour-intensive...
SHF #12: Nectarine Custard Tart
This is my contribution to SHF #12, hosted by Elise, and the theme is custard.I often make desserts that use custard (crème caramel, pudding, ice cream) so the only difficulty was narrowing down the options. In the end, since nectarines are plentiful this time of year, I made ...
Art of Cakes
For the next ten weeks, I will be taking “Art of Cakes”. Details here.Week 1: Pound cakesWeek 2: Carrot cake (missed)Week 3: Banana layer cake with German icingWeek 4: Orange chiffon cakeWeek 5: LinzertorteWeek 6: Yogurt mousse cakeWeek 7: Chocolate Mousse CakeWeek 8: Tiramisù...
Ruby’s Oatmeal Buttermilk Muffins
Recipe from a newspaper clipping my mom collected a long time ago. Notes: Differences from the recipe in the link compared with my copy: 1 tsp baking powder, no vanilla, optional addition of 1 cup chopped dates to the batter. Very easy to make. I usually double this recipe, ju...
Amaretti
This is my third attempt at making my favourite cookie. The problem in previous batches was the batter spread out too thin, yielding a thin, chewy cookie. This time, I mixed in the egg whites by hand, adding a bit at a time until it was soft enough to pipe. I used dried aprico...
Nectarine Upside-down Chiffon Cake
Recipe from Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan. Notes: This cake turned out really well. Baking time was extended by about 20 minutes (with the pan covered in foil) as it wasn’t done in the middle. A bit soggy near the nectarine part, maybe I left it in the pan to cool too l...
Lemon Meringue Ice Cream
Used homemade meringue and substituted store-bought lemon curd for the lemon syrup. There’s a lot of lemon flavour in my adaptation: a few drops lemon extract in the meringue, lemon zest infused in the cream and Liberty lemon Méditerranée yogurt (8%) instead of plain Greek yog...
Blueberry Crumble Fromage Frais Ice Cream
Recipe adapted from deliaonline.com. Notes: Substituted quark (0.25% fat) for fromage frais. Crumble made from pie dough scraps saved up in my freezer, mixed with cinnamon and brown sugar. Very flavourful, lots of textural contrast, a keeper.
Seven-Grain Honey Bread
Recipe from Baking Bread: Old and New Traditions by Beth Hensperger. Notes: The honey makes the dough very tacky, even though there is quite a bit of butter and oil in it. During shaping, I tucked the ends under so it has a nice shape. Good oven spring. Loaf is tender and sweet.
Baci ice cream
Made with Green & Black’s Organic Hazelnut Chocolate Spread. Base is very thick, like a pudding, gave the machine a real workout. Ice cream is so rich, it doesn’t feel very cold in the mouth. Could use more hazelnut flavour next time, either use a different hazelnut spread...
SHF #11: Espresso semifreddo with almond florentine
This is my contribution to SHF #11, hosted by Ronald at loveSicily, and the theme is coffee.I’m not a regular coffee drinker (caffeine on an empty stomach makes me tremble!) although I enjoy a cup once in a while. However, the aroma of coffee and its use as a flavouring is som...
Surprise cake
Lots of interesting ingredients including beets, olive oil, ginger, orange and polenta. Batter mixes up purple. This turned out nothing like the photograph in the cookbook: it’s very purple, dense and moist, like a pudding (in fact, it’s called surprise pudding in the index). ...
Zucchini-walnut protein bread
Made with yellow pattypan zucchini. Original recipe calls for pecans. Very dense and starchy, like a pudding. The protein comes from soy protein powder (different from soy flour!), which I bought at a health food store. Katzen suggests the “biscotti treatment”: slicing the bre...
Pastry 6: More tarts
For the last class, we began by rolling out a batch of sweet dough that we had prepared and frozen last week. Again, the warmth of the lab made the task more difficult, but I managed to fit the dough into 15 mini tart molds, with plenty left over. Chef demonstrated the crème b...
Beet Ice Cream
Recipe calls for 3 “large” beets: a large beet is about 8oz/220g? Made a half recipe (about 3/4 quart) because I only had a handful (8 oz) of small beets. Roasted beets in a loosely covered shallow pan with a little water for about an hour and strained most of purée through si...
SHF #10: Fresh Cheese and Honey Tartlets
This is my first contribution to Sugar High Fridays, an online food blogging event. SHF #10 is hosted by Nic at bakingsheet and the theme is honey.After searching through my baking books, I decided on Fresh Cheese and Honey Tartlets from The Foods of the Greek Islands: Cooking...
Pastry 5: Apple galette
We spent another sweltering evening in the baking lab making apple galettes, a flat free-form pastry. I wasn’t too excited about this class, as it didn’t seem that there would be much to learn. We made up a large batch of all-butter pie dough, using milk instead of water. I do...
Almond financiers
Enough batter to fill a quarter sheet pan, albeit a bit too thin. Some of the browned bits from the beurre noisette are noticeable in the cookies. A bit too chewy, with an eggy and nutty taste. Could cut back on the sugar. Didn’t follow recipe exactly (one extra egg white, a b...
Pastry 4: Chocolate tarts
I was 15 minutes early for class tonight and was surprised to see so many classmates there already, helping to scale ingredients. When you see blocks of Lindt chocolate and raspberries on the work bench, you know whatever you make will be yummy! Since my partner hadn’t arrived...
Pastry 3: Napoleon slices
A heat wave blew right into town last week… and so our goal was to try and make napoleon slices (millefeuille in French) as fast as possible and then escape the warmth of the kitchen! Last week, we rolled out the last of the puff dough onto a sheet, docked it, and left it in t...
Pastry 2: Puff panoply
We made three different products today, but most of it was just assembly. Chef began by doing a demo of making frangipane, a nut-based pastry cream. Equal amounts of fat (she used half butter, half shortening), sugar and ground nuts (half ground hazelnuts, half almond paste) w...
Basic 10: Swiss rolls
The last class of the course featured Swiss rolls (also called jelly rolls) which are a thin layer of sponge cake spread with a filling and rolled into a cylinder. We immersed 16 eggs in warm water briefly to get them up to room temperature. Chef gave us a tip that vinegar hel...
Pastry 1: Puff dough
We’re in the same lab for this one as for Basic. Our very chatty “German-trained” instructor has been in the business for almost 30 years, starting when she was 14. During the roll call, she made it a point to comment on almost everyone’s names. I assume she’s been in Toronto ...
Art of Pastry
For the next six weeks, I will be taking “Art of Pastry”. Details here.Week 1: Puff doughWeek 2: Apple strudel, turnovers and palmiersWeek 3: Napoleon slicesWeek 4: Chocolate truffle tart and chocolate mousse tartletsWeek 5: Apple galetteWeek 6: Key lime tart and crème brûlée ...
Basic 9: Black Forest Cake
I had been eagerly anticipating this class, in which we were to make Black Forest cake. Unfortunately, the heat of the ovens combined with the forecasted high of 32°C made the baking lab quite uncomfortable. First, we made devil’s food cake. Shortening, sugar and salt were cre...
Basic 8: Spritz cookies
Spritz cookies are a traditional butter cookie made with a cookie press or pastry bag. We began by creaming together shortening, butter, icing sugar, salt, vanilla and lemon zest until it was a uniform colour and consistency, making sure to scrape down the side of the bowl. At...
Basic 7: Pâte à choux
We started this morning by making pâte à choux. Water and shortening is put into a pot, and brought to a rolling boil. Then we dump in sifted flour and stir until the flour has absorbed all the water and has gelatinized. It’s done when it clears the side of the pot. To avoid a...
Reading Rainbow
Thanks to great prices at BookCloseouts.com and an irresistible impulse to collect reading material, I now own the following:Forever Summer by Nigella LawsonOn Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGeeJacques Pépin Celebrates by Jacques PépinThe Sec...
Banana-Caramel Coconut Cream Pie
Filling looked lumpy. Strong coconut flavour (Aroy-D makes thick coconut milk). Caramel too runny and cloying. Crust holds up well. Deteriorates rapidly after second day.
Basic 6: Rolls
Soft bread rolls was the goal of today’s class. We began by dissolving fresh yeast with water to form a yeast slurry. All of the breads I’ve made in the past used instant yeast or active dry yeast, so this was something new for me. Fresh yeast is faster acting than the others ...
Basic 5: Creams
Crème caramel was our first product today. Chef began by demonstrating how to melt sugar to produce the caramel. After heating a pot on the stove, he tossed in granulated sugar a bit at a time, waiting until the previous handful had melted. This, he explained, along with a min...
Basic 4: Masking and Piping
The first thing our instructor said this Saturday was that of the ten classes, today’s would be the most boring. The session would be devoted to cake decorating exercises. We began by learning how to use the mixers to make royal icing. The icing is a mixture of water, meringue...
Basic 3: Coffee and Tea
We started this morning with muffins. I’ve probably made at least 100 dozen muffins in the past so I didn’t think this was going to be too hard. After mixing everything together, we let the batter rest for a while to let the bran hydrate. Dissolving brown sugar in the water/eg...
Tools of the trade
Before I enrolled in this course, I knew that I had to buy some equipment for use in the class. During the first morning, our instructor walked us through the list (which was different from the one on the website). I’m glad I waited because there were many things that he said ...
Basic 2: Pie Oh My
When I arrive, the ingredients for today’s pie are already measured and laid out: flour, shortening, granulated sugar, modified cornstarch, a lemon, apples and butter. We begin by peeling and slicing apples and immersing them into a bowl filled with water and lemon juice. This...
Basic 1: First impressions
It was almost a given that I’d show up late for the first class. I ran into the baking lab, 5 minutes late, to find the class had begun. The basement room contains a row of Hobart mixers along one wall, and large steel fridges and freezer along another. Racks of equipment (rol...
Baking Basic
For the next ten weeks, I am attending “Baking Basic”, the introductory course in the Bakery Arts program at George Brown College.Week 1: First impressionsWeek 2: Apple pieWeek 3: Muffins and tea biscuitsWeek 4: Masking and piping exerciseWeek 5: Crème caramel and bavarian cre...