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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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).
(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...
