The rising sun painted the sky a wonderful orange and magenta on my way to class this morning. We came early in order to make up for time lost a few weeks ago when our croissant dough had to be tossed.First order of business: croissants. After two full days of thawing, our dou...
This very involved pie with multiple time-consuming steps comes from The Secrets of Baking by Sherry Yard. I don’t normally make complicated desserts unless it’s for celebrating a special occasion, or I’m hosting a dinner party, or I’m trying to impress a date. But I picked an...
In a disappointing (but not entirely surprising) turn of events, our class was set back a little bit because one of the freezers, the very one containing our croissant dough, broke down. We spent the morning re-making the croissant dough, as well as making the danish dough. Th...
Alanna is hosting this month’s Sugar High Friday event and the theme is surprise (surprise!). Now a surprise isn’t something you usually want when baking or eating. No one likes to find out that she has forgotten to add the sugar when putting a tray of cookies into the oven, o...
An easy cake to make but, of course, being Cook’s Illustrated, there are a few tweaks. First, the lemon zest is Microplaned, then minced, then softened in lemon juice so that the little bits contribute flavour but not texture. Second, the glaze is applied in two stages, immedi...
This recipe uses baking soda and buttermilk so the waffle batter is quite foamy. They have a strong buttery taste which I found too overpowering.
Another sub teaching us today (our regular Chef is in a dragon boat competition), an instructor that I’ve heard positive things about. The best thing about her instructional style were the sound effects and sarcasm. This was also the first Chef who bothered to talk about minim...
I found this old cookbook at the Mississauga Symphony Used Book Sale last night. Inside was a Curried Fruit Cobbler made with plums and peaches. In this rendition, I made half the recipe using all peaches, recycled leftover pie dough scraps for the topping and baked it in thre...
Instead of the sweet pastry found in the magazine, I used the rest of the pie dough from last week’s plum tart. There are a lot of recipes for this pie on the Web with wildly differing proportions of sour cream, sugar and peaches. I only needed 10 minutes at the higher tempera...
Well, buttermilk in name only: the supermarket ran out (!) so I used a mix of yogurt and skim milk. For my own version of “fruit explosion”, I used prunes, dried cranberries, golden raisins, dates and walnuts. This is one of the easiest muffins to make, but not the tastiest, a...
Back to school again. This time, the class is focusing on yeasted products typically served during the first meal of the day. The regular instructor was away, but our substitute was a familiar face, the same Chef who I’ve had for both cake classes. Many of the students were fa...
There are two interesting techniques in this recipe: one is to macerate the peaches in sugar beforehand, to release excess juices and avoid a runny filling; the other is to prebake the crumble so that it stays crisp. Both contribute to a delicious result: the peach filling is ...
La Paloma, a Toronto gelateria, was the inspiration for this sorbet. I tried their version of pineapple-basil earlier this year and was struck by the tasty combination. I used Thai basil (which contributed some anise-like flavours) and only half the quantity called for in this...
The crust is pâte sucrée, the filling is pastry cream enriched with ground toasted almonds and vanilla, almond and Amaretto. The roasted plums gave off a heady aroma right out of the oven, delicious. Wonderful flaky pastry, a surprisingly smooth and creamy filling, topped with...