The first order of business in class was to make a caramel filling. This was quite easy: caramelizing the sugar, then mixing in whipping cream and melted milk chocolate. We let this cool to a thick, but pipeable consistency. Unfortunately, I left ours in the fridge a little to...
Grr, I made this cake twice this week. The first time, I forgot the eggs (!!!) and baked it in a 9” loaf pan. Of course, it didn’t turn out but I learned a few things: there is too much salt in the recipe, and it really does need a 10” pan.The second time around, I made a 1.5×...
My substitutions: 19 ounces of bittersweet chocolate replacing 16 oz semi + 3 oz unsweetened; all pecans instead of half walnuts. The “dough” is indeed quite batter-like. I bought a cookie scoop (#24) to make these and it already feels like one of those indispensible gadgets. ...
I learned about two (2!) baking supply warehouses this week that were previously unknown to me:David Roberts Food Corporation has an outlet store in Mississauga (Google Map). They have a huge assortment of packaged nuts (375 g tub of macadamia nuts for $8!), dried fruit, snack...
It happens that the class for this week coincides with the theme for this month’s Sugar High Friday: chocolate truffles.My partner and I began by chopping and melting some dark chocolate which we combined with cream to make ganache. Often, a recipe says to boil the cream and t...
My approach to recreating a wonderful cake I had in Japan has been to look for recipes using chestnut paste and then substituting azuki bean paste. For this pound cake, I replaced the sweetened chestnut purée with koshian, and added two tablespoons of cocoa powder. While the c...
The crust (butter and shortening) is easy to work with, but the quantity is barely enough to line a 9” pie plate. I used a mix of Northern Spy and Fortune apples; the latter are called Longo’s apple at Longo’s (?). For the streusel topping, I replaced almost all of the sugars ...
I didn’t have any sour cream so I used buttermilk with additional butter and flour. This turned out to be a mistake as the muffins had a pronounced buttery flavour. I also used sea salt instead of table salt and they were too salty. Tsk tsk, I know better than to make substitu...
The recipe in the link says to use self-raising flour, but the book calls for plain (preferably Italian 00) flour. In fact, I think there’s too much leavener already. 1 ½ teaspoons of baking soda is very noticeable; I would reduce it to 1 tsp next time. I also forgot the cream...
The recipe in the link is terribly transcribed: it doesn’t provide a recipe for the pastry (a pâte sucrée flavoured with orange-blossom water and orange zest); it also omits 3 Bosc pears from the ingredient list. The dough is very soft and I made the mistake of letting it warm...
To start, Chef spent time explaining the ingredients we were going to use in tonight’s class for the cherries. He suggested we take store-bought maraschino cherries and let them soak in a flavoured syrup or alcohol for a few months to imbue them with even more flavour. Fresh, ...