Wouldn’t these be perfect for molded marzipan? They remind me of the shortbread molds my mother used when I was growing up, which featured elaborate engravings of old botanical drawings. They were beautiful.
I know my boyfriend reads this here blog, so I’m just gonna leave these images here and hope for the best. Not subtle, I know, but Valentine’s Day is only two weeks away, people!
[via House on the Hill]
Happy Independence Day to my American friends! There is perhaps no better wholesome, all-American holiday with which to share the news that you can now read my story about the wholesome, all-American baking and pastry community in Portland, Maine over at enRoute. We had the most tremendous time during our brief stay there earlier this year, and I’m already scheming ways to return. On Standard Baking Co:
Portland’s most renowned pastry shop, Standard Baking Co., is located under its sister restaurant, the James Beard-award-winner Fore Street, whose wood-fired kitchen can take much of the credit for Portland’s foodie reputation. Standard’s sweet wonders are inspired by old-world traditions: caramel-coloured pain au levain, impossibly tender croissants, spongy financiers and sumptuous morning buns swirled with caramel and nuts.
On Scratch Baking Co:
Some of Portland’s most heavenly baked offerings are found over the Casco Bay Bridge in South Portland. At Scratch Baking Co., unpretentious American desserts like graham crackers and shortbread studded with sea salt tumble forth from woven baskets. Scratch’s masterful blueberry scone is feather-light and tastes faintly of sweet cream. Its most popular item is an outrageously addictive, chewy-yet-crisp bagel, lovingly made with a nine-year-old sourdough named Lulu.
Click through the whole slideshow to read it all! I took so many more photos during our trip, and I’ll post more soon.
Posted in baking, travel, work, writers
Tagged baking, enroute, pastry, portland maine, scratch baking co, standard baking co
Consider this a recipe dump for all things regarding baked goods. At a recent St. Jean bbq at work, I may have gone slightly overboard, featuring:
This cardamom-scented upside-down strawberry cake from Joy the Baker…
This (quite lopsided) raspberry-rhubarb galette from Lottie + Doof…
This stupendously rich chocolate cake with raspberry compote from David Lebovitz, via Cucina Nicolina…
And this lemon cake from Vitae Curriculum, with my own lemon curd recipe (use lots of yolks, no sugar, and more zest than you think you need).
And with leftover lemon cake batter and leftover chocolate ganache, I made a pan of cupcakes, too. And finally, a bit of homemade whipped cream, made by whipping a cup of heavy cream with a few tablespoons of sugar.
Some photos from our recent workshop with Patisserie Rhubarbe’s Stephanie Labelle. I soaked up every second we had with this insanely talented pastry chef, and this workshop was probably the most advanced one we’ve done yet. Not a single person in the room had ever made a panna cotta or marshmallows by scratch, and the workshop was full of people madly scribbling notes as Stephanie explained the complex recipes. There was also an almond tart, tangy rhubarb compote, and rhubarb-spiked lemonade — I was buzzing on sugar until about 2am that night. More photos at Le Pick Up’s site.
Posted in baking, fruits, people, photography, work
Tagged baking, depanneur le pick up, rhubarb, rhubarb workshop, stephanie labelle
My intense strawberry cravings began last week, thanks to Luxirare, and continued unabated. Then I kept seeing this cake all over the internet — first at Saveur, then at Lottie + Doof, and finally Bon Appetempt — and no longer could I deny its garish, neon pink hue. I had to have it. So I made it for the Dep, added a box of fresh strawberries, and its happy rosy exterior did not disappoint.
[Clockwise from top left: Kouign-amann, car snack from Montreal; Scratch Baking Co. graham cracker; Standard Baking Co. blueberry-oat scone; Scratch sea salt shortbread; Rosemont Market raspberry Linzer square; Scratch almond scone; Scratch coconut macaroon; Standard croissant, stuffed with gruyere and ham.]
I’m currently trying to wrap up a project relating to my recent trip to Portland, Maine. I was combing through my photos, and eventually arrived at the last photo from the memorably gluttonous trip: an image of a plate barely containing all of the crumbled bits and pieces that I took away with me (not pictured: the baguette, five cupcakes, whoopie pie, and two croissants that we ate on the car ride to Vermont). As you can see, almost everything had a bite or two taken out of it. Can you believe that I actually tried to give these semi-stale leftovers to our lovely host friend? Man, I’m obnoxious.
This airy, sweet apple cake — adapted from the Smitten Kitchen recipe — has a nearly perfect, loose, buttery crumb. The cake is laced with ribbons of cinnamon sugar and dotted with chunks of diced apple, and topped with icing sugar + diced walnuts. It is perfect for breakfast or after dinner. It is great as a snack, eaten over the sink, hand cupping the falling crumbs. And, it is blissfully simple to assemble. This cake disappeared in two days. I made another version for the Depanneur Le Pick Up yesterday, this time soaking the apples in sticky, tart homemade raspberry jam before tossing into the batter.
Posted in baking, breakfast, food, home
Tagged apple cake, baking, cakes, smitten kitchen
Some views from my baking work station at Depanneur Le Pick Up. I’m going to try to better document what I do at work, but I’m often so busy churning out hundreds of cookies, cake after cake, pans of brownies, etc, that I don’t often have the luxury of admiring everything like I do at home. The vermilion intensity of these pumpkins was too good to pass up, though. They were great in spiced cakes + butterscotch cookies.
[That cake, by the way, is Smitten Kitchen's 'Mom's Apple Cake.' I adapted it for sheet form and it turned out great. A beautiful woman came by the cafe three days in a row to buy pieces of that cake. When she came on the third day, the cake was gone. She was devastated! And grudgingly bought a cookie instead.]
Earlier this fall, we bought a beautiful basket of tender, fragrant pears at the market and I needed to make something sweet for a dinner party. I loved the weird primordial vibe of this French Pear Tart at Tuesdays with Dorie, so weird primordial tart it was.
With the almond cream, pastry dough, poached pears, and jam glaze finish, it’s a bit labor intensive, but certainly worth it. Along the way I made one error — I used a tart pan about 40% bigger than what was recommended. But the error turned into a delicious surprise: the crumbly, sweet pastry dough and fluffy almond cream baked so thinly and for so long that the batter turned into a big slab of praline. Brittle. Or firm, chewy caramel. The result was not so much a tart, but a crunchy, sweet cookie topped with tender slices of pear.
But the greatest bonus of making this tart: we saved and bottled the poaching liquid from the pears — infused with citrus, cloves, cinnamon, and sugar — to make fizzy, aromatic bellinis for my guy’s birthday party.
Posted in baking, celebration, fall, food
Tagged baking, french pear tart, happy accidents, pear bellinis, tuesdays with dorie
As I had never eaten them before, an earlier trip to the PSU Farmer’s Market this summer inspired the purchase of a small bag of pie cherries. They are much more pert and tart than their juicy, plump Bing or Lambert counterparts, but I was reassured that pie cherries are the only acceptable way to go in a traditional French clafoutis.
A clafoutis is a mild, custardy sweet made with a thick, flan-like batter that bakes away leisurely in the oven. While it’s traditionally made with cherries — and their pits (be sure to remind your guests of their stoney presence) — I’ve seen lots of mouthwatering variations made with plums, blackberries, raspberries, and even chocolate. It is a light accompaniment for breakfast, but we enjoyed it as a snack with tea, or as a post-dinner dessert, too.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a recipe to share with you, because we didn’t use one! I was skeptical about making such a tender dessert without a recipe, but I was reassured by the most confident of cooks that no recipe was needed. We ate this warm, right out of the oven, and later, its cold leftovers, right out of the fridge, with our fingers digging into the cold aluminum packets… and it’s actually better cold. Our clafoutis was magical — the yellow, wet cake faintly sweet and eggy, the tart cherries so addictive when cooked until hot, and an extremely liberal powdering of icing sugar, as they call it in Canada.