TWD: Chocolate-Crunched Caramel Tart

There was a tart that kept popping up on blogs this summer. A chocolate short crust topped with a layer of caramel, finished off with a rich ganache, that had been published in Saveur. I was dying to make this tart. It looked heavenly and downright decadent. Alas, the occasion never arose for me to make the tart. Then, I looked at the September choices for Tuesdays with Dorie, and lo and behold there was a little number called a Chocolate-Crunched Caramel Tart. Curious, I looked it up in The Book, and there was a tart remarkably like the one I had been wanting to make, and I had an excuse to bake it! My excitement could not be contained.

I had very high hopes for this one, and oh it did not disappoint.

There is nothing terribly complicated about this tart, though it does take some time to make, as there are 3 separate elements and each must cool before the next may be added.

The caramel layer is supposed to contain honey-roasted peanuts, but I just don't like peanuts. So, I sauteed some chopped pecans in a little butter, maple syrup and salt and added those to the caramel instead. They worked like a charm. They added a wonderful element to the tart, so I am really glad I didn't skip the nuts entirely. The slightly salty crunch was such a nice juxtaposition to the ganache and buttery short crust, both of which were rather soft. The only other change I made was to replace the corn syrup in the caramel with agave.

This is definitely in my TWD top 5, and it is a danger to have around! All day, every time I walked past it I snuck a bite. Before I knew it, I had eaten almost 2 pieces. Yikes! Thankfully, I gave most of it away... I can't wait until I have occasion to make it again.

Carla of Chocolate Moosey chose this divine tart, be sure to visit her blog for the recipe. And then go make it.

The Daring Bakers: Roasted Root Vegetable Vols-au-Vent

I was so excited for this month's Daring Bakers challenge, because I have been wanting to make puff pastry for a long time. Also, the recipe for puff pastry that was chosen was from Baking with Julia - a cookbook I bought several months ago, but had yet to bake anything from. My mind was racing with all of the possible filling options, and I actually made the puff pastry a week before the reveal date, but things just kept coming up and keeping me from actually baking and filling it. Today was finally the day (even though the reveal date was actually yesterday...).

I decided to go with a filling of root vegetables - red and chiogga beets, sweet potatoes and fingerling potatoes - roasted with whole garlic cloves, fresh rosemary olive oil and sea salt. It was beautiful and delicious.

The puff pastry was surprisingly easy to make, and not nearly as time consuming as I thought it would be. I was pleased with how my pastry puffed, though it leaked a lot of butter in the process. Perhaps I wasn't as careful as I should have been while I was making it... Nonetheless, it was so scrumptious. It had a rich buttery flavor - as anything containing a full pound of butter should have - and was quite flaky despite all of the leakage. I'll be making this again for sure, the possibilities are endless!

Michel Richard’s Puff Pastry Dough

From: Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan
Yield: 2-1/2 pounds dough

Ingredients:

2-1/2 cups (12.2 oz/ 354 g) unbleached all-purpose flour
1-1/4 cups (5.0 oz/ 142 g) cake flour
1 tbsp. salt (you can cut this by half for a less salty dough or for sweet preparations)
1-1/4 cups (10 fl oz/ 300 ml) ice water
1 pound (16 oz/ 454 g) very cold unsalted butter

plus extra flour for dusting work surface

Mixing the Dough:

Check the capacity of your food processor before you start. If it cannot hold the full quantity of ingredients, make the dough into two batches and combine them.

Put the all-purpose flour, cake flour, and salt in the work bowl of a food processor fitted with a metal blade and pulse a couple of times just to mix. Add the water all at once, pulsing until the dough forms a ball on the blade. The dough will be very moist and pliable and will hold together when squeezed between your fingers. (Actually, it will feel like Play-Doh.)

Remove the dough from the machine, form it into a ball, with a small sharp knife, slash the top in a tic-tac-toe pattern. Wrap the dough in a damp towel and refrigerate for about 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, place the butter between 2 sheets of plastic wrap and beat it with a rolling pin until it flattens into a square that's about 1" thick. Take care that the butter remains cool and firm: if it has softened or become oily, chill it before continuing.

Incorporating the Butter:

Unwrap the dough and place it on a work surface dusted with all-purpose flour (A cool piece of marble is the ideal surface for puff pastry) with your rolling pin (preferably a French rolling pin without handles), press on the dough to flatten it and then roll it into a 10" square. Keep the top and bottom of the dough well floured to prevent sticking and lift the dough and move it around frequently. Starting from the center of the square, roll out over each corner to create a thick center pad with "ears," or flaps.

Place the cold butter in the middle of the dough and fold the ears over the butter, stretching them as needed so that they overlap slightly and encase the butter completely. (If you have to stretch the dough, stretch it from all over; don't just pull the ends) you should now have a package that is 8" square.

To make great puff pastry, it is important to keep the dough cold at all times. There are specified times for chilling the dough, but if your room is warm, or you work slowly, or you find that for no particular reason the butter starts to ooze out of the pastry, cover the dough with plastic wrap and refrigerate it . You can stop at any point in the process and continue at your convenience or when the dough is properly chilled.

Making the Turns:

Gently but firmly press the rolling pin against the top and bottom edges of the square (this will help keep it square). Then, keeping the work surface and the top of the dough well floured to prevent sticking, roll the dough into a rectangle that is three times as long as the square you started with, about 24" (don't worry about the width of the rectangle: if you get the 24", everything else will work itself out.) With this first roll, it is particularly important that the butter be rolled evenly along the length and width of the rectangle; check when you start rolling that the butter is moving along well, and roll a bit harder or more evenly, if necessary, to get a smooth, even dough-butter sandwich (use your arm-strength!).

With a pastry brush, brush off the excess flour from the top of the dough, and fold the rectangle up from the bottom and down from the top in thirds, like a business letter, brushing off the excess flour. You have completed one turn.

Rotate the dough so that the closed fold is to your left, like the spine of a book. Repeat the rolling and folding process, rolling the dough to a length of 24" and then folding it in thirds. This is the second turn.

Chilling the Dough:

If the dough is still cool and no butter is oozing out, you can give the dough another two turns now. If the condition of the dough is iffy, wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate it for at least 30 minutes. Each time you refrigerate the dough, mark the number of turns you've completed by indenting the dough with your fingertips. It is best to refrigerate the dough for 30 to 60 minutes between each set of two turns.

The total number of turns needed is six. If you prefer, you can give the dough just four turns now, chill it overnight, and do the last two turns the next day. Puff pastry is extremely flexible in this regard. However, no matter how you arrange your schedule, you should plan to chill the dough for at least an hour before cutting or shaping it.

The September 2009 Daring Bakers' Challenge has been chosen by Steph of a whisk and a spoon. Steph chose Vols-au-Vent, which we are pretty sure in French means, “After one bite we could die and go to heaven!”

SMS: Caramelized Onion, Sage and Cheese Muffins

I will admit, I wasn't terribly excited about these muffins. Especially after reading about others slightly blah results. After making a few changes, though, these are the best savory muffins I have ever eaten. They were unbelievable!

I made a 1/2 recipe because my sage plant has been so picked over, all I could get off of it was 1 tablespoon and I didn't want them to be sage-poor like these cornbread muffins were. Tracey told me not to skimp on the spices, but the spices were cayenne and black pepper - too spicy for my little one. I knew I had to compensate somehow to add some flavor to these muffins. The first thing I did was to brown the butter. I know, I know, do I ever make anything without brown butter? I'm obsessed with it, and it really adds another dimension to baked goods, so I just couldn't help myself. I also added 1/2 teaspoon ground coriander (remember, this was for 1/2 recipe), and took the sugar out entirely. The recipe calls for sharp cheddar, which we usually keep around, but we were out so I used what we did have: jack and parmesan.

I absolutely loved these muffins. They smelled divine while baking, and tasted divine once they were out. The coriander was a perfect complement to the caramelized onions, sage and cheese. These are a wonderful beginning-of-fall treat, and I'm sure they'll be making several appearances throughout the chilly seasons to come.

Thanks to Hanaa of Hanaa's Kitchen for choosing these muffins for all of us to bake. They were a wonderfully delicious surprise! Visit Hanaa's blog for the original recipe, and take a look here to see what the other SMS ladies came up with this week.

And the Winner is...

Tracey of Tracey's Culinary Adventures! Just email your shipping address to blueridgebaker@gmail.com and I'll send your square baking dish out ASAP!

Thanks to everyone who entered! It has been a really fun 6 months, and I'm looking forward to many more!

Kamut Pound Cake

Ever since I got Alice Medrich's Pure Dessert a few months ago, I have been wanting to try out this pound cake. I finally had the opportunity when a few of us decided to bake it together via Twitter.

The thing that stopped me from making this pound cake earlier was the kamut. The health food store that I shop at regularly doesn't carry kamut flour or whole kamut. Thankfully I did find whole kamut at a different store, and even more thankfully, I own a (previously unused) grain mill. Problem solved. Freshly ground kamut flour in hand, I met up with Nancy, Di and Amy Ruth online to make our cakes.

Kamut is an ancient variety of wheat, that has only in recent years made it into the mainstream. It has a sweeter, more buttery flavor than the wheat we're used to eating, and is higher in minerals, amino acids and protein than its more common relative.

I was really excited to bake with a new ingredient, and I was not disappointed. The end result was an unbelievably moist pound cake, with a wonderfully dense yet separate crumb. The kamut added a cornmeal-like crunch to the cake, that gave it a rustic feel. It wasn't too sweet, which I loved, and I think it would be delicious served with fresh fruit and perhaps a dollop of freshly whipped cream. The only think I didn't like about it was that the crust was greasy. I don't know if my fellow bakers had the same experience or if it had to do with my alterations.

Kamut Pound Cake

adapted from Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich

3 tablespoons whole milk at room temperature

3 large eggs at room temperature

1/3 cup agave nectar

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1 cup + 2 tablespoons unbleached flour

1/2 cup kamut flour

3/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

13 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened and cut into small chunks

Preheat oven to 350. Line 8x4 loaf pan with parchment. Whisk together milk, eggs, agave and vanilla. Set aside. Over the bowl of a stand mixer, sift together flours, baking powder and salt. If there is any bran left in the sifter, tip it into the bowl. Stir the dry ingredients together. Add butter and half of egg mixture. With the paddle attachment, beat on low speed until dry ingredients are moistened, then increase speed to medium and beat for 1 minute. Scrape bowl. Add 1/2 of remaining egg mixture and beat for 20 seconds. Add the rest of the egg mixture and beat for another 20 seconds. Pour batter into prepared loaf pan, smoothing the top with a spatula. Bake until tester comes out clean 55-60 minutes. If cake looks like it's browning too quickly, place a foil tent over it at 30 minutes. Cool cake in pan for 10 minutes, then remove and cool completely on rack. Serve it plain or toast thick slices and serve with fresh peaches and cream. Alternately, toast slices and top with coarse salt and fresh ground pepper, and serve with a cup of black tea.

Alice Medrich also gives a few variations on this pound cake such as bourbon & nutmeg and whole wheat & chocolate which I'm anxious to try out. If the simple kamut is any indication, I know they will be delicious.

TWD: Cottage Cheese Pufflets + a Giveaway!

When I read the name for these little treats, I pictured a savory, rustic looking ball containing whole cottage cheese. The recipe had caught my eye several times while perusing The Book, and every time, I read Dorie's words with surprise. She says that she had the recipe for these in one of her first kitchen notebooks, and that the only note next to them was "delicious". Honestly, even that endorsement by Dorie wasn't enough to make me read through the recipe - if I had I would have found out that they are actually refined little jam-filled triangles. I don't love cottage cheese, and couldn't imagine it in a baked good. It was not with a lot of excitement, then, that I set out to make them. I should have had more faith in Dorie...

I read on the TWD P&Q that people were having a lot of trouble with their dough. It was sticky, soft and finicky, it needed multiple refrigerations, etc... I decided to drain most of the liquid out of my cottage cheese in order to hopefully combat these problems. Well, it must have worked, because I found the dough really easy to work with, and not unusually sticky at all.

I replaced the sugar in the dough with agave, and filled my pufflets with sugar-free sour cherry jam. If you don't know this already, I have never given my almost 3 year old son refined sugar, so whenever I am making something that I would give him were it sugar-free - basically anything that isn't chocolate - I make it that way.

They pufflets came out of the oven golden, puffed and looking quite yummy!

These were not my favorite jam-filled treats - I would rather have a rugelach any day - but they were pretty tasty, and my son loved them. What more can I ask?

The pufflets were chosen by Jacque of Daisy Lane Cakes, where you can find the recipe for them. To see how everyone else's pufflets turned out, look here.

Also, I'm having a giveaway to celebrate my 100th post. Details are here.

BBA Challenge: Cornbread

Being from the south, I have eaten my fair share of cornbread. I can say without a doubt that I do not like it sweet. Now don't get me wrong, I'll certainly slather a warm piece with butter and honey, but it just isn't right to put sugar in the batter. So when I saw that there was not one, not two, but three different sweeteners in this recipe, I knew changes would have to be made.

I eliminated the brown sugar, granulated sugar and honey - yeesh! - and upped the salt a bit. The recipe also calls for bacon. I'm a lifelong vegetarian, so needless to say I didn't use that either. I wanted a little punch to the cornbread, so I added sage, and browned my butter. The recipe calls for buttermilk, but I didn't have any so I substituted yogurt as I often do.

When I got a bite with sage, it was delicious, though I should have added more. The flavor of the brown butter didn't come through, though there is only 2 tablespoons of butter in the recipe so i didn't have terribly high hopes for it.

Two unusual elements of this recipe are that it starts with an overnight soaker of cornmeal and buttermilk, and it contains fresh corn kernels. These were two of my favorite aspects of the bread. The soak made the bread incredibly moist and creamy, and I loved the flavor and crunch of biting into a sweet juicy kernel of corn.

When it comes down to it, though, I probably won't be repeating this one. The extra work that goes into this cornbread just isn't justified by the final product. It isn't bad, it's actually quite tasty. Just not any tastier than my usual recipe. In addition, it takes a long time to make - not necessarily active time, but due to the soaker it has to be planned for in advance - and it uses an inordinate number of bowls. My go-to recipe can be whipped up in about 5 minutes in one bowl.

The recipe for this bread can be found in the wonderful book The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart.

Be sure to enter my GIVEAWAY for a wonderful 8x8 square baking dish. Here's how.