Daring to do it: Croissants

This was an awesome challenge that deserves a wonderful, glowing write up. But things are busy right now... So unfortunately this post will be fairly basic. But this is something I want to make again. And again...!


The Daring Bakers go retro this month! Thanks to one of our very talented non-blogging members, Sarah, the Daring Bakers were challenged to make Croissants using a recipe from the Queen of French Cooking, none other than Julia Child!

I love croissants. But I don't eat them too often because of that whole butter thing... Lactose intolerant me doesn't like to overdo the dairy... So I made my croissants with soy milk and margarine. They worked really well. I made the recipe twice. First time I followed the recipe (well, except for those two dairy changes/substitutions).
Some process pics:

Out of the oven - half plain, half with cinnamon sugar on top.The inside. Not as fluffy as "professional" ones, but darn tasty!!I was impressed with the flavor, the texture, and the butteriness, despite not using butter! So I made them a second time. This time I made half cinnamon sugar:

Look at those layers!!
Then the other half I made into pain au chocolate. Yup. Chocolate.

Thank you, Sarah! I love this recipe, and I think this is something I am going to do a lot! They were not nearly as difficult or time consuming as I had feared, and they worked SO well! If you can control your urge to lick the screen, take a look here at what my fellow Daring Bakers made!

Daring to do it: Stock and Soup

Peta, of the blog Peta Eats, was our lovely hostess for the Daring Cook’s September 2011 challenge, “Stock to Soup to Consommé”. We were taught the meaning between the three dishes, how to make a crystal clear Consommé if we so chose to do so, and encouraged to share our own delicious soup recipes!


I have long wondered about the difference between "stock," "broth," "consomme" and "soup." Thanks to Peta, I have a little bit more of an understanding!! For this challenge we were asked to make stock, then take it to another level. I was not brave enough (read: didn't think I could) to attempt a vegetarian consomme, but I did make one of my favorite soups, which, oddly enough, I had never made myself before! And I made a yummy side for the soup, which really made this challenge super yummy, even if I didn't stretch myself as much as maybe I could have...
My first Daring Cooks' challenge taught me to make stock. In the year and a half since, I have made stock quite a few times, and I tend to keep vegetable ends and cuttings in my freezer for that purpose. For this stock I used the ends of some leeks, onion skins, broccoli stems and asparagus stems, as well as some fresh carrots and celery and seasonings. It all went into the slow cooker overnight, and when I woke up what had started like this:
had turned into this:
Off to a good start! When we woke up, Hubby commented on how good the soup smelled... With a stock that smelled that good, I knew the soup would have a great flavor.

One of my favorite soups is one my mother makes. It is a quinoa vegetable soup, and it is really quite good. Hearty but not too thick, warming and a complete meal, thanks to the wonderful food that is quinoa. Somehow, though, I never get around to making it myself. Thanks to Peta, I finally did! I had to make a few changes to the recipe, based on what I had in the house, but it seemed to work out well.
The veggies:
There were also split peas and (of course) quinoa, Add it all into the pot, let it do its thing, and then you have this:

Yum.

Peta asked us to make some sort of accompaniment to go with our soups. I really wasn't sure what to make, though, since this soup really can stand alone. I could make bread of some sort, or try again to make bread bowls... Nothing called to me. So I turned to Mark. No, not my husband Mark! Mark Bittman, of course. MY favorite cookbook is his How to Cook Everything
Vegetarian. In there I found his recipe for cheese shortbread. Kind of like Cheez-Its for grown ups. Perfect!

These were so good. Better warm, but perfect with the soup. We wound up breaking them into pieces and stirring them right in...

Thank you, Peta, for giving me the kick I needed to make this soup! You were a supportive host, and it has been so much fun to see how everyone has taken something seemingly simple and made it so creative!! If you want to see what my fellow Daring Cooks came up with, then take a look here!

Daring to do it: Candy

The August 2011 Daring Bakers’ Challenge was hosted by Lisa of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drive and Mandy of What the Fruitcake?!. These two sugar mavens challenged us to make sinfully delicious candies! This was a special challenge for the Daring Bakers because the good folks at http://www.chocoley.com/ offered an amazing prize for the winner of the most creative and delicious candy!

Yes, another challenge, and with it another contest. The contest part is kind of... well, a non-issue for me, I guess. But the challenge? Way cool! Candy making is something that has always seemed beyond me. Sure I have tried in the past, but not with the expectation of it being "real" candy, just a treat for me. But with the recipes provided by our fabulous hosts, I knew I would at least have fun trying! While the challenge was hosted by a chocolate company, there were plenty of non-chocolate options to choose from, also. Here at the four candies I completed this month.


Peanut butter fudge:

I followed the recipe as written, except I halved it (which I shouldn't have done!!) and I used soy milk. It turned out AMAZINGLY - Hubby is the peanut butter addict in the family, but I think I ate most of the pan!

Sponge candy (aka Honeycomb):

From a scientific perspective, this was awesome! Unfortunately I wasn't as thrilled with the taste as I wanted to be. There was too much of a baking soda taste, which interfered with my enjoyment. Strangely, though, I kept coming back for more nibbles... (There was some discussion in the forum about this candy, with other alternative recipes with differing amounts of baking soda... So I think I will have to try this one again.

Pate de fruits:

I used watermelon, strawberries and blueberries for my pate de fruit. I knew it would be a bit more complicated because of the high water content of the watermelon, but, having never made this before, I figured I wouldn't really know any better anyway! I used powdered pectin instead of liquid, as that was what I had. This was good. I would like to try a peach pate de fruit, as there is a peach tree growing in my backyard giving such yummy, juicy fruits!

Chocolates:

Ganache:

Tempering:

Molding:

These were good. I made my ganache with dark chocolate and soy milk. The ganache never set as firmly as I would have liked, but I think that is because of the milk - using cream, as is usually done, would have added more fat and depth. I then added pretzels to it, for crunch and yumminess. As for tempering chocolate... I will call what I did "pseudo-tempering." I don't have a chocolate thermometer, and the candy thermometer simply does not go low enough to be accurate. My chocolate shells had the right snap to them, but not the shine of a proper temper. I definitely want to do this again, with peanuts... And probably with candy molds so they will be a bit of a more manageable size!

I did attempt one more candy - rock candy. But that is one that requires days to grow. And it hasn't been enough days, so I don't think it has finished growing... Hopefully you'll see that one some other time...

Lisa and Mandy, thank you so much for this fun challenge. It was great to learn along with my fellow Daring Bakers, and to see the amazing and creative candies everyone made! Take a look for yourself, but try not to drool on your keyboard!

Daring to do it: Appam and Curry

One of the reasons I joined the Daring Kitchen was to broaden my horizons. I like to think that I am open minded when it comes to food, and this is a great way to really get my hands into foods which I otherwise might never try, or even hear about!! This month was a great example of just that...

Mary, who writes the delicious blog, Mary Mary Culinary was our August Daring Cooks’ host. Mary chose to show us how delicious South Indian cuisine is! She challenged us to make Appam and another South Indian/Sri Lankan dish to go with the warm flat bread.

Mary is wonderful. I love looking at her blog, both for the challenges and otherwise, since her dishes are always so beautiful, both to look at and from a flavor perspective! I knew she wouldn't lead us astray, even if she was having us make something I had never heard of!!

Appam are sort of like crepes, but yeasted and made with rice. (I know, yeast in a flat bread? Sounds like an oxymoron!) I generally only have brown rice in the house, just as a personal preference. While appam are usually made with white rice, I decided to go ahead and try brown, just to see if I could...

Start by soaking the rice for several hours. Because I was using brown rice, I soaked mine overnight.

Once thoroughly soaked, the rice is blended with proofed yeast. Blend and blend and blend... You want your batter as smooth as you can get it.The blended batter then gets set aside to rise. Actually, you want it to go beyond rising to fermenting. Did I mention that this is not a dish you can decide to make spur-of-the-moment? Yeah... lots of time needed, but most of it is unattended, so not too bad. I let me appam batter rise all afternoon, then I put the bowl into the fridge overnight. I took it out and let it come to room temperature before moving on to the next step.

Coconut milk and salt are added to the fermented rice, and the appam are finally ready to be cooked. A few tablespoons of batter are put into a lightly greased frying pan, the pan is covered and the appam cook for about two minutes. After all of the time that goes into preparing the batter, the cooking is really quick and easy!
I was actually a bit more worried about the curry than the appam in this challenge. I have never really tried curry, and was nervous that it would be way to strong for my taste... Also, despite the variety of great looking recipes Mary had provided for us, I couldn't find one that spoke to me... or that didn't have so many spices I had never even heard of! After looking at a lot of recipes on-line, I decided to fake it... I made a list of the spices I saw popping up in many of the recipes and headed to one of my favorite local stores which I knew would carry at least some of them. I bought fenugreek seed, cumin seed, green cardamom pods and curry powder.
(They didn't have curry leaves, so I had to go for the next best thing...) I toasted the seeds and pods in a pan before crushing them. This, along with the curry powder, was my Indian spice blend. For the actual food part of the curry dish, I chose to go simple. I sauteed onion, carrots and lentils in coconut oil until the carrots were a bit softened and the onions were translucent. I added halved grape tomatoes and some vegetable stock, as well as the rest of the can of coconut milk left from the appam batter. (Oh yeah, and the spice mix, too!) The resulting curry dish was really good! The coconut milk added just a touch of sweetness which was really nice. And the appam were a great accompaniment, both for taste and texture. I wound up snacking on them by dipping them into the curry sauce as I was cleaning up! The curry was also great the next day over rice... I am really glad that I have more spices so I can do this again! (And so is Hubby!!) Thank you so much, Mary, for this amazing challenge! You were a wonderful and supportive host, and I loved working with you! To see what my fellow Daring Cooks created, take a look here.

S'mores going on than you know!

Amidst the craziness that is having a two year old and a two month old, I really am keeping up with crafting and cooking. And not just for the Daring Kitchen!! It is just the blogging part that seems to fall by the wayside. Hopefully one of these days I will catch up on some of the more interesting and amusing projects we have undertaken... But today's, for a couple of reasons, had to get posted. (This was not something I had planned, ergo the lack of pictures from the process...)

A good friend came over for dinner tonight. Someone we had not seen in a while, and we had missed, so I wanted to make something special. Well, when you ask Little Girl what she would like to bake, her usual answer is cupcakes. Which she said today. So I searched for cupcake recipes. I kept seeing s'mores cupcakes, and I thought that sounded both yummy and fun. I found this recipe for cupcakes that I liked. It looked easy enough and also didn't call for any ingredients I didn't already have in the house. Instead of using Nutella like the original poster used, I made my favorite quick fudge icing for the chocolate layer, and for the marshmallow frosting I used my fluffy white frosting recipe. While the finished cakes looked nothing like s'mores (not that there was any thought they might!), they were really quite cute, and I was excited to try them. In Hubby's words, they are a little more understated that expected - they are not overwhelmingly sweet, and the marshmallow frosting really brings out the "s'mores-ness" of them.

Now the reasons why I had to post these... It turns out that yesterday was National S'mores Day. Why there is a National S'more Day is beyond me, but who am I to question a day celebrating gooey, chocolaty goodness? And how did I find out that it was National S'mores Day? My sister, Auntie Twin posted about it on her blog this evening - having made s'mores cupcakes of her own!! Apparently this twin thing had its mojo working today! It was just too much fun to pass on the post, so here it is, in all of its s'mores-y goodness!

Daring to do it: Fraisier

Jana of Cherry Tea Cakes was our July Daring Bakers’ host and she challenges us to make Fresh Frasiers inspired by recipes written by Elisabeth M. Prueitt and Chad Robertson in the beautiful cookbook Tartine.

This month's challenge looked amazing. Ihad seen cakes like this before in bakeries, but never thought how they were accomplished. Thanks to Jana, now I know!

Start with a chiffon cake, which will be split in half. Yum... Light, airy, and not too sweet.

Then make pastry cream. This is actually a whipped cream substitute made with tofu which was blended with the soy pastry cream I made...Get together the cake, cream and the other components you will need: simple syrup and fruit. Traditionally, fraisier is made with strawberries. (Fraise...) I added blueberries to the mix, too. And don't forget your springform pan lined with plastic wrap.

Assembly was so easy, my two year old did it!! (Ok, she just helped... best sous chef ever!)

First wet the bottom layer of chiffon cake with the simple syrup.

Then arrange halved strawberries around the edge of the pan, cut sides facing out. Add blueberries if you want...

Pipe (or in my case, squeeze!) cream around the berries, essentially holding them in place. Then add a layer of cream on top of the cake.

Put more fruit on top of the pastry cream, This will then be covered with the second layer of chiffon cake.

Soak the top layer of cake with more simple syrup.

Wrap the whole cake in the plastic wrap, let it set in the fridge for at least four hours.
I topped the cake with more berries and some colored sugar sprinkles. The pastry cream didn't set up as firmly as I had hoped, but I was still very pleased with the way the cake looked!

And, more importantly than the look, the taste of the cake was amazing! I could eat this cake every day! All of us, including my parents, loved the way it turned out. As long as my dad doesn't know that the filling was made with tofu, I think he will go on loving it! (He knows it was non-dairy. We just didn't point out the whole tofu thing. Safer that way.)

Thank you, Jana, for this fun, beautiful and delicious challenge! I can't wait to make this one again! If you want to give it a try, here is the recipe.

If you want to see what fabulous creations the other Daring Bakers came up with, look here.

Daring to do it: Handmade Noodles

Steph from Stephfood was our Daring Cooks' July hostess. Steph challenged us to make homemade noodles without the help of a motorized pasta machine. She provided us with recipes for Spätzle and Fresh Egg Pasta as well as a few delicious sauces to pair our noodles with!

I live in the best neighborhood ever. When Baby Girl was born the neighbors got together and made a schedule to provide dinners for us. As much as I love to cook, it was SO appreciated to have the chance to not worry about timing and being in the kitchen. I felt badly, though, since we have dietary restrictions in our family. Because of the vegetarian and Kosher limits, many of the meals we were gifted with were pasta based. Which is fabulous, as we all like pasta, especially Little Girl! But then this challenge was posted... More pasta... Yummy, but possibly a bit of overkill! What was I to do? It was time to be a little creative...

The first dish I made was gnocchi. I love gnocchi. I love potatoes, so what could be bad about potato pasta dumplings? I have actually made gnocchi before, so I didn't really rely on a recipe. Mashed potatoes, seasonings and whole wheat flour, mixed together until it "felt right." (Proportions? Measurements? Who knows!) Little Girl helped me roll the dough into snakes, and then we cut them into pillows and used a fork to give them the traditional gnocchi look. The cooked gnocchi made a great lunch dressed with garlic butter and shredded cheese.Even with the vast amount of pasta we had been eating, I was really intrigued by one of the recipes Staph provided - spatzle (spaetzle?). I had heard of spatzle before, but hadn't known what it really was. It looked like a good, quick and yummy version of pasta. But more pasta? Well, me being me, I decided that I was going to make it, but not quite as given. Introducing chocolate spaetzle! I replace part of the flour with cocoa powder, and used cinnamon and sugar as the seasoning, but otherwise left the recipe alone. And instead of the breadcrumb "dressing," I used graham crackers (and topped it with chocolate sauce...!). Yes, it was still pasta, but it was dessert! I was excited about it, and the leftovers didn't last long!

I thought that would be it for me for this month. Two recipes for the month more than covered the "requirement" for my participation. But the egg pasta looked too good to pass up. So dinner for the last night before posting was handmade egg pasta with roasted veggies. The dough came together very well and very easily - it was done with my right hand while I held a fussy five week old Baby Girl in my left hand. (Oh, yeah, I am left handed...) Then Little Girl helped me roll the dough out. So it was a family affair! The noodles were so good! I commented to Hubby as we sat down to eat that the house smelled like fresh pasta... And Little Girl came back for seconds. And thirds. And fourths, I think!

Steph, this was a really exciting challenge! I love the freedom we had to explore the world of handmade noodles, and it was a lot of fun to see what our fellow Daring Cooks came up with. If you want to see for yourself, take a look here.