Blueberry Galette

I've never made a galette before. I've tried -- using store bought puff pastry -- and the results were ..."eh." But I never closed the door on the galette and its unassuming simplicity.

So when we got 2 pints of blueberries from our CSA's fruit share, I knew they were destined to be encased in dough and baked to perfection (with butter & sugar of course, the way Mother Nature intended).

My new love interest, Pinterest, hooked me up with a recipe from Baking with Julia -- a book I own and deem too difficult to make anything from it turning my kitchen into a powder puff of flour, but nevertheless written by Dorie Greenspan so this counts as part of my Dorie baking marathon even though it didn't come out of the cookbook Baking ... Whew. That was a mouthful.

Deciding against puff pastry, the recipe for the galette dough was simple, combining ingredients in a food processor and chilling the dough. The dough rolled out easy, folded over easy, and took little precious counter space other than the cutting board.

Now I have 2 perfect little blueberry galettes to bring to my moms group family picnic today.

Recipe here.  (A lot of blogs participate in Tuesday with Dorie ... a group I'd love to be part of but can't be so disciplined at the moment).

Memorial Day Quick Classic Berry Tart

Dorie Greenspan mentions in her book Baking that this tart is found in every patisserie in France. She's probably right although I wouldn't know because I gravitated to anything chocolate or mousse-like when I drooled over a patisserie window.

I say window because I couldn't afford patisserie as a college student. I lived at the boulangerie instead and gorged on chocolate and almond croissants. 

My favorite boulangerie moment is when we left a boîte late one night -- or so early in the morning -- that a boulanger had already arrived at his shop and was busy baking for the day. We knocked on his back window and bought freshly baked croissants and ate them walking through the empty streets back to our apartments. Sweet moment indeed.

Recipe Here.

Birthday pound cake

Today is my grandma's 83rd birthday and to continue my 2013 tradition of baking for everyone's special day (and baking my way through Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours cookbook) I have baked a luscious to-die-for pound cake.

Oh pound cake ... Sara Lee makes them, right? Who needs to actually bake one? Well, considering that the ingredients are flour, sugar, and a whole lot of butter it's important that the ingredients be the best quality. No offense to Ms Lee, but homemade is always better - taste and health.

Well here's to the health of "Nani" on her 83rd! Happy Birthday!

Recipe here.

Chocolate chocolate muffins: aka hostess cupcakes

My cousins birthday party was the past weekend and for their party I wanted to bake something of course. Chocolate was mentioned often in their requests and so I turned to Dorie's chocolate chocolate cupcakes.

In her side note she says you can play with them and stuff them with jam or marshmallow fluff ... That gave me an idea to turn these into nostalgic hostess cupcakes with the iconic white swirls on top.

The frosting is a chocolate ganache and the filling is marshmallow fluff - as is the white swirls on top. Pretty delicious!

Coffee break muffins

I'm at it again!

Matt ran to pick up our coffee -- we order it from a local shop that roasts it in the city and ships it out to us in the burbs -- while I made coffee break muffins from Dorie's Baking cookbook.

The whole kitchen smelled like a donut factory (very good thing) as these muffins baked. They used 1tablespoon of espresso powder and 1 cup of freshly brewed coffee (and I made it STRONG) and some cinnamon too.

They were good but eating them with a foamed cappuccino was a little too intense even for me.

Excellent with some of my aunts strawberry jam!

Recipe Here.

Lemon non-poppyseed muffins

I had been hankering to make something else out of my Dorie baking cookbook this weekend but didn't want to leave the house. The only thing I had (almost) all the ingredients for, and that I could bake with two kids playing on the kitchen floor, were Dorie's Lemon PoppySeed muffins.

I had no poppy seeds and I didn't have enough fresh lemon juice for the icing... So I used orange extract & water instead and created the kind of icing that you find yourself using your fingers to scrape up all the bits that had dropped below the cooling rack.

This recipe is the absolute most simple and yet most delicious of muffins I have made so far in her book. It's a sour cream recipe and mixes up only using 1 bowl and a measuring cup - so no real mess either. This is what you'll want to make when you have guests for breakfast.

Recipe Here.

Madeleines

I almost named our baby girl Madeleine, and as I failed yet again to make perfect looking madeleines, I am glad I chose the name Claire.

Dorie's recipe for traditional madeleines is on the menu tonight for dessert. The recipe is fairly easy - a few ingredients, not a lot of fuss, and the biggest deal about them is to keep the batter in the fridge for 3 hours before baking. Okay. Commence baking.

I did everything per the book - my own foible is that I only have whole wheat flour in the house. No biggie.

When I checked the batter after the 3-hour chill, it was thick and foamy - the baking powder evidently. Is it supposed to be like that?? The recipe says to fill the madeleine tins to the top, but its hard to do with a foamy batter. The result is over-filled tins and huge madeleines that don't have either the small hump on the backside (the hallmark of a true Madeleine) nor crispy edges like Dorie's picture.

They taste good though, a little too cake-y. This will have to be a re-do at some point.

Recipe Here.

Corn muffins

Snow everywhere and W is getting sick again. This may be the 3rd cold this winter that he has come down with - coughing, runny nose. So what better thing is there to do when sick kids keep you home bound but make muffins.

Luckily, I had all the ingredients for corn muffins (another recipe from Dorie's Baking -- can you see I'm serious about making everything in this book?).

These were almost too easy -- mix dry, mix wet, mix them together and voila. What I did love was the addition of real corn kernels (I used frozen) and it had a nice balance of sugar and salt. Pair with some salted butter and dig in.

Corny goodness.

Recipe Here.

Orange Berry muffins

My next true baking endeavor isn't until the end of march for my cousins birthdays. In the meanwhile, I have to occupy myself with getting through some other parts of Baking: From my House to Yours -- namely breakfast items.

This morning we were supposed to have some friends over for breakfast (but we had to reschedule ) so I made Dorie's orange berry muffins.

The batter was not lumpy and bubbly as described, but thick. Other than that, they baked fine, not sweet and with just a subtle orange flavor. They were a good accompaniment to our daily cappuccino.

Recipe here.

Amaretti torte

My grandfather turned 79 today and in his honor I made him an Amaretti torte using small amarettini cookies imported from Italy. My grandfather immigrated to the US from Italy in 1954; his mother was born in Chicago at the turn of the century and thus, she was able to bring her entire family to the states even though she had moved back to Italy as a young girl where she married and had 8 children.

My grandfather came to accompany his younger siblings and only intended to stay in Chicago long enough to make money to take the boat right back. But ... Well, he met a cute italian-american-chicagoan and here we all are 59 years later celebrating his 79th birthday -- children, grandchildren, and now his 2 great grandchildren.

Happy Birthday grandpa!

Cake is the 15 minute Amaretti torte from Dorie Greenspan's "Baking: From my house to yours."

Recipe here

Birthday cheesecake

My mom loves cheesecake; at least I think she does. I do know for a fact that she loves to make cheesecake. So for her birthday, I decided to make her one as her birthday cake (even though she went and bought 2 more cakes -- my family is nothing if not over prepared when it comes to dessert.)

I've never made a cheesecake before and I wanted to make the best one in the world. So of course I turn to my Dorie Greenspan cook books -- specifically Baking: From My House to Yours. This is my baking bible and I want to try and plow through it and bake everything I see, which Matt told me I can't (because we'll gain weight) so I've decided to bake for special occasions. Lets just have lots of them.

This is not a hard recipe, it just has a lot of steps which includes cooking the cheesecake in a water bath. Result: luscious, creamy, sinful, this is the real thing. I added some orange extract and orange zest for a hint of flavor. Serve it with blueberries and raspberries for a perfect dinner ending.

Happy birthday mom!

Recipe here

Snow day baking

What do you do when you can't leave your house? Bake cookies!
These are adapted from Dorie Greenspan's Baking cookbook - adapted in that I use less butter and sugar and they are still awesome! This is her chocolate chip cookie recipe with cocoa to make them double chocolate. So good, it's hard not to eat each batch as they come out of the oven.
The park district is closed yesterday and tomorrow so Matt & I had to do a boot camp DVD last night so we totally earned this!