TWD: Pecan Sticky Rolls

In The Way to Cook, Julia Child states that brioche dough is only for special occasions, a treat to be reserved for only the most joyous days.  With more than half a pound of butter and four eggs in the dough for eight pecan rolls, that is understandable.

No wonder they taste so heavenly. Rich, sweet, slightly cinnamon-y and a bit crunchy from the pecans. Oh my.

Using an alternate recipe and method for the brioche dough than that one in the Baking with Julia cookbook, I was able to mix and knead in the food processor. It still took quite a while to fully knead and come together, but at least the food processor didn't overheat. Here is the dough, still a bit soft and not quite ready to take out:

As you continue to mix, the dough comes together and gets shinier. Here it is in the bowl, ready for the first rise:

After a couple of rises, the dough was refrigerated overnight. Roll, fill, freeze until solid enough to cut, then place in a baking pan (another stick of butter is spread in the bottom of the pan, then sprinkled with brown sugar; this is the "sticky" part of the roll) and let rise again. Bake.

Lessons learned from this week's adventure in baking:

1. In spite of my hatred for recipes whose ingredients list begin with "1 recipe of xyz", in this case, it was worth it to learn to make the brioche dough.

2. It is possible to make a multi-step, multi-stage treat without totally wrecking the kitchen.

3. I have a great deal of respect for bakers past, who first created this treat without the convenience of electric mixers.

4. I actually used two different recipes - the original brioche recipe from Julia Child's The Way to Cook, as the basis for the pecan sticky rolls from Baking with Julia - to make these. If it weren't for the discussions on the TWD blog, I'd never have thought to go looking for an alternative to a stand mixer and the methods shown in the BWJ cookbook. A big part of my motivation for doing this challenge is to learn to bake better; being able to make these sorts of changes and have a degree of confidence in the result is a huge breakthrough for me.

Too see the original BWJ recipe, visit Lynn or Nicole. For more discussion and many more links, visit the Tuesdays with Dorie site (link in the sidebar).

TWD:I got nothin' edition

Somehow, I ran out of week. Or rather weeks, plural, as I've had two weeks to make the delicious and easy Hungarian Shortbread that was this week's challenge for Tuesdays with Dorie. The recipe can be found at Lynnette and Cher's blogs.

Once you get past the shock of using one pound (yes, the whole thing!) of butter in a single recipe, it's simple to make. Tips from the conversations at the challenge site: Use the food processor or a stand mixer with a grating attachment to grate the frozen dough, and bake the bottom layer of the shortbread alone for the first fifteen minutes of the bake time, before adding the rhubarb and the top layer of grated dough.

Rhubarb is optional - lots of people used strawberries, another berry or different jams in place of the rhubarb filling.

Because it is so very rich, it can be cut into small pieces, serving a crowd. If I do decide to try this, I will probably bake a half recipe.

Next up is pecan sticky buns. I thought I was out for that one, as it begins with a brioche dough that requires (according to the Baking with Julia cookbook recipe, anyway) a fifteen minute kneading in the stand mixer, complete with warnings about monitoring the heat of your mixer to avoid burning out the motor - !.  I've no stand mixer and no counter or storage place to put one.

Julia Child herself comes to the rescue on this one. Her cookbook, The Way to Cook, just happens to both be sitting on my bookshelf and to have a recipe for sticky pecan buns in it. A recipe whose brioche dough is made....in a food processor. I'm curious to see how the recipe recreated by modern chefs stacks up against her original.

TWD: Lemon Loaf

I should subtitle my entries for Baking with Julia "Baking with the Lazy and Ill-equipped".  The "lazy" part is self-explanatory; the "ill-equipped" is due to my zeal in culling out my possessions before I moved.

This week's recipe was for Lemon Loaf. A killer lemon bread is in my Twelve Things Diane Bakes(TM) arsenal already; this loaf is more like a pound cake than a quick bread in texture.

Several procedural notes:

For future reference, as a substitute for cake flour, place two tablespoons cornstarch in the bottom of a one cup measure; fill the rest of the measure with flour. I remembered to buy the lemons, but forgot the cake flour and was too lazy to go back to the store.

A small, large holed cheese grater can be used as a zester in a pinch, if the correct size grater apparently was a casualty of the great purge.

What to do with three naked lemons? Make homemade lemonade, of course.

Close up of the crumb:

Taste test: The night it was baked, the lemon flavor was fairly subtle. The bread is dense, like a pound cake, though (mine at least) isn't quite that firm. The loaf is a bit dry, as many people have noted. Personally, I'd love to try it with a heap of macerated strawberries topping it.

The second day, the flavors were more pronounced, bringing the lemon to the front. Definitely better, but still needing the strawberries.

It's good, but I doubt I'd make it again (though I still want the strawberries).

For more tests and the recipes, hop over to Treats or The Place They Call Home.

TWD - Pizza Rustica

The challenge this week was Pizza Rustica, a cheese-filled pie that is a traditional Italian Easter dish. The three cheese and prosciutto filling is baked in a slightly sweet pastry shell with a simple criss-cross lattice top. While cooling, it looked like this:

I'm still getting used to the heating pattern in my oven, obviously. Should have rotated the pan a few times to even out the browning. Still, it looks pretty good.

The directions say to "cool thoroughly", and to serve either just warm or at room temp. My guests arrived while the pie was still a bit warm, so we went ahead and cut into it. Cooling is a good idea, as the cheese has a chance to set up a bit, making for easier cutting. Once sliced, it looked like this:

While everyone liked the dish as a whole, I'm personally still up in the air about the sweeter pastry. While I agree it's a nice counterpoint to the savory filling, I think I'd cut back on the sugar in the crust from 1/3 cup to three or four tablespoons. The pastry, by the way, was a dream to roll out and form, with very little sticking.

Served with whole wheat rolls and a salad bar, this made a lovely spring lunch.

For the recipe, visit

TWD: Irish Soda Bread

After yielding to two sweet challenges in a row, TWD: Baking with Julia returns to bread, and an easy one at that: Irish Soda Bread.

Flour, salt, baking soda, buttermilk. Blend, then turn out on a floured board and give it a few quick kneads. Pat it into a disk, put on a buttered pie plate and bake until golden.

The dough was extremely soft and sticky, in spite of adding a bit of flour during the short kneading process. Patting the disk down resulted in mini peaks where the dough followed my hand as I pulled it away. This wasn't going to be the prettiest loaf of bread. In spite of its looks, it rose well during baking, developing a nice, evenly brown crust.

We ended up cutting the bread while it was still a bit warm, as both my dinner guest and I were starving. The crust had a bit of give to it, making it difficult to get thin slices. The crumb was dense and even, moister than I expected. Overall, it was the perfect bread to sop up the juices from the tomato-based stew that was dinner. On its own, the faint sourdough type flavor was pleasing and not overpowering.

To my surprise, and to the contrary of much of what I've read about the bread, it didn't dry out within hours of baking. We cut the entire loaf, storing the leftovers in a plastic bag, squeezing out as much air as possible. The slices were still moist enough to butter and eat the next day.

All in all, if I don't have the four hours it takes for frozen yeast rolls to rise (and what is up with that, Rhodes?), this is a great go-to bread for soups and stews.

TWD: Baking with Julia - Rugelach

The first of the March recipes for the Baking with Julia challenge is rugelach - a small, rich pastry cookie filled with all varieties of rich fillings. In spite of my dislike of plums, and by extension, prunes, I went ahead with the more or less traditional prune, fruit and nut filling.

Have I ever mentioned that one of my favorite cookies to bake is spritz? The dough can be mixed entirely with a hand mixer, then stuffed in a cookie press and squeezed out onto the cookie sheet. No muss, no fuss.

In other words, the antithesis of rugelach making.

The dough is a soft cream cheese dough, needing several hours in the refrigerator before rolling out and filling. It's spread with a paste made of ground prunes mixed with a bit of sugar and nuts. Dried fruits (raisins for me) and nuts (pecans in this case) are spread on top. The whole shebang is rolled up, then chilled again.

As a final step before baking, the roll is brushed with an egg wash and the cut cookies rolled in a cinnamon-sugar-pulverized nut mixture.

I made a half batch, partly because I was afraid I wouldn't like them, but equally afraid I would, if you know what I mean.

Rolling things around filling is not one of my better skills; my rolls barely met on the other side, but still held together (for the most part) through baking.  To my surprise, they smelled absolutely delicious while baking.

The taste was a revelation as well. The sweetness of the sugar and cinnamon balanced out the slightly tart taste of the prunes, while the butter and cream cheese kept the dough soft and flavorful. They are very definitely a rich treat; one cookie is incredibly satisfying.

Will I make them again? Maybe, though I may try the apricot filling (naturally, I found dried apricots at the store today, since I wasn't looking for them anymore) or possibly chocolate (nutella, maybe?). My final result wasn't very pretty (these are the best of the bunch), but on the whole, they were worth the effort.

Tuesdays with Dorie: White loaf

Nothing quite smells like heaven as bread baking. This week's recipe in the Tuesdays with Dorie challenge is a loaf of white bread. Oddly enough, bread is one of my Twelve Things I Can Bake (c). But it has been a long time...

A confession to start: I've gone rogue on the technique. As written, the recipe used a stand mixer to do all of the work. I don't own one and have no place to store it even if I did. However, I checked Julia Child's The Way to Cook, also sitting on my bookshelf, and discovered she is a great fan of the food processor for bread making, for everything up until the final knead.

No picture, but the dough balled up nicely on top of the mixing blade, pulling together well after the initial break up when the butter was added. The final turns were done by hand on a floured board. (note to self: pull the plastic mixing blade from the processor out of the lump of dough before giving a first push)

The dough is turned into a greased bowl, turned to coat and covered with plastic wrap, then set aside to rise for an hour or so.

What to do while it rises? Have a cup of coffee and a piece of cake (not baked by me). Don't you envy my harvest gold countertop?

When it is doubled in size, punch it down (not pictured: the fingertip-poke smiley face I drew in the risen dough before punching it down)(I'm easily amused).

Stretch the dough out into a rough rectangle, then fold it in three like you're refolding a brochure for your next vacation to Disney. Pinch the edges shut, pat and push all around to get a nice, compact shape to drop into a greased loaf pan. Cover with greased (or sprayed with non-stick cooking spray) cling wrap and set aside to rise again.

Have another piece of cake. Or not.

Ooo! Look at the pretty loaf! Considering my yeast had an expiration date of October 2011, I'm impressed! (see the end of the post for other notes on oddities).

Into the oven it goes. Here is where things deviated from what I would usually do in baking bread.

First, at about ten minutes before the baking time was over, I turned the bread out of the pan and stuck an instant read thermometer in the bottom, with the business end hitting about the center of the loaf. According to Julia, the bread is done when it reaches an internal temperature of 200 degrees. It was only at 180, so back in the oven it went.

In another departure from the norm, I left the bread out of the pan, setting it directly on the oven rack for another eight minutes of baking. The exposed sides picked up some color, and the added stiffness of the side crusts made the entire loaf easier to slice.

Eight minutes later, assault the loaf again with the thermometer. Woo hoo! Exactly 200 degrees!

This was the most difficult part of the whole experience: waiting until it was just barely warm to slice into it.

The loaf sliced like a dream. In fact, it is possible to cut slices as thin as a quarter of an inch (but who wants such a skinny slice, unless you are making a sandwich?)

The crumb is a bit inconsistent, but I know exactly why: I'm lazy. I knew when I pulled the dough out of the food processor it was a bit wet, and I didn't knead enough flour into the dough, nor knead quite long enough on that final hand finish.

Because of an unplanned "hang with the girls" afternoon Saturday and an extra long (but phenomenal) church service Sunday, I never did get to the store. As a result, I used salted butter rather than unsalted in the dough, decreasing the amount of actual salt added just a tad. Since my food processor specifically says three and a half cups of flour is all it will handle, I made just one loaf instead of two (again, lazy). And I may have added a bit too much water...the yeast was pretty foamy, and it was hard to read the measure when I put in the rest of the water.

The entire process, start to finish, took about four hours, two and a half of which was rising/baking time. Practice would cut that down by almost an hour.

Truly, I follow directions much better than this most of the time...but I've made a lot of bread in the past, and knew what the tolerances for error were.

That does it for the first Tuesdays with Dorie.

Oh, wait - the taste? Incredible.

Doughgirl

Beginning next Tuesday, I'll be participating along with the wonderful crew at Tuesdays with Dorie and their Baking with Julia series. The concept is fairly simple: Dorie Greenspan wrote a book called Baking with Julia, where a horde of chefs recreated recipes based on Julia Child's thirty-nine episode show on baking. We bake two of those recipes per month, putting up posts on our individual blogs of our process/thoughts/success (or lack thereof).

I've long said that there are only Twelve Things I Can Bake (c). My own personal goal for the series is to experiment with other stuff, learn more of the techniques behind good baking, and feed anyone available (there is no way I can or should eat all of the resulting sweets; I intend to do my actual baking on the weekends, so you local folk may want to "happen" to stop by after dinner on Sunday for a taste test and a quote to be included on my Tuesday post).

I'm in the middle of making the first week recipe, but have already gone "rogue". I had in my bookcase Julia Child's The Way to Cook, and realized that the technique she uses in that book for the same basic recipe is considerably different - and works better with the equipment I already have.

You'll just have to wait until Tuesday to find out the details.