Foggy weather and scones

scone dough ready to be rolled and cut

What a difference a week makes....

Last week here in Kansas City, we dealt with sub-zero highs on a few days .... brutal, brutal cold for this area.  And today, as the morning begins, it's above freezing, and very very foggy with visibility only a couple hundred yards in my neighborhood.  This is the perfect weather for scones, and biscuits, and muffins.  

So today I'm making some scones.  It's a recipe I've tweaked just a bit from the original, but it comes from the book Baking With Julia.  This is a great book that showcases recipes that guests demonstrated on the PBS show Baking With Julia.  Julia Child and her guest chefs and bakers always had fun displaying some of their favorite foods, and some of these recipes are very easy to do.

I've taken the recipe for buttermilk scones from this book, and, as I said, I've tweaked it just a bit.  But essentially it's the same.  It's a very easy recipe that can be made in minutes.  It's very forgiving.  And the end result is very delicious and homestyle.  

But what I wanted to share today is something very easy to do with any scone.  The final flourish on this recipe is to brush the prepared dough with melted butter and then lightly sprinkle granulated sugar over the top, but I always add a little bit of large-crystal sugar as well.  This gives a wonderful mild sweetness to the top of the scone as well as a little bit of sweet crunch.

Simple enhancements like this add so much to any food.

Enjoy the foggy morning, and think sweet thoughts of the coming warm spring.

Brownies in winter

 

Hello, everyone!  What a cold week we have had in Kansas City.  It is the perfect weather for warm brownies today and tomorrow and the day after and ..... 

I am always interested in tweaking brownie recipes because it seems to me that brownies, much more than cookie and cakes, can be radically different from just the tiniest tweaks.  And so I like to experiment with tiny adjustments sometimes just to see what happens.  Over time I've developed strong opinions about recipes and techniques for making brownies.

For example, I never use brownie recipes that ask for chocolate but no cocoa powder.  For me, cocoa powder is an essential part of every brownie.  A brownie made with both cocoa powder and chopped/ground chocolate has a nicer level of sweetness for me, and I also like the texture much more.  If I want to use a specific brownie recipe that doesn't call for cocoa powder, I will always add some anyway, usually (but not always) reducing the flour weight by the same amount as the added cocoa powder.  Not a lot is needed.  Even a small amount does wonders.  And of course the type of cocoa powder is very important.  Quality is paramount.

I often like to use a combination of chocolates, balancing the chocolate flavor by combining chocolate with different percentages of cacao when I make just about anything that has chocolate, and this is especially true when I make brownies.

Even technique is important.  For instance, one recipe I know and use (although I've modified it a bit for my own use), instructs the baker to rapidly and vigorously mix the brownie batter until it starts to pull away from the edge of the saucepan and achieves a certain texture and viscosity.  If you make this batch twice, once by mixing that way and once not, you can definitely tell a difference.  It is proof that technique does matter when making many things in the kitchen.

Eggs should be room temperature before being added and mixed into the batter, and they should be mixed thoroughly or you could have strands of egg whites that don't completely combine.

Some brownies are best when baked in a foil-lined pan.  Some not.  For some I use different types of molds.  Some need to be completely cooled before removing them from the pan and cutting.  For some brownies, it's good to freeze them after baking so that you can get clean cuts for a nice appearance.

Those are a few of the things that I think about when it comes to making brownies.  Of course, the most important thing is to think about great they will taste

Well, this weekend I'm going to be making probably two or three different types.  It's going to be a nice chocolatey weekend.  I better pick up some extra milk today.  

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Cold weather and blueberry cake

 

This week here in Kansas City has been very cold.  Actually, it's been very very cold!  But it's going to get even worse over the next few days.  That means staying inside and reading, watching movies, and cooking.  While the high temperatures will be in the single digits over the next few days and the low temperatures will be below zero, I will be safely ensconced in my kitchen making good food.

Today I've already made blueberry cinnamon snack cake.  Every time I make this, my mind is taken back to the practice runs I did with this cake when I was first developing it.  The first few times I made it, I loved the flavor, but there were two problems.

First, the cake was challenging to bake because to bake it entirely through sometimes meant cooking it too long and what was supposed to be a very moist cake turned out to be too firm on the crust and too dry in the outer layers.  If it wasn't cooked long enough then there was the risk of a thin horizontal layer through the middle of the cake that was still not cooked enough, a thin layer of batter that hadn't quite turned into cake.  This would have been mitigated if I had chosen to make small cakes, but I wanted a full 9-inch cake and I was determined to make that happen.  The solution in the end was simple.  The blueberries had to be completely warmed up.  They had to sit out at room temperature first and then be microwaved a short time to warm them up even more.  Once I had that figured out, then the issue was resolved.

Second, I didn't want the cake to be blue.  The problem here is that once you microwave the blueberries they often start to release their juices.  So I experimented with various things and finally came up with the solution.  After microwaving, I rinse the blueberries in warm water, not cold, and then let them dry on a paper towel to soak up the water as well as any juices still releasing from the berries.  Now they could be mixed into the batter without turning everything blue.

These are rather simple solutions, but the details in them proved challenging to define:  how warm to make the blueberries, how to dry them without squishing them, whether to use large blueberries or small wild blueberries, etc.  I experimented with this recipe for a couple weeks tweaking and tweaking the process until I got it just right and I could duplicate it every time to my satisfaction.  And I took lots of notes on all the attempts and what worked and what didn't, trying to detail the protocol precisely.  I ate a lot of blueberry cinnamon snack cake and so did the wildlife that visits my yard.  

I am glad I went to all that effort.  It is one of my favorite things to make and pass out to people.  And today I will be eating many slices throughout the day.  It is sweet but also relatively healthy as cakes go.  Have a great weekend everyone.  Stay inside and stay warm!

Triple chocolate sablés

Today I am making triple chocolate sablés.  These don't require many ingredients and they aren't very complicated.  They also don't require much time.  And they taste amazing!

First we need flour with a small quantity of very high quality cocoa powder mixed in and a small amount of baking soda.  Then we will measure out both white sugar and light brown sugar, a little fleur de sel, and a teaspoon of vanilla.  Butter should be measured out but kept chilled in the fridge.  We will not soften the butter before creating our dough.  The final ingredient to prepare is the chocolate.  For this recipe I use 5 ounces of chocolate:  2 ounces bittersweet with 60% - 66 % cacao, and 3 ounces semisweet with 52% - 55% cacao.  The cacao percentages can be modified, but these are the percentages I prefer for this cookie.  All 5 ounces are chopped -- some pieces will be tiny, some just very small, and there will be a fair amount of almost powdered chocolate when finished.  The non-uniformity of the chopped chocolate is one of the good things about this cookie.

The cold butter is creamed in the mixer.  Then the sugars, fleur de sel and vanilla are added and mixed in thoroughly.  Now the flour mixture is poured into the mixing bowl but mixed only until incorporated.  We don't want to overmix this.  Finally the chopped chocolate is added.  The chocolate pieces will help any butter mixture that remains stuck on the sides mix in as it swirls in the bowl.

Now the entire mixture is poured out onto a tray.  It is quite crumbly, but this is OK.  We want it that way.  At this point, I will use my hands to start forming it into a log.  As the log takes shape, I start flattening the sides so that in the end it is a four side square log about 9 inches long.  I will manipulate it both by hand pressure and by percussive force on the tray (tamping it down on the tray) until I have a basically even shape from end to end.  Then I will turn the square log on it's end and tamp it down just a bit to flatten it, and then repeat with the other end.

Now this has to go into the fridge for at last a few hours.  It should be cold and very firm.  Once chilled, slice off 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick slices and pop them into a 325 F oven for 11 1/2 minutes, 12 at most.  One of the nice things about this dough is that is can be taken straight from the freezer (where it can be stored for a month or so), cut and baked right away without the need to warm up.  Simply bake the cookies an extra minute or so.

When they come out of the oven, let them sit on the pan for a few minutes.  They need to firm up a bit before removal to a cooling rack.

These are an amazing cookie.  The first batch will be out of the oven soon.  I can hardly wait.

Enjoy the mild weather today.  Soon we will see bitterly cold temperatures if the weather forecasts are correct.  I will keep some of this dough in the freezer for those cold days coming up.