Day 2: Butterscotch Cookies

Last night I was trying to figure out what to make for my second day of baking.  I was going through all the recipes I had marked for "try this soon!" and just didn't find anything that jumped out at me.  I was going to help my dad demolish some furniture in the backyard today, so I was wanting something quick to make as I wasn't sure what time we would be done and the kitchen gets crowded by dinner time.  Luckily a friend gave me a recipe for some cookies she thought sounded tasty, and after looking at the recipe, I agreed and thought they'd be perfect for Day 2 of baking!

Well, after a morning of breaking down and hauling out furniture, the time had finally come for baking!  My dad was looking forward to these cookies as he likes butterscotch and I was excited to use a brown butter recipe.  I don't have that many recipes that call for browning the butter, but the few that I do have I love the taste, so I am excited about this one as well.  I personally am not the biggest fan of butterscotch.  It is okay, but not high on my lists of flavors that I love.  The last time I made something butterscotch was last summer when working at the ranch.  I made chocolate butterscotch pudding pies, 4 of them to be exact.  The group of guests there that week did not all want dessert, so I wound up with 2 whole pies leftover.  Well, I am not much of a hugger and when a co-worker decided to sneak a bear hug in while I was holding a pie, well.... let's just say he got a pie in the face.  Another co-worker threw the last pie in the other cooks face, and weeeeell, we all ended up with pie all over the kitchen (and I mean ALL over the kitchen) and all over ourselves!  Hahaha, at least the guests were entertained with the after-dinner-pre-square-dance shenanigans of the kitchen!  :)

not a hugger.

Sidetracked, again, sheesh.  Back to my cookies.  So these cookies are fairly basic, but that is what makes them wonderful.  It doesn't take that much extra time to brown the butter, and the rest of the recipe comes together quickly.  The cookies are small cookies, perfect for 2 bites!  I started once again with my mis en place of my ingredients and searched for a pan that I could see my butter browning in well.

butter, brown sug, salt, eggs, vanilla, flour, b.soda, b.powder, kosher salt

So the recipe starts off with browning the butter.  A few times I have been baking or cooking and people come in and say "Ooooh, that smells so good, what is it?" only to find out that I hadn't gotten much else started than some butter in a pan or some melted butter to brush on something.  Butter, while people shy from it for fattening reasons, is a smell many people find comforting and tasty no matter what.  Browning butter does that same thing. 

 I put the butter in the pan and watched it foam up at first, and as it kept melting and turning brown, the smells were just wonderful! 

 Don't believe me?  Try this recipe.  Brown the butter as it calls for, and see if anyone in your house comes to see what you're making with their lips smacking as they walk in the kitchen!

I tried to be better with getting more pictures today, so the next few are of the dough mixing up.  Since the butter is already melted, it definitely incorporated more easily (at least for me) with the eggs than unmelted butter does.

look at those eggs mix in!

Following the recipe, I added the flour in thirds and mixed it til it was all incorporated.

It looked a bit crumbly and dry to me, but when I took a handful in my hand it seemed to clump together okay, so I went with it.






I got the first batch ready and in the oven, but by the end of rolling and dredging for that first tray, the dough was already drying out a bit.  I added a little water to moisten it up, and then it was perfect.  In the 10 minutes it took  for the first batch to bake, I had rolled out the next batch.

sprinkled with kosher salt on top.

As these cookies came out of the oven, they smelled amazing!  They had a crunch on the outside and a little chewiness on the inside that was a perfect combination together!  They melting in my mouth as my taste testing dad and I tried fresh out of the oven and I already was wishing I had made a bigger batch. 

these smell so good!!!

Dad had his with a cup of coffee and I had mine with a cold glass of milk.  No matter what you are having them with, they quickly disappear, yummy!

On the taste scale of 1-10, this cookie would get a 9.  I thought it was a perfect bite-sized cookie that I know will be on my cookie list for the holidays, or just anytime really!  :)

Day 1: Chocolate and Almond Meringue Cake

So, I wanted to start out my 30 days of baking with something unique but also something that sounded super tasty to me.  I have many recipes and cookbooks that I went through, along with my favorite food blogs, and came up with an interesting cake.  If you know me, you know I love chocolate cakes.  I am always in the search for a fabulous chocolate cake that is both dense but airy, and has a fabulous chocolate taste.  I do not need it to be a chocolate overload of flavor, but just a good over all taste.  I love the flourless chocolate cake from school, the OCI Dream Torte, but it is a little denser than what I am looking for, but the taste is fabulous.

This cake caught my eye because it does not have any frosting, but instead a crunchy meringue in its place.  The idea of breaking through an airy baked meringue with my fork just sounded like music to my ears as I imagined the finished product.  From a young age, I was very much opposed to any dessert with meringue in it.  My brother always loved lemon meringue pie, so we often had it at the holidays along with an apple pie (my pie of choice), but I just could not see the appeal of the fluffly white topping.  Only in the last couple years have I realized how tasty meringue can be, and now very much enjoy a good lemon meringue pie (shhh...don't tell my brother).  This meringue though, is not the soft fluffy kind, but the crispy baked kind, which is just as tasty too.  As a kid, I remember seeing baked meringues for sale in small bakeries, but I could not fathom how they could be tasty seeing as the fluffy stuff wasn't on my untasty list.  Now, I realize what I missed out on and that makes me sad.  But I will fix all that I missed out on with this cake!

And so the cake.  This is a flourless chocolate cake topped with a meringue with almonds and chocolate pieces.  Mmmm... sounds so tasty!  The original recipe called for hazelnuts in the meringue topping, but I could not find them on my shopping trip, so I opted to sub them out for almonds, which personally I like better.  So I started out my morning by doing my mise en place for my recipe.

espresso, vanilla, salt, brown sug, bittersweet choc, eggs, and butter.

I measured out all my ingredients, melted my chocolate, separated all my eggs, and cleaned off my Kitchen Aid.  Personally, I love my Kitchen Aid and am sad that it is starting to make some funny noises that worry me that it might be breaking down.  Now, this is a Kitchen Aid my parents bought who knows when (sometime when I am a child), that still works well up til now.  With many cleaning out sessions of the kitchen by different family members, the mixer has been lucky to still have all its parts (the paddle attachment was recently found much to my joy)!  Blah, I am getting sidetracked, which is easy for me.

the missing paddle attachment!

Back to the cake.  So I mixed up the cake, though I forgot to continually take pictures, and it all came together well.  I popped it in the oven for the 25 minutes the recipe called for the baking time, but wound up baking it for about 7 minutes longer as the center was still super soft and jiggly when I tested it.  While it baked I made my meringue for the topping and mixed in the chopped chocolate and almonds.

almonds, bittersweet choc, cornstarch, sugar, and egg whites.

the meringue mountain!

Once the cake was no longer jiggly, I pulled it out and spread on the meringue (I remembered to take a picture!) then put it back in the oven for another 25-30 minutes until the meringue was brown and crispy.

hot out of the oven!

cracked and fallen...

...but still tasty!

Seeing the result, I have decided to redo the cake at a later date.  I was unhappy with how the meringue seemed to fall and I think in the end, that the amount of meringue made in the recipe, that it was too much for the pan (which was the size called for in the recipe).  It would be the right amount for a slightly bigger pan, but for this one I will cut it down a bit so that it wont rise so high over the edges and hold on when it fell.  I was expecting it to fall some, but because it caught the edges, it broke it up more than expected.

mmMmmmm....

For this baked good, my dad was my taste tester.  He was very surprised to find out it was a flourless cake, but found it very airy.  I agreed with him that it was more airy that I had expected, because I thought it was going to be more dense like the Dream Torte I love.  I loved how the meringue was crunchy as I took my first bite, but also melted in my mouth to mix with the soft chocolate cake to make a fabulous bite.  Though the cake was great, I personally I think that the cake could use a little more chocolate for my taste.  I also think the amount of nuts in the meringue could be cut in half as well, though I do love the crunch and taste of the roasted almonds.  I was very happy with the fact that the meringue, crispy and fallen as it was, did not fall apart as my dad had predicted when I cut it.  It stayed together quite well as I served it and that is a big plus to be, because I hate when a cake falls apart when being served!

Tasty!

Overall, on a taste scale of 1-10, I would give this cake an 8.  It was unique and tasty and I would definitely make it again!

30 days of baking! Here I go!

My 30 days of baking starts today, in T-minus 30 minutes.  My plan for these 30 days is to make either something completely new for me, or a recipe I have been wanting to perfect.  I am hoping only to do recipes I have done many times over only by request, since I am hoping to challenge myself more with this baking session.  And so, I am off to print out my recipe and mise en place, or prep, all my ingredients, and then, bake!  Think tasty thoughts, I will be back later!

And here I blog again...

An update for those of you who I have not kept in quite so good contact with since I stopped blogging - sorry:

So as most of you know, I did indeed graduate from school over a year ago.  After graduation I went to work on a MT dude ranch as a baker, then later as the head cook.  The ranch was wild and crazy and we (there were only 2 of us) cooked for hundreds at parties and most typically an average of 60 per week.  We cooked for a wide variety of people with various allergies (everything you can think of, someone probably had it) and people of all ages and all tastes for food.  Cookies were made daily along with 3 meals a day, 7 days a week.  And through all of the craziness of the ranch (from pudding pie fights in the lodge to the bee stings to the weekly square dances) and cooking out 'on the range' for cattle drives, I loved it all in the end.  Maybe not right at the moment of all the things going on at the ranch, but looking back at it I did indeed like it in the end.  But while I did like working there, last winter I chose to move on and look for more baking focused work.  While I had hoped to stay MT, jobs were not quite as plentiful for baking, and so I made the choice to move back to CA.

Oh, CA.  To me, CA is where I can come and immediately fit in and not feel like I was gone.  But it is also where I feel out of place.  I miss MT.  I felt very at home there.  But coming back to CA has been the right choice this time.  Upon arrival back to good ol' Orange County (I refuse to call it "the OC"), I began job hunting again.  I had been looking while in MT, but only received a few responses, and most of those were not even in CA.  After many many MANY job applications and resumes filled out and a few interviews later, I was hired at the Wolfgang Puck Bar & Grill (at LA Live/Staples Center) as the Pastry Chef.  The only Pastry Chef in the restaurant.  Now it isn't the biiiiigest restaurant by any means.  But for me, 550-650 people dining on some evenings was a lot.  Without going on and on and on here, I worked there for a few months, but chose to leave for various work related reasons.  My quitting though, happened to coincide with a time when I needed to be home with my family, and so in the end worked out for the best.

And so, here I am 4 months later, and I am yet again stuck waiting to find a job.  I have once again been looking for ages, applying for practically anything (not only baking related), and still I wait.  I have been very unmotivated to bake lately.  I want to, get all ready, but then lose all motivation.  It is very saddening to me to not have the want to bake as I did in the past.  Since I last worked, I have only made one cake until this last week.  The cake was specially made for two good friends as a celebration and was perfect for them.  A chocolate cake with a mocha mousse filling, frosted with a chocolate honey mousse and chocolate cake crumb coating, with homemade honeycomb candy and chocolate filigree on top.  It held up as best it could do on a drive from LA to Vegas in the middle of summer with temps around 110*.  But in the end, it was a tasty celebration and fun to make.  I came home from that weekend wanting to do more baking and would once again get everything ready and then ::poof:: no motivation to do it.

This last week my mom asked me to make some Baklava and Scones for her to take to some friends.  While I have no motivation to bake for myself, I can bake just fine for others if they ask.  And so I did.  I (stupidly) started my Baklava around 11pm one evening - which made for a verrrrry late night - and the next day made Cranberry Scones, both so tasty.  And I loved it!  Even without much motivation, I still love baking!

And so this is where I am at today.  Since baking for my mom last week, I have begun compiling a list of things I want to bake.  Anything and everything!  Things I have tried in the past and love and things I have never tried before (some I had never heard of til I was dinking around online!) and I have a loooooooong list started.  And from this list, I am going to start what I am calling '30 days of baking'.  In my mind, I am going to try to bake something for a month straight.  I will be trying all kinds of recipes and hopefully get back into blogging on here to show anyone still reading what I am up to.  I miss my bloggie and my baking so I am starting back up on both.

So when will I start my '30 days of baking' you ask?  I will be starting on Wednesday, September 15, 2010.

And so I am off to look at more cookbooks, food blogs, and grandma's recipe cards to find more yummy recipes to add to my list.  I want a large variety to choose from as I wake up each morning and decide what to bake that day!  Any suggestions or requests?  Perhaps some lil' boxes might make it out in the mail during this next month...  :)