Daring Bakers French Macaroons

The October Daring Bakers Challenge was French Macarons or Macaroons. French macaroons are very different from what Americans think of as macaroons-- a chewy, mostly coconut cookie. These are a combination of ground almonds, egg whites, sugar and flavorings, sandwiched with a filling of our choice. They are light, like angel kisses.

The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

I ground the almonds in my food processor, then added the confectioners sugar and ground them again, to get the "almond flour" as fine as I could. The cookies are baked in two stages-- once at a low temperature for just a few minutes to dry the bottom of the cookie, then at a higher temperature for the remaining time. This results in a "foot" that doesn't rise as much as the rest of the cookie, which creates the distinctive macaroon shape.

I made the cookie recipe with no added flavors (flavors or zests were optional) and filled them with a chocolate almond ganache. The cookies at first were a contrast in textures-- a crispy cookie and a creamy chocolate filling. But as they sat, the cookie softened to a texture that just dissolved in my mouth. Yum!

You can find the recipe and directions for the cookies here.

Ingredients

Confectioners’ sugar: 2 ¼ cups

Almond flour: 2 cups

Granulated sugar: 2 tablespoons

Egg whites: 5 (Have at room temperature)

Directions:
1. Preheat the oven to 200°F.

Combine the confectioners’ sugar and almond flour in a medium bowl.

If grinding your own nuts, combine nuts and a cup of confectioners’ sugar in the bowl of a food processor and grind until nuts are very fine and powdery.

2. Beat the egg whites in the clean dry bowl of a stand mixer until they hold soft peaks. Slowly add the granulated sugar and beat until the mixture holds stiff peaks.

3. Sift a third of the almond flour mixture into the meringue and fold gently to combine. If you are planning on adding zest or other flavorings to the batter, now is the time. Sift in the remaining almond flour in two batches. Be gentle! Don’t overfold, but fully incorporate your ingredients.

4. Spoon the mixture into a pastry bag fitted with a plain half-inch tip. You can also use a Ziploc bag with a corner cut off. It’s easiest to fill your bag if you stand it up in a tall glass and fold the top down before spooning in the batter.

5. Pipe one-inch-sized (2.5 cm) mounds of batter onto baking sheets lined with nonstick liners (or parchment paper).

6. Bake the macaroon for 5 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and raise the temperature to 375°F. Once the oven is up to temperature, put the pans back in the oven and bake for an additional 7 to 8 minutes, or lightly colored.

7. Cool on a rack before filling.

The ganache recipe follows:

5 ounces semi-sweet chocolate, chopped

1/2 Cup heavy cream, scalded

1/4 tsp almond extract

Put the chopped chocolate in a heat-proof bowl. Pour the hot scalded cream over the chocolate and mix until blended. Add the almond extract, and mix to blend. Chill until the ganache is thick enough to spread, then put a liberal amount between each pair of macaroons.

The recipe made about 2 dozen filled cookies for me-- I must have made them larger than the directions called for. But they were delicious nonetheless!

Beatty's Cake, Redux

I was telling a friend about Beatty's cake (that I made for Barefoot Bloggers in September) and she requested that I bring it to our Dirty Dozen Garden Club covered dish get-together tomorrow. So I made it again, and of course it turned out not quite as pretty as the last time. (Things only turn out pretty when I basically just make it for us to eat, not when I'm bringing it somewhere.)



I hope it tastes as good as the last time, since I've been raving about it being the best chocolate cake I've ever tasted. (I find most chocolate cakes to be dry and one-dimensional as far as the flavor is concerned.)



Wish me luck!

Beatty's Chocolate Cake, Barefoot Bloggers September

When we taste most things we try, we say, " this is a keeper" or "not so good." After this cake, we said, "Oooh! This is really good!"

The Barefooot Bloggers late September recipe was Beatty's Chocolate Cake, from Barefoot Contessa At Home. Go here for the recipe.

This was a pretty straightforward recipe for a dark chocolate cake with chocolate butter cream frosting. The thing that makes it different, that makes it "over the top," is the undertone of coffee. This is moist, sweet and delicious! And complex-- lots going on there. This is definitely a keeper.

Jan's Corn Muffins

The cornbread I usually make for the Harvestfest, while good, is very labor-intensive. So I'm determined to find an alternative that I can add/substitute next year to make the Saturday before the Harvestfest a little less stressful. I liked these, but they probably won't be a general favorite. (I like breads with a little more complexity to them than the typical white-bread lover does.) They are from The Dairy Hollow House Cookbook, by Crescent Dragonwagon.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Blend:

• 1 egg


• 1/4 cup honey


• 1/4 cup vegetable oil (I used canola)

Combine

• 1 cup buttermilk


• 1 Tbsp cider vinegar

Pour the buttermilk/vinegar mixture into the egg/honey/oil mixture.

Mix

• 1/2 tsp salt


• 1Tbsp baking powder


• 1 cup cornmeal


• 1 cup whole wheat flour

Add dry ingredients to moist ones, stir just enough to combine. Fill 12 Pam-ed muffin cups about 2/3 full. Bake for 25 minutes.

Cornbread

I spent the day making 10 pounds of bean soup and 8 loaves of cornbread. The cornbread is from Crescent Dragonwagon and the Dairy Hollow House Soup and Bread Cookbook. I've been making it for years, and it is my go-to cornbread for our Harvestfest and any soup suppers that include bean soup.

3 Tbsp butter

1 cup cornmeal

1 cup all purpose flour

1 Tbsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 cup canola or other mild vegetable oil

3 T sugar

1 egg, slightly beaten

1 1/4 cups buttermilk

1/4 tsp baking soda in the buttermilk

Preheat oven to 375 degrees

Measure out the cornmeal, flour, baking powder and salt in a large bowl, and stir to combine.

In a second, smaller bowl, mix the oil, sugar and egg until blended.

In a third bowl, add the baking soda to the buttermilk, and mix to combine.

In an 8- or 9-inch cast iron skillet, melt the butter over med high heat. While the butter melts, pour the buttermilk mixture into the oil mixture until blended, then add the liquids to the dry ingredients, mixing with a whisk just until blended. (Don't overmix!)

With a spatula, scrape the cornbread batter into the the sizzling melted butter in the skillet, and immediately put into the oven. Bake at 375 degress for 25 minutes.

Remove from oven and let stand for 3 minutes, then cover the skillet with a large plate and turn the cornbread out onto the plate. Let cool and serve, or overwrap with foil while still slightly warm.

Daring Cooks September Challenge

The Daring Cooks Challenge this month was to make a vegan, gluten free main dish (or appetizer, depending on the size we made) of Indian dolmas with a chickpea filling and coconut curry sauce. Check out the recipe and directions here.

I made the dish in reverse, starting with the sauce. I combined the garlic and onions with the spices and cooked tham until they were soft and fragrant. I added the flour (I used buckwheat in place of the spelt, since I knew I would never use the rest of the bag of spelt and I would use buckwheat flour for buckwheat pancakes-- the idea was to be gluten free and buckwheat flour fills this requirement) and cooked it with the vegetables and spices to make a roux, then added the vegetable broth and coconut milk and stirred to make a smooth sauce. I added the tomatoes and simmered for 30 minutes. The resulting sauce was fragrant and looked just like the picture in the directions from Debyi who chose the recipe. Woo-hoo! One down and two to go!

Next I tackled the filling. I cooked the chopped vegetables with the garlic and spices until it had cooked down into a thick filling. (I substituted jalapeno peppers for the Hungarian mediums hot ones called for, since that is what I had in my garden.) I added the mashed chickpeas (I mashed them by hand so that some texture of the chickpeas would remain) and the tomato paste and cooked it all until thick.

Then I made the dosas, which are like buckwheat crepes. (I used soy milk.) Some of the Daring Bakers had trouble with these, but mine came out beautifully whole and perfectly cooked. Three for three! High five!

I put them all together and plated them, and took their glamour shot, and then we dug in. The resulting dish was... filling.

Beautiful, but bland.

Fragrant, but disappointing.

The sauce, which had 2 cups of coconut milk in it, had no flavor at all. The filling, which had minced jalapeno peppers in it, had no heat at all. It tasted good, but really was not the spicy dish we were expecting from the wonderful smells coming from my kitchen all afternoon.

Maybe it would have improved over night, as many tomato-based dishes do, but I dumped the rest without taking up the space in the fridge to find out. Not one of my better results.

Barefoot Bloggers September

Well, this month marks my first foray into another online cooking group: The Barefoot Bloggers. (I know, I know, like I need another excuse to cook more goodies!) This group makes dishes from Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, and you all should know by now that she is in contention for my favorite Food Network cook, along with Giada and Tyler. So, without further ado we have her Birthday Sheet Cake from Barefoot Contessa Family Style.

This recipe made me aware for the first time that the pan I have always assumed was a sheet cake pan, probably isn't, as the batter went up, up, up and over the sides of the pan into the bottom of my oven, where it began to smoke. It didn't set off the smoke alarm, thank Goodness.

The recipe was pretty straightforward and easy. The resulting combination of flavors of the lemony cake and the deep chocolate frosting will never be my favorite, but I have to admit, the combination is growing on me. The frosting is a chocolate lover's dream, though, and I think I'll try it on a chocolate cake next time, because it is so easy and good.