May 2013 – Valerie

D’Artagnan Bars

By: Valerie May 24, 2013December 5, 2020

Cookies, Bars and Biscottichocolate, d'artagnan2 Comments

As is often the case, lately I have been craving chocolate. Fortunately, I can always count on Anna to have a wonderful chocolate-containing recipe in her cookbook. This time I opted for d’Artagnan bars, a dessert with which I was not familiar with but later learned is similar in taste to the chocolate bar 3 musketeers. Like the peanut butter nanaimo bars, these chocolate bars are composed of three layers: the chocolate cookie crumb base, the fluffy chocolatey filling and the top chocolate glaze. So much chocolate!

Springtime Lemon Wedding Cake With Fondant

By: Valerie May 20, 2013December 5, 2020

Cakes and Cupcakesbuttercream, cake, curd, lemon1 Comment

Yield: a 6- and 9-inch 2-tier round cake Recipe: 37/200 “Back to Baking”, pp. 178 As mentioned in my previous two posts, I made a triple-layer lemon cake for my mom this mother’s day. I say triple-layer not because of the physical cake layers, but rather because the cake is composed of three…

Lemon Buttercream

By: Valerie May 14, 2013December 5, 2020

Frosting, sauces and garnishesbuttercream, egg whites, lemon8 Comments

I really enjoy buttercream. Used to frost cakes, cupcakes or even to separate and fill the layers in a cake, it is both sweet and rich. Nonetheless, I have only ever made vanilla or chocolate buttercream, with slight variations at times. Lemon buttercream was a first for me. More than that, it was the first time I made buttercream with egg whites as opposed to butter and icing sugar. I was so unsure about the ingredients that I double-, no triple-, checked the ingredients and instructions to make sure that it was indeed a recipe for buttercream composed of plain white sugar and egg whites.

Lemon Curd

By: Valerie May 13, 2013December 5, 2020

Frosting, sauces and garnishescustard, lemon2 Comments

If you read my previous post, you will know that I am not a big fan of custard or similar textures. I have however learned to be more open-minded about custard since I actually quite enjoyed it in the classic fruit-flan tart I made a while back. I needed to make this particular recipe because I was making the lemon cake for mother’s day. This recipe looked pretty straightforward. Whisk the ingredients together, whisk over a water bath and then whisk in the butter. A nice 20 minutes. However, I don’t know what happened but my curd took almost an hour to make!

Snickerdoodles

By: Valerie May 7, 2013December 5, 2020

Cookies, Bars and Biscotticinnamon, cookies, snickerdoodles, sugar1 Comment

I will freely admit that I never had a snickerdoodle cookie. Not only that, but I never really knew what they were. I guess I never bothered to look it up. However, following a small pause in my usually very frequent baking, I felt like making cookies that were new to me and I thus made these. Unbeknownst to me during all this time is that snickerdoodles are actually soft and chewy, sugary and sweet, melt-in-your-mouth cookies!

Basic White Sugar Cookie Dough

By: Valerie May 6, 2013August 4, 2014

Foundation recipescookies, dough, white sugar4 Comments

Yield: 2 to 3 dozen cookies Recipe: 33/200 “Back to Baking”, pp. 22 I haven’t baked in a little while. I guess work and responsibilities took over my life these past weeks! Fortunately, I now have more time (if not I’ll make time!) to dedicate to my primary passion of baking. I felt…