Baking With Anna Olson
I had pecans. I had chocolate. The only logical thing to do was to make the delicious-looking maple pecan chocolate squares seen in Anna’s cookbook. They looked rich and buttery, and they were exactly that! Uncomplicated to make, rich, chocolatey, buttery and crunchy (due to the pecans, of course!), these bars make the perfect dessert when in need of a little boost of energy. The addition of maple syrup provides the much desired sweetness and distinct flavour.
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As one might remember, my last attempt at making a triple-layer lemon cake with lemon curd and Swiss lemon buttercream was not very successful. Actually, pretty much everything went wrong when I did those recipes. However, I had vowed to redo the recipe to prove to myself that I could do it. Fortunately, there was a recipe in the book for the same cake but for a smaller version (the other one was made to me a wedding cake!). As such, I did this smaller cake which has the same components and the same ingredients. I was very pleased with how this one turned out.
Read MoreThis recipe for a lemon curd is simply a smaller batch of an earlier recipe, making about half the amount. I had similar difficulties as the first time I did it, but in the end it came out well. After 2 hours, the curd was as I would expect: shiny, a nice consistently and lemony.
Read MoreLemon Swiss buttercream. Oh, the difficulties I had when making this recipe the first time for the larger batch. Succinctly, it was my first time making buttercream with egg whites and the result was a very runny and lumpy mixture. Not pleasant. Fortunately, with helpful comments and suggestions from Anna and other readers, I tried this recipe again, which is simply a smaller batch. I don’t know if it is the new stand mixer, increased patience on my part or the fact that I had your tips in mind, but the result was a heavenly, fluffy, spreadable and lemony Swiss buttercream. Pure delight.
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I realized that it had been a while since I had made cookies. So I made these! These cookies quite resemble, in appearance at least, the Salted Orange Toffee Slices that I made at the beginning of this blog, but they are nonetheless different in taste. Although this recipe was just as simple to follow, these cookies were softer and more chewy than their predecessor, with a predominant taste of butter, sugar and melt-in-your-mouth toffee bits
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Bread pudding. This is a concept I never really grasped. Why would you want to purposely wet bread and eat it so? In my mind the result would be a soggy and unpleasant mixture. This recipe, however, yielded a dessert that was none of that. Admittedly, I think that I slightly undercooked the bread pudding and as a result it was a bit “wet” still, but I could tell that perfectly cooked it would have tasted even better.
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Confession time: I have never had a scone! Until recently, I never actually realized that such a thing existed. Since I have come to realize what a scone looks like, however, I have not been enticed to try one. I always wondered: what are they supposed to be? A cake? A cookie? Some type of bread snack? To my inexperienced eyes, scones looked dry and crumbly. How wrong I was!! Today I made the white chocolate and black pepper scones and…. my oh my.
Read MoreAfter writing the last post, I realized that I had successfully, or for the most part at least, completed 1/5 of Anna’s cookbook. That is, I completed 40 recipes out of the 200 recipes found in “Back to Baking”. When I first started in October, 9 months ago, I purposely decided to not set myself a deadline. With my studies, work, volunteer work and other obligations, I did not want to make myself go insane by doing 200 recipes by a set deadline. As can be deduced from this blog, baking is one of my passions.
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This weekend I had my family, consisting of my parents and my two younger sisters, over for diner. In an attempt to reconcile my mom with my food and baked goods (she is admittedly not a huge fan of homemade goods), I decided to make the lemon meringue pie in Anna’s cookbook. This was perhaps a risky endeavour, as my mom adores lemon pie and would thus be an honest critic, and also… I do not like lemon pie (gasp!!).
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Father’s Day is coming up this weekend. That can only mean one thing: it’s time to make a cake! It felt good to get back into baking after taking a small break (I was moving and everything was packed!). My dad uncharacteristically and specifically mentioned that he would very much like for me to make him a carrot cake for the occasion. Who am I to refuse?
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Valerie 