Baking With Anna Olson
This past weekend was Thanksgiving weekend! I love this time of the year simply for all the wonderful moments spent with the family with good food and the beautiful fall weather. As was inevitable, I made one (or three! recipes to come) dessert to bring along to my parents house. This dessert was an easy pick because I had too many apples that I needed to pass and more importantly, it looked delicious!
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Like many other desserts from Anna’s cookbook, I had never made “sticky buns” or, as we called it in French, brioches. With anything else that I had never done before, I thought that sticky buns were very complicated to do. It is not so! This recipe was so well-explained that even a novice like me was able to do it.
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Brownies are probably one of the most universally loved desserts. Understandably. They mostly consist of chocolate, butter and, often, nuts. The simplicity of this type of dessert is what makes it so well loved. The twist in Anna’s recipe includes whole wheat (to make us feel a little less guilty of eating these delicious brownies), coffee and a cream cheese frosting. I really enjoyed making and eating these brownies.
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I guess August is the month of the ginger! After the gingerbread cream pie, I followed with this recipe for cookies with a double dose of ginger: fresh and candied! The result was quite satisfying. The cookies were soft and chewy and had a very pronounced ginger taste. If you do not like ginger, these are not the cookies for you. However, if you happen to like ginger, these little treat are marvellous.
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It had been some time since I had made a pie, so I decided to try this recipe for a gingerbread cream pie, mostly because it sounded so scrumptious! I did not have any problems make the dough or the filling and everything seemed to be going as planned. I left the filling to set overnight and prepared the topping only the following day. The filling was delicious and the topping was just as tasty.
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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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Valerie 