Baking With Anna Olson
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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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!
Read MoreYield: 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…
Read MoreI 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.
Read MoreIf 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!
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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!
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Valerie 