Baking With Anna Olson
I had never before done crème fraîche and although I was nervous to make it as I am with all fermented foods, it was pretty straight forward to make. Mine cultured for 36 hours as it is pretty humid here, and the cream thickened quite a lot. Since I was making this to accompany a dessert, I naturally assumed that this cream would be a bit sweet, forgetting of course that it is fermented with buttermilk so it does taste a bit sour.
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Flour is once more abundant in my home. Well, not abundant but many pounds more than I had a few weeks ago. As such I have ramped up my baking once more and I was excited to try these raspberry, lemon and white chocolate rugelach. I had never heard of these Jewish delicacies, but I am very glad to have discovered them. These were truly one of the best cookies I have ever made. I say cookie, but truly they are more in between a cookie and a pastry. A cootry? A paskie? That sounds better.
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As the weeks of quarantine are prolonged, my supply of flour is decreasing at an alarming rate. I have only a few more recipes’ worth of flour as there is a nation-wide shortage and I have been unable to get my hands on some, so I have to choose my last few bakes carefully. Of course I was looking for a little cookie or hand-held dessert to eat with tea in the evenings. And so came these chocolate-dipped madeleine cookies.
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For the last dessert that I would make before gradually going back to work, I made these creamy lemon squares by popular, or should I say repeated but polite, requests. My boyfriend simply loves anything lemon so I wanted to make this for him before I left. However, my sister makes amazing lemon squares and he often talks about them and compares other (non-lemon) desserts to it, so the bar was set high! Due to this I almost expected to be defeated and not do The Lemon Square justice. Fortunately, as usual with Anna Olson’s recipes I need not worry.
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I had been craving cupcakes since the beginning of the quarantine and had yet to bake some. Normally I would go for moist comforting chocolate cupcakes, but yesterday I decided to try something new and made these spiced coconut cupcakes. The spice blend for this recipe seemed interesting and I was quite curious about the black pepper. I don’t think I’ve ever used black pepper in a dessert recipe before! Turns out that it works very well indeed.
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The next quarantine baked goods that I decided to try was these cute lime and coconut medallions. These cookies are essentially shortbread, as they are tender and a little crumbly. When I formed the logs the mixture seemed quite dry and I was doubtful that it would bake properly and hold its shape, but I needn’t worry. Once in the oven the butter melted and held everything together.
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Since these langues de chat cookies are based on the same batter as the Tuile Cookies, I made these in the same day and this was quite time efficient. I simply prepared the batter, used half to make the tuile cookies and the other to make these adorable langues de chat, this way I got more variety of cookies with the same amount of work.
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During these difficult times, I have found myself baking more and more. Bread, pavlovas, croissants, and so on. One thing that is always necessary in our household is some cookies or baked goods to go along with tea in the evening. As we had the last banana mini loaf recently and thus the last sweet thing in the house, I thought it would be a great time to go Back to Baking since it had been a while. The ingredients that I had on hand allowed me to make tuile cookies.
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This recipe is one that I have been avoiding for years. Every time I was looking for a beautiful and impressive dessert to make for a special occasion, I would look through the cookbook, come across the Dobos Torte and immediately think to myself that it looked way too complicated, so I would pass on it and do something else, something that was in my comfort zone. Again, looking for an elegant dessert, ideally a cake, to make for our New Year’s Eve party at friends’ place, I stumbled upon this recipe.
Read MoreFor New Year’s Eve I offered to bring a dessert for our hosts since they were taking care of everything else. I wanted to make a beautiful-looking cake that would be tasty as well, and this is the chocolate hazelnut* buttercream required for the recipe. This is a more involved buttercream that requires more steps than simply whipping eggs with sugar and butter, but I enjoyed making it and the flavour was delicious.
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Valerie 