Baking With Anna Olson
These chocolate peanut pretzel squares are very scrumptious, the perfect combination of sweet and salty, soft and crunchy. I had actually made it more than a month ago, but never got around to posting it. It was so good, however, that I had to make it again. Definitely a favourite.
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Whether it is good news or bad, I have always found joy or solace in baking. So I return once more to my trusty cookbook, which has now seen better days. It is very well-loved, to say the least. In an attempt to balance my love of baking and the fact that I am, in this current situation, mostly baking for one, I have decided to try making a recipe from “Back to Baking” once every two weeks.
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Fall is truly my favorite season. The beautiful trees changing colour as the weeks go by, the breezy but still warm air, the walks and the crunchy leaves, the hot chocolates, sweaters and long coats. But also, I feel like baking in autumn is just that much better, for some reason. A warm tray of cookies or a hot pie coming out of the oven just taste and smell better when it is a bit more chilly, I think. In any case, someone at work mentioned that they liked pumpkin, which I do not, and I was reminded of the pumpkin tart recipe that I have flipped through and ignored several times in the cookbook throughout the years.
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It is clear to me now that I really am not good at making meringue desserts. I have tried twice now to make Pavlovas, and they always crack. Very finicky desserts, these. I don’t know what I am doing wrong but I can never get them right. I followed tricks on the internet to try to prevent it from cracking, the main one being to let them cool down in the oven after baking by shutting off the temperature and cracking the door open.
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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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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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For years now, I have used the same recipe from Everyday Annie to make chocolate cupcakes or chocolate cakes, which is often. Those cakes are moist, very chocolaty and always a huge hit. They have never failed me and it is my go-to recipe when I need to make a tasty cake. I have never found a chocolate cake/cupcake recipe better than that one. Until now, perhaps.
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There is one recipe in the book that I looked at and perused many times over the past two years. However, I could never bring myself to do it. Even though the title of the recipe sounds delicious, as soon as I came across one ingredient in the recipe, I couldn’t do it. That ingredient is… mayonnaise. I strongly dislike mayo, except in tuna sandwiches and crab salad, where it belongs, and could not fathom doing a dessert with mayonnaise! It was against my core beliefs. Mayo, in a brownie? Why?
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So many months have gone by without me baking from the cookbook, or almost nothing at all for that matter. My boyfriend was on a no-sugar diet (self-imposed!) and thus I had much left motivation to bake something just for myself. However, I recently rewatched Julie & Julia and felt inspired to go Back to Baking (hehe…), which was how this blog started in the first place.
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Valerie 