From Paris with Love...and Hate

I have sort of developed a love hate relationship with a particular cookie.  I love the concept of it, as it can be changed to any number of flavor or flavor combinations, and it's honestly not hard to make.  However, it's finicky and weather plays a great role on how it turns out, creating the hate portion of our relationship.  So what particular cookie is this?  The french macaron, not to be confused with the macaroon, the almond and meringue based sandwich cookie.  There's a couple of different recipes out there for how to make the maracon cookie itself, some are as simple as whipping up the egg whites, and folding it into ground up almonds and powdered sugar.  While others have extra steps such as making an italian meringue (making a hot syrup and pouring it into mostly whipped egg whites) - this is the approach I've started using.

An italian meringue produces a more stable meringue due to the fact that extremely hot sugar syrup is poured into the egg whites.  This cooks the proteins resulting in whites that are more resistant to deflating, which works wonderfully for the case of macarons.

So, back to the macarons.  One of the things I love about these, and it plays so wonderfully with my personality, is that there is a myriad of flavor combinations you can do with them.  In the past I've done mexican hot chocolate, peppermint, orange cream, roasted pineapple, coconut lime and many others.  I've seen people do flavors like hibiscus and PB & J to name a few.  So pretty much anything works.

Of course, just don't make them on a humid day.  Meringues don't really work on humid days, and I've yet to have great success making macarons on humid days.   There's a few ways to combat this, which I'll try down the road, but for now...

Two for One Deal on Nolstagia

I'm originally from St. Louis, and in the world of food St. Louis is known for two things:  fried ravioli and gooey butter cakes.  Since this is a baking blog, ravioli doesn't really fit...but you should make it sometime, it is really good.  I want to talk about the other thing, which you probably haven't heard of in reality, the gooey butter cake.

Legend has it that this cake came by of accident in a 1930's bakery, where a new baker used the wrong type of butter smear.  There's two types of smears in this story, a deep butter smear and a gooey butter smear.  The later is used as an adhesive to make things like crumbs, nuts, ect stick to unbaked pastries and cakes.  This new baker was hired to make deep butter cakes, which use the deep butter smear, but the baker got them mixed up and used the gooey butter smear instead.  The mistake was eventually caught, but it was too late to do anything about it.  Rather than throw them away, the cakes were baked off and sold.  The cakes sold so well, they were kept and became a St. Louis favorite.

Of course there's several different versions of gooey butter cakes.  Paula Deen's very fond of them and her recipes, like a number of others out there, use a box of cake mix.  To me though, the authentic recipe uses a yeast dough as the base, so that's the recipe I'm using.  And since we're also talking about deep butter cakes...why not make one of those too?

It's worth noting that both of these cakes are actually considered coffee cakes.

Adventures in gluten free baking

I had originally intended for a different subject for this post, but it changed at the last moment due to a sudden idea that trying gluten free bread would be fun.  Of course I've never made gluten free bread.

Truth be told, up til about 4 months ago I would scoff at the idea of gluten free and refuse to do any sort of gluten free baking.  I will admit there were a couple of different reasons for that, from things like dealing with elitist health nuts to my sister's brief stint with being gluten free and sending me bizarre recipes and condemning me to a life of diabetes because I wouldn't give up gluten.

Anyways, obviously my views have changed since then and now I like to take recipes and try out gluten free versions of them.  I've had tremendous success with it, and for some things if people weren't told about it they would never know they were eating a gluten free cupcake for example.

On a related note.  I get asked what I use for baking, and currently it's Pamela's Artisan Flour Blend.  It's a mixture of rice flours, sorghum flour, potato starch and a few other things.  It's pretty bland tasting, unlike other mixes which contain things like garbanzo flour (which makes things taste like peas), so whatever  you make ends up tasting like what's expected.

So, back to the bread....

Reinventing the wheel

A while back I had the genius idea that I was going to start a baking blog, mostly because the small bubble I live in wasn’t a great outlet for sharing and testing ideas.  I could make things here at the house and they’d pretty much sit there, untouched…or conversely, I’d eat it all.  A few times I’d make things and take it into work to share, but when you work at a bakery that doesn’t go over too well. 

So, I decided I’d start a blog as a way to share things, but it pretty much fell by the wayside when I’d plan out what my first post(s) would be and then make something and it did not turn out like I wanted.  This happened a few times, and then I got busy at work and I discovered what a social life was, and then I decided I wanted to open a bakery.  That last one being the inspiration to restart my attempt at this, because I need to develop recipes for items I would sell and this is a great way to document it (and possibly get feedback).

You might be wondering what’s up with the name.  Allow me to explain by introducing you to four of the best taste testers you could ask for –

Yup.  I can’t count the number of times I have had finished something and turned my back for a minute, only to hear the clash of a pan hitting the floor as one of dogs had decided to try out something.  So, the name was inspired by them.

So, about that whole documenting ideas…

Let’s talk about cookies, particularly the quintessential one.  Chocolate chip.  This particular cookie can be the most intimidating one, as you ask people about it and you’ll hear their mother or grandmother made the best one ever.  It’s a hard thing to live up to.  How do you deal with that?   

For me, the perfect chocolate chip cookie should be crispy on the outside, but soft, chewy and buttery on the inside and it should never be cakey.  This past fall I traveled up to the northeast to visit my sisters and spent a day in NYC and visited Bouchon Bakery in the Time Warner Center and tried their chocolate chip cookie (along with a ton of other things).  It was the best tasting chocolate chip cookie I had ever had.  It wasn’t because they use expensive chocolate like valrhona, instead what stood out to me was this rich, caramel, almost nutty note to it.  I spent the next fifteen minutes analyzing what that could be.  Did they add coffee to it and it was somehow playing off the chocolate to give that effect?  It wasn’t until I got home and looked up the recipe and discovered that they added blackstrap molasses and combined with the brown sugar is what gave it that caramelly depth.

So, in my attempt to find a suitable chocolate chip cookie recipe, I first looked up random recipes on the net and didn’t have much luck.  I decided to consult the recipes of a baking god you probably don’t know…Maida Heatter.  Turns out her chocolate chip cookie is a tweaked version of the Tollhouse version, so I figured it’s a good place to start.