Tag: Baking

Rich blueberry scones

This delicious scone variation produces a softer textured scone, almost like a little cake. They are more delicate, and you can eat them with a fork while hot, or by hand when cool. I got this recipe from my daughter-in-law, and I assure you these are a great hit with company!

2 ½ cups flour
¼ cup granulated sugar
¼ cup light brown sugar
1 Tb baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
¼ tsp salt
6 Tb butter, cut up
1 cup cold, heavy cream plus 2 Tablespoons
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
Turbinado or brown sugar for sprinkling
½ cup blueberries or other fruit

Preheat the oven to 400˚ F. Line a baking sheet with parchment.
Mix together the flour, sugars, baking powder and baking soda.

Cut in the cold butter with a pastry blender.
Mix the heavy cream, egg and vanilla and add to the flour. Mix until uniform.
Add the blueberries, cut up if very large. You can also press blueberries into each scone after you cut them up, and even vary which kind of berry you use. Or even chocolate chips!

Either pat the dough into a circle and cut into wedges as we described earlier, or scoop out dough using a large cookie scoop or ice cream scoop.

Brush each scone with cream and sprinkle with brown sugar.
Bake for 16-18 minutes until browned and a toothpick comes out clean.

Let cool a bit before serving. Serve with lots of butter.

Makes about 15 or 16. They keep well in an air-tight bag or container. Heat them in the microwave for 30 sec before serving the next day.

Why were my scones so flat?

We make scones for breakfast fairly often, because as we showed earlier, you can make them quickly and they are quite delicious.

But, a couple of days ago, we made some of the worst scones we’d ever made.

As you can see, the recent scones were a flat-out disaster. We had used new baking powder and everything, but they were a flop. What had gone wrong?

Well, the immediate suspect was the baking powder. Baking powders sometimes fails because it was stored improperly: in a hot warehouse or truck, for example. Let’s explain how this works here.

Baking soda is just sodium bicarbonate, NaHCo₃. You use it when acidic ingredients such as buttermilk, sourdough or yoghurt are included in the batter. The baking soda will react with any of those acids to release carbon dioxide, CO₂, which causes bubbles that make the dough rise.

Baking powder is sodium bicarbonate mixed with one or more acids in dry crystalline form, such cream of tartar (tartaric acid), monocalcium phosphate, sodium aluminum pyrophosphate, or a couple of others. Double acting baking powders (and most of them now are) contain two acids, one that reacts immediately when liquid is added and one that reacts only when heat is also applies. In all cases, the baking powder also contains cornstarch, to help keep the mixture dry and add bulk to make it easier to measure.

But you can easily test baking powder by putting a couple of teaspoons in a bowl, and adding boiling water. Just microwave a cup of water in a pitcher for a minute or so until it bubbles a bit, and pour it over the baking powder. It should foam up right away as you see below.

But let’s look at that suspect baking powder: no foam at all, it scarcely breathes a word!

In fact, it doesn’t really look at all like the other sample. In fact let’s look at the package:

Oh!

Square biscuits really are better!

Taking a tip from my friend Robert Lortz, I made square (or rectangular) biscuits today.

There are no scraps that you have to re-roll and the biscuits rise higher because you didn’t force them into a biscuit cutter. You just cut the dough with a table knife or sharp knife and move them onto a cookie sheet with a spatula. You can see the results.

My biscuit recipe is slightly different than Lortz’s but it is pretty similar. Rather than shredding the butter, you cut the stick into little slices and blend them into the flour with a pastry blender. The real difference is that you fold the dough into thirds and roll it out three times to make some buttery layers.

Ingredients

2 cups flour
1 Tb baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
1/3 cup cold, unsalted butter (2/3 of a quarter pound stick.)
1 cup plus about 2 Tb buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 450˚ F.
Mix the flour, baking powder, soda and salt in a bowl.
Cut the butter into thin slices and put them all into the flour.
Using a pastry blender, cut the butter into the flour until uniform, but with some small butter lumps remaining.
Add the cup of buttermilk and mix in with a fork. Add a little more buttermilk if all the flour isn’t all incorporated.
Roll out the dough on a floured board or pastry marble.
Fold the dough and thirds and roll it out again three times to form some butter layers in the dough.
Cut the dough rectangle into squares (or rectangles) using a knife.
Then use a spatula to move them to a cookie sheet.
Bake for 10 minutes.

The result is tall, fluffy, buttery biscuits. Enjoy them!

Cheery Ring for Breakfast

Here’s a simple and delicious breakfast coffee cake you can delight Mom or anyone else with. It’s great for Valentines Day, Easter, Mother’s Day or any other special occasion.

It’s a yeast dough that rises twice: once the night before and once during the night. You can also make the rings in the morning in about 2 hours start to finish.

You make it using canned cherries (not cherry pie filling). You can find canned cherries at supermarkets in the aisle with the canned fruits, not with the baking supplies where that horrible canned pie filling is found.

The dough

½ cup milk
1/3 cup shortening
¼ cup sugar
½ cup lukewarm water
1 package yeast (not instant)
½ tsp sugar
1 egg
3-4 cups flour

The filling

1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
1 can red pitted cherries, drained

The icing

½ lb confectioner’s sugar
4 Tb butter
Milk about 3-4 Tb

Place the milk, sugar and shortening in a glass pitcher or bowl and microwave for one minute. The shortening does not need to melt completely.
Place the yeast, water and ½ tsp sugar in another pitcher and stir. Let it sit a few minutes until it’s foamy.
Put the warm milk mixture into the bowl of a food processer and add 1 cup of the flour.
Pulse briefly to mix.
Add the egg and mix.
Add the yeast and mix.
Add 2 more cups of flour, and enough more to make a smooth dough.
Let the dough rise for 60-90 minutes
Melt the butter and combine with the brown sugar and flour.
When the dough has risen, remove it from the food processor and divide it in half.
Roll out each half on a floured board to a 6″ by 18″ rectangle.

Sprinkle half the cherries, half the brown sugar mixture and half the nuts on each rectangle.
Roll the dough into a long tube and place the tube on a greased cookie sheet. Connect the ends and pinch them together to make a ring. Since this makes a round dough ring, you can use a pizza pan for the cookie sheet.
Repeat for the second half of the dough.
Make a series of cuts about 3/4 inch apart going from the outside about 3/4 of the way into the tube.
Take each slice and rotate it about 90 degrees, lifting and twisting it with your knife, so the cherry mixture is horizontal.
Cover the pan containing each ring with aluminum foil (sprayed with a little cooking spray) and cover both wrapped rings with a damp towel.
Allow them to rise in a cool place such as a basement or garage overnight. If you allow them to rise in the refrigerator, make sure they are tightly wrapped. In that case you may have to let them rise a bit more outside the refrigerator in the morning.
Before you go to bed, wash out the food processor so you can use it to make the icing in the morning.
In the morning, preheat the oven to 375 F.
Uncover the rings and bake them for about 15 minutes, until brown.

Ice with butter cream icing and serve warm.

Buttercream icing

Place the confectioners sugar and the butter in a clean food processor bowl and pulse until uniform. Add the milk, a little at a time until the icing is a smooth, spreadable mixture.

We try donuts made with Greek yogurt

Bon Appetit recently published a delicious recipe for cake donuts made with Greek yogurt, which they called “yonuts.” The yogurt gives them just a little tang, and they are quite simple to make. You can probably have warm donuts for breakfast in about half an hour.

So, their recipe is

2 ½ tsp baking powder
2 cups flour
1 tsp kosher salt
2 large egg yolks
1 cup Greek yogurt
½ cup granulated sugar
2 Tb melted unsalted butter, cooled
1 tsp vanilla extract
5-6 cups vegetable oil for frying (peanut or canola)
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
Pinch of salt
Zest from ¼ lemon
¼ cup water (or less)

Mix the dry ingredients in one bowl
Mix the egg yolks, yogurt, melted butter together with a whisk
Mix in the granulated sugar and vanilla extract.
Slowly add the flower mixture and mix with a whisk, or eventually a wooden spoon. The batter will be a bit stiff.
Roll out the batter on a flour board or floured parchment. You may need to flour the top side, too.

Cut out the donuts using a donut cutter, or a circular cookie cutter. In the latter case, we found you could dig out the donut hole with a cookie scoop. Dust off any excess flour before frying.
Heat the oil to 350˚ F (use a thermometer) and cook the donuts 3-4 at a time. BA suggests 2 minutes per side, but we found that a bit too long. We recommend 1 to 1 ½ minutes per side. Turn them when they are brown.
Drain the donuts on a wire rack until cool.
Meanwhile, mix the powdered sugar with water until it is thin enough to dip the donuts in, but don’t overdo it. Mix in some zest from ¼ lemon.

Dip both sides of each donut in the icing and let them dry briefly. Eat at once.

We ate them as soon as we could. This recipe makes 9-10 donuts. They are still pretty good the second day. You should probably rewarm them in the microwave for 15 seconds or so.

Rustic Bread: Great bread with almost no work!

I am grateful to Bob Scrofani for pointing out this simple bread recipe published on YouTube as Rustic Bread by “Flavors of Spain in the Southwest.” This is an experience report on how I did it and how you can, too.

The recipe is embedded in the video and in the comments, and it assumes you have a kitchen scale. There are hundreds of reasons to have one around, but I give the U.S. measure equivalents as well. The recipe uses all-purpose flour, and I use King Arthur for this. The cup/weight equivalent may vary for other flours.

This recipe takes very little work, but a bit of time, include 4 episodes of folding, 20 minutes apart. and a slow 12 hour rise.

1000 g all purpose flour (7 ¾ cups)
20 g salt (1 Tb plus ¼ tsp)
1/8 tsp yeast (they suggest 1 g, but yeast particles vary a lot between vendors)
780 ml water (26 oz) at 80˚
A plastic storage container (with lid) that holds at least 12 cups.

You will also need either a 4 qt cast iron Dutch oven or an equivalent casserole dish. We used a 2.5 quart Corningware casserole dish, and it was plenty big enough. Our storage container held 21 cups, and the dough never rose more than halfway inside the container.

Weigh out the flour in the storage container, and add the salt, yeast and water. Mix with your gloved hand. You can try a wooden spoon, but it doesn’t pick up the flour along the bottom as well. Mix until all the dough is cohesive. Cover for 20 minutes.

2. After 20 minutes, you can begin folding the dough over itself inside the container until it is together in the middle. Try to stretch it each time you pick up a corner. You can do this best with a moistened hand. Cover for another 20 minutes.

3. Repeat folding after 20 minutes

4. Repeat folding the 4^th time after another 20 minutes.

5. Cover and allow to proof/rise for 12 hours. If you can’t bake it at that time, refrigerate the dough, covered until you can.

6. When you are ready to begin baking, put the casserole or Dutch oven into a 475˚ F oven to heat.

7. Turn out the dough on flour board and divide it into two. Fold and stretch each one into a ball, and put each ball in a bowl and cover it with plastic wrap or a plastic bag and let it rise for an hour.

8. Remove one dough ball and flour it. Take out the baking dish and cover. Lay one dough ball into the disk, cover it and put immediately into the oven.

9. Bake covered for 30 minutes. Uncover and bake 10 more minutes.

10. Remove the bread to a cooling rack. Make sure it is done by tapping on the bottom. You should hear a hollow sound. Be sure to let the dough cool at least 30 minutes.

11. Reheat the baking dish and cover in the oven and bake the second loaf the same way.

Even after all this baking and cooling, it is possible that the bread may be slightly damp. I suggest you slice it half an hour ahead of dinner to make sure the slices dry out.

If you have left-over bread, you can make it into very good toast. In fact, you can slice the whole loaf, freezing the slices and take out a few for toast any time you want.

Simple chocolate cake (black and white)

This basic chocolate cake recipe has been around for years. Our simplifications are in using a scale and chilling the icing skim coat. As we have said before, you really don’t need to sift and measure the cake flour: just weigh it. And before you start mixing up the batter, weigh the mixing bowl. This will make it easier to divide the batter into two pans.

The cake

2 8-inch round cake pans
buttered parchment paper
3 1-oz squares baking chocolate (unsweetened)
2/3 cup sugar
½ cup milk
1 beaten egg
½ cup shortening (or unsalted butter)
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
2 cups sifted cake flour (224 g)
1 tsp baking soda
¼ tsp salt
2/3 cup milk

Preheat the oven to 350˚ F
Butter the cake pans and line them with parchment as we show here. Butter the tops of the parchment, too.

Put the chocolate, 2/3 cup sugar, ½ cup milk and beaten egg in a saucepan. Cook slowly over medium heat until the mixture thickens and the chocolate melts. Set aside to cool.
Put the shortening in a mixing bowl and stir to soften. Beat in the 1 cup sugar. Add the 2 eggs one at a time and beat until light and fluffy. Add the vanilla.

Weigh out the flour and add the soda and salt and stir briefly.
Add the flour mixture to the creamed mixture, alternating with the 2/3 cup milk.
Blend in the chocolate mixture.
Weigh the mixing bowl and the batter, subtract the weight of the empty mixing bowl, and divide by two.

Put one cake pan on the scale, set the tare to zero and add half the weight of the batter. IN our case the total batter weight 1146 g, so we put slightly under 573g in each cake pan. (Some batter will stick to the sides and the spoon, so allow for that. We went for about 560 g each.)
Bake in the 350˚ F oven for 25-30 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean.
Let the pans cool on the stove or on a rack, and then release the cakes from the pans and let them cool.

Simple buttercream icing

2 lb confectioners sugar
½ pound (2 sticks) butter
2-3 Tb milk
1 tsp vanilla
2 squares unsweetened chocolate

Place the powdered sugar in a food processor
Add the butter cut into 1 Tb pieces
Pulse until smooth
Add enough milk to mix until smooth and spreadable
Add the vanilla
Take out about a quarter of the icing to a separate bowl
Melt the unsweetened chocolate at 50% power in a microwave for 1-2 minutes
Mix the chocolate into the quarter of the icing.
Place one cake layer on the cake pan or on a cake spinner platform.
Ice the top of that layer with the chocolate icing.
If the top layer is flared out, trim it with a knife do the sides are straight, and set it on top of the chocolate icing.
Mix about 2 Tb of icing with about ¼ cup milk until uniform. This is the icing wash for the skim coat.

Spread the skim coat on the top and sides of the cake and chill it in the refrigerator for half an hour. This will make a smooth surface to ice that won’t crumble when you spread the white icing.
After the cake is chilled, spread the white icing on the top and sides of the cake, using a spatula to make the sides smooth.
Return the cake to the refrigerator while you make the ganache.

Chocolate ganache

2 oz semisweet chocolate chips
2 oz bittersweet chocolate (or use a little less baking chocolate and some semisweet)
½ cup heavy cream
½ Tb honey
¼ tsp coarse salt
1 tsp vanilla

Put all the chocolate in a heatproof bowl
Combine the cream, honey and salt in a saucepan.
Bring the cream to a boil, and pour over the chocolate.
Place the ganache in the refrigerator until it begins to firm up. If it gets too firm, you can remelt it in the microwave and start the chill again.
When the ganache is still just pourable, dribble or pour it over the chilled cake to make any pattern you like.
Serve with raspberries or strawberries.

Buttermilk biscuits in 4 minutes

I made this article and movie to show that if you can make buttermilk biscuits from scratch in 4 minutes, there is no reason to resort to mixes or refrigerated (oy!) dough. The recipe is just

2 cups flour
1 Tb baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
1/3 cup unsalted butter
1 cup plus 2 Tb buttermilk

Here’s the whole movie:

And after baking 10 minutes at 450 F, you have hot, tender, layered biscuits.

It’s that simple.

German chocolate cake you’ll love

This fairly easy recipe is a simplification of the one on the Bakers German Chocolate bar. We show you a few shortcuts. Some people make this light cake and just decorate it with the coconut-pecan topping. We do that but ice the sides with chocolate buttercream icing to hold it all together.

4 egg whites
4 oz German Sweet Chocolate
½ cup water
1 cup (2 sticks, 8 oz) softened unsalted butter
2 cups sugar
4 egg yolks
1 tsp vanilla
280 g cake flour (2 ½ cups sifted)
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
1 cup buttermilk
3 lined 8” cake pans

Preheat the oven to 350˚ F
Beat the egg whites in your mixer until stiff. Remove to another bowl until needed.

3. Cream the butter and sugar in an electric mixer

4. Add the egg yolks one at a time, beating after each addition.

5. Put the chocolate in a bowl with the water and heat in a microwave for about 90 seconds until melted. Stir until uniform.

6. Add the vanilla to the sugar-butter mixture and beat in the chocolate.

7. You don’t really need to sift and measure the flour, as we described in this article. One cup of sifted cake flour weights 112g, so just weigh 280 grams (which is 2 1/2 cups sifted) into a bowl and add the soda and salt. Stir briefly to mix.

8. Add the flour mixture alternately with the buttermilk.

9. Fold in the egg whites by mixing in ¼ of them and then folding the rest in using a rubber spatula, dipping a turning the blade to mix in the whites without deflating them.

10. Line the 3 cake pans with parchment using the technique we described here. Butter the pans and the parchment.

11. You now need to separate the batter into 3 equal parts. We do this by weight. The stand mixer bowl and contents weighed 3606g, and we know the empty bowl weights 1014g, so the contents weighed 1578g. Thus, we need to put 526g of batter in each of the 3 cake pans. We put each cake pan on the scale, press the tare button to zero it, and add 526g of batter. The third pan is always a little short because some batter sticks to the sides and to the spatula. So we steal a little from each of the other two pans to make them about even. It is still easier than eyeballing it!

12. Bake the cake in the pans for 30-35 minutes, until the cake starts to pull away from the edge, and a toothpick comes out clean.

13. Let the cakes cool on a cooling rack, and then take the cakes out of the pans and let them cool completely.

Cake Filling

8 oz evaporated milk (This is 1 1/3 6 oz cans)
1 cup sugar
3 beaten egg yolks
½ cup butter (1 stick) cut up
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/3 cup sweetened, shredded coconut
1 cup chopped pecans

Combine the evaporated milk, sugar, egg yolks, butter and vanilla in a saucepan. Cook and stir over medium heat until thickened. Stir constantly to avoid burning.
Allow the liquid to come to a slow boil but keep stirring to avoid sticking.
Remove from heat and add the coconut and pecans.
Chill in the refrigerator until cool enough to spread.

Buttercream frosting

2 lb confectioners sugar
2 sticks (8 oz) butter, cut up
¼ cup milk (approximately)
3 oz baking chocolate

Combine the sugar and butter in a food processor and pulse until mixed.
Add the milk until spreadable
Melt the chocolate in the microwave for about 1.5 minutes at 50% power. Stir until uniform and then add to the buttercream mixture and pulse until uniform. This will make more frosting than you need, but you will use about ¾ of it.

Assembling the cake

It is easiest to ice the cake on a little rotating cake platform, but if you do, be sure to start with a cake cardboard under cake, as the layers are delicate and won’t pick up easily to move to a cake cover later.

Place one solid layer on the bottom and carefully ice it with the filling. If the filling is too cold to spread, warm it for 15 sec on the microwave.
Place a second layer on top and ice it either with the chocolate buttercream frosting or with the filling. You will have plenty of both. Place the third layer on top and ice the top with the filling.
If any of the sides protrude, trim them off so the sides are relatively uniform. Ice the sides with the chocolate buttercream, using a spatula dipped in milk to smooth the outside of the cake. Let it dry for half an hour before serving.

A quick way to line cake pans

Most cake recipes suggest you line the bottom of your cake pans with waxed paper (old school) or baking parchment (new school). Well tracing and cutting out those circles for 2 or 3 cake pans is a lot of trouble. Here’s an easier way.

Cut a square of baking parchment, a bit bigger than you cake pan. For 8” cakes, cut a 9” or 10” square. It doesn’t have to be very accurate or even square: a rectangle will do just fine. We’ll cut off the excess as we go along.

Fold the square diagonally so that the left edge meets the top edge. This establishes that square. Any left on the bottom will be cut off.

Fold that triangle in half down the middle.

Then, keep folding down the middle until you have a little pointed triangle.

Lay that triangle on the bottom of the cake pan with the point at the center, and cut off the triangle at the edge of the pan.

Then, unfold it. It should be a circle that will just fit in your cake pan. If it is a little big, just refold it and cut off a little more.

Then, butter the pan, lay the liner inside, and butter it, too. That’s really easy. I did all 3 cake pans in about a minute! See the top picture for all three!