The Brooklyn Baker!

Well folks, this is it. The last week of my year-long baking project. I made this cake on January 10th, I believe, ten days later than I should have. I attempted to make Chocolate Covered Hi Hats for New Year’s Eve, but the cupcakes imploded in the oven and I just didn’t have it in me that night to try again. So I accepted that things happen, and plotted something to make a few days late.

Rob and I were watching America’s Test Kitchen one day, and they made the most incredible looking Triple Chocolate Mousse cake. I started scouting around online to see if I could find the recipe, but those Test Kitchen/Cooks Illustrated fans are an ethical bunch. No one had the recipe listed, but I noticed that someone mentioned it was in the November issue of Cooks Illustrated magazine. Sure enough, I had that issue on my shelf. And there was the recipe.

And so, ten days late, I began my final week of baking for the year.

The recipe started with a flourless chocolate cake base in the bottom of a springform pan. The cake layer baked beautifully, other than the fact that it started pulling away from the side of the pan. I noticed commentors on the America’s Test Kitchen message board had this same problem, but I have no idea how one would fix it. Someone mentioned not greasing the pan before pouring in the batter, but I would be terrified that the cake would stick. I just went with it.

Flourless chocolate cake batter:

Baked:

The next layer that went down was a dark chocolate mousse layer. Heavenly:

The final layer was a white chocolate mousse layer that used gelatin as a stabilizer (I’ve really discovered the power of gelatin this year):

I topped it with some dark chocolate shavings because it looked kind of naked with nothing on top. After I refrigerated the cake for a few hours, we took it out, crossed our fingers and unmolded the cake.

It worked!!!

You’ll note that my layers aren’t as distinct as they should be. That’s because the dark chocolate mousse layer seeped down into the area where the flourless chocolate cake pulled away from the side of the pan. But once we cut some slices, the layers became more distinct:

This cake was pretty fantastic. The only problem was that it was so rich, we couldn’t eat much of it. Tragically, half the cake had to be thrown out after a day or two because we just couldn’t keep eating it. But I hope to make it again in the future and take it to an event or family gathering so it can get the proper respect it deserves!

So that’s it! 52 weeks, a little more than 52 baked goods. A few failures, a few standout favorites and a lot of money spent on ingredients, cookbooks and toys. I can’t even put into words how proud of myself I am that I finished this project. The fact that I learned some new techniques, discovered my love of Christopher Kimball and Co. and made croissants from scratch are just the tip of the iceberg; I finished a project that I started! So so amazing.

Now that we’re a month into 2010, I’ve been thinking about what I want to do now. I’m going to take a break from weekly baking. While I enjoyed almost every minute of it, it can be exhausting. But I’ve already baked a few things this year for birthdays, so I don’t think I can stay away for long. Baking has gotten into me and I don’t think it’ll leave any time soon.

I hope by the end of February to launch a new blog that will feature not only things I’ve baked, but reviews of bakeries and cookery stores in my new city, baking news and baking-related events I’ve attended or wish that I could attend (I’ve managed to attend a book signing by Jen Yates of Cake Wrecks fame and Christopher Kimball and Jack Bishop of Cooks Illustrated/Cooks Country/America’s Test Kitchen fame (eeeeeeeee!) ). I’ve already got a website on hold, but I won’t mention the address yet, as I want everything in place before I unveil it.

I want to thank everyone who supported me during this year, especially my husband, who acted as taste-tester, ingredient-fetcher and shoulder to cry on when things didn’t go so well. I love you.

Despite the fact that it will be February in one hour, rest assured that my project has been completed. I’ve just been a little too lazy in posting my final two weeks.

On Christmas Eve, I baked a Grasshopper Pie to take to my sister-in-law’s Christmas Eve party. I referred to this as Booze Pie while I was baking it, because it contained a lot of booze. I had to visit two liquor stores in lovely Park Slope to procure the green Creme de Menthe and clear Creme de Cacao (which both made an appearance at our New Year’s Eve party when my husband and his friend made Ginger Mint Surprises and Cacao Zeroes (don’t ask).)

This recipe started with a Mint Oreo cookie crust that was made up of crushed Mint Oreos and butter. Delicious.

The filling was comprised of the aforementioned booze and not much else. Some gelatin and whipped cream were involved to both stabilize and lighten the filling:

The filling went into the pie crust, which was then refrigerated overnight:

The filling tasted incredibly alcoholic the night it was made, but mellowed out the next day. It came out deliciously minty with a nice chocolately finish from the crust. The party guests seemed to enjoy it.

The next post will be my last! I can hardly believe it.

For the past six years, I’ve known Christmas is near just by opening my refrigerator. While I’m not looking, my husband will sneak a carton of eggnog into our grocery cart every week. And he’s the only one in our house who drinks it.

Yes, readers, I am a nog hater.

The running joke (which is actually 100% true) is that the very idea of eggnog is enough to engage my gag reflex. Have you ever looked at the ingredients in eggnog? There are uncooked eggs is that stuff! It probably doesn’t help that I don’t like milk either. There are just way too many things going on in eggnog that I do not like.

But baking with it? Count me in! It seems like the perfect baking ingredient. So I knew I’d have to find an eggnog cupcake recipe somewhere…and I found it at How to Eat a Cupcake!

The culprits:

The recipe was pretty straightforward, and included a nice douse of rum (because if you’re going to drink eggnog, it should probably be alcoholic…) and cinnamon. The batter tasted yummy:

And I even found somewhat holiday-ish cupcake papers!

The batter went into the cupcake tins:

And when they came out, I frosted them with Cinnamon Rum Frosting (the same frosting I used for my Pumpkin Spice Cupcakes at Halloween). I dusted the tops with a little cinnamon:

Very pretty. I had one of these cupcakes right after I baked them, and thought it was okay. Not spectacular. It seemed a little dry. But I put them in the refrigerator and hoped for the best. I don’t know what happened in that refrigerator, but the next day these cupcakes were ah-mazing. They looked amazing, they smelled amazing and they tasted amazing. A few of my co-workers said this cupcake edged out the Tarte Tatin with Carmelized Apple Cupcake as their favorite. One of the account executives took a cupcake and sniffed it experimentally, then looked at me in amazement and said, “It smells like a Yankee Candle!”

It’s that frosting, I tell ya’. That frosting could save a burnt-black cookie.

Two more weeks, two more weeks, eek! This week I’m baking a Grasshopper Pie for my sister-in-law’s Christmas Eve party. And I still haven’t made a decision on the final project. I’ve got two ideas in mind, but both could prove to be beyond my budget. I’ll have to put some more thought into it. I feel like it needs to be something spectacular, seeing as how it’s The End!!!

Oh, Martha, is there anything you can’t do?

I knew I had to make gingerbread cookies at some point this holiday season, and when I quizzed a couple of my co-workers on what kind of treat they’d like me to bake, they immediately said gingerbread cookies. Who am I to deny my fans?

Martha’s recipe is a little bit different from most gingerbread cookie recipes, in that it incorporates fresh ginger into the cookies. The recipe is incredibly simple to put together, although I found it took some convincing to get the dough out of my mixing bowl and onto a sheet of parchment without crumbling into bits. I had to manhandle it a little bit to get it rolled into a ball.

Martha recommends chilling the dough in the fridge for at least an hour before rolling it out, which I agree with. But then she gets a little crazy. She suggest you roll out the dough onto a cookie sheet, then freeze it for 15 minutes before cutting out the shapes, and then putting the shapes on another cookie sheet and freezing THOSE for 15 minutes before baking. I don’t know about all that. My dough never really got too soft, and after I froze the first sheet of rolled out dough for fifteen minutes, I couldn’t get a cookie cutter through it for about ten, which seemed to me like it canceled out the freezing…but whatevs. I’m sure Martha had a reason for all the freezing. I just found it unnecessary.

Once my cookies were baked and cooled, I went to work trying to make Royal Icing once again. If you’ll remember, back on Father’s Day, I tried to make Royal Icing for the hammer and saw cookies I made for my dad, with disastrous results. This time, it went a little better. My icing was still a little too runny, and no amount of powdered sugar could get it to the consistency I wanted. As you’ll see in the photos of the finished cookies, my icing didn’t spread too much, but it still wasn’t perfect. I’ll keep trying in 2010.

Unfortunately, once again, I took zero photos of the production process of these cookies. But here are a few of my favorite finished cookies:

Gingerbread Man wearing a diaper (or briefs, you decide)

Gingerbread Christmas Tree

Gingerbread Star

Gingerbread Cyclops with Claws

Whew! I’m caught up again! Only three more weeks in this project..it’s crazy to think that I’ve actually stuck it out and can see the finish line just around the corner.

Thanksgiving! The second best holiday of the year (Christmas is number one, of course, and Halloween is probably third). My Thanksgiving this year was different from all my past ones; instead of watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV, I got to see it in person!

Also, my mom came out to visit from Ohio! This was also a pretty big deal, as my mom has never been to New York City before. We took her around to all the tourist traps and posed for pictures with the Naked Cowboy. Much fun was had.

My darling husband insisted that I make some kind of crazy cranberry sauce this year, so I scoured the Internet for recipes. I found one that combined cranberries with pears, sugar and honey and seemed easy enough to figure out. It actually turned out quite lovely. I’m not a cranberry sauce fan, but even I put a little on my turkey this year:

My main project though was a Pumpkin Pie. My husband’s family is all about traditions at holiday events, so when I told Rob I wanted to mix things up a little bit and make a Pumpkin Chiffon Pie, he was beyond nervous. He was so afraid that the pie would be some radical experiment. But it wasn’t! I followed the recipe from How To Eat a Cupcake, and it turned out great! The only problem I had was that my pre-baked pie crust slid down the pie pan on one side a little…not enough to ruin the pie, but enough to ruin the aesthetic.
What makes this pie a little different is that it incorporates gelatin and whipped egg whites in with the traditional pumpkin filling. It makes for an incredibly light pie. I like pumpkin pie well enough, but after one piece I’m usually done until the next Thanksgiving. I could have eaten two or three slices of this one.
Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures of the pie-making process, as I was really busy putting it and the cranberry sauce together the night before Thanksgiving (we had to be up at 5 a.m. Thanksgiving morning to get to the parade route in time). But here’s the finished product, which went over very well:

The recipe started with a really thick batter. It definitely did not have the consistency of a chocolate chip cookie dough, but it was thicker than a cake batter:

The batter went down on cookie sheets and, as I learned from the Iced Pumpkin Cookies, I put it down in exactly the way I wanted the cookies to turn out, as pumpkin cookies don’t spread much:

They baked up into beautiful golden cookies that were slightly springy and moist:

The filling for the middle was made of Crisco and sugar and a few other things and was delicious. I spread a thick layer on half the cookies, and then sandwiched another cookie on top:

The cookies were a big hit. Brian and Alison both loved them, and their kids worked on those cookies for the better part of ten minutes (they were pretty big cookies), licking up every crumb. I’m so happy that they enjoyed them, because I was living in fear that they’d take one bite and then spit it out.

Kid-tested, mother (somewhat) approved (the kids did run around like crazy people after all the sugar!).

Wowwww, I have been M.I.A. for some time. Sorry about that. I plan to rectify it in the next couple of days. I’ve only got a few more weeks of baking, and I need to get the blog caught up before the baking ends!

On the first full weekend of November, Rob’s sister and her boyfriend came over for dinner. We had falafel and a Free Form Apple Tart for dessert. The falafel was good, but the tart was better.

The recipe began with making a crust in the food processor:

The dough was then chilled and then rolled out in a (rough approximation) of a circle:

The next step was to layer apple slices in a circle on the dough in what I would describe as a snow-fort pattern. My first attempt was a little too tall and a little too narrow:

The next try was much better. Once the apples were down, the dough was folded over itself and then gathered around the edges:

The whole shebang was placed on a rimmed baking sheet and baked for about an hour:

Apparently the big thing with these Form Form Tarts is that they tend to leak. That’s why it’s so important to leave about two inches of the dough uncovered with apples to fold over; it acts as a barrier. I’m proud to say that my tart did not leak. And it was delicious. And even better sliced up with homemade whipped cream on top. I plan to make this again sometime soon. It was a lot of work peeling and slicing the apples, but overall fairly easy.

For Halloween, I wanted to bake something that would invoke childhood. Halloween, no matter how old you are, is always about dressing up and candy. And when you’re older, booze. So when I saw the Chocolate Malt Cupcake in Gail Wagman’s cookbook, I knew I had to give it a try.

The recipe started off with an incredibly light cupcake batter that included Ovaltine. (“Be…sure…to…drink…your…Ovaltine? A crummy commercial?”). This batter is so light that it’s scary. It seems more like frosting than batter. Getting it into the cupcake tins was kind of a nightmare:

They baked up fine, if a little fragile. Light cupcakes require a really light hand, which I sometimes don’t have. It’s why I like heartier fare:

The recipe included crushed Whoppers candy in the batter, which I wasn’t a fan of. I feel like the Ovaltine got the malt aspect across just fine. The other weird thing was that the cupcake papers started pulling away from the cupcakes! I think it’s because the batter was so light that it didn’t even stick to the papers. Weird.

The frosting was much easier. And tasty!!! Chocolate malt is actually a pretty good flavor when it’s not on the inside of a Whopper and all crunchy:

To make these the ultimate in Halloween cupcakes, I had to top them with candy! I picked up some miniature candy bars at the grocery store and topped each cupcake with a candy:

These went over very well at work. I carried them around to different offices and forced people to say, “Trick or treat.”

I also made some Pumpkin Spice Cupcakes with Cinnamon Rum Frosting (Danae over at The Busty Baker gave me the recipe for that delicious, delicious frosting) to take to my sister-in-law’s Halloween Party. They were also a success, but I neglected to take photos of the process. This is all I’ve got:

(I ran out of frosting for those last two cupcakes, so they just got some powdered sugar.)

Next up, a Free Form Apple Tart!

I’m sooo behind! Eek! My job’s kept me really busy (I started daytime hours, so while I have a more normal schedule, it also means I have more time to read, watch TV or play video games rather than update my blog). But fear not, I haven’t missed a week of baking.

A few weeks ago, I made Apple Tarte Tatin Cupcakes. This is another cheater post, as I made these earlier this year to take on TV with me when Carmen Owens and I pimped CupcakeCampColumbus on a morning show. But these cupcakes didn’t really get their due, and I think they’re pretty fantastic, so here they are again!

The cake part of this cupcake is a pretty straightforward brown sugar cake:

The cool part comes with the apples:

The apples are sliced into 16 pieces and then fried in butter in a skillet. Tip: Make sure you get firm apples. I think I got Braeburns or something, but they started falling apart as soon as they hit the pan. I managed to salvage enough for the cupcakes, but it was a pain!

Once the apples had caramelized with butter and sugar, they were placed on top of the cooled cupcakes:

Meanwhile, I whipped up some caramel to drizzle over the apples. This caramel never quite thins out the way I think it should…it stays very thick and starts to harden as soon as it’s removed from the heat. But it tastes amazing:

My coworkers really enjoyed these cupcakes. The general opinion is that these are the best thing I’ve brought in so far.

Next up, Chocolate Malt Cupcakes for Halloween (posted just a few weeks too late!)