The Home Made Danish Project

Did you know that a standard danish has 243 layers?

That’s right ladies and gentlemen. 273 layers of delicious dense and chewy yet still light and fluffy puffiness that comes from 5 single turns.

Today I put myself to the challenge of making some danishes. (Or rather, one huge danish that I wasn’t expecting to get so huge.)

The process itself is fairly easy and fun. The dough was easy to work with and it tastes pretty frigging good if I may say so myself.

I started the morning by measuring all the ingredients and putting them in the fridge to get cold. Including the flour, but not the yeast.

Then I dissolved the yeast in the cold liquid. Oh you bet you read that right! In the COLD liquid. Not warm. Cold. Ever had someone tell you yeast won’t rise in cold liquid? They were lying to you. It will, it just takes longer than if it were in warm liquid.

Then I mixed everything together until I had a nice soft sticky dough. I put the margarine block inside. Another weird thing, margarine. You might be wondering why margarine is used instead of butter, and I wondered that too. Until I read the little blurb in the book* I was using that says: “margarine is used for this dough because it produces a lighter and flakier texture than butter. Also, because the fat and the dough need to be at the same consistency to give the best layered structure and margarine has a higher melting point than butter, margarine is preferable with such a soft dough.”

*The book, I think I may have mentioned before, is The Professional Pastry Chef by Bo Friberg Fundamentals of Baking and Pastry, 4th edition. I love this book SO SO SO much. I have never been disappointed by a recipe and there isn’t any useless part of this book. I have read every page of information and learned so much. It’s definitely worth the money.

If you have wanted to make your own danish or danishes, don’t be afraid! It’s fairly easy and will turn out wonderfully if you follow the recipe (:

Here is the recipe I used (small batch, because I didn’t need 12 pounds and 8 ounces of dough!)

Danish Pastry Dough: small batch (From The Professional Pastry Chef)

1 1/3 cups of cold whole milk
3 large eggs
1 pound and 6 ounces of margarine  (I used a store brand of hard margarine. The ones that are packaged like butter.)
1 ounce of active dry yeast OR 2 ounces of fresh compressed yeast
2 ounces of sugar
1 teaspoon of salt (adjust accordingly to the salt content of your margarine. If it’s high in sodium, lessen it to 1/2 or 1.4 tsp. You can even eliminate it all together if you are worried about a salty dough. I left the salt in and found no adverse affects.)
1 tsp cardamom (I left this out mainly because I absolutely despise cardamom)
1 pound and 6 ounces of bread flour

• Mix the milk and the eggs, then refrigerate the mixture, and the flour, for at least 1 hour before making the dough.
• Shape the cold margarine into a 5 inch block and place in the refrigerator until needed.
• Dissolve the yeast in the milk and egg mixture. Use your hand to speed this up since yeast dissolves slowly in cold liquid. Stir in the sugar, salt and cardamom. Reserve a handfull of the flour and mix the rest in until a soft sticky dough is made, using the reserved flour as needed.
• Place the dough on a floured table and shape it into a 7 inch square. Place the butter block on it diagonally so you see 4 dough triangles are showing. Fold in the triangles toward the centre and seal in the margarine.
• Roll the dough as carefully and evenly as possible into a rectangle measuring 12″x8″. Use as much flour as you need to prevent sticking.
• Give the dough a single turn (fold it like a letter. one third into the middle, and the last third on top of that) Cover and place in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.
• Roll the dough to the same size and give it three additional single turns, resting the dough for 30 minutes in the fridge between each turn.
• Roll the dough out to about 1/2″ thick, cover with plastic wrap and place in the fridge for about 30 minutes.
• Do whatever you want with the dough! Read below to find out what I did with mine.

Cherry Danish

• Roll the danish dough to about the size of a half sheet pan. (rolling on the actual the pan lined with a silpat is easiest.)
• Cut 1/4″ strips about the length of your middle finger all down the long sides of the dough.
• Spread your filling in the middle but don’t get too close to the ends or sides.
• Bring up the cut strips into the middle so that the strips from opposite sides are overlapping, locking them in place and are sort of hiding the cherry filling.
• Sprinkle with coarse sugar, and bake in a preheated 375 degree oven for 35-40 minutes, turning the sheet around halfway through baking.
  
• When the pastry is done, take it out of the oven and brush with with simple syrup all over.
• Then drizzle on a simple icing made of icing sugar and water and some flavourings. Almond and vanilla work well with cherry (:
• Eat it and enjoy it!!!
  

Wedding Cake

Phew! It’s been a few days since the wedding, but all went well. Very well. Very, very well. And I’m sad that it’s all over. I can’t help but think when the next time I will get to do something so fun again.

I spent 2 days on the cake. The wedding was this passed saturday, the 14th of November. I started working on it the thursday before.

What I made (with the help of my dear mother!) was 3 cakes, tiered separately.

A 16″, a 12″, and an 8″. The 16 was a dummy cake because they didn’t need that much cake for the wedding. The 12″ was the tiramisu cake. What I actually ended up making was DELICIOUS. It went like this:
-vanilla cake on the bottom brushed with a soaking syrup made of bailey’s caramel+disarono+espresso
-mascarpone filling
-chocolate cake
-more mascarpone filling
-another layer of syrup soaked vanilla cake

then I covered the cake with a french buttercream. That was then covered in fondant. It was absolutely divine! I even had many compliments that my cake was better than the various cakes served as dessert after dinner. That made me very happy and more confident in myself as a baker. If you want the recipe, feel free to leave a comment with your e-mail address and I will gladly send it to you (:

The 8″ cake, which I unfortunately didn’t get a picture of it until it was covered in fondant, was the one I wanted to eat but didn’t get to. It was a lemon poppyseed cake, soaked with a lemon syrup and filled with a french buttercream+lemon curd mixture. Then covered with french buttercream and fondant. You can see it all finished on the top of the first picture. I didn’t get to taste it all together, but the individual components of the cake were super delish!

Making this cake was an absolute blast. It was so much fun and a good learning experience for me. I’m so glad I did it and I would happily do it again in the future!
Enjoy!

Banana Muffins

I’ve somewhat neglected this blog for a few days. I am bored of the usual wordpress layouts and I was trying out squarespace. I like it. I really do. But I can’t see myself paying $96 a year for a blog when I don’t know how I’m going to buy myself food to eat while I’m in school. I just can’t. So back to the ugly wordpress themes! I’m still trying to find one I like. You might see some changes every once in a while. Just bare with me!

I love bananas. I love everything about them. The texture, the taste, the smell. Love it. And I pretty much love almost everything that comes from bananas, including that fake banana flavoured medicine your mom made you take as a kid. I liked it. Wait, no, I loved it.

I haven’t made these muffins for a while because I haven’t had an abundance of bananas in the house. But I noticed that today I did! And so with a quiet empty house, apron on and spatula in hand, banana muffins I made.

I think I like this recipe more than any other because of how much banana is incorporated into the batter. Usually I come across recipes that only require one or two banans. And this one uses four. Four delicious over-ripe bananas. And it uses pecans rather than walnuts, which I love. I find walnuts a little too bitter sometimes for banana muffins. I like them in banana bread, but not muffins. And yes, there is a difference.  I also made a quick cream cheese frosting to top them off. So yummy! So without further ado, here is the recipe

Amazing Banana Muffins (from Tyler Florence)
Makes 18 delicious muffins

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

4 overripe bananas

1 cup brown sugar

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted and cooled

2 eggs

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1/2 cup pecans, chopped

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F and lightly butter 2 muffin tins.

In a large bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, and salt; set aside. Mash 2 of the bananas with a fork in a small bowl so they still have a bit of texture. With an electric mixer fitted with a wire whisk, whip the remaining bananas and sugar together like you mean it, for a good 3 minutes. Add the melted butter, eggs, and vanilla and beat well, scraping down the sides of the bowl once or twice. Mix in the dry ingredients just until incorporated. Fold in the nuts and the mashed bananas with a rubber spatula. Spoon the batter into the muffin tins to fill them about halfway. Give them a rap on the counter to get any air bubbles out.

Bake until a toothpick stuck in the muffins comes out clean, 18 to 20 minutes. Let cool for a few minutes before turning the muffins out. Serve warm or at room temperature.

And that’s that! I find that if you keep them in an air-tight container after they are cooled, they get these really moist sticky delicious tops to them. And I love that.

Enjoy!

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Okay, so call me crazy.

Halloween is barely over and I’ve already started listening to Christmas music and thinking of menu ideas.

I can’t help it! Christmas is my absolute hands-down favourite time of the year. Not because of the presents, not because of any of the “commercialized stuff”, but because of these 5 things:

1. Snow. I effing love it. Can’t get enough of it.
2. Decorations. Everything looks so pretty with all the lights and garlands and ornaments.
3. Getting together with all sorts of people.  Especially people you maybe don’t see so often. I love it!
4. Getting to snuggle up on a cold night in a big blanket drinking hot chocolate while watching Christmas movies.
5. FOOD! Who doesn’t love the food aspect of Christmas.

Christmas just makes me so happy. There is no other time of year when I am happier or in a better mood. I busted out the ol’ classic Christmas tunes today and guess what? No really, guess! IT SNOWED! Seriously man, it snowed like crazy. Maybe it was just for 2 minutes, but it snowed none the less. And it got me all shivery inside with excitement and happiness and wonderful feelings. So that’s when I got down to the business of starting to plan the menus. This is something I do every year and it brings me so much joy! And then when I finally start making all the things I planned it’s sort of a bitter-sweet ordeal. I get to make the delicious wonderful things and then eat them, but it also means that it’s either super close to Christmas day or already is. And that makes me happy and sad at the same time because I know that it means that the next day it will all be over and time to take down all the decorations! So sad.

But this year it also means something else bitter-sweet. After new years I will be leaving home and heading to school. Sure it’s only 5 hours away, but that’s a long way! Not as close as my last school was where I could just go home every weekend if I wanted to. But guess what school I am going to? That’s right! Pastry school! And I couldn’t be more excited about that fact. I can’t wait for Christmas. And I can’t wait to start school.

This is going to be a wonderful holiday season. I can just feel it.

Oh yeah! And here is my first draft of what I plan on making (most things with mom!) for Christmas and the holidays in general!

Christmas Menu

December 25th Breakfast

Crisp corn flapjacks w warmed maple syrup and butter
thick cut applewood smoked bacon
scrambled eggs
(with cream cheese and chives)
fruit salad
(banana, mango, apple, peach, pear, dragon fruit, passion fruit juice)
cherry cheese danish

December 25th Dinner

rosemary & garlic turkey
(basted with butter and dotted with garlic and rosemary)
apple walnut stuffing
(traditional stuffing with apples and chopped walnuts)
garlic & artichoke mashed potatoes
sautéed corn w shallots
pull apart soft and buttery home-made dinner rolls
cranberry-cherry sauce
(my twist on a classic cranberry sauce. A hint of cherry sweetness and lime zest)

Cookies and Breads

shortbread cookies
(mom’s classic with glacee cherries)
gingerbread cookies
nanaimo bars
cinnamon bread

All of which I will include recipes for slowly but surely!

Oh man I am so excited for Christmas!

The Best Chocolate Cupcakes with Ganache Frosting

Today I needed to make some quick cupcakes for…well, just because I wanted to! ha. So I made the old classic stand-by, the best chocolate cupcakes recipe. And just let me give you a little tip. And keep this near and dear to your heart. If you don’t use a good quality cocoa in this recipe, it will turn out sub-par. Trust me. I’ve done many tests and trials. Try to use a full out cocoa powder that is really dark in colour and smells like strong chocolate. It will give it a much deeper and richer flavour. Also make sure to use natural cocoa powder and not alkalized or ‘dutch processed’ cocoa (dutch processed, or alkalized cocoa has been processed with an alkali to neutralize the acids in it. So when you use a natural cocoa powder that still has its acids, it reacts with the baking soda in the recipe to help it rise in the oven. This is what makes this recipe so good. Perhaps I should edit it to specifically say natural cocoa powder..hmm..)

The cocoa that I use is from a natural foods store. It’s called Ambrosia Natural Foods and I buy their big bags of cocoa whenever I’m in the area It just tastes much better than anything like Hershey’s or your store brand since most of those are dutch processed (well, they are in my area anyways). But hey! That’s just my tastebuds talking. They like a deeper chocolate flavour in things (:

So for the frosting on the cupcakes, I made a quick ganache with 8oz of callebaut milk chocolate and 3/4 cup of hot heavy cream. Then when it was liquid and warm I whipped it in my stand-mixer for a few minutes until it was cool and held its shape so it could be piped easily.

Voila! Delicious and easy cupcakes.

And I promise to have an actual new recipe soon! I’ve been busy making halloween costumes lately so I haven’t had much time to experiment with many new recipes.

Wedding Cake Taste Test #1

I officially suck at cutting cakes evenly just look at those uneven layers! I need one of those cake slicers…If I were in school already, I would get a really bad mark on the montage of this cake!

Okay! So yesterday I made a trial cake in my new 12″ cake pan and the results were fantastic. What a great wedding cake recipe! The cake turned out fluffy but not light enough that it would sink under the weight of fondant. And it was moist and had a really good flavour to it. I didn’t have any almond extract to add, but I have a feeling it would make the cake even more wonderful. When you eat the cake on its own though, it tastes a little bit floury. Do you know what I mean? But once it was all put together it was really good.

So this is how it all started. I’ve been eyeing up this one recipe from Epicurious.com for a while and decided that it was the day I would try it! I divided the recipe by 1/3 with no bad results. While the cake was baking I made a random soaking syrup by combining some ingredients we had in a small saucepan and letting it simmer. They were Bailey’s Caramel and some Disaronno. I put some ground up espresso beans or whatever they were in a coffee filter and tied the top. Then I put all of these on the stove in my new wonderful $5 saucepan and let it gently simmer until the alcohol was evaporated and the espresso had diffused into the mixture. It was really really really good once it had reduced slightly. The only problem was that I didn’t have enough! But that’s what this trial was about. Figuring out things like that.

So then I cut the round cake in half to make two half-circles. Then I cut those each piece into 2 layers so I would have a 4 layer half-circle cake. I made some random cream out of some cream cheese, mascarpone cheese, sugar and a bit of milk with a touch of the buttercream to spread on the layers of the yummy-soaked cake. Then I covered it all with an italian merangue buttercream. It was really really good! I wasn’t trying to make it look good or anything, I was just trying to get an idea of the flavours we wanted. I was overall fairly happy with it. I now know you always need MUCH more soaking syrup than you think you do to actually get a good amount in the cake.

You can find the recipe I used and dived by 3 here.

Halloween Sugar Cookies

I love the holidays because it means that I can make festive sugar cookies or any decorated cookie. I am not really artistic, but somehow the cookies always end up looking okay. Although the ones I made today, I told my mom (who was taking them to work) to tell everyone that they are ‘abstract halloween cookies”  because they were not so pretty!

I’ve been on the hunt for a good sugar cookie recipe, and still haven’t found one. I guess this one is okay. Everyone else said the cookies tasted really good but I thought they weren’t as good as they could have been. Maybe I just don’t like sugar cookies and keep thinking they are something they reall aren’t.  But these stay soft in the middle but are strong enough to not fall apart. Overall, with the icing on them, I liked them!

Rolled Sugar Cookies

1 1/4 cups of unsalted butter at room temperature
1 1/4 cups of cups icing sugar, sifted
1 1/4 cups of regular granulated sugar
5  large egg yolks
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 1/4 cups pastry flour, sifted
1/2 tsp salt

Whip the butter until smooth with the paddle attachment of your stand mixer. Add in the sugars and mix until light and fluffy. Add the egg yolks, one at a time and beating until each is fully incorporated. Then add the vanilla.
In a separate bowl, sift together the flour and salt.
Mix the flour into the butter/sugar/egg mixture until it forms a dough.
Remove from the bowl and knead the dough a little bit until it’s smooth. Then divide it into 2 discs and wrap in saran wrap. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours.
Preheat the oven to 325F. Chill your cookie sheets lined with parchment paper or a silpat. (I find that when I use the silpat, the cookies pretty much don’t spread at all. But when I use parchment paper they do spread. Not so that they are unrecognizable, but just enough that you can tell. )
Knead the first disc of dough a little bit until manageable. Cover your work surface with clour and roll out to around 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch thick. However thick you want the cookies. I like mine to be 1/2″. Cut out the desired shapes, and then pop the tray of cookies into the freezer for a few minutes. Then bake in the preheated oven for about 10-12 minutes (if your cookies are 1/2″ thick. use less time for thinner thickers, and more for thicker cookies.)

Continue the cycle until your dough is gone! But remember not to put the raw cookies on a hot or even warm cookie sheet because then they will spread for sure!

Use your favourite icing to ice them. I used a royal icing recipe I found somewhere on the internet.

Royal Icing Recipe

Ingredients:

6 oz (3/4 cup) of warm water
5 Tablespoons Meringue Powder
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 kilogram (2.25 lbs.) powdered icing sugar

*** Note; if your meringue powder has no vanilla flavour (vanillin powder) in it, add a teaspoon of clear vanilla to this recipe.

Directions:

In mixer bowl, pour in the warm water and the meringue powder. Mix it with a whisk by hand until it is frothy and thickened…about 30 seconds.

Add the cream of tartar and mix for 30 seconds more.

Pour in all the icing sugar at once and place the bowl on the mixer.

Using the paddle attachment on the LOWEST speed, mix slowly for a full 10 minutes. Icing will get thick and creamy.

Cover the bowl with a dampened tea-towel to prevent crusting and drying.

Tint with food colourings or thin the icing with small amounts of warm water to reach the desired consistency.

I didn’t particularly like the icing that much. It was really really thick at first and I had to spend a lot of time thinning it out and even then after sitting for a few minutes it was still too thick. Maybe I just didn’t make it properly!  I usually use a different icing recipe almost every single time I make cookie.  I like experimenting with all the different recipes.

No Recipe Today!

Okay so I know this is supposed to be a recipe blog, and a recipe blog it is! But some days I just want to share some really really neat things that I find, and share some websites that I love.  And today is one of those days! (: so bare with me and let’s get started!

First off, I want to talk about this wedding cake that my mom and I are making. I am so excited for it and having a lot of fun gathering all the items we need for it. All we need left really is the fondant, and we are going to use Satin Ice since it doesn’t taste like playdough. In the meantime I’ve been doing some practice cakes for flavours. So here is what the bride wants (I say only bride because the groom doesn’t even like cake, so he left it all up to her. how nice!):

-3 separate tiers of 16″, 12″ and 8″.
-They have a huge dessert table so she wants the 16″ cake to be fake, so styrofoam.
-The 12″ cake will be a tiramisu inspired cake. 3 layers: white cake brushed with kahlua/coffee mixture with mascarpone cream filling and then a moist chocolate cake (with a possible mocha layer in between the chocolate cake cut in half) and then more mascarpone cream filling and then another kahlua/coffee brushed vanilla cake layer. Frosted with a sweet buttercream and then covered in white fondant.
-The 8″ cake is their little take home cake, which is a lemon poppyseed cake. Layers of lemon poppyseed with a lemon curd and sweet buttercream filling. Frosted with sweet buttercream and again, covered with white fondant.

Now, for the decoration. On the 16″ and 12″ cakes, they are to be covered in white fondant. There will be black vertical stripes on both tiers, with a black bead border on top. In the middle there will be a black  fondant oval plaque with a small white bead border, and the bride’s name on the 16 and the groom’s on the 12.
On the 8″ cake, it will be covered in white fondant, with a black ribbon bow on the bottom third. But still with a black bead border on top and the plaque on top but with their last name.

Just in case you don’t understand, the picture at the top is a drawing I made in paint that took me a while…ha. I must say that I am not  fan of the new paint layout in windows 7! It’s all different and I don’t like it. Anyways, look up top to see!

So this is how it should look. In the beginning I thought the design was kinda ugly! Not gonna lie. But now after I drew it here, I think it looks okay. And kind of pretty! There is one thing that I left out though. The bride wants black daisies on the bottom of the 16″, and black eucalyptis on the bottom of the 12″, and I think that would make it too busy. I’m sure when it gets set up on the wedding day it will be nice.

There is one thing that my boyfriend has always asked me. In the future, if I had my own cakery (ha, my short form for cake bakery.) and someone asked me to do a wedding cake (or any cake) that I thought was really ugly and I was so not into it, what would I do? And this is my answer: If I really thought the design was something I wouldn’t do well for whatever reason, I would tell them that I didn’t think I was the right person to do their cake, and maybe recommend someone else that I thought would do a better job on it.

Okay this just turned into a huge jumble of words! And I don’t want to read over it to make sure there are no errors. Oh well!  I also just thought of a sweet name for my dream pastry shop! And I’m not telling (:

OH YEAH! the reason why I actually wanted to write this post in the first place is to share my love of CAKE STENCILS! ahhhh! I love them so much! I really really really want the Damask 5 tier stencil set and the lace 5 tier stencil set!!!! they are so cool! You can find them at www.designerstencils.com and I LOVE themmmm so much!

Happy Baking!

Vanilla Cupcakes with Vanilla Mousse filling and Chocolate Ganache Frosting

I am NOT going to give the recipe for these. I just wanted to post SOMETHING about them because I put so much work into them. They are definitely not a favourite recipe at all. They were nothing what I was expecting. So disappointed!
I wanted to make something where I could utilize two new (and by new I mean things that I don’t usually have in my cupboard for whatever reasons) ingredients that I had. But now I feel like I wasted the chocolate on these! I used callebaut milk chocolate for the chocolate ganache. The chocolate, which I can’t get in stores unless I order it online from the US) was delivered to me by my dear boyfriend Kevin who’s aunt lives in Michigan. His sister went to visit their aunt this passed weekend and Kevin was sneaky and asked his aunt to get some things for me (The chocolate and PEPPERIDGE FARM BAGELS! I love these bagels so frigging much it’s not even funny. There is no bagel like this in Canada and it breaks my heart. They are so soft and buttery and delicious!!! ahhhh!!!). Anyways, so I used almost 3/4 of the brick of chocolate in these and now I am sad that it wasn’t in anything that I REALLY loved and wanted to eat constantly. And that’s asking a lot, because most of the time I don’t eat what I make aside from tasting it. I just really wanted something delicious! I have to redeem myself  soon.

Pumpkin Pie

I’m Canadian, and so that means that one of my absolute favourite excuses to eat delicious food just passed by. But not without celebration! It was thanksgiving this passed weekend, and you can bet that I stuffed myself full of all the wonderful food and desserts! And I will continue to stuff myself until all the leftovers are gone. Turkey dinner is my favourite* meal of all time and the fact that we really only eat it twice a year makes it so much better.

And my favourite* pie of all time, is none other than the great Pumpkin Pie!
Seriously, it’s so good. All cinnamony and gingery and just so delicious you could die! I think I could eat an entire pie (or perhaps even two if I was really hungry) by myself. Of course there has to be whipped cream on top. It just doesn’t taste as good to me when it doesn’t. Of course it’s super good on it’s own, but when that whipped cream is on top it just brings it to a level that can’t be beat! Here is the recipe that my mom and I use and that I love so much!

*makes 2 pies
56oz of pureed pumpkin
4 eggs
1 3/4 cup of brown sugar
2 teaspoons of cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups of evaporated milk

Just mix everything together in a big bowl with a whisk until blended and smooth. Pour into 2 unbaked 9″ pie shells and put in the oven. First, at 425F for 15 minutes, then reduce the oven temperature to 350F and bake for 30-35 minutes.

For the pie shells:
(This pie dough tastes really really good, but it doesn’t really hold it’s shape as well in the oven as some others. I just use it for the flavour, so if you don’t mind a rustic looking pie crust, this is for you!)

1 cup cold unsalted butter
2 cups all-purpose unbleached flour
1/4 cup of sugar
1/4 teaspoon of salt
1/4 cup cold water

Mix together the dry ingredients, then add the butter (it makes it really easy if you cut the butter into cubes before and pop them in the freezer for a few minutes.) Cut in the butter until it’s a crumbly mixture and the butter pieces are about the size of a pea. Pour in the cold water and mix around with your hands until a dough forms. Knead on a floured surface for a few minutes until it’s smooth. Let it chill in the fridge for about 15 minutes.
Take out the dough from the refrigerator, cut in half and roll out the first half to however big you need it. Do the same with the other half and put it in the pie pans. Chill in the refrigerator for another 15 minutes prior to filling and baking.

Enjoy!

*I don’t have favourites of anything, except turkey dinner and pumpkin pie. LOVE THEM!