Here’s a really bad  picture of them

Man oh man can you see that deliciousness? They’ve got that thin crispy top layer that I love so much! Arrgghhh! I want to eat them all but I only ate two. And I cut them small, I swear. Like 1×2 inches, I SWEAR!  Here’s my little trick to you. No one around to help you eat a huge tray of brownies? Put your brownies in the freezer pre-cut! Yes, the freezer. They last so long that way and eating them frozen is amazing! Of course you could wait for them to thaw to eat but come on, frozen brownie bites? It’s what I do around these parts of town. If you open my freezer, you would be attacked by freezer bags full of brownie bites and the like. It’s neat.

Recipe? Recipe. For you, my home dawgs.

2/3 cup of butter
1 1/2 cups of sugar
4 tbsp water
12 oz chocolate (I have a huge 20kg box of callebaut somethin’ or other so I am forced to use that. but hey, it tastes effin’ awesome)
4 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups of flour
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1/2 tsp baking soda

Preheat your oven to a lovely 325 degrees farenheit. In a saucepan, melt the butter with the sugar and water and bring to a boil. Add the chocolate and stir to melt. Remove from the heat and add the eggs, one at a time. Looks good doesn’t it? All smooth and shiny and chocolatey, mm mm! Then add in your vanilla, and your dry ingredients, stirring just until incorporated.  At this point you can add another 12 oz of unmelted chocolate, nuts, anything you like! Bake these bad boys in a 9×13 greased and floured pan for about 35-40 minutes. DELICIOUS!

Now, I scribbled this recipe down in a hurry and can’t remember where I found it from. So if anyone recognizes it and knows where it’s from please let me know so I can give props! Big ups! You know, credit. I’m no recipe stealer!

so instead I am here

www.bakemetasty.wordpress.com

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!!!
  

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!

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!

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!

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.

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.

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

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.