Category Archives: Baking

Cheesecake

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Anna Olson has a new show and it is all sorts of magical. It is called, Bake with Anna Olson. Each episode is dedicated to a common dessert/bakery item, for example, cheesecake, meringue or ganache. She begins with the basic recipe and builds on those to make more complicated dishes. She will start with New York Style Cheesecake and work up to make layered Key Lime Cheesecake. This show is straight forward, informative, eye catching and most importantly, will cause you to salivate.

I first caught this show after my mom had bought me my Kitchen Aid Mixer but it was not yet in my possession and I was trying to determine what to make using it for the first time. I wanted to make something that couldn’t be made by hand or using a hand mixer and would require the power and force of the mixer. After I saw the cheesecake episode of this show, I was sold.

I made Anna Olson’s New York Style Cheesecake.

1. As a rule of thumb, my mom doesn’t make cheesecake using more than 3 packages of cheesecake. This is probably a good rule of thumb but this cheesecake looked so sinfully delicious and creamy that I had to go for it. It used 4 packages of cream cheese.

2. The Kitchen Aid Mixer is literally the best thing in the world. I love it. It is whisper quiet and so powerful and just whipped the cream cheese into submission.

3. The sour cream adds a nice creaminess and rounds out the flavour of the rich cream cheese. The addition of lemon zest to the cake also does this.

4. This is only the second cheesecake I’ve ever made (I made a pumpkin cheesecake a few years ago for Thanksgiving) and it successfully did not crack AND I did so without using a bathwater. Anna’s baking instructions are: bake at a higher temperature for 10 minutes, lower it for 25 minutes, turn off for 30 minutes but leave the cheesecake in the oven, crack the door for 30 minutes (I am simplifying it obviously, but follow the directions). The total baking time is 1 hour and 35 minutes. This seems excessive but I think it might need another five minutes at some point because the middle could have been a little more solid.

5. The cake is topped with a mixture of sour cream, lemon juice and sugar. Light but with a little bit of a bite, this is the perfect way to top this cheesecake. Also, it will hide any unsightly cracks that may have formed.

This is going to be my go to cheesecake recipe so be warned if you have a slice because it is rich, fattening and oh so delicious.

Amelia’s Birthday

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My sister Amelia’s birthday was on May 7th so last weekend the whole family gathered at my parent’s place to celebrate.

I made two types of cupcakes: Devil’s Food Cupcakes and Butterscotch Cupcakes with Salty Caramel Frosting.

1. The Devil’s Food Cupcake was the recipe from Martha Stewart I have used several times. The cake base is delicious and moist but I need to find a new icing. I used to whip the chocolate ganache but for some reason it did not set this time. I think next time I make these cupcakes I will just use a simple chocolate icing.

2. The Butterscotch Cupcakes are a recipe from Betty Crocker. They were incredibly sweet and next time I should probably follow the recipe and use 3/4 butterscotch chips rather than an entire bag. I think it would also help to melt the chips and then fold them into the batter to give the batter a smooth, rounded out butterscotch flavour.

The icing was delicious but incredibly thick and hard to work with. I had to thin out the icing twice with milk in order to make it a pipe-able consistency. I wish the icing had incorporated salt into it to give it slightly more depth rather than just sprinkling salt on top.

3. I had a major baking fiasco while making these cupcakes and I will actually own up to it. I had to melt some butter on the stove while baking the Butterscotch Cupcakes, so I had turned  on the stove, melted my butter and had continued baking. I pulled the cupcakes from the oven and put them on top of the stove. After about 5 minutes I noticed a burning smell but I thought, “Hey, there is probably some stuff on the oven element, no big deal.” Another 5 minutes passes and I notice smoke out of the corner of my eye, the cupcakes on the stove were smoking. I thought the venting from the oven had burned the cupcakes but I had left the stove on, which I didn’t realize until I was completely finished baking. I only lost 3 cupcakes to severe burns which wasn’t too bad.

See – even people who are passionate about baking and do it all the time have major fiascoes.

Overall, these cupcakes were a success, a little on the sweet side but you are eating a cupcake – what can you expect? Happy munching!

Recipe for Devil’s Food Cupcakes here. Recipe for Butterscotch Cupcakes below.

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More Cookbooks…

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I was bad on Friday – I went to BMV bookstore on Bloor and bought cookbooks. I went because I was looking for the Williams Sonoma baking cookbook on the lovely advice of my friend Sarah after my lemon meringue pie failed and died. I had vowed not to buy anymore cookbooks but I was going to make an exception in order to redeem my pie making abilties.

Of course I didn’t find the book I was looking for and I came home with three other books. Now there are more recipes to choose from and I am looking at the Amazon search page which is suggestion two more Williams Sonoma cookbooks to buy with the first one I looked up… Decisions, decisions.

My First Pie – Martha’s Mile High Lemon Meringue Pie

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We all know why I don’t make pie. But sometimes you need to get over things. I decided to make my first pie for Easter dinner. I made Martha Stewart’s Mile High Lemon Meringue Pie.

1. In theory, this pie is perfect. In actuality, it was a failure,

2. I do not like Martha’s pie crust recipe. She uses Pate Brisee crust but I should have listened to my mom and used the recipe on the shortening box. Rookie move and now I have another pie crust in my freezer.

3. I need pie weights. Or dried beans. My crust shrank slightly and came away from the edge of the pie pan. I also need to learn what to do with my edges, this looks slightly terrible.

4. The lemon filling was AMAZING. Using real lemon makes such a difference. So citrus and fresh tasting, it was like a glass of lemonade in each bite. If only we could have enjoyed the pie.

5, This brings us to the meringue. I think it didn’t work for a number of reasons  – a) I had my oven on, so the kitchen was ridiculously hot b) I used egg white substitute instead of real egg whites c) I didn’t put the sugar in at the right time. I listened to Martha Stewart over my mom. I called my mom after my meringue was failing and she set me straight, put the sugar in right at the end and d) I didn’t whip the eggs long enough.

I thought I had whipped my eggs long enough and the meringue looked decent, but it did not set well. Even filling my blow torch was a headache. I couldn’t figure it out, and then I gave in and let GC take over and we finally got  it to work. The blow torch is amazing and I can’t wait to use it on creme brulee or on marshmellows.

I torched the meringue and everything looked beautiful. I should have put it in the fridge once I was done, but I didn’t. Who knows why. We get in the car to go pick up my sister and the meringue starts shifting on top of the lemon. By the time we get to my sister’s apartment the meringue has slipped onto my lap and eventually ends up on the dash of the car and the passenger side doors. We left the pie on my sister’s counter and continued on our way to Easter dinner.

6. For a first attempt, I think it went pretty well. The pie looked good, and the individual components tasted delicious. Next time it’s just a matter of getting everything to stick together. Luckily my mom had the foresight to make two pies and now I have half of a pie made by my mom in my fridge.

Stay tuned to future pie attempts.

Creamy Layered Lemon Squares

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More baking done over Easter – Creamy Layered Lemon Squares from Kraft’s What’s Cooking.

1. Everyone should have at least one white trash recipe in their arsenal. And by white trash, I mean a dessert that contains Cool Whip.

2. This is the only way I will purchase Cool Whip – if its going to be used in some other way that makes it unrecognizable as Cool Whip.

3. This is basically a cheesecake with a Cool Whip lemon jello layer on top. This is light, and creamy and the perfect dessert for finishing a heavy, holiday dinner.

4. Again, I used steroid-induced gargantuan strawberries and I probably should have quartered them rather than just cutting them in half. This  is more of an aesthetic thing. I was also supposed to top the squares with strawberries but I didn’t want to do it before it set and when I remembered it was in the trunk of my car and we were driving to Brampton.

Happy munching!

Vanilla Very Berry Cupcakes

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For Al’s birthday I made Vanilla Very Berry Cupcakes.

1. These were, I wouldn’t say difficult to make, but more accurately tedious. In theory, it’s very straight forward: make vanilla batter and make a berry coulis of sorts. Now the first berry sauce you make is slightly chunky and goes into the middle of the cupcake, between the vanilla cupcake batter.

Fine. No problem. I can handle that. The issue came when the sauce was supposed to thicken and be piped into the cooled cupcakes. My sauce would not thicken. I put tons of corn starch in the sauce and it coagulated at the bottom of the pot. When I tried to put the sauce in a piping bag it completely dripped out. I had to carve into my cupcakes and slowly spoon the sauce into each cupcake. It was worth it because the cupcakes were moist and fruity.

2. The icing was an entirely different fiasco. Partly this was because my hand mixer broke mid-mix. The right beater randomly stopped spinning and my icing was ridiculously thick. After calling my mother and having a break down, I added more milk and thinned out the icing. Once it was thinner, I was able to mix my icing. In the process of piping out my icing I broke two piping bags.

3. Strawberries do not work well on cupcakes. Or maybe just not the steroid-injected-gargantuan strawberries you buy at the grocery store. I prefer how raspberries and blueberries look toppled ontop of cupcakes.

4. Powdered sugar makes everything look prettier.

5. These were delicious and super fruity. They were a fruit explosion topped with creamy icing. There was so much sweet vanilla flavour – it is always great when you can actually taste the vanilla. When I left my house it smelled wonderfully of vanilla, berries and coconut (I had also made Magic Bars as per Al’s request).

The recipe is below the cut…

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Gingersnaps

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I miss baking. I don’t get to do it enough because I am trying to not weigh 900 lbs. I am allowing myself to make cookies once a week. And bake when special occasions arise. And when there are rotten bananas on my counter I will make banana bread.

A week ago I made Betty Crocker’s Gingersnaps.

1. These cookies have a great blend of spices – cinnamon, ginger and cloves.

2. These cookies are considered low calorie according to the cookbook – they use shortening instead of butter and a much smaller quantity compared to most other cookie recipes.

3. These are chewy and dense out of the oven but quickly get rock solid.  When they do get hard, they are the perfect afternoon snack to be enjoyed with a cup of tea at work.

4. The cookies will take a few minutes to crack in the oven. After about 5 minutes the first cracks will appear on the surface. Wait another 4-5 minutes and they will be perfect.

A year-round adult version of a gingerbread man. See the recipe below the cut.

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Chocolate Chip Cookies

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Everyone has their own go-to chocolate chip cookie recipe – either it’s from the back of the chocolate chip package, Martha Stewart or it’s just a tube of Pillsbury cookie dough (if this is you, please continue reading to see how easy it is to make chocolate chip cookies and how truly offensively you have been living your life). My go-to is Betty Crocker’s Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe.

I love and use this recipe for a couple of reasons:

1. Betty Crocker does not lie – she says this recipe makes 4 dozen cookies and it does.

2. When I was a kid, I used to bake all the time with my sister Amelia and we would use this recipe. We have baked so many chocolate chip cookies using this recipe that the page in the recipe book is coated with enough dough to make another cookie.

3. It makes tender, moist cookies that melt in your mouth instead of crunchy, crumbly cookies that make a mess everywhere. In my edition of the Betty Crocker cookbook there is a diagram that illustrates what you did wrong if you cookies pancake out (too soft butter), or stay firm and perfectly shaped balls that you scooped out onto the cookie tray (too much flour).

On the note of softened butter – My favourite thing about my new (to me) kitchen is my refrigerator. It is from the 1970s and is a lovely olive green/yellow colour with wood veneer handles. Although almost everything is wrong with this thing, it has one piece of genius – the butter compartment has a temperature/hardness control on the outside allowing you to thaw butter in the fridge! This means, because I have this handy dial set to soft, I can literally bake whenever I want and can avoid the moment that almost always accompanied a new baking project: “I forgot to thaw my butter…”

4. If you don’t have a stand mixer (like me currently….hint, hint) you can easily make cookies using an electric hand mixer. I find it is actually better at beating the butter and mixing a smooth, liquid base before you add in your dry ingredients. It is slightly more difficult, however, to gradually add your dry ingredients and not to end up covered in flour when you use a hand mixer. I opted to stir in my dry ingredients using a spatula-spoon type utensil. Mix in all your dry ingredients before you mix in your chocolate chips.

5. The recipe calls for semi-sweet chocolate chips to be used but in my infinite wisdom, I combined all the various chocolate chips I had into one bag. This resulted in a mixture of white chocolate, semi-sweet chocolate, milk chocolate and mini chocolate chips being used in this batch. It created a nice subtle scale of chocolate flavours and colours.

6. Leave them in until they look almost cooked – this is Betty’s advice, and now my standard cookie rule. It is a common, rookie cookie move to leave cookies in the oven until the tops are hard. This will result in a rock solid cookie in your mouth.

I enjoyed a few of these at work and I left them sitting out on my desk in the sun. The chocolate chips were warm, and gooey as if straight out of the oven. Yum.

I also enjoyed a few with my friend Cynthia on our common lunch hour in Yorkville.

Chocolate Salted Caramel Cupcakes

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For my sister Theresa’s 26th birthday I made her Martha Stewart’s Chocolate Salted Caramel Cupcakes to take to work. Theresa has a top three favourite cupcakes that I make, in the following order:

1. Gingerbread Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Icing

2. Chocolate Salted Caramel Cupcakes

3. Chocolate Chip Cheesecake Cupcakes

(If this is not the correct order, I apologize Theresa).

Of all the cupcakes Theresa likes, these are the most time consuming but I love her.

1. These are mini cupcakes as to not overwhelm you with the richness. I think the next time I make these I will ignore this rule of thumb and make them in regular-sized muffin tins. You have to hollow out each cupcake in order to fill it with caramel and this is time consuming. You also don’t get a ton of caramel in each cupcake which, in my opinion, is the best part.

2. The icing needs to be a bit thicker – the recipe only calls for 1/2 cup of icing sugar but I think 1 cup icing sugar would pull the icing together better and make it thicker. If it was thicker the piping would come out better. Regardless of how the icing is, the sea salt brings out the cocoa in the icing and strikes a perfect balance between sweet and savoury.

3. I used St. Patrick’s Day wrappers. I did something that I hate when people do – when your birthday is near a holiday and people lump it together with that holiday. Birthdays and holidays should be separate. It was more because I didn’t have very many mini cupcake wrappers and I have promised myself I will not buy anymore (from my estimation I have approximately 1200+ cupcake wrappers).

4. According to Martha this recipe makes 56 mini cupcakes. It made 84. Oh, well.

5. Making caramel will always scare me – when you add the cream to the sugar mixture there is bubbling, steam and a lot of heat in your face, you basically have a volcano in a pot. There was also the constant fear that my cats were going to jump on the stove and scald themselves. Fortunately, this didn’t happen and we were just left with salty, sweet goodness. It makes about 2x too much caramel so I would suggest having an ice cream sundae ready to be topped with the extra cut-out cake and the extra sauce. Yum. And then have a cupcake when you are done. Double yums.

Recipe below the cut.

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Devil’s Food Cupcakes

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Last Thursday was my last day of work. I quit my job to pursue a new career path in the big city. Oh, and to live with GC.

I made Martha Stewart’s Devil’s Food Cupcakes for my co-workers as a thank you for how great they have been over the past two years.

The only thing I do differently than Martha is instead of letting my Chocolate Ganache Frosting to naturally and slowly thicken, I use an electric hand mixer to whip the ganache. I assume that changes this from ganache to something else that I have bastardized but the result is still silky, smooth, chocolate icing.

The reason these cupcakes are so good is the use of the sour cream in the cupcake batter. It makes the cake light and fluffy which is the exact texture of the frosting. The frosting doesn’t have that awful, gritty quality that a lot cupcakes tend to have. This is my go-to chocolate cupcake recipe – try it out!