PetarG

It is here.

For this one I did not want to use a recipe, so I threw together a 3:2:1 shortbread base, par-baked it, topped with cream cheese and ricotta and egg mix, baked it until it was solid enough to support a layer of sauteed apples (thickened with starch and spiced) and finally topped with some crumble. Pretty good, especially a day-two after. No idea why I used ricotta but it worked out.

Looks divine. Is there a princliple with sandwich making (besides the salt, fat, acid etc.)? What goes with what etc.

Must be those solids then which thickened the mixture. Seems like a lot of proteins and fibers.

Some cheese puffs (gougeres). Had some roasted chicken thigh and sweet-spicy-sour tomato jam (chilli flakes, ginger and all) to fill them with. Made with a base of stock, not milk or water as it usually goes. As a result, they did not brown as much (as they would with milk).

So I made some macarons and had yolks leftover and thought to make creme brulee. I used Sally's recipe but the creme turned out like this - curdled in the top half and good in the bottom half. I made some mistakes, like not putting a cloth on the bottom to insulate the ceramic bowl, but I wanted to ask yall: should the dish be shallower (mine is 4-5 cm deep)? Pour hot water higher (I used ~ 2 cm deep water in the pan the porcelain bowls were in)? Lower temperature (recipe calls for 160 C)? As long as the eggs set I guess ... Gotta say, it is interesting the upper part curdled, while the lower part was fine.

Perusing local pastry shops is necessary to widen your horizons (even if I most certainly will not be making anything as complex or precise soon). Here's two cakes (sweets?) from a local pastry shop. A Paris-Brest and ... well I forgot what this green thing was. It was pistacio-flavoured and filled with pistacio buttercream (I think). The first one was filled with thick buttercream, augmented with nut flavors. I haven't actually made buttercream yet but It's on my to-do list as it seems as a type of a basic pastry filling. It wasn't overly sweet which is something I appreciate. Note that my shots here don't do justice to the pieces themselves. Last thing is my dinner - a simple apple crumble. Sauteed some apples with brown sugar, thickened with a starch slurry and poured into a pan. Topped with crushed pecans and a bit of rum extract, and then topped with a basic 1:1:1 flour-sugar-butter streussel mix. Did not awe me, but it was a warm, comfortable dish. As one of youtubers I watch says, "a hug on a plate". Come summer, and I'll top it with a scoop of 'nilla ice-cream and a caramel sauce. Ideas on how to spice this up (except caramel sauce); perhaps do it again with pears or some other fruit? I find that butteriness of the streussels pairs well with acidic fruit filling.

Ah, english is not my first language; I was under the impression that "batter" means any egg-flour-whatever mixture the meat/vegetable/cheese is rolled into. But as I know now from baking, batter is just a very high hydration ratio (semi-liquid) dough.

What kind of batter produces that smooth finish? No bread crumbs, only flour? Any special liquid?

First attempt at making macarons; properly I mean. Before that I made the "gnarled macarons", which is what you get when you don't care how they look - the taste is the same! Two batches - one had beautiful ruffled "feet" (ugh i hate that term), and other had mostly cracked shells - the difference was the temperature (only have one cookie sheet so I put the piping bag into the fridge which made the batter denser), and also shorter drying time. No matter, I'll eat the cracked ones and bring the perfect ones to work with me. One thing I noticed is that brownies and macaron batter have roughly similar mouthfeel - chewy, dense (at least the way I made them). This does kinda make sense when looking at the ingredient ratios - they have roughly similar ratios of (well, depends on the brownie of course, but I like them chewy an fudgy) liquid and flour and sugar (in macarons that is the almond four through). EDIT: If only I learned how to photograph food now ... EDIT2: It's the NYT recipe. To be frank, I was very puzzled when it called to DEFLATE the air bubbles in the meringue - isn't the purpose of beating the whites to aerate the batter? How does the macaron shell rise then, where are the bubbles the expanding steam should fill? Does the upper dried crust prevent steam escaping and thus it rises by steam making little "vents" at the bottom (the "feet")? Counterintuitive, this deflation process.

If there's something I have at least some experience in, it's choux. Not the Eclairs (piping that stuff is still beyond me), but cream puffs. Here's some choux with craquelin and pastry cream filling with some raspberry jam; there's cardamom in the choux buns themselves as well. As it happens, there was a party at the place I volunteer at so they got taken care of pretty quick. My personal favorites are gougeres though, and I am thinking of making them with some flavourful stock instead of the usual water/milk base.

What is that, is that like a Borek (Burek here in the Balkans), but sweet-filled?

Some random stuff - a no-bake pastry cream and raspberry jam "cake" I made from leftover Speculatis cookies (those that look like small windmills) and toasted nuts and leftover "macaron-like" failures. Delicious, delicious cracked failures. Next time I'll watch the cracks early and load them with even more chopped nuts. Other options are (not sure of it will work) - mix in a bit of flour for a even more chewy cookie (I guess it would edge close to a brownie cookie at that point), or chopped dried cranberries for even more chew. And spices! The cake itself was nothing special (I did not use a recipe, just combined what I had in the fridge), and was better a day after when the cream melded and softened the base which was on day 1 still very crunchy. Next up is choux - something I actually have real experience in.

Odd, maybe I had trouble smelling stuff that day. Okay, maybe a question. Do you have a rule when it comes to substituting peanut butter for butter? I used the same recipe for chocolate chip cookies (Sally's) which was quite succesful, where I replaced 50% of the butter with peanut butter (which is something I read on the net); in this recipe butter is melted. The peanut butter made the dough way too thick, so once the flour was mixed in it ended up sandy, like sticky, grainy sand that did not easily stick together. Does peanut butter demand more moisture (maybe an extra egg), or maybe it was the type of peanut butter. I don't have much experience with using peanut butter in cookies. EDIT: Wow, just browsed some chocolate chip peanut butter recipes and the amount of PB and butter they call for is frankly unbelievable for me, together they are almost 170% of flour. Still, there must be a reason for that.

Of course. Since I added 100 g, and it is 20% fat, that would be added 20 g of fat. I'll make loadsa more with many variations. No, but I will. Mind you, the cake is nice and moist after heating up in the oven, with a slightly crunchy crust, great with some chopped nuts and lemon curd. I'm planning one in the following days. I guess this is because I don't know what the cake is "supposed to be", but upon reflection that is a silly thought. I know it is moist, tasty and had a nice crunchy crust, but felt a bit dense after cooling - a tad rubbery. It can be a poisonous thought - is this "correct", It'd be better to describe what it feels like and compare to what I wanted the final product to be like, but be ready to be surprised. I'll make a lot more, nowhere enough cookies made to draw any real conclusions. That being said, I wonder why cloves/ginger/cinnamon did not come through? Do you roll them in the spices so they are at the surface, and easily fly to the nose? I mixed them into the dough itself, so that's why I think they could not get easily to my nose.