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.

So - pound cake. Although Ruhlman's ratio says 1:1:1:1, I used the Preppy kitchen's recipe, which has ratio closer to 1:1.25:1.25:1.13 (flour-egg-butter-sugar). Also had sour cream. While the cake was pretty tasty and had a nice crispy crust, was moist, tender (even better with a lemon-sugar glaze), I felt it was pretty dense, and once cooled felt kinda rubbery. Figure 1 shows the cross-section of the cake the day after. Notes - I am unsure what caused this density. Could be that the sugar and butter was undercreamed, or that the flour, once added, was undermixed (saw an article from King Arthur's). Or not enough baking powder. Thoughts? EDIT: I see now large holes along an arc some 1-2 cm below the upper crust. Separation of the upper layer from the bottom? Figure 1: Pound cake the day after.

Does acid inhibit browning in general (is this caramelization or Maillard reaction in the cookie, or both), and why? *quick google* Oh, okay, there's papers about that. Imma skim them.

Yes, but I wonder if there is a limit after which the cookies lose a lot of their flavor. Also - heard that baking soda is usually best used immediately, but after freezing for 2 days I had no issues, so don't know what's up with that (the cookies have baking soda).

The chocolate chip cookies dry out pretty quickly, especially if the crumb is not very dense. Thus, I have given up to try to keep them fresh and instead opted to freeze the cookie dough in 45 gram balls, and bake as necessary. This way, I can have fresh cookies as I please, in under an hour, which is a better alternative. The 2 tablespoons of rum extract I put into them did not really stand out, so I'll need to find a blend of spices that better complements chocolate, as I do like spiced cookies.

Had some shortbread dough, so rolled it and made cups in the muffin mold. Filled with cream cheese and lemon curd. While the each ingredient separately was quite nice, and I had a lot of fun making the cups, the lemon was a tad too strong. It really should be used sparingly. Having thoughts of a shortbread base topped with creme patisserie and a cherry pudding.

Made some brown sugar shortbread, and did not like the result. It felt dry, like there was sand in the mix, but it also had a chew in the middle, probably because of the brown sugar. The next day the texture improved (I guess the cookie took on moisture), but it was still no the tender shortbread I like. Perhaps whipping the butter - thus basically trying to make the volume larger, but also drying the dough via brown sugar hogging up all the moisture - is not a good combo. Guess if I am to use brown sugar, make sure whatever you are baking has a good amount of moisture it can keep, so the result, moist + chewy, which is why we like stuff like brownies and american cookies, is obtained. Dry and chewy not so much. But what do I know (more by the day, hopefully). EDIT: I also put half a teaspoon of cloves, ginger and cinnamon into the cookie dough, but in the end they were almost imperceptible. Probably because they were bound up in the dough, and could not thus hit my receptors in the nose, and there was no moisture to transport them. Probably should use these spices in stuff that emits a lot of vapors instead, so moist and warm stuff.

Any differences when using brown sugar in shortbread? I baked a batch replacing white with brown sugar and it came out a bit mealy, kinda dry feeling, like there's unbound sand in there, instead of crisp like the white sugar variety. Perhaps when cooling the borwn sugar will draw in more ambient moisture but it's weird, I baked it until lightly golden edges like I do with the white sugar variety. I also added a bout half a spoon of cinnamon, 1/4 of cloves and some ginger, but that couldn't have been the cause?

It might be that, as I live in EU. So extra sugar does not dissolve. Fine by me, the cookie was good by itself, but a great base for chopped toasted nuts.

Unexpected but welcome success - I had some scraps of cookie dough left in the freezer, so I popped them into the oven at 175C and to my surprise, the cookies spread out far less. Thus, they were thicker and softer inside, and also have developed a nuttier taste. Was not expecting a day of rest in the freezer to do this, but this is already a stark improvement. Had one left, so I sealed it (after cooling) into a plastic tupperware box, see how it tastes tomorrow morning. Anyhow, mild rambling ahead. As I see it, it would be helpful to gather a set of axes along which recipes can vary, so I can more systematically test variations in recipes. To illustrate, most frequent changes to recipes are: scaling - making batches smaller or bigger - this fundamentally does not change the recipe, as the ratios remain the same, unless the geometry of the problem changes (i.e., deep vs shallow pan, thick vs thin cookie) variation in [main ingredient] - here I mean swapping AP to bread, or cake flour, or swapping butter for coconut butter leavening - egg, soda, baking powder etc. baking temperature - high or low, short or long, but also the starting geometry of the cookie "spices" - i.e., flavour ingredients that do not change the texture or geometry of the product - these are interchangeable If I could learn what variation in each of these fields does, then achieving a certain goal (say "soft" or "large volume/minimal spread") would be a problem of choosing from each of these categories an ingredient that maximizes the desired effect. For example, if I wanted the cookie to spread less, I would not choose brown sugar (apparently it makes the cookie spread out more), I would add cornstarch, I would let it cool (rest) in the fridge before baking, and I would bake at 190 for slightly shorter, instead at 180 or 160. Of course, this is a not a complete list. There are probably other axes, but am I on the right track? The aim now would be to "fill out" this matrix with knowledge by either experimenting or reading literature.

By "what is important" I meant, what qualities one looks for in pans and sheets. Of course, different qualities are important for different purpuses. But this sheet is not the greatest, I see I need to get a new one. This one is pretty thin - I could not use it as viable body armour. No stand mixer, don't even know where I'd put it, only a hand electric mixer which was thus far fine for all purposes execept low-hydration bread dough (should've heard it strain when mixing brioche, also a workout and a half). Also: a good pancake pan a good sautee pan a small food processor parchment and cling film aplenty whisks, silicone spatulas, grates, ladles etc. Anyhow, I tried making american cookies, using mainly the Sally's chewy cookie recipe which called for melted butter. It was fine after baking, nothing special, pleasantly chewy but the next day they were a bit too dry (and as many things american, a tad too sweet for my taste). I made mistakes in preparation as well - I did not have enough brown sugar (recipe called for 3:2 parts brown to white sugar, I only had 1:4), which (as I read it) makes for a crisper but less chewy cookie. I also was in a hurry, and did not let the dough rest enough, nor have I chilled it before baking. Lesson learned - make the dough a day earlier, let it rest, form it into balls and let them chill for a moment. What I want is a thicker cookie, chewy inside, with a smaller surface to volume ratio so drying is a slower process; I also left them on the countertop in my room overnight which probably did not help the moisture loss. Also, chocolate is important - use a better tasting chocolate. A question (or two) for seasoned eGulleters (is that what we call ourselves here) - the chocolate loses a bit of its sheen while cooking because it becomes untempered - is this even possible to avoid with these cookies? Also, how do you store them to avoid moisture loss, or at least minimize it? I also made some more shortbread - this one was slightly denser than the last one, probably because it went directly from fridge, cut into slices and into the oven, and because I formed it into a brick with a bit more force. The cookie had thus a bit of a snap. Good to know. Attached below is a picture of the chip cookie (should probably put more chocolate in the as well, this one has almost none). I will probably play a bit more with the shortbread, fill it with lemon curd (made some today) or top with toasted nuts and sugar or lemon glaze.