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Dorie Greenspan

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Everything posted by Dorie Greenspan

  1. Thank you for the congratulations! It was pretty exciting to win and my head is still spinning. And let me also add a welcome back to Patrick. I, too, thought of a pm. Glad to see you back and lovely to see those muffins photographed in your wonderful style.
  2. Bekkiz -- glad you're enjoying the book. With the glaze for the Applesauce Spice Bars, all you really want to do is simmer the mixture until the sugar is melted and everything is blended and has turned a light-medium caramel color; the glaze should thicken slightly but still be liquid enough to pour over the bars and spread easily. I hope this helps and that you'll make the bars because they're awfully tasty. Chufi -- your pound cake looks great!
  3. Laura, I know this isn't the first time I've said this and I'm sure it won't be the last -- you're AMAZING!!! 100+ people out of a dorm kitchen. I wonder if there's a section in the Guinness Book of World Records for your accomplishments!? There's no reason you shouldn't be able to freeze the shortbread dough and then bake the cookies the day you need them. As for the glaze on the mini-bundts, you can freeze it. If the glaze looks dull when it's defrosted, give it a little heat from a hairdryer -- that should bring back its shine. Can't wait to hear about your party!
  4. Aria, I don't think checking the doneness of the cake with a knife would have caused the center to sink. I'll be interested to hear how the cake was -- I'm wondering if perhaps the center of the cake isn't a little underbaked. Let us know.
  5. Emmalish -- thank you! What a great thing to say about the book! Marmish -- I'm not anywhere where I can measure now, but essentially you just need enough applesauce to fill the tart to a little below the rim. Put a piece of plastic wrap in your pan, spoon in your leftover applesauce and see what you've got. I hope it's enough, so that you can make the tart -- I hope you'll it.
  6. Is the pink icon with the hearts coming out of its head the one meant to be used for blushing??? Thank you all -- again and again -- for your enthusiasm. And even more thanks for sharing that enthusiasm.
  7. I'm so glad you've all had such a successful baking weekend -- happy enough to use a clickable smilies (if this isn't a first for me, then it's only a second): I just pulled some rugelach out of the oven (next I'll learn how to post pictures). My mom came in from Florida and has to fly back this afternoon, so I'm going to put them in her snack pack.
  8. I'm so glad to see your post about the chocolate-crunched caramel tart, Becca, because I've had the recipe on my brain for a few days now. I have to choose a recipe to be served at an event in Toronto in May and I've been going back and forth between the tart and the Devil's Food White-Out Cake. My deadline for sending in the recipe is today and your post just made up my mind for me -- thank you!
  9. Thank you everyone for your good wishes and your continued excitement about the recipes -- it means so very, very, very, very much to me. Lannie, I love that your 15-month old is liking the desserts. I just got an email from RuthW saying that her 11-year old wants the Plaisir Sucre from the Pierre Herme Chocolate Dessert Book for his birthday -- look what you have to look forward to! And Katie M, it made me smile to think about you bringing the cardamom coffee cake into work freshly made. I love when recipes can be broken down so that they're really easy to make -- and baking lends itself to that. When I read about the way you made the cake, it made me think again about how foolish it seems to use a cake mix when you can make what is essentially a cake mix yourself. And, you can use premium ingredients!
  10. Thank you! I'm thrilled with the nomination -- actually, I'm kind of skipping around my office while I'm writing this.
  11. Welcome Domestic Goddess! It's so exciting for me to think that you'll be baking my recipes in Korea -- I hope you can find the book. Thanks so much for being so interested.
  12. CSY -- here are the answers, as best as I can give them to you: 1. Will the taste be different if I use (regular, quite-smallish-granulated) sea salt, stores here don't carry Fleur de Sel. Yet I do remember that joke "i don't have butter so i use magarine, i don't have brown sugar so i use white sugar...". Cookies deserve more respect than that I think. Fleur de sel has a very distinctive, minerally flavor and, most interestingly, it tastes less salty than other sea salts. You can make excellent World Peace Cookies uses different kinds of salt, the only thing you'll have to play with is the quantity. If you're using a "quite smallish granulated sea salt", start with 1/4 teaspoon. 2. Food bloggers describe the taste as "a burst of saltiness", does this mean when we're mixing, we should be careful to keep the sea salt not too melted, still "keeping their original shapes, just smaller"? You don't need to worry about overmixing the salt -- just be careful not to mix much when you add the dry ingredients. 3. For the bittersweet chocolate, that means cocoa content should be around what percentage? V-brand is not commonly available also. When it comes to dark chocolate, I always urge people to use the chocolate they most like to eat. Since you're using the chocolate as chips, the type of chocolate will greatly affect the taste but do nothing to the "mechanics" of the recipe. If you like dark chocolate and if you can find it, I'd suggest you use a great-tasting chocolate that has at least 55% cocoa; I usually use a chocolate with upwards of 65% cocoa. 4. I googled under "WPC", and many nice pics from different homebakers came up, yet there are also some with the color and all being really not that appetite-arousing(Type A. very pale, and CLAY-like, but the taste is said to be non-the lest superb. Type B. very dark, like ink, exactly. Type C. very flat. ). What might the cause be? The variations in color are because of differences in cocoa powder -- some cocoa powders, like those from Valrhona and ScharffenBerger, are coal dark, while others are pale. And, cocoa powder can change the texture of the cookies a bit too. Again -- you're going to have to experiment to find the ingredients that you like best/that best match your taste. A word about flat cookies: If your oven is too hot, the cookies will spread too much and be flat. Make sure your oven is at 325 degrees F. 5. How long can these cookies keep in a container once made? The cookies will keep perfectly for about 3 days at room temperature and will still be irresistible after about 5 days. The baked cookies can also be frozen for up to 2 months. However, if you can swing it, the best thing to do is to freeze the unbaked log of dough and cut (without defrosting the log) and bake the cookies just when you need them. I hope this is helpful.
  13. A reader just recently sent me a letter about the rice pudding being too runny, so I ran into the kitchen, made a batch and found that, because of the typo, the timing was off by a lot. Aaarrrgh! It's not as crucial if you're making chocolate rice pudding because when the chocolate cools it thickens the pudding, but without it ... Happily you're right about the taste: runny or thickened it's good! Dorie
  14. Colls509, I'm so glad you made a bunch of the Spoon Desserts -- they're real favorites of mine, but I don't hear about a lot of people making them. There's going to me an article about them in the May-June issue of Cottage Living and I was thrilled when they chose to spotlight these recipes. It's funny, you had the puddings fireside -- which is perfect -- and Cottage Living saw them as right for spring-summer -- also perfect. A heads-up on the Rice Pudding -- there's a typo in the recipe: you need to cook the rice for about 50 minutes to have it absorb about 80% of the milk.
  15. Wow -- both the dacquoise and loaf look great -- I love the dacquoise as an individual serving. Prasantrin -- as a buttermilk substitute, I'd mix together 2/3 cup nonfat (or low-fat) yogurt and 1/3 cup milk (nonfat or low-fat) and substitute it for each cup of buttermilk. Hope you like the muffins.
  16. Lindacakes -- yes, you can make a bundt cake in a tube pan. The important thing with these cakes is the hole in the center; the swirls, curves and patterns are just the pretty things. Renee, thank you for sharing my blog address. I'm very new at this cyberspace thing, but I'm having great fun with it. Now, if only I had an extra few hours in the day ...
  17. Really like the potato-masher patterned chocolate-peanut butter cookies and the Mardi Gras tart is stunning! Coll 59 -- it's great that you're working -- oh, why can't we say playing? -- your way through the Bundt section -- it's one of my favorites. And isn't the gingko-effect fun! Emmalish -- I love the expression "ridiculously chcolatey " -- wouldn't it make a good title for a cookbook?
  18. Freddurf -- this is probably too late and maybe not even that helpful, but ... I've never left buttercream out overnight, but I have chilled it, heated it just enough to mix it, then mixed it like mad until it returned to its original consistency, which it does after going thru an extremely ugly period. Lia -- great that you're happy with the loaf. It's good that you waited to taste it, most loaf cakes, and the chocolate-banana cake is one of them, like to have a day to ripen. The overnight rest gives the flavors a chance to settle in and for the texture to become its best self.
  19. Colleen, Here are a couple of possibilities: You can make the whole tart tonight, cool it completely, cover it and refrigerate it overnight. Tomorrow, pull it out of the refrigerator about an hour before you're going to serve it. You'll lose just a little by chilling everything overnight, but you're still going to have a fabulous dessert AND you're going to be calm for mom's birthday. Or, you can make all the pieces of the tart and assemble it tomorrow. Bake the crust and keep it uncovered at room temperature. Make the ganache and keep it in the fridge -- follow the directions for re-warming it in the microwave tomorrow. Make the caramel, cool it and keep it covered at room temperature overnight. Tomorrow, warm the caramel in the microwave (look at the directions in the book), fold in the peanuts and spread it over the crust. Chill the assembled tart for 30 minutes, then let it sit out while you get the table ready. Hope this helps and really hope that you and mom enjoy it.
  20. Welcome Barbara! I hope you're going to really, really enjoy baking from the book. Lisa Antonia -- I can't explain the texture of your bars, but I think that cutting militarily precise bars is hard because the cake is soft and the apples are, as you said, irregular. Fortunately, this is not a dessert in which looks count for much -- I think the taste makes up for any raggedy edges.
  21. There are times when the type of cocoa powder that you use will make a difference, but it is not a problem with the World Peace Cookies. I usually have Droste Cocoa, a Dutch-processed cocoa, in the cupboard and so that it what I use most often. When I have ScharffenBerger or Valrhona cocoas, I use them and have liked them most. That said, friends have given me World Peace Cookies made with natural (non-Dutched) cocoa from the supermarket and we've polished off the batches happily.
  22. Toliver, there's no problem with doubling the recipe -- I do it all the time. So glad you like the cookies.
  23. I certainly understand why anyone would be willing to give up the last of their most treasured chocolate for World Peace Cookies -- they're pretty swell. I've often thought that if (heaven forbid) Pierre Herme, the cookie's creator, did nothing else he would deserve the Legion of Honor medal for these alone. Actually, I always use the best chocolate I've got in the house when I make these cookies becuase I think they deserve it! Toliver, about your cookies -- I'm assuming they were thin, yes? I have had the cookies seriously flatten out on me when the oven was too hot. Check that your oven is really at 325F. Also, even if you're in a hurry, these are best made one sheet at a time. An idea for getting more cookies out of the recipe: Instead of cutting the cookies thinner, divide the dough into thirds and make three skinny rolls instead of two chubbier rolls, then cut the dough into the regular 1/2-inch thick rounds to bake.
  24. Badiane, it's never a good idea to drastically reduce a basic ingredient in a recipe, and cutting the sugar in half is pretty drastic. I'm really not sure how the cake would come out with only half the sugar, since the sugar affects the texture of the cake as well as the flavor. If you've got more willpower than I have, you could keep the full amount of sugar and eat only half the amount of cake.
  25. Reading the thread made me want to bake a banana cake, but I'm in worse shape than emmalish -- I've only got 1 banana! I walked into the kitchen just in time to see our son take the last bite of the second banana! I'm glad you like the banana bundt Badiane -- so do I! It's what I would make if I had more bananas or the oomph to go out shopping. Looks like it's going to wait until the weekend.
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