My adventures with pastries (and sometimes savoury stuff)

[PetarG]

23 hours ago, blue_dolphin said:

Assuming you're actually chewing them and not swallowing them whole, normal retronasal olfaction should be quite sufficient to deliver odor molecules in food or drink in the mouth to the receptors in the olfactory epithelium

 

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.

Edited February 15 by PetarG (log)

[PetarG]

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.

Edited February 20 by PetarG (log)

[PetarG]

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.

 

[PetarG]

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.

Edited February 25 by PetarG (log)

[PetarG]

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.

 

[PetarG]

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).

 

[pastrygirl]

On 2/15/2024 at 12:52 PM, PetarG said:

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 successful, 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.

 

It's not a 1:1 substitution.  Peanut butter is approximately 50% fat and 50% solids, no water.  Butter is more like 75% fat, 5% solids, 20% water.

[PetarG]

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

[PetarG]

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.

 

[PetarG]

It is here.