Your Daily Sweets (2005-2012)

[Zeemanb]

FINALLY starting to get some consistency in my batches of macarons. And by consistency I mean that when some of them go south I can generally troubleshoot...humidity, don't take shortcuts like buying cartons of egg whites, crack the oven open once or twice when they look like they are rising too quickly, etc.

I'm really getting my system down though...pastry is starting to amaze me as far as repetition allowing you to narrow down personal preferences in your hardware and recognizing the subtle look, feel and even the sound of the various stages of prep that lead to success.

Knocked out three batches over the weekend to freeze until shortly before Christmas when I do all of my fillings. This is the first chocolate batch I did, and for whatever reason the addition of (really good) cocoa and slight change of egg white/sugar proportions created a very sturdy batter that was easy to work with and the results on all five cookie sheets were among the most consistent I've gotten so far. I have enough now for around nine dozen finished macarons, and the narrowing down of buttercreams and ganaches of choice can begin....

Edited to add: Lol, oh yeah, not all sweetness and sunshine....I managed to fatally break a batch of meringue-based strawberry buttercream. Heating it up, cooling it down, more mixing....nothing worked, I broke it good. Now to think of a way to utilize half a quart of semi-runny but delicious buttercream.

Edited November 28, 2011 by Zeemanb (log)

[judiu]

Edited to add: Lol, oh yeah, not all sweetness and sunshine....I managed to fatally break a batch of meringue-based strawberry buttercream. Heating it up, cooling it down, more mixing....nothing worked, I broke it good. Now to think of a way to utilize half a quart of semi-runny but delicious buttercream.

Jerry, use the buttercream as a dip for "Milano" type cookies, or for shortbread...

[Panaderia Canadiense]

Honey Spice Cakes! These don't look like a whole lot, but boy howdy are they ever tasty. And as a note to self - I am NEVER AGAIN making them in the fleur-de-lis moulds. The batter is insanely sticky and I had to use the high-pressure spray attachment on my garden hose to finally get them clean.

[Zeemanb]

Edited to add: Lol, oh yeah, not all sweetness and sunshine....I managed to fatally break a batch of meringue-based strawberry buttercream. Heating it up, cooling it down, more mixing....nothing worked, I broke it good. Now to think of a way to utilize half a quart of semi-runny but delicious buttercream.

Jerry, use the buttercream as a dip for "Milano" type cookies, or for shortbread...

Oh man, wishing I didn't bring that up...now I'm thinking of dipping vanilla oreos in there...... lol.

Deciding on macaron fillings is the really tough part- but sour cherry, dulce de leche and cinnamon apple butter buttercreams are at the top of the list right now....

[Panaderia Canadiense]

If you make your dulce de leche thick enough, you shouldn't have to buttercream it at all - and then you'll have what is called an Alfajor Suspiro in Ecuador.

[Zeemanb]

If you make your dulce de leche thick enough, you shouldn't have to buttercream it at all - and then you'll have what is called an Alfajor Suspiro in Ecuador.

And with THAT note you just boosted my cool-factor at holiday parties by about 1000% with the addition of Ecuador into the conversation .

[Panaderia Canadiense]

Awesome! To truly make them authentic, you should either roll the edges in toasted coconut or chill the whole sandwich, dip it in dark chocolate, and roll that in toasted coconut.

[Kim Shook]

PC – I adore your braided chocolate bars!

Jerry – next trip to Richmond – Mr. Kim wants more coffee, but I want macarons !

Curls – please, please tell me how you manage to make such a gorgeous apple pie! My apples never stay up inside the top crust like yours. They cook down level with the pie pan and I end up with a bunch of empty crust! Gorgeous.

A Coca-Cola cake that I made for a co-worker’s birthday:

It was fantastic – moist and super-chocolatey. Everyone at the office said that it was the best chocolate cake they had ever tasted.

Halloween cupcakes:

Cake for a co-worker’s BD:

I had some trouble with this cake. It was a Southern Living recipe. The cake layers felt apart into 2 and 3 large pieces. The frosting was supposed to fill and completely frost the cake and there was not nearly enough for that. Also, while the frosting tasted great, it was much too thin – even if there had been enough, it would have slid right down the sides of the cake.

Another cake for one of Mr. Kim’s co-workers:

Just chocolate/chocolate. Classic, delicious and very easy!

My MIL did Thanksgiving and asked me to make a side dish and a pecan pie. I’d never made pecan pie before. So I remembered a friend’s fantastic looking ‘Heart of Dixie’ pecan pie at Cookskorner.com and tried that out:

It was fantastic! The dough is a pate sucre with cocoa and it calls for both chopped and whole pecan halves. Heavenly! There was not a sliver of a piece leftover.

[curls]

Kim, thank you! Your stuff looks fabulous too, I especially love your Halloween cupcakes! As for the apple pie, the apples did shrink down a little bit but what I do is put the apples slices into the pie as tightly as possible to minimize the air gaps. If you really want to avoid shrinkage, you can precook the apples a bit and concentrate the juices in a saucepan before putting everything in the the pie shell (details for this are in RLB's Pie and Pastry Bible).

Edited December 1, 2011 by curls (log)

[Zeemanb]

Kim, that pie looks insanely delicious! Your cupcake frosting looks fantastic, hook a brother up w/the recipe (meringue based it looks like?)! Love that glossy shine...with some mint oil it may make a great filling for the ol' macarons.

[dhardy123]

Orange Walnut Opera:

Almond Plum Bar:

Pistacio Sour Cherry, Orange Pomegranate, Chocolate Dolce de Leche Tarts:

Mont Blanc with candied chestnuts:

[LizD518]

I made macarons for the first time in almost a year. My parents are going to Paris next year for their anniversary and all of my Mom's Christmas gifts are going to be Paris-themed. These came of pretty good, but I have to do a couple more batches before I'm ready to give them as a gift. I put two trays in the over at once and the one on the bottom resulted in cracked tops, while the one on the top did not quite cook enough. But I think the feet look pretty good!

This was the first time making butercream for me as well - peppermint and chocolate peppermint. It is a Swiss meringue and I'm not sure I whipped the sugar and egg whites enough at the start, but it tastes really good and I just put it in the fridge to stiffen up a bit - I wanted to take a couple of pictures before I lost the light.

[Genkinaonna]

Kim-I LOVE pecan pie, that one looks amazing!

Dhardy-beautiful stuff, all of it! What is the white part of the Mont blanc? Bavarian cream? And can you send some my way?

Liz- Your macarons are lovely, very festive.

I'm doing a candy/holiday baking class tonight for a couple of friends, and I made some strawberry pate de fruits last night to make sure the recipe works. They're sweet, but tasty. I think I might add some citric acid to the sugar I use tonight for coating them to offset the sweetness a little bit.

[jaredrakes]

Butterscotch blondie bars with peanut pretzel caramel from this month's Bon Appetit. Good concept but a little too sweet for us. Maybe cut down on the caramel and use a little more salt in the blondie part next time. Makes a good looking cookie/bar...definitely worth doctoring a little.

[tikidoc]

Giving lots of goodie bags out at work this holiday season, so I made a variety of stuff. Now I need a glass of wine - marathon baking session today. Peanut butter cookies, whole wheat chocolate chip cookies, PB/oat/chocolate chip cookies, strawberry marshmallows (from recipe here), mango marshmallows, caramel corn (Jaymes' recipe), chocolate covered toffee sprinkled with pecans. And a batch of bagels rising in the fridge to boil and bake tomorrow. Tomorrow, finish the bagels, chocolate marshmallows, and rosemary shortbread with a light sprinkling of sea salt. And package everything up to give out Tuesday.

[RWood]

I haven't done a cake in ages, but got an order for a 90th birthday party this weekend. Almond cake with a layer of whipped ganache, a layer of amaretto whipped cream and raspberries and chocolate buttercream.

[Darienne]

Lovely, Rwood.

[ddelima]

Chocolate Custard with Raspberry and Dark Chocolate Center

[Darienne]

Looks delicious, Xilimmns.

No photo here of last night's "Dessert as Dinner" mostly because it looked a tad like a dog's dinner...but was a great success. Mark Bittman's Free Form Apple or Pear Tart. Biggest problem making it was finding a suitable apple in Moab.

The produce manager said: Use Rome apples. They were really uninteresting. Friend said: Use Honeycrisps. Ditto for taste. So bought Granny Smiths and they were fine. Miss Spies from home. But on the other hand...red cliffs, blue skies, sun and low humidity. No contest.

We ate said pie with 5-year aged Cheddar brought from Ontario. Strange that in his recipe, Bittman makes no suggestion of eating the tart with cheese...

[Dejah]

2o dozens of hand rolled shortbread: flour, cornstarch, icing sugar: some as gifts, some to be consumed by family soon...

Six 9x13 trays of Birdseed Bar: again as gifts and family consumption:

[Lior]

That looks amazing!! I love stuff like this. Cant wait to make some-but when????

[Dejah]

LIOR: If you're talking about the birdseed bar, it really just takes about 30 minutes to pull together if you have all the ingredients.

[LizD518]

Had some girlfriends over last night to how them how to bake macarons - I'm hardly an expert but it was fun and the results came out pretty well. We also made buttercream and lemon curd. Apologies for the horrible picture.

[Panaderia Canadiense]

Here's why I've been infrequent with this thread throughout December: the entire balance of my Christmas sweets, on one table!

That lovely mix includes: gingersnaps, chocolate-chip sugar cookies, maple-walnut shortbreads, three kinds of oatmeal cookies, Nanaimo bars, pumpkin bread, foccaccia (not technically a sweet, but I made it and it's there), cinnamon rolls, varous jams and pickles, and the gold bricks are Nova Scotia black fruitcakes.

[Zeemanb]

LizD518- those really are some good results!

Last week I finally finished one last semi-successful batch to round out the holiday gift macaron assortment I've been rambling about for months now. Some examples are more shameful than others, but in order to salvage 18 or 20 dozen finished cookies I had to settle for some inconsistencies. Six different flavors, five hundred different shapes and sizes....

I found these cool gift boxes online, there's a sleeve with a little round window on one end that slides over it. I got this size and a smaller one.

Flavors:

Pistachio- found a really great pistachio paste on Amazon and just added it to some Italian meringue based buttercream. Probably my favorite of the bunch.

Chocolate/Vanilla- In my top 2, used Dagoba (sp?) cocoa powder.

Chocolate/Mint

Amarena Cherry- Just added chopped cherries and juice to a very basic paddled butter and sugar mix for the filling.

Cinnamon Apple Butter Buttercream

Salted Dulce de Leche- made the dulce de leche in the SVS...85C for around fifteen hours. Based on a comment from Panaderia Canadiense I made sure to make it thick enough to stand on its own as a filling. I did top each dollop with several flakes of fleur de sel to round out the sweetness a bit.

Overall I'm pretty happy with this year's results. What I lacked in precision I more than made up for in sheer volume. The nice thing is that I've done so damn many batches at this point it feels almost effortless to throw one together, lol. Now to decide what flavor combo to create for a Mexican themed NYE party....I'm already taking some of the dulce de leche's along. Horchata...there is one possibility. Actually, let's just say Horchata will be it. Done and done.