Archive for March, 2010
A Dutch baby pancake is a big, puffy, custardy pancake that is baked in a skillet in the oven. If it came down to it, I would say that it’s a little bit like a cross between a pancake and a popover, only better. The babies are easy to make, but take a little longer than regular pancakes to cook, so I tend to save them for lazy mornings when I am planning to sit around and enjoy a leisurely breakfast. I like a basic Dutch baby with lots of maple syrup, but I gave this one a little more depth of flavor by adding browned butter to the recipe. It only took a couple of minutes to brown the butter and add it to the batter, so not much extra cooking time was added for a lot of extra flavor.
Since you need to brown the butter for this recipe, it doesn’t really make sense to brown the butter in one pan and preheat another skillet up in the oven, a step which is typically part of the technique used to get a high rise on these pancakes. Instead, just prepare the pancake batter and preheat the oven, then the brown the butter in the pan you intend to use to bake the Dutch baby. Whisk the browned butter quickly into the rest of the already made batter, then transfer everything back into the hot and greased pan (with all of that nice browned butter flavor there, too) and slide it back into the oven to finish cooking.
The dutch baby will sink a bit as it cools, so don’t worry if it deflates a little before you serve it (although like a souffle, you basically want to serve it as soon as it comes out of the oven). The pancake will still have nice crisp edges and a firm, yet slightly custardy, center to it.
+Continue Reading
When I decorate cookies for Easter, I typically use some sort of colored frosting to create the designs, or simply rely on brightly colored sprinkles and candies to give the cookies a holiday look. Like decorating Easter eggs, however, using just two techniques can get a bit boring after a while. It’s nice when Easter eggs look unique, as well, as festive, and the same is true of Easter cookies. This Stamp & Style Easter Cookie Cutters set from Williams-Sonoma provides you with everything you need to spruce up those Easter cookies and make them a little fresher. The festive stamps and easy-to-use rollers allow you to create everything from borders of bunnies to wavy lines and zigzags all over your eggs. They’ll really allow kids to get creative when they decorate the cookies, too.I have to admit that part of the appeal here is that Easter egg cookies made with this set will be less messy (no dye on fingertips) and much tastier than real Easter eggs, and while you can’t hunt for them in the garden, nothing will be wasted because you can eat them all up when the holiday is over.
In the name of the greater campaign to fight childhood obesity, the New York City City Council is heavily restricting the number of bake sales that can take place at New York City Schools. Their stance is that homemade rice krispy treats, pumpkin bread and cupcakes aren’t a part of “the wellness puzzle” as they see it. Instead, the products that will be permitted to be sold at schools must come from a list of 27 packaged foods that meet city health department guidelines.
PTA members are strongly against this idea, which will restrict sales to once a month or in the late evenings (when parents are probably coming to schools for meetings and very few children are present), because the money that these frequently held sales pay for lots of extracurricular programs that there is no money in the school budget for. Baking is also a great family activity, getting parents and kids together at home, working together, to support their community and their schools.
I’m all for home baking, of course, and the thing that strikes me the most about this issue is also something that struck Laura Shapiro, a food historian and author, in the article: “[W]e’re supposed to believe that a packaged chocolate-chip cookie is preferable to a homemade one, not on the basis of taste, texture or the quality of the ingredients, but because it came from a factory and has a nutrition label.”
+Continue Reading
Creme brulee’s signature is that crisp, caramelized crust that sits atop the delicate custard. You make it by sprinkling on a layer of sugar, then caramelizing it with the flame of a kitchen torch. If you’ve made creme brulee, before you may have run into a common problem with this straightforward-sounding step. Sugar that is in too thin of a layer won’t caramelize into a crisp crust. Sugar that is too coarse will not caramelize easily, leaving you with uncooked sugar at the top of your brulee or with a slightly melting custard beneath a topping that needed too long under the torch.
The best sugar for topping off a creme brulee is superfine sugar. Its tiny crystals caramelize quickly and easily. You can find it at most grocery stores, but if you can’t, regular sugar is your next best bet because it is also relatively fine in texture. Brown sugar is too moist and clumpy and raw sugars tend to be far too coarse. If you have a large-grained sugar that you would like to use, give it a whizz in the food processor to break down some of those crystals and make it more like regular or superfine sugar, then use it to top off your brulee.
When you have fresh berries around, a clafoutis is a great way to showcase them. A clafoutis is a French dessert that is somewhere between a cake and a custard. It is just firm enough to slice easily, as cakes are, but it is based heavily in milk and egg, and has a lovely custard flavor and texture to it. The vanilla-scented batter is a great backdrop to all kinds of fruit. Pear Clafoutis is one of my favorite variations, but I’ve used blackberries for this batch.
Fresh blackberries go very well with the vanilla custard flavor of this dish. They’re bright and have a nice sweetness to them – and I have to admit that their beautiful purple color is offset very well by the pale clafoutis. You can use frozen berries, but your clafoutis will take a few minutes longer to bake and the berries might loose a little bit of their texture as the dish bakes. I think that fresh berries are your best bet, and you can easily mix in some blueberries or raspberries in this, too.
This clafoutis batter mixes up very easily in just one bowl (or in the food processor) in about 2 minutes. It has very simple ingredients, so as long as you have berries on hand, you can quite literally start putting this together on a moment’s notice. When you pull it out of the oven, you’ll notice that it rises like a souffle, thanks to the number of eggs in the batter. It will fall slightly as it cools, so don’t worry if yours doesn’t remain puffed up after it finishes cooking.
You can serve this dish warm or chilled, it is very tasty both ways. It can be made a day in advance, but it really looks and tastes its best within a day of making it, so I would try to make it the day you will be serving it if possible.
+Continue Reading
