Archive for the ‘Pastries’ Category
When you think of danish, you probably think of buttery pastries made with many layers of tender dough and filled with anything from sweet cream cheese to fresh fruit to nuts. A danish is definitely a decadent way to start off the day, but it is also fairly time consuming to make the dough from scratch if you want to bake your own. This Quick and Easy Braided Cherry Danish offers a simpler, more streamlined alternative to traditional danishes. The dough is still buttery and rich, but it contains no yeast and can be ready to put into the oven only minutes after getting out your ingredients.
This danish reminds me of the Quick and Easy Cinnamon Bun Bread that I’ve made several times because of the way it translates a usually time-consuming recipe into a much simpler one. This recipe was based on one that I saw on the Smucker’s website that calls for Bisquick as a base for the pastry. My dough doesn’t use any baking mixes and is just as easy to make. The dough is made with butter and cream cheese, both of which are cut into a mixture of flour, salt, leaveners and sugar before milk is added to form a dough. You can get a very flaky dough by leaving the butter and cream cheese in fairly large chunks when you cut them into the flour mixture. The pastry, once baked, will be heavier than a danish dough made in the traditional way and a bit more biscuit-like. That said, it is still a light, very tender and very tasty base for a much-less-time-consuming danish with a great buttery flavor that is a perfect canvas for all kinds of fillings.
I filled my danish dough with all natural cherry preserves that had lots of cherries in them. You can use any kind of preserves you like, but I definitely recommend using something with juicy pieces of whole fruits and being generous when you spread it onto the dough. The more filling you use, the more flavorful your danish will be. Good quality preserves are the easiest choice, but you can make your own filling by cooking fresh fruit with sugar (like making a pie filling) until thick on the stovetop and using that as your filling, too.
This danish is excellent when it is freshly made, when the top of the pastry is slightly crisp and the filling is still slightly warm from the oven. It can be baked a day in advance, but the pastry is at its peak that first day. Fortunately, since it is so easy to make, this is the perfect dish to throw together on a weekend morning for a homemade pastry to enjoy with your coffee.
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Sufganiyot are a type of jelly filled donut that are traditionally served around Hannukah, a holiday that bases many of its most popular foods on frying. The sufganiyot are not much different than any other jelly donut. They are made with a fluffy yeast dough, deep fried and then injected with a generous amount of jam or other fruity fillings. Although deep fried donuts are delicious, and it is definitely not a bad thing to indulge in them from time to time, it’s nice to have an alternative to deep fried balls of dough. In light of this, I turned the Jelly Donut Muffins from The Baking Bites Cookbook – which are similar to my Sugar Donut Muffins – into Bite Sized Jelly Donut Holes, or Baked Sufganiyot.
These little donuts are the size of a mini muffin or cupcake and they’re baked in a mini muffin tin. The batter is not made with yeast, but is a buttermilk batter that makes a cake-like donut. The baked donuts are rolled in sugar then filled with a little bit of jam before serving. Sugar forms a slightly crisp, sweet coating on the outside of these bite-sized treats and really gives them the feel of a donut.
You can use any kind of jam or jelly that you like in these. Most of the sufganiyot I’ve had – and most jelly donuts, come to think of it – have a generic, cherry pie-like “red” filling inside. I opted for a dark raspberry jam to keep the coloring consistent, but a flavor like apricot, blackberry, strawberry or anything else would do just as well. These are best when they’re fresh, but they’ll keep well in an airtight container for a day or so if you want to bake them up in advance, too.
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Paris Brest are a type of pastry that I encountered on my trip to Paris last year. The pastries were created in 1891 in honor of a bike race that ran from Paris to Brest, a city on the Western coast of France. They are made of pate a choux that is piped into ring shapes to mimic the shape of a bicycle tire, as opposed to the rounds that you see for cream puffs or the oblong bars for eclairs. The choux rings are traditionally topped with almonds and filled with pastry cream, but really you can make them in and endless variety of flavor combinations.
This Paris Brest is filled with Espresso Whipped Cream, which couldn’t be simpler to make. I simply added some strong coffee extract – a good bit of instant coffee dissolved in a tablespoon of hot water will make a fine substitute – and vanilla to lightly sweetened whipped cream. Just enough coffee flavor and sweetness comes through rich tasting cream. I whip the cream to fairly stiff peaks and pipe it into the split-open pastries using a star tip, then dust them with confectioners’ sugar, to give them a traditional look. You can skip the piping and simply spread the cream inside with a spoon or a knife. Just don’t forget to split the pastries in half with a knife before filling; you can’t just poke a pastry tip in there and fill these up like a cream puff!
You can make them any size you like, but most that I spotted (and my homemade ones, too) are about palm-sized, the perfect portion for a one person snack. My rings were about 2 1/2 – 3 inches across. If you make yours larger or smaller, you might need to extend (or shorten) the baking time by a couple of minutes. Regardless of the size, however, these are easy to make, impressive to look at and definitely delicious to eat. The choux dough can be made in advance and refrigerated if you don’t want to do this all in one setting, and to give the pastries an extra crispness (say, if you’re going to leave them sitting out for a while) let them cool in the oven with the door open before filling them up.
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When you walk into a donut shop, you see lots of familiar treats. There are cake donuts with a variety of sprinkles, crumbs and glazes. There are crackly old fashioned donuts, also made with cake donut dough, that have a lot of texture to them. There are yeasted donuts in all kinds of rings, twists and swirls, with glazes, sparkling sugars and other toppings. There are also twisted, ring-shaped crullers. These are french donuts that stand out on the donut shelf because they are very different from their cake and yeast-raised neighbors.
I’ve seen crullers described as just another cake donut, but one bite will tell you that this simply isn’t true. Crullers are light, moist and eggy inside. Unlike cake donuts, they are often hollow, as well. Crullers are donuts that are actually made with pate a choux, the same pastry used to make cream puffs and eclairs. The choux paste is made and piped into rings using a big star tip – which helps give them their signature crinkly look – before being deep fried like any other donut.
Choux paste is not difficult to work with or to pipe, and it keeps well in the fridge for several days if you want to make it in advance. It is difficult to handle freshly piped choux paste enough to get it into the frying pan without it loosing its shape, however. To avoid this problem, I used a tip from Gale Gand’s cruller recipe (since they all start with choux, I’ve noticed that most cruller recipes look pretty much the same!) and froze the dough for a few minutes before frying the donuts. This firmed them up enough to make them easy to handle and hold their shape until they got into that hot oil.
Crullers are best when they are relatively fresh – though the same could be said for all donuts – and have a slightly crisp texture to contrast to their softer, eggy centers. I topped mine with a coconut glaze and some toasted coconut. The crullers are not sweet on their own, so you’ll want to at least go for some powered sugar or cinnamon sugar on top if you don’t want to glaze your batch.
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In Madrid, there is one dessert place that is a must-visit destination. That is Chocolateria San Gines. This chocolate shop has one specialty and that is Churros con Chocolate. The chocolate is thick, rich and pudding-like, and the churros are light and crisp. The combination is pretty much the only thing on the menu and the waiters tend to assume that this is what you want when you walk in (a good thing when you don’t speak all that much Spanish). The shop is open almost 24 hours a day, serving up this specialty as a snack, as breakfast and as dessert.
On my recent trip to Spain, of course I made it a point to stop in and I wasn’t let down. But I also wanted to be able to recreate this delicious snack at home when I got back. Fortunately, it turns out that the recipe for their Churros con Chocolate is available on the Food Network website!
The churros are unusually light because they start out with a dough that is very similar to the choux pastry used for cream puffs. This makes them very crisp on the outside and very tender, as well as very slightly eggy, on the inside. Although they are deep fried and it does take the oil a while to heat up, the recipe is pretty easy to mix up and make, but expect to spend some time over the stove because the churros will have to be fried in batches.
The chocolate sauce is somewhere between hot chocolate and chocolate pudding, with a consistency that is jsut the right thickness to drip the churros into, but still liquidy enough that you can drink the leftovers when you’re done. The sauce can be mixed up while you’re frying churros and reheats well. I recommend pouring it into small mugs or other individual cups so everyone has their own dipping (and drinking) container to work with.
You’ll probably notice that my churros, unlike the churros that you find at the ball park, are not completely straight. This is because these churros start to curl slightly as soon as they hit the hot oil, largely because it is not a heavy batter. Don’t worry about this. Not every one I had in Spain was perfectly straight either and I promise that they’ll taste just as good whether they come out straight as an arrow or curvy as an “s” – especially if you make the chocolate sauce to go along with it.
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