Believe it or not, I actually have a better reason than the usual, “Sorry, we’re busy” for not posting much lately. If you keep an eye on the flickr site, you might’ve noticed that food pictures have been appearing there but never migrating over to the site. Well, the reason is that I’ve had a side project going on — I’ve been making a cookbook! My good friend Jessica is getting married today, and as a wedding present for her, I gathered recipes from her friends and family and put them together in a cookbook that I had printed over at blurb.com. I didn’t have time to make everything myself, but we did test out and photograph some of the recipes, so those are what you may have seen show up on flickr. I wanted to share some of these delicious recipes with you, too, but I didn’t want to ruin the surprise for Jessica, who I think might read this here blog occasionally. But the beautiful wedding was yesterday today, so the cat’s finally out of the bag. The next several posts will be recipes shared by Jessica’s friends and family.

First up is this Irish cream poundcake from Katrin Baker, an advisor to both Jessica and me when we were in the Honors program at NCSU. I couldn’t resist adding some chopped chocolate to Katrin’s recipe, though I’m sure it would be delicious either way. As Katrin says, this cake actually gets better after it sits for a day or two. I especially liked it toasted. Thanks, Katrin!

Chocolate Chip Irish Cream Poundcake

adapted from Katrin Baker, originally from Cooking Light, she thinks

2 3/4 cups cake flour (about 11 ounces)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup low-fat or fat-free cream cheese, softened
10 tablespoons butter, softened
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 large eggs
3/4 cup Irish cream liqueur
3/4 cup dark chocolate, chopped, or chocolate chip (optional)
Cooking spray
2 tablespoons powdered sugar (optional)

Preheat oven to 325 F.

Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt.

Beat together cream cheese and butter with a mixer at high speed. Beat in granulated sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla. Add eggs, 1 at a time; beat well after each addition. Beat on high speed 1 minute.

With mixer on low, add flour mixture and liqueur alternately to sugar mixture, beginning and ending with flour mixture; mixing well after each addition. Stir in chopped chocolate, if using.

Pour batter into a 12-cup Bundt pan coated with cooking spray.

Bake at 325 F for 55 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool 10 minutes on a wire rack; remove from pan. Cool completely on wire rack. If desired, sift powdered sugar over cake.

I got this nifty square tart pan (how could I have gone this long without a tart pan?!) with a gift certificate from Christmas.  I was itching to try it out, but I’m cutting back on sweets, so I was on the lookout for a savory tart idea.  I ended up using a balsamic vinegar crust from La Tartine Gourmande and a custardy filling of beets, goat cheese, and walnuts from alpineberry.  It was a delicious but light and simple supper.  Matt’s comment was “it’d be good as an appetizer, and smaller” — well, not a bad idea, maybe I’ll try it sometime with miniature tart pans.  Anyway, the night we made it, all we needed was something light and simple, and this fit the bill perfectly.  It was also pretty good leftover, at room temperature even.

The balsamic vinegar added a different little tang to the crust, and I think beets and goat cheese are always a great combination.  The only problem I had was that the tart shell shrank — a lot — but I think that was probably my own fault since I didn’t want to wait to let the dough rest after I made it.  So, if you try this out, I’d recommend letting the dough sit in the fridge at least an hour before rolling it out, and then refrigerate again before baking.

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So in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve gotten a bit behind on my blogging events. I missed last month’s Daring Baker’s event (though that Filbert Gateau sounded delicious, I just ran out of time), and I’m several weeks behind on Whisk Wednesdays, too. (I do have several Whisk events that I’ve cooked but haven’t found time to write up yet.) Part of my problem lately has also been that our camera isn’t working right — more on that later, but that’s why the pictures this time are not quite up to par, and why everything was taken with a flash. However, I was very excited to participate in this month’s challenge — Chocolate Eclairs, with a recipe from Pierre Hermé.

From reading the other posts that are up so far, it sounds like quite a few Daring Bakers had previously mastered eclairs and didn’t find this to be too much of a challenge. I’d never made choux paste (pâte à choux) before though, so I was pretty psyched to try it out. For this challenge, we were supposed to use at least Pierre Hermé’s recipe for the choux paste, and then at least one other chocolate element: chocolate pastry cream and/or a chocolate glaze on top. I went with the chocolate glaze, but stuck with a more traditional vanilla pastry cream (custard) filling (recipe from Joy of Cooking), as I thought both chocolate elements might be a bit over the top. (And, honestly, I just didn’t have enough chocolate in my stash — GASP! — and didn’t want to go to the grocery store.) I decided to make mini éclairs, again because I think a whole one can be too rich, so I now have a nice stash of bite-sized éclairs in my freezer, you know, for unexpected guests, or late night chocolate cravings.

As I said, this was my first time making any kind of cream puff dough, so I was thrilled when my éclairs actually puffed up as they should. There might have even been some dancing around the kitchen, though you’ll have to ask Matt about that, as I admit to nothing. Really, the only part about this recipe that was a bit challenging is that I under-filled the bottoms of my éclairs a bit, and so they wouldn’t always keep their tops on (how rude!). Other than that, the filling and the glazing was a bit tedious, but everything was pretty successful, and the finished products were mighty tasty!

Thanks to Tony Tahhan and MeetaK at What’s for Lunch, Honey? for hosting this month. If you want the recipe we used, I’ll link to it on someone else’s blog once a few more posts are up. (Most of it is in the pictures below actually, though if you want to make them you might want a few more details.) And, as always, check out the blogroll to see how everyone else fared!

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It’s that time of the month again … time for another Daring Bakers‘ event. This time, Kelly from Sass & Veracity and Ben from What’s cooking? hosted us to make a Danish Braid. Making this was a lot of fun. I have never made this kind of pastry before. The process is somewhat like making puff pastry (also on my list of things to try to do). After making the dough, which is deliciously flavored with orange and cardamon, you spread it with butter and fold it up on itself, then you keep rolling it back out and folding it in on itself several times over the course of a couple hours, so that you have thin layers of dough with butter in between. The dough is also yeasted, so after assembling the braid, you let it rise for a couple hours. Mine actually didn’t rise as much as it probably should’ve, but it still tasted fine and made a nice light, flaky dough.

This time we were allowed to put our own touch on the recipe by choosing the filling. The recipe came with directions for an apple filling, but I decided to use blackberry preserves instead. At the last minute I remembered that I also had some blanched almonds left over from the Opera Cake last month, so I ground those up with some sugar and an egg to make almond paste, which I spread in the braid underneath the jam.

This is definitely a recipe I will try again, and since the dough made enough for two braids, you might even hear about it again if I think of an interesting enough filling!

I didn’t make any changes to the dough recipe, so I will refer you to Kelly’s post for the recipe, which came from Sherry Yard’s book The Secrets of Baking. Thanks to Kelly and Ben for a great event! And make sure to check out everyone else’s Danish Braids on the Daring Bakers’ Blogroll … there are some great ones out there!

Yeah, I’m way behind the curve on this one, but whatever. I’ve been reading for a while about the wonders of macarons (not to be confused with American macaroons). I finally bought some recently at La Baguette, a French cafe at the Stanford Mall. I’m sure they were somewhat (ok, hugely) inferior to the famous ones you find on the streets of Paris, but I thought they were still pretty tasty. They’ve been in the back of my mind for a while now of something I need to try, but they are notoriously difficult to get right. They must be mixed for exactly the right amount of time so that they have a perfectly frilly “foot” at the bottom, but are not too dense. Some say they must be left out for up to a couple hours before cooking to develop a “skin” to help form that beautiful domed shape and ruffled foot, etc., etc.

So when I finally decided to try my hand, I of course carefully looked back at all the detailed directions I had seen of what to do to produce the perfect macaron, right? No, of course not. At 10:00 pm on a recent Saturday, I felt a sudden urge to bake. I was getting started kind of late, so I didn’t want anything that would take too long, but any type of cookie I had made before just didn’t seem exciting enough. I was sure David Lebovitz would have a recipe for macarons, and of course he did. Last time I tried something from his site it turned out pretty well, and I had all the ingredients on hand, so I was good to go. These actually come together pretty quickly, so 45 minutes or so later (including cooling) I had myself some very un-authentic macarons. (Though apparently I should’ve let the flavors meld overnight instead of eating the entire plate that night … I’m only barely exaggerating.)

The good news? Despite my inattention to detail (the tops are peaked, they are too narrow and tall and shaped somewhat like acorns, many of them cracked on top, but miraculously, some of them do have a decent-looking foot) they still taste pretty delicious, even if they don’t look anything like they are “supposed to.” The even better news? I’m sure I’ll be trying these again (perhaps with a more creative flavor), and when I get it right, I’ll fill you in on the results!

If you want some more details on what to do to have adequately-tasting but ridiculous-looking macarons, here’s what I did wrong that I will correct next time:

• Since our freezer is still filled with Honey-Lavender-White Chocolate Opera Cake, I halved the recipe. This meant folding the dry ingredients into only one egg white, which was very difficult to do.
• Fold the ingredients together more thoroughly. I was super-worried about overmixing, but based on these tips, I think my batter was too stiff. (Hence, I ended up with the peaked-top acorn-shaped cookies.) Apparently the batter should “flow like magma”, not hold any shape you pipe it into exactly.
• Pipe out bigger circles. (This could’ve been partly from the too-stiff batter.) I realized after the fact that David says 1″ circles and about a tablespoon for each cookie. (I just read the 1″ part the first time.) I don’t know, maybe when you move to France your definition of an “inch” shifts. At any rate, my 1″ circles were way less than a tablespoon, and I think they should’ve been a bit bigger and also flatter. Though the almost-bite-size result was kind of cute.
• I used leftover ground almonds from the opera cake, which I realized later had a little bit of flour in them. I don’t know as much about baking chemistry as I would like, but my guess is that’s probably not kosher (sorry, I know that’s a terrible pun, I’ve been hanging around Matt too long), so next time I will add a bit of the powdered sugar instead of flour to keep the almonds from turning to butter.
• Let egg whites come to room temperature. I have no idea what effect it did or didn’t have on the end result (in fact I saw one recipe saying to keep the egg whites chilled), but next time I’ll follow what most recipes seem to say and use room temperature eggs.
• Don’t grab unsweetened instead of bittersweet chocolate from the pantry for the filling. (Yep, that’s how little attention I was paying. Amazing, huh?)