This weekend’s assignment, from The Baking Bible bake-through, is oatmeal cookies. But these aren’t just any oatmeal cookies. They’re Rose Levy Beranbaum’s take on oatmeal cookies, so you know they’re not going to be just like the ones Grandma made, because what would the point of that be? You’ve already got Grandma’s recipe, or the Joy of Cooking recipe, or the one from the Fannie Farmer cookbook, or the one from some well-aged newspaper clipping. Nope, these are going to be a little different, and you pretty much have to expect that. It’s like Rose says at the top of her chocolate chip cookie recipe in this book – many people asked for her perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe, and her response was always, “How could I improve on a classic?” I think it really boils down to not being afraid to challenge peoples’ expectations.
I think a lot of my fellow bakers played with this recipe somewhat, but I always like to try things exactly as written, before tweaking, so that’s exactly what I did.
I’ve mentioned my Thursday potluck lunch with co-workers, before. It’s pretty much the best part of the week, even though I work with pretty great people all week long. The group has 8 members, currently… carefully hand-picked for reliability, sense of humour, and general awesomeness:
2 members of one of my scrum teams – one of whom was a founding member of the group, and was at the Focaccia campfire
1 member of another one of my scrum teams – another of the founding members
1 of my former teammates, from when I was on what can safely be described as the best team ever
1 of the technical writers that I regularly work with (and whose wedding I attended last fall)
1 of our scrum masters, who, yesterday, was wearing a shirt that read “Don’t read the next sentence. Oh, you little rebel. I like you.” Today, it was a loading symbol with “Sarcastic comment loading. Please wait.” Matt‘s all kinds of awesome.
Me – a former developer, turned product owner/product manager. I think I managed to keep my place in the group after turning to the “dark side,” solely on my baking merits.
Oh, and a VP. VP ALM Solutions or something like that. I have no idea who invited him to the group.
Over the years, the members of the group have changed here and there, like when someone turns out to not be good at volunteering to contribute, or annoyingly regularly fails to notify the group when they won’t be there. Generally, the meals are pretty awesome. We have occasionally had to order pizza, though… like the time that one member of the group thought he could bring in a raw 10 lb roast in the morning, and have it cooked by lunch, in a slow cooker. Dude didn’t cook. AT ALL. Take out, all day, every day. He changed jobs a while back, saving us from kicking him out of the group. 😉
This week, Doug made chicken tortilla soup for us, and it was really tasty. I’m putting that recipe (or Jay’s improvisation of it, because he never follows recipes), on my request list for home. For dessert, I figured I’d make the cherry pie a few days early, and bring it to share, so that I’d have this ready to post for pi day.
Everyone in the Alpha Bakers group that baked this week’s recipe early was absolutely raving about these – the soft, sticky caramel sauce, specifically. I was going to post some of the quotes, but Monica beat me to it… so I’ll just quote her quotes:
“I just sampled the sticky caramel. OH MY WORD!!!!”
“OMG, these buns are so good I had to make a second batch.”
”..made them this past weekend. YUMMY. They lasted about an hour”
“The caramel pairs so well with your brioche recipe. Everything is in perfect harmony! That said, I feel like having another one now!”
Looking at Monica’s post again, I also realize just how terrible I am at taking appetizing pictures of food. To be fair, when I’m baking, I’m generally more concerned about taste than presentation, so it’s no wonder my pictures tend to turn out like this:
My advisor from my master’s thesis (>8 years ago) got back in touch with me a few weeks ago, after noticing the links to my blog posts on my Twitter feed. I remember one Friday afternoon, sitting in his office at UW, having our weekly chat about my progress, his research, teaching, life, the universe, and everything, when he mentioned that he typically made pizza for his family on Friday nights. I asked him if he had a favourite pizza dough recipe, because at the time, I think I was just using a recipe that came with the breadmaker my parents had. He suggested that I should check out The Bread Bible, by one Rose Levy Beranbaum, and if I couldn’t remember her name, to go look up http://www.realbakingwithrose.com. I did. Then I went to the nearest bookstore. And, even though I was a grad student, I found the money for The Bread Bible, which was quickly followed by The Cake Bible, and adding Rose’s blog to my RSS reader.
One day, a post popped up on Rose’s blog, which linked to this post on Marie Wolf’s blog. It talked about a bake through project. I’d never participated in anything like that, but I knew it would be a good way to force gently encourage myself to a) actually thoroughly explore a cookbook for once, and b) actually put content up on a blog. With cookbooks, I have a tendency to buy them, pick a few recipes that jump out at me, and make those same things over and over again. See the basic white, yellow, and chocolate butter cakes, and the neoclassic buttercream in The Cake Bible. Pizza dough, white sandwich bread (which I’ve converted to whole wheat sandwich bread), and (more recently) Rye Sourdough in The Bread Bible. Pie crust in The Pie & Pastry Bible.
The Heavenly Cakes bake-through had many lovely results. I ‘met’ a wonderful group of bakers from all over the world, and got to bake with them most weeks for a couple of years. Most of our blogs went somewhat quiet for a while between then and now, and it’s been great to reconnect, recently. As one of the active participants in that bake-through, I also given the opportunity to help Rose and Woody with testing some of the recipes for The Baking Bible, which was a real insight into the amount of work that goes into a book like this. We followed the recipes, measured and weighed the components at every stage of the process, gave feedback on taste, texture, clarity of instructions, etc. Rose’s response to our feedback provided another level of insight. When something got universally low ratings, she completely swapped out a crust recipe. We struggled with a process or ran into crystallization issues on a sugar syrup, and something got tweaked. I mentioned the other week that my interest in baking is related to a love of watching simple ingredients turn into something completely different. It’s also deeply intertwined with a love of science, and specifically, food science. I did a grade 7 science project on the different results between using honey and sugar to sweeten cookies, and I thought that a career in food science was where I’d end up, until I discovered computer programming. Long story short, the level of detail and explanation in the way Rose authors her recipes really appeals to me, and satisfies my inner food science nerd.
I think I’m getting around to my point. A couple of weeks ago, someone in the Baking Bible bake-through group suggested that maybe we should bake our way through The Bread Bible as well. I thought “No way, I can’t manage that, with everything else I’ve got going on.” Then, I thought.. why not? I already bake bread for Jay and I every couple of weekends. Bread is also generally relatively forgiving, if you have to leave it at some stage. It takes a lot of clock time, but usually not a lot of active time. So, I’ve signed up for another bake-through! This time, it’s bread! We’re baking once a month, and it looks like posts are going to be “due” the first Wednesday of the month. We’re following the order laid out by Marie on her Breadbasketcase blog, which is what started this whole journey!
This week’s Alpha Bakers recipe was chosen to celebrate Purim. Quoting wikipedia, here: “According to the Book of Esther, Haman, royal vizier to King Ahasuerus (presumed to be Xerxes I of Persia), planned to kill all the Jews in the empire, but his plans were foiled by Mordecai and his cousin and adopted daughter Esther, who had risen to become Queen of Persia. The day of deliverance became a day of feasting and rejoicing.” That day is known as Purim. According to some sources, ‘hamantaschen’ translates, literally, to Haman’s pouch, which is a reference to Haman’s attempt at bribery (pouch of bribery money), and the triangular shape is in ‘homage’ to his hat. Also, I keep misreading the name of these as “hamanatschen.”
Whatever it is, it’s an excuse to make and eat cookies, which is something I can always get behind.
As you’ll recall, once a month, one of the recipes I bake goes to my friend and co-worker, Gilad. Unfortunately, at the end of this month (so, at the end of this week!), he’ll no longer be my co-worker. 😦 I’m glad he’s not leaving the area, and I’ll still see him at least once a month through this year, though! 🙂 Anyway, I had a hard time picking what to give him this month, so I let him choose. He said he loved lemon, so this was it!
Posset shortcakes!
I haven’t tried these yet, though the leftover posset was delicious. Maybe he’ll let me have a taste tomorrow!
Trying out posting from my phone, tonight, because I don’t think I’ll have enough time in front of a computer tonight to get this posted. This week’s selection from the alpha bakers group is a chocolate cake with a spicy ganache.
At one point during our recipe testing days, I asked my group of baking buddies for suggestions on something to enter into a baking contest at work. One suggestion that received overwhelming recommendations was the Chocolate Peanut Butter mousse tart from the Pie And Pastry Bible. I modified the recipe a little bit, and I posted the changes I’d made here on the blog. It won in the contest’s “Pie” category, and I’ve made it numerous times since then, because it’s a definite favourite among a certain group of friends. I noticed that The Baking Bible includes a hazelnut version of this tart, which I’m very much looking forward to trying. Anyway, a few weeks ago, I came across a recipe for a chocolate caramel peanut tart, on Gesine Bullock-Prado’s blog, and I knew I had to try it, to see how it stacked up. I may have also taunted my friends about it. Since the Alpha bakers group is on a “catch up” week, and I have yet to skip any recipes, I thought I’d make it this weekend.
As someone who always bakes cheesecake in a water bath, I feel like this is something that should have occurred to me a long time ago. Why not make cheesecake in the slow cooker? It’s the perfect environment for a baked custard, providing long, slow, and moist heat. I’ve mentioned before that I have a group of co-workers that eat a “pot luck” lunch together every Thursday, and I often provide dessert. We do slow cookers in the winter, and BBQ in the summer. When I saw this month’s Canadian Living Magazine, I knew that I had some new things to try on (one of) my favourite groups of test subjects. I don’t see the recipe on the Canadian Living website yet, but I changed it substantially anyway, so I’m going to share what I did, here.
Rose’s Alpha Bakers did another bread this week, and it’s another bread that has a pre-ferment. This time, I actually made the biga according to the recipe, instead of using my own starter. This bread’s biga is made with pumpernickel flour, which a number of the bakers had a hard time finding. Fortunately for me, I was able to adjust the granularity on my flour mill, and produce something that (probably) closely resembles pumpernickel flour. Because it’s a stone mill, some of it was pretty fine, and some of it coarser. I don’t think that had any serious impact on the finished bread.
eatsndrinks.ca 
