Category: The Baking Bible

Sour Cherry Pie

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.

David takes better pictures than me
David takes better pictures than me

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Caramel Rolls

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:

Sticky buns
Caramel buns

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Hamantaschen

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.

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Lemon Posset Shortcakes

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!
Posset shortcakes!

I haven’t tried these yet, though the leftover posset was delicious. Maybe he’ll let me have a taste tomorrow!

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Swedish Apricot Walnut Bread

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.

Coarsely ground rye - aka pumpernickel flour
Coarsely ground rye – aka pumpernickel flour

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Gingersnaps

Coooooookies
Coooooookies

To me, a gingersnap is dark in colour, molasses-y, gingery, and coated in sugar. One of my baking buddies posted a picture of this week’s assignment a few days early, and I was surprised to see something very… pale. Not that there’s anything wrong with pale – I’m married to a ‘ginger,’ after all – it was just unexpected. Apparently, in the UK, a gingersnap is made with melted butter & golden syrup, and caster sugar or golden baker’s sugar? No molasses, no brown sugar. Since I had no idea what either caster sugar or golden baker’s sugar were, I poked around both the regular baking aisle, plus the organic section (where I normally find another Rose favourite, muscovado sugar), and did a little Google search right there in the grocery store, and settled on this:

Golden cane sugar
Golden cane sugar

It looked a little coarse, compared to what was described on the Interwebs, but I figured I could always grind finer it in my food processor… which I did, but it didn’t really get all that fine, and, while I have nothing to compare it to, I think it turned out just “fine” anyway. 😉

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Golden Orange Panettone

There was a lot of angst in our baking group about this week’s recipe from The Baking Bible.  I’ve been baking bread at least every other week for the last couple of years, so bread honestly doesn’t scare me. In my adult life, I think I’ve only had a real disaster once with bread, when I left the yeast out. Did that a few times with my parents’ bread machine as a kid, too.  This one’s a special sort of bread – lots of butter, lots of egg yolks, and candied/dried fruit.  In my post this week, alongside the pictures for the panettone, you’ll see a few process pictures of my rye sourdough, which I was working on at the same time.

Bread cousins!
Bread cousins!

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Black and Blueberry Pie

Last weekend, when I tallied up the sweets in the house, I made a decision about this week’s recipe from The Baking Bible bake-through. I eat lunch with some of my favourite people that I work, every Thursday. It started as a summer BBQ thing, many years ago, since we’re fortunate enough to have a patio and a grill available for employee use. In the summer months, we pay in a certain amount a month, and someone picks up food for the grill and gets reimbursed from the pool. A couple of years ago, we decided to try a potluck version in the winter – we rotate through main course slow cooker meals, and try to keep it relatively equitable. This week, my contribution was going to be dessert.

My most appealing shot of the pie
It looked best before baking…

Here’s a conversation from lunch, from memory:

Doug: It’s quite good. I really like the crust.

Matt: Yeah, it’s good.

Doug: You have to say WHY you like it.

Me: Yeah, if you don’t give me good feedback, you won’t get quoted on my blog.

Matt: I don’t want to be quoted on your blog. It’s good.

[Me, in my head: Too bad, Matt!]

Doug followed this up with gesturing to the pie with his fork, and saying something along the lines of: Normally, I mean, other than something like lemon meringue pie, the filling just all spills out, and the top collapses. This is actually full of fruit. It’s a nice consistency.

Geordie & Jeff agreed with him.  So, there you go.

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Chocolate Cuddle Cake

On Saturday morning, I looked at my counter, where you can find: a tin of holiday treats and a bag of chocolates from my friends, a tin of Chocolate Chip Cookies (from The Baking Bible), not one, but TWO gingerbread houses, leftover candy from decorating gingerbread houses, and two boxes of handmade truffles. In the freezer, there are still two pieces of frozen pecan pie, and the fridge had a couple of pieces of fruitcake and a couple of pieces of cheesecake.  So, what’s a girl to do, when she’s participating in a bake-through with friends from all over the world? Bake anyway, and plan on taking the bulk of it to work.  So, that’s what I did/will do tomorrow.

Completed Cuddle Cake
Completed Cuddle Cake

…I just want to know where this cake gets its name. Continue reading “Chocolate Cuddle Cake” →