Thank you! They’re so close! Great fluffy, airy dough coated in cinnamon sugar is pretty much there already. The apples just have to be flavorful. I was trying to use what we had, which was a Granny Smith and a Red Delicious. I don’t like GS for desserts 99% of the time because they lack flavor and are too tart, and the RD is a little better in terms of flavor, but not ideal. With the apples here my best bet is to cook the apples to coax more flavor out of them.
Oh, man - gotta wipe that drool off my screen! 
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I agree. I use GS in Tarte Tatin, and instead of putting the apples into caramel, I cook them until they give off their juices, which caramelize, giving them more flavor.
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Yeah, I don’t like Granny Smith at all for baking, but if it’s all I have it’s definitely better to cook them. Generally I try to grab Golden Delicious when they show up, or failing that Gala/Fuji. Red Delicious and GS are pretty much always available.
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Have you tried Honey Crisp?
I like Honey Crisp for eating, but I didn’t use them much for baking. In any case I can’t get anything like Honey Crisp now.
For baking I liked apples like Jazz, Ginger Gold, Cameo, Jonagold, Ida Red, and whatever else tasted good at the farmers’ markets. I tried the much hyped Northern Spy once and got the mushiest apples 
.
I have noticed over the years that Red Delicious and Granny Smith have greatly diminished in flavor, even the Galas are going that way. Cosmic and Honeycrisp are at the top of my list now, for eating and baked items. Once in awhile an Opal will show up. A lot of the old standards have disappeared. Macs, Jonagolds are nowhere in my markets. The big one pounder Honeycrisp apples are too big for baking alone, we cook one and divide it for dessert. The smaller ones are perfect, for now.
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Lemon cream donuts filled with a combination of pastry cream + low fat lemon curd (that is lemon curd with no added butter, which makes it really bright) + sour cream. The combo came out pretty tasty. Covered in sugar that I pulverized with lemon zest. Best when donuts are fully cooled but not refrigerated and freshly filled with cold lemon cream.
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I made this no-bake tart today.
It is delicious. The yogurt pastry cream is great. I would use chocolate cookies next time or leave the cocoa out. I used Maria cookies, which are much lighter than Esbieta’s and not very sweet. I felt like with the cocoa the crust was stuck in between. Next time I’d use the high amount of butter as she advises for a more cohesive crust. I used the smaller amount of sugar and I would do so again.
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Made sourdough English muffins again and these came out great. I used milk this time and a little more honey. I kind of winged it in terms of measurements, adding more milk to make sure I had a very loose dough, as I don’t like English muffins made with a dough you can neatly shape or cut out. I try to ensure the dough is around 87% hydration at least.
I kind of forgot I had this dough in the fridge, so by the time I remembered I couldn’t be bothered to try to get more uniform, rounded muffins and just haphazardly scooped out the dough onto cornmeal.
These muffins have a great chewy texture and a perfect, very subtle tang.
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I made a couple of no-bake cheesecakes from Cook’s Illustrated.
One was their Oreo cheesecake made with a pudding base enriched with white chocolate rather than gelatin or whipped cream. This was good in terms of taste, but a bit soft. Their choice to use flour rather than cornstarch in the base is no doubt to make a looser consistency and I would prefer to have the set of cornstarch. This would mean whisking the pudding base before incorporating it into the cream cheese, but that isn’t a major inconvenience. I’d make it again with this particular change incorporated.
The second one was their lemon cheesecake. I used Maria biscuits as I can’t find lemon sandwich cookies, but I should have accounted for the filling making them more cohesive and increased the butter.
I’m not sure if I like this all that much. It’s not bad, but I generally have a preference for lemon cheesecakes to be made with zest and maybe a little juice rather than the more common ones with lemon curd added in. I don’t mind curd as a topping, but I prefer the lemon flavor to be less tart in the cheesecake itself. And from a consistency standpoint they went with unwhipped cream to make it denser and less mousse-like, but it still sort of misses the mark in terms of cheesecake.
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Purty, tho!
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This one is easy and pretty tasty. 2 cups of AP, 1 cup of buttermilk, 1 cup of sourdough starter, a scant teaspoon of salt, and 3 teaspoons of turbinado. Knead it. Roll it out a half inch thick. Cut the muffins out and place them on a cookie sheet sprinkled with cornmeal to rise. Place them carefully on a not too hot dry griddle or pan. Cook to desired brownness.
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Beautiful. Active starter, I take it (not discard)?
Yes. I have had this starter for decades. I feed it with flour, a smidge of sugar, and enough unchlorinated water to be able to stir it with a fork without too much effort. I fed it Sunday and made the muffins today.
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I had some blackcurrants in the freezer and decided to make some no-churn ice cream with condensed milk. This type of base is pretty sweet, but the blackcurrants are tart, so they provide balance. I added a pinch of salt and a squeeze of lemon. My instinct was to purée the berries for the swirl because I feared hard berries, but I left them. I cooked them with a little cornstarch to help keep them soft. They are a touch icy, but not too bad at all. Overall this turned out really well and I’d make it again.
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I’m envious of your black currants. And the ice cream looks great.
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Thanks! They’re available frozen here all the time, and I bought some for a cake that I still haven’t made. I kind of want to get more for a tart now.
As I’m sure you recall, they’re just not very available in the US, whether fresh or frozen, even now that most states have lifted their longtime bans on growing them. I love their flavor.
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Love the design .
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