It was great. Pastry was very buttery and had good layers. Yes rum flavoured frangipane.
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Beauty!
Thanks, not complicated.
I hope it’s ok to place this here:
I just read a remarkable memoir (ebook from my library) From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily and Finding Home by Tembi Locke. I think it’s beautifully written and describes food made in homes in a little village. Author is African American from Texas and she meets a Sicilian chef while studying in Florence. They marry but there is a struggle to be accepted by his father. There are a few recipes at the end of the book … I’m going to try making the tapenade.
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Tiramisu tart. Almond sweet crust, mascarpone cream, ladyfinger biscuit. I’ll need to assess this tomorrow because I’m too palate fatigued. My initial thought is that most tiramisu-inspired tarts feature just one ladyfinger round and that this would be preferable. I put a little too much cream on the bottom layer so I had a bit too much of a dome.
The mascarpone cream which is spiked with amaretto (as is the coffee syrup) is delicious. I did add a little salt and thought more would have been good. This is something both Claire Saffitz and Stella Parks do well with their tiramisu versions— they don’t skip the salt!
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So overall I really like the tart but feel it could use more coffee flavor and I do find it a bit awkward to eat with the crisp crust offering up resistance when trying to cut through the whole thing, which is soft.
That recipe was from Kiev International Culinary Academy with some changes (there’s no need to use 7 eggs to make ladyfingers for an 18 cm tart, no need for all that cocoa just to dust the top). They are having a cookbook lottery on Instagram so I’m sharing the link here. There’s a chance to get a free ebook from their collection:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CnMDcPUIDve/?igshid=ZmMyNmFmZTc=
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There is no such thing as too much cream! 
It looks really good.
I like tiramisu, but I have difficulty with desserts dusted with cocoa or icing sugar as they make me cough.
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I mean I was supposed to save more for the top and use less on that first layer 
.
It is really good and I think gets better as it sits, which makes sense for a tiramisu-inspired dessert.
As for the cocoa, it helps to let it hydrate. Stella Parks has you sift it when you assemble specifically so the cocoa hydrates.
“Cover and refrigerate the tiramisu for at least an hour before serving. This will give the flavors a chance to meld and help the filling firm, but it also ensures that the cocoa layer will be hydrated, for a texture that’s velvety, not powdery and dry. When that happens, there’s no risk of flying into a coughing fit by accidentally inhaling cocoa with your first bite”
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Nice to know I’m not the only one! Misery loves company?
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First team meeting of the year, and I had to use up some heavy cream. I made this recipe: https://www.lottieanddoof.com/2015/03/salted-caramel-pound-cake/. The glaze was very thin, and I had to add tons of powdered sugar to get it firmer, which I don’t love. Also think that I could have had about 1/2 the glaze I did! However, disappeared quickly at work?
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A question for The Bread Heads among you (or anyone else, too).
I’ve got a recipe I’ve been using for English Muffins for a few weeks now (thanks Scott!). I like the product and find the particular technique very easy to do. I recently read King Arthur’s version and they enrich with an egg.
So I decided I’d add an egg to my usual recipe and gross up the flour to keep the hydration ratio constant.
Question is - for a 55 gram egg, do I treat the entire 55 grams as “liquid” for purposes of figuring the amount of flour to be added? On one hand it sort of makes sense, but on the other I know an egg won’t exactly work the same as water or milk in the recipe. Is there some accepted fraction of the egg that should count as “liquid”?
Many thanks.
An egg is 75% water and an egg white is 90% water.
If adding egg to an English muffin I like to go with egg white like Stella Parks does. Not only because I always have egg whites on hand, but they don’t add fat the way whole eggs do.
While I think her book recipe is better, these and Peter Reinhart’s English muffins from Artisan Bread Every Day (not the ones in Bread Baker’s Apprentice which are really bad in terms of being English muffins as far as I’m concerned) are the best I’ve made and in Stella’s case simpler than any others, and I’ve made a lot of English muffins. My main issue with this recipe is the amount of honey she calls for is a lot and comes through in the final product, so I cut it by at least half.
Another good one is Dan Lepard’s cider vinegar muffins, but honestly they’re not as good as Stella’s or Reinhart’s in terms of texture and similarity to commercial English muffins. Interestingly Lepard’s have an egg and the other two do not.
Btw here is a video on eggs and how they affect bread dough that might be of interest:
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I’m definitely not a bread head, but for English muffins, I do use the KAF recipe that includes the egg, but make it with 240g whole wheat flour and 309g KAF bread flour, and find them to be easy to make and yielding good texture and a nice, slightly nutty flavor with the WW addition. I cook them entirely on the stovetop, checking the temp with a thermometer, but don’t let them rise on a griddle/in a pan as the recipe suggests, as I find the exterior gets overdone that way.
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My third take on this over-night, sourdough-discard biscuit recipe. Following my first attempt, I tried baking several small biscuits crowded in a cast iron skillet, and while they tasted fine, I wasn’t happy with the result: less rise, less flakey, no crispy bottom and a texture as if they’d been steamed.
So, back to the sheet-pan with plenty of circulation between biscuits. This time, however, to counter the toppling I doubled the size of the biscuit. The wider base solved the tipping issues (although they still slid around a bit), and I got the texture I was looking for.
Now I can move on to something new (but will keep this recipe in my “keeper” file).
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Matcha financiers.
This last batch of financiers has sort of convinced me that I prefer my financiers without any baking powder, which makes them puff up too much and then sink back down.
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In the spirit of using ingredients on hand, a blueberry coffee cake – I had everything I needed to make it.
This is a New York Times recipe I like - not quite as rich or as sweet as a Boy Bait. For today’s version, I used 25% white whole wheat, buttermilk for the dairy, and used abut 1/4 c. of my own streusal topping from the freezer.
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Today I wanted to try to make a more airy or fluffier bread. I had read about putting baking powder and baking soda in the mixture, along with the yeast. I added a 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda to my standard bread formula. I was worried about there not being enough acid to activate the baking soda, so I added a tablespoon of Apple Cider Vinegar to help the baking soda. The bread was better, but I think I’m going to add an egg yolk next time. I saw that in this thread and want to try and see what difference an egg yolk makes. For now, Sunshine & I enjoyed an afternoon snack of hot bread and butter.
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