Lemon verbena shortbread with the last of my homegrown LV for the year
I picked this recipe because it used a large volume of fresh leaves, which was my goal. However, and I’m not sure if this had to do with the fact that many of the leaves were very large and very mature, there was a lot of ribbing from the leaves that I had to pick out by hand after blitzing the leaves with sugar. This was a PITA.
The recipe had lemon zest in addition to the leaves, and I finished the cookies with a sprinkling of lemon verbena sugar as well. The flavor is great, classic buttery shortbread with the right amount of LV deliciousness. I increased the salt slightly because @Shellybean .
I was dithering over whether to roll out the cookies, as the recipe says, or to make a log and slice. I did the former, and the finished shape is cute and uniform, but it was annoying to have to gather the scraps, chill again, roll out again, etc.
All that said, however, they’re really good. Shortbread never disappoints.
Back at work, and a team meeting. Quite a few bananas in the freezer, so I decided to try this Nigella recipe: https://www.nigella.com/recipes/chocolate-tahini-banana-bread. Should have used a smaller loaf pan: a bit squat! batter tasted good… will report back tomorrow
Erin Jeanne McDowell’s buttermilk biscuits from Savory Baking. I forgot to brush the tops with an egg wash, which would have made them quite stunning, but no big deal – they’ll all end up in the same place.
The dough gets two sets of lamination folds. One before a 30-minute rest in the fridge, and another before a couple of hours rest in the fridge. Finally, the cut biscuits are returned to the fridge a third time while the oven pre-heats. All this resting makes it pretty convenient to time them to be ready for dinner.
Despite a little weeping, I love how tall these come out. They probably wouldn’t topple so much if I made them wider, but they’re a pretty big biscuit as it is. I’ve always found her portion sizes quite generous.
Erin has a similar (but not quite identical) recipe in the New York Times (gift link is here), to which the same lamination process could be applied.
No recipe. Made a starter with potato and yeast, next day added bread type ingredients. The expansion was unexpected. Of course they were loved. Mystery rolls that are delicious.
Bread Pudding, very loosely based on the Bittman recipe from the NYT.
Four eggs
Three cups of milk
Between 1/3 and 1/2 c granulated sugar (eyeballed)
Glug of vanilla
Liberal amounts of cinnamon and nutmeg
Five French sandwich rolls *
Sprinkles of turbinado sugar and more cinnamon before baking
Dreamy coconut roll cake from my KICA ebook. Almost a perfect cake except I’m not in love with the filling. It contains mostly cream cheese which I find too savory and distractingly tangy. When I tasted it I thought it lacked sugar (white chocolate is the only sweetener, and only a small amount), so I whipped it with 30 g powdered sugar, which definitely improved it, but I still think I’d prefer to switch the ratios so the bulk of this is whipped cream with maybe a bit of cream cheese. I steeped the cream with coconut for extra coconut flavor.
The sponge is absolute perfection.
Meanwhile I have some pistachio joconde cooling and how great is it that though I don’t have kids, I still get to experience the joy of a three-year-old directing me to look at what she’s doing and finding her happily doing this?
I weighed 360 grams for the first two trays and I suspect the third had a bit more, so not as even it should have been.
I was worried about the raspberry buttercream because it really isn’t sweet, but I figured it needed to be that way because the pistachio joconde is pretty sweet. In the end that turned out to be right and I find the end result still on the sweet side. The bigger issue is that the buttercream lacks raspberry flavor. I wanted to try it as written with raspberry purée, but freeze-dried fruit simply produces a superior flavor. I ended up sprinkling some raspberry powder on the layers when I tasted a bit of scraps with the buttercream.
The pistachio joconde is great. Super soft, moist, and fluffy. I saved scraps to maybe toss into an ice cream, since being sponge cake it’ll stay nice and soft when frozen. Lemon seems the obvious choice for a flavor, but I have to think on it. Maybe ginger would be good.
Beer Bread - to go with the chili soup I made for dinner. My recipe has more sugar and salt than you’d think belong in a bread. But it’s definitely not cake-like.
MidwesternerTT Whole Wheat Beer Bread
12 oz can beer (Michelob Golden Light is beer of choice at our house; use what you have)
1 egg
2 c. white flour
1 c. whole wheat flour
4 1/2 tsp. Baking powder (be sure it’s not beyond expiration date)
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup minus 2 Tablespoon sugar
2 T. brown sugar
(optional) top with 1 – 2 T. melted butter
Mix egg & beer. Add all dry ingredients and mix with a spoon 20-30 seconds – do not overmix. Batter will be lumpy. Pour into a greased 9 x 5 inch bread pan. Top with melted butter.
Bake 375 degrees, 45- 55 minutes until golden brown and bread pulls away from sides of pan.
Remove from pan and cool on wire rack 30 minutes (ideally, here it seldom gets more than 15 min cooling time) before slicing. Store any leftovers wrapped in waxed paper (gets soggy if you store in plastic) - a bread pan helps hold waxed paper around loaf, and tape also helps.
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what are we looking at?
I can relate!
