What are you baking? November 2023

Cooking Discussions Baking, Sweets
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Well, in spite of toddler tampering, I did manage to make this framboisier.

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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.

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Oooo! I’ve never heard of that! I knew hanging out here would pay off!

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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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Classically it’s almond and most famously used in Opera cake. I still have pistachio paste I made and decided to try this out to use it up. . Even with my homemade paste it worked out well and is one of the easier sponge cakes to make.

I wanted to make a pistachio and raspberry honey cake from Ukrainian pastry chef Marusya Manko, but I don’t have enough pistachio paste for a full recipe and don’t want to cut it in half.

I’ll probably make a pound cake or some cookies with chopped chocolate with the remainder of the paste.

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Besides husband’s favorite yellow layer cake with increasingly darker chocolate ganache frosting, and the occasional Elvis Presley pound cake, the only thing I usually I try are financiers because of the nut flour.

I have pistachios, pistachio powder ( from Turkey) and a tube or two of pistachio paste.

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Sorry for being a week late, but I’m in the no-frost camp. Love them just as they are and they look great. Also, that pan. Sweet.

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(Angle is weird - loaf is about 4 inches high)

When we were married long ago we put a bread machine in our registry. A couple of years later I got a recipe book by Marjie Lambert called The Bread Machine Book.

Although we only used the bread machine for maybe 4 years before I went to hand-made bread, not liking the “hole in the butt” issue with the bread machine, (and despite which the machine still sits in my pantry, unused for a quarter century), there were some favorites from Ms. Lambert’s book.

My wife recently asked about 3 or so of those long-past favorites. I tried to re-create one yesterday while I was making 15 bean “Italian Soup” for my MIL. By dry weight it’s about 50% bread flour, 25% wheat flour, and 25% corn meal. It goes really well toasted and buttered with any bean soup.

I dug around on the internet trying to see what I might need to do to convert a bread machine recipe into a hand-made recipe. But all I found were the opposite - how to convert a hand made recipe into a bread machine recipe, and the only real advice I found was to mind the total cups-o-flour capacity of a given bread machine.

Does anyone have any general tips for conversion, going in the other direction?

What I found in making this without the bread machine (stand mixer and baking in loaf pans, I mean) is that I started with 3 cups combined bread and wheat flour and cornmeal, and ended up adding almost another 1.5 cups of bread flour while mixing/kneading, and still ended up with a soggy mass. When I gave up trying to get it not be a sticky mass, and threw it into a bowl for the first rise, it did rise, though.

Then when I dumped it out and shaped a couple of wettish rectangles to go into the loaf pans, it did rise again.

And the bread turned out really nicely (pic of remaining half one of the 2 loaves at top) but man the uncertainty was killing me. How could a recipe that called for 3 cups of flour need another 1.5 cups? The hydration ratio on the original recipe was about 72%.

Maybe there’s something about bread machines, and/or maybe the corn meal boiled slurry that just throws stuff off, but now I’m hesitant to try to convert the other two she asked about.

Thanks!

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That looks great! I love beer bread and like you, I was surprised by how much sugar it took without turning into dessert. I’m craving a slice now :grin:

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Like this? https://hurstbeans.com/recipes/italian-bean-soup

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OT, but that Hurst recipe is great. I’ve made it several times and we both like it a lot.

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Lucky you. I really wanted to make a pistachio roll cake, but I didn’t have enough paste for it and this cake, plus all the ground pistachios that coat the outside. I have a decent amount of pistachio recipes if you are looking for something to do with them.

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Does your bread machine have a dough setting? You could use that and the original recipe, just place in pans for final bake. Or as another poster here did, experiment with removing the paddle just before 2nd rise and let the machine do the baking too. Edited to add this link to the start of @MunchkinRedux posts over on the Bread Machine discussions about removing the paddle. Bread Machine Recipe Exchange - #19 by MunchkinRedux

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Thank you! I think I will finally try to make some pistachio financiers first.

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May be a Coconut Crème Diplomat?
I used Coconut Milk in the Crème Pat and Whipped Cream for a Bûche de Noël made with RLB’s Chocolate Cloud Roll to great results. Customer wanted the “Mounds Bar” Flavor. Any who I think it would would work great for you.

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I like crème diplomat a lot, but I love this filling except for the prominence of cream cheese , and honestly a day later I even liked the cream cheese more than I did initially (the sugar I added was definitely needed), so I want to keep it with the ratios tweaked. It’s also much simpler to make than crème diplomat (which I enjoy making, but I appreciate a more streamlined filling for rolls).

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Strawberry, raspberry, and vanilla Swiss roll. Filled with a strawberry and raspberry compote and mascarpone whipped cream. I finally put one in one of these boxes I bought a long time ago with the intention to make buche de Noel cakes.

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I use David Leibovitz’s recipe for that.

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I get it.
I also found that a simple Whipped Crème Fraîche/Sweet Cream Mixture works well in Roll Cakes (slightly stabilized with Gelatin if being held for long).

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Thank you!

The one that uses almond flour? Can I just sub pistachio powder for all of the almond flour?

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