Thank you! Especially for taking the time to find the recipe for me
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Looks terrific. Can’t you settle for Concord grapes from a market?
these look absolutely delicious, and I want to try them. Like, immediately.
It took some searching, but I think I found the recipe. Is this it?
http://anniehoa.com/corner/Finanicer/Peanut-Butter/index.htm
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It looks like you found the correct recipe.
Here it is with metric weights included.
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Oh yes, I could, I just meant the last time making it with Pinot grapes probably.
That’s correct, and thanks @maccrogenoff for the metric link. The peanut butter weight is 50 grams and egg whites right around 120 g.
Passion fruit meringue tarts. For a change I think the meringue isn’t superfluous and actually adds to the end result. Delicious! I like the meringue untouched better for these.
I was hoping to practice piping with the St. Honore tip, but I found it very difficult to pipe the very light meringue on the slippery filling with this tip.
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Today I made the Pear Chestnut Cake from Dessert Person by Claire Saffitz.
I am a big fan of chestnuts in any iteration: roasted from street vendors in Paris, savory in pasta, chestnut flour baked goods (Alice Medrich’s chestnut pound cake is high on the list of my favorite cakes.).
Of course, when I looked through Dessert Person this cake looked delicious. The last time I went to the farmers’ market a vendor had fragrant Bartlett pears. Hooray!
The cake is fantastic. The chestnut and pear flavors are wonderful. Due to having chopped pears in the cake and sliced pears on top of the cake, it is nice and moist.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the recipe posted online. If you have Dessert Person and you like chestnuts and pears, I highly recommend that you make it.
The recipe calls for fruit flavored brandy (preferably pear) or rum. I didn’t have pear brandy so I used Calvados. I’m not extravagant enough to buy a bottle of booze for one cake even though I bought a ten inch springform pan and creme fraiche for this cake.
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Will have to get that book out of the library again to try this: I love both chestnut and pear…
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Going to a friend’s birthday tonight, and it’s so warm we might be able to sit in her backyard! I made browned butter blondies https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/brown-butter-apple-blondies/ which I apparently also made last year around this time…
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Beautiful cake. Like an exotic version of Boston cream pie which I love.
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I tackled milk bar’s Banana Layer Cake last week. It involved a stupid amount of special ingredients that I had to order. It is the most difficult baking project I’ve ever attempted. I brought it in for coworkers to enjoy with the Payday coffee on Friday. Everyone loved it. I didn’t taste it myself. It isn’t the prettiest of cakes but apparently it tastes good. I am in no rush to make it again.
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My kefir cream seemed to have gone off, so I decided to bake it into some bread.
I only have 00 flour as a suitable bread flour right now, so not ideal gluten amount and I struggled with getting a strong gluten network, especially given that my kefir cream is made from heavy cream so it’s fairly high fat. I love butter, but I have oil left over from frying some shallots, so I used that instead. The dough was not the easiest to shape into pretty rolls. They were rough-textured. But I have to admit the end result is absolutely delicious.
Oh, and I saw that the supermarket has large sacks of Caputo flour with 13% protein, so I think I’ll be buying one and finally baking some bread to my heart’s content. I’ve been waiting months for bread flour to come back!
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As promised, here’s my attempt at the PB financiers:
They came out domed, rather than flat, which I’m guessing is the result of letting them sit in the oiled and floured mini-muffin tins when I discovered I accidentally had turned OFF the oven (rather than stopping the timer) and had to wait for it to reheat. This also meant they didn’t de-pan gracefully, and I had to tediously run a knife around each little bite to pry them loose.
I also don’t have a full-size food processor, so my almond ‘flour’ was more like coarse almond meal, rather than fine flour. Maybe actually buying almond flour is a better course of action for this.
The little cakes themselves are very tender, though honestly, I think I overbaked them a bit. I went for 13 minutes. Could probably knock 2 minutes off that for this small a shape. They have a nice, subtle peanutbutter flavor, with light, sweet toasty notes.
This is the first time I’ve attempted a financier of any type. No doubt future batches will be better… Still, 2 or three with a cup of tea in the morning probably isn’t the worst thing I could eat.
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I grind almonds in the coffee grinder whenever I need almond flour. The food processor doesn’t do a great job and I like them really fine for most baked goods.
If you have disposable aluminum containers, they come out of those perfectly without any need to grease.
I don’t know if you let the batter sit overnight, but all financiers benefit from an overnight rest because everything hydrates fully. The ones I made resting just a few hours didn’t brown as evenly as the first batch that sat overnight, and the texture is better when rested. The butter just seems to get absorbed better so they don’t seem as rich and heavy.
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I didn’t rest the batter at all (which I most always do with cookies of any type, for the same reason. I’ll try this next time. )
It also occurs to me I could easily swap out the peanut butter for almond butter. Doing that, plus tweaking the classic PB cookie recipe has gotten me some great almond cookies my partner and her co-workers often request. Maybe the lightest touch of almond extract to round things out.
Thank you for the tips and the inspiration. 
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I made RLB’s White Gold Passion Genoise and wow the passion fruit syrup-soaked genoise sandwiched with passion fruit curd is so good! My only issue here is the frosting. Don’t get me wrong, it tastes great, but it’s heavy, runny, and hard to work with even after being in the fridge overnight. I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to do something like a white chocolate whipped cream folded into the cream cheese. You’d get the flavor of white chocolate and cream cheese, but a light and fluffy frosting.
I tried out Rose’s genoise this time but with cake flour. She’s overly fussy with the Wondra or a sub of cake flour and cornstarch. Feels thoroughly unnecessary knowing genoise is quite successfully made with just cake flour. I added 1/4 tsp salt. I went with it, but I don’t see the benefit to taking out part of the batter before adding the flour to mix with the butter rather than the classic method of incorporating the flour and then removing some batter to add to the butter. I imagine Rose thinks you’re working the batter less this way, but when you add the completed batter, the density is more similar than removing just the beaten egg batter without the flour in there. It came out just fine, but I don’t think there’s any benefit to making it this way than the classic way. I would also bake it as an 8-inch cake. I typically use around 2-3 eggs for a 6-inch genoise, so 4 eggs makes more sense to me for an 8-inch pan.
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I need these in my life! How were they?
Giant hand pies (or miniature slab pies) a little over 7” across. One is apple-raisin (for DH) and the other is apple-and-rum-raisin (for me!).
I used a Serious Eats pie crust recipe, making enough for one single-crusted pie. The filling (made yesterday) consisted of a diced honeycrisp apple, par-cooked with sugar, butter, lemon juice, cinnamon, and a pinch of salt. Any juices were drained, cooled, whisked with Sure-Jel, and cooked until thickened before stirring back into the apples. Before closing, I topped each with the appropriate raisins and drizzled with a few drops of boiled cider and Calvados.
I imagine we’ll get 4-6 servings per pie, depending on who you talk to.
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