So there’s this awesome website called Bake It Pretty – if you haven’t been there yet, you really really must. And if cutesy adorable baking supplies weren’t enough of a reason, here’s another one… to VOTE FOR MY CUSTOM SPRINKLE MIX! So there’s this contest, okay? And one of my custom sprinkle combinations was chosen as a finalist! The name is “Hello Kitten”, and SHUT THE FRONT DOOR, what little girl wouldn’t want this on their damn cupcakes? Hell, there are little boys out there that would love it too. For that matter, there are BIG boys and girls who would kill for this stuff. Seriously. Hearts, pink sugar bubbles, and pearly white sprinkles?

So get thee to the following link: http://www.bakeitpretty.com/blog/2010/05/vote-for-the-ultimate-sprinkle-mix/ and vote for me!!!

Okay, shameless self-promotion is now complete.

These dewy flowers are more than ready for their closeup...

Hello, my darling readers. Are any of you still there? Yes? Oh good, I’m so glad. I know I’ve been a Very Bad Blogger as of late. *wrist slap* I’ve given you virtually nothing to gnaw on with this blog in the past few months, but I honestly truly kinda sorta feel like I might have a bonafide excuse… I’m a gettin’ hitched in less than a month! Yes, it’s true, and I’m soooooo excited. I’m happier than a piglet floatin’ a warm bath bucket. (Click the link. No, really, do it. You’ll thank me once you’re done “squeeeee”ing from the epic cuteness).

Getting married! So what exactly does this mean? It means I’m throwing the awesome party to end all awesome parties (I’m talking even better than my infamous 29th birthday Pirates a-Go-Go! party. Yeah, epic, I know.) and y’all are invited (through the magic of the intertubes, that is). What else does this mean? Besides wearing a purty dress and lookin’ all fancy, it means I have a legitimate reason to make a BIG HUGE FREAKIN’ FRACKIN’ CAKE!

I’ve gotten pretty much the same reaction each time I tell someone new about my wedding-cake-making experiments so far. They inevitably get a queer look on their face and ask, “You’re not making your own wedding cake, are you?!” When they encounter my enthusiastic affirmative response, the next question is always the same: “Are you crazy???” I’m still not sure if they mean this rhetorically or not… hmm… regardless, it is true: I AM CRAZY. Crazy like a fox (one covered liberally in buttercream, of course). In truth, I am crazy for a number of reasons, but not this one. If anybody has eaten one of my cakes, they’ll understand. I will be that bride, the one wearing a plastic poncho over her dress while she touches up the decorations one last time. Because my cake is worth it! It is made of butter, sugar, love, fairydust, magic, rainbows and EPIC WIN, and I won’t put up with anything less for my own wedding.

I even got to do a trial run, if you can believe it! My darling friend Anne, upon hearing my wedding cake plans, asked how much I would charge for such a cake and if I would consider making HER cake in late April. I said HOLY CRAP OF COURSE I WILL! duh. And don’t bother with the payment, as this is my wedding gift to you, silly girl. She gratefully purchased the materials (butter. lots and lots of butter.) but the labor of love was my gift to them. It also served as a perfect trial run for our own cake in June, and they had no problem whatsoever with being my guinea pigs.

So where to begin? How to go about this epic task? Like the good librarian that I am, I read a bunch of books! While I gleaned tips from all of them, one in particular stuck out as the ultimate DIY reference book: Wedding Cakes You Can Make, by Dede Wilson. The instructions were spot on, with great tips, tricks, and the recipes are SLAMMIN. Unlike many similar books, she spells out to you how many cups of cake batter, filling, frosting, etc. you need for every shape and size of pan you would possibly use. Each of the cake recipes is SCALED FOR YOU, to fit a variety of pan sizes. Seriously, this book saved my ass from doing a lot of math. I cannot recommend this book highly enough! Also of much help (and encouragement) was Deb from Smitten Kitchen’s Project Wedding Cake posts from 2008. It’s one of my ultimate favorite blogs, and reading through those posts truly gave me the courage I needed to tackle this momentous project!

What came next was about a month and a half of lists, spreadsheets, sourcing, shopping, baking, filling, frosting, decorating and EATING. Because I’m ME, and couldn’t think of doing only one cake flavor, each of the three tiers was completely different. All told, I made and baked 5 batches of cake batter, 4 batches of Italian buttercream, 1 saucepan of dark-chocolate-mint ganache and 2 quarts of strawberry-balsamic filling. The final tally of ingredients included 10 pounds of butter, 9 pounds of sugar, 5 dozen eggs, 3 boxes of cake flour, a pound of chocolate, and nearly a whole bottle of vanilla. Yes, you read that right, TEN POUNDS OF BUTTER. I don’t mess around when it comes to cake, this stuff is SERIOUS.

The final masterpiece was three stacked tiers (12, 10 and 8 inches), each of which was split into 4 layers of cake and 3 layers of filling, plus a good 60 or so cupcakes:

Top tier: “Dreamsicle” Cake – Golden butter cake with orange zest and orange/vanilla buttercream.

Middle tier: Chocolate-mint cake with minty dark chocolate ganache and creme de menthe buttercream.

Bottom tier: Golden butter cake with a fresh strawberry-balsamic filling and vanilla buttercream.

Cupcakes: Golden butter cake with strawberry cream inside, topped with vanilla buttercream and sprinkles.

Behold, a wedding cake appears!

Upon reaching the reception location, unloading my gear and stacking the cake layers, I made a horrific realization: The batch of buttercream I’d made the night before, intending to use for piped decorations, had separated into a globby mess of FAILcream! After a moment of intense freaking out, I came up with a solution that I’m just gonna go ahead and call BRILLIANT, since it turned out prettier than my original plan. I took the organic roses I’d bought to decorate the top of the cake (Why organic? Because nobody likes pesticides in their buttercream!) and ruthlessly tore half of them apart into a pile of petals. Using the FAILcream as a sort of glue, I stuck petals along the base of each tier in a crown/halo sort of effect, which hid the cardboard cake-boards beneath each layer while simultaneously LOOKING GORGEOUS. There were even still enough flowers left over to make a pretty cake topper!

You may have noticed, dear readers, that there is no fondant in sight. That is because I don’t believe in fondant. Why? Because 99% of the time it tastes like a nasty, sugary mess! Also, call me crazy (we’ve already established that I am), but I want my cakes to look like CAKE, not playdough or plastic. Seriously! I want my cakes to be liberally smothered with luscious, dreamy buttercream. I want you to look at the cake and KNOW it’s gonna taste good under there, not wonder what’s hiding behind the sugar-dough curtain.

Luckily, Anne and Brett – the happy couple – fully agreed with me! All in all, they LOVED the cake, as did all the guests, apparently, judging by how fast that sucker went! I, of course, had to try all the flavors. Multiple times. You know, for science. I went home that night exhausted, but ecstatic – the tiers stayed stacked, nothing fell down, no major catastrophes (other than the buttercream FAIL), and most importantly, it tasted awesome! Not bad for my first wedding cake, eh?

Because I’m lazy, and feel like I’ve already written a ton, I’m just going to paste some pictures here of the process. You’ll be hearing more in part 2, when I start baking my own wedding cake in the coming weeks!

Cuppycakes ready for the oven. FYI, the bestest tool in the world for scoopin' batter into muffin tins is a mini ice-cream scooper (the kind with the trigger in the handle to release the batter)

Aren't these cupcake wrappers just darling? I got them at a wonderful online store called Bake It Pretty!

Cupcakes cooling on the counter... hey wait a minute, what's that down on the floor?

Mango sayz: I LIKE CUPPYCAKES TOO! NOM!

I think you guys should maybe cool off in the cupboard here instead...

Aren't these berries gorgeous? You should look closer...

Obligatory macro shot

By the end of the day, this bowl had THIRTY TWO egg yolks in it. The buttercream only needs whites!

Did somebody say buttercream?

Are you drooling yet?

Crumb coat is crumby.

Much butter was harmed in the making of this cake. By harmed, I mean MADE EVEN MORE DELICIOUS.

Ta-dah! May I present one gorgeous wedding cake (and one very tired but happy baker)!

A quivering, glistening yolk, shortly before its demise

You may have noticed I’ve been conspicuously… um… silent lately. Yes, my friends, I am a Very Bad Blogger. *slaps my own wrist* I could spout all sorts of lovely excuses, but to tell you the honest truth, I’m kinda lazy. SHOCKING! I know, right? So I totally bailed on the DB challenge last month despite it being something very exciting and delicious (tiramisu! yum! and my fiance is STILL begging me to make it for him…). Mostly it was from the horrifying experience of trying to make my own mascarpone cheese – if any of you know me and my hatred of cheese, you’ll understand. BUT I WAS DARING! I tried, even though the smell of the cream heating and curdling on the stove almost made me vomit. I couldn’t bring myself to use the stuff when it was done. Sigh…

So THIS month I see the challenge and am left, well, a bit baffled. First of all, it was a word I’d never seen or heard before (what the heck is a “tian” anyway? really?). Then when I started looking further I just couldn’t help but think “okay, so it’s a cookie with jam, whipped cream, fruit and caramel on top? What’s the big deal? Needless to say, I was not particularly inspired to action. This is why I didn’t get off my fat ass to do the darn thing until the day the challenge was due. Will I never learn??? This is ALWAYS a recipe for disaster!

What ensued was one part FAIL, one part WTF, and one part WHY BOTHER? And while much of this was probably My Own Fault, I can honestly say I feel that the recipe and instructions were partly to blame as well.  First of all, the disjointed recipe/assembly instructions were often vague and definitely contradicted themselves at times. Second, though I took some small liberties with the recipe (subbing sliced strawberries for orange segments because really, who the fark wants to spend their Saturday peeling and segmenting a buttload of oranges?), many of the elements just turned out strange and/or didn’t work at all. The orange caramel sauce? Um, not so much. More like a thin, watery caramel-like orange juice, and don’t even get me started on the creepy brown color! The Pate Sablee was, to my palate, rather dry and tasteless. And the orange marmalade? Well… um… *shuffles feet with a hangdog expression on my face*… ALL RIGHT I ADMIT IT! I BOUGHT MARMALADE AT THE DARN SUPERMARKET! The thought of spending all day blanching the same little orange bits three times in three different pots of water to make the marmalade just made me shudder. I’ve personally never even seen a marmalade recipe that was that persnickety and fussy. And for fark’s sake, marmalade from the store has always tasted just dandy to me! The one other alteration I made was to make one large (enter the trusty springform pan!) instead of a bazillion small cookie-sized desserts. Because really, my kitchen is ridonkulously well-stocked to the point of obscenity… but even I don’t have enough cookie cutters/crumpet rings/ramekins/whatchamacalits to make a bunch of these things. And they told me I COULD do the one-big-dessert concept, so no biggie, right?

Okay, enough with the flagellation, self- and otherwise. I’m not going to spell out the entire recipe here on my blog – if you want it there are plenty of other sites willing to indulge you. Basically, in the bottom of some variety of vessel you put down some fruit, cover it with whipped cream stabilized with gelatin, then top it with the cookie bit you previously baked and shove it all in the freezer to set. Turn it upside to unearth the dessert (like a flan!) and then marvel in its delicious glory. Unless you’re me. All Ican really say is this: “meh”

Though the dough for the pate sablee came together beautifully, as previously mentioned, the resulting cookie was pretty dry and tasteless.

My strawberries, sadly, had ZERO flavor whatsoever (Damn you early-season strawberries! I know it’s barely Springtime, but still, the grocery store taunts me with these first berries of the season… which tasted like nuthin). The caramel sauce never came together and persistently SEPARATED on me, leaving an orange pulpy layer on top which was not appetizing looking in the slightest. And even the damn whipped cream was tasteless! SERIOUSLY! How does that happen? I even added a smidge of vanilla to it, in vain. The tiny bit of sugar didn’t do much for the flavor of the cream. And the whole gelatin nonsense? Half of it stuck to the bottom of the cup I’d bloomed it in, and the other half ended up like snotty bits of rubber cement that dried in my whipped cream. These creamy jello boogers were mostly covered up by the chunks of marmalade I “folded” into the whipped cream (um… yeah… not so easy to fold a solid chunk-o-marmalade into soft and delicate whipped cream).

By this point in the process I’d also managed to slosh the not-quite-caramel sauce all over myself and the kitchen by accident, so I was not exactly in the best of moods. Once I slathered the giant cookie bit with marmalade, I looked down and said to myself “WHY AM I DOING THIS AGAIN? I DON’T EVEN WANT TO EAT IT ANYMORE!”

But no, I soldiered on. I plopped that jammy cookie puck down on top of the lumpy cream and tasteless strawberries, wrapped it all in clingfilm and set it in the freezer to set. I’d meant to take it to a party that night as a potluck offering. I didn’t even want to bring it – I could FEEL the FAIL emanating from the damn thing. The sad voice of my dessert fail taunted me from the freezer as I walked out the door… we ended up stopping on the way to bring pizza.

When I did eventually unearth the dessert it was hard as a rock and not exactly very appetizing (yum! it’s ice cream, literally. cream that is now ice. woo hoo!). Even after letting it thaw through, it was never anything more than “meh.” After about an hour on the counter defrosting, it was soggy. And NOBODY likes a soggy cookie, no matter how much tasteless clumpy whipped cream and sad strawberry-like fruits it is covered with.

Fail, faily McFailersons. I’ve seen others do some lovely things with this recipe, and I’m sure there’s some goodness in there, but I just can’t help but feel like I lost a page of instructions along the way. You know, the one that tells you how to make it delicious?

*shrug*

Life goes on, I suppose.

BUT NOW FOR THE GOOD NEWS! The next couple of months promise to be exciting ones here in the burning kitchen. Why, you ask? Because there is not one, but TWO wedding cakes in its future. One of which will, in fact, be my own. No, I’ve never made a wedding cake before. But if there’s one thing I love, it’s a challenge, and I’ve ALWAYS wanted to make one. Whenever I tell someone I’m making my own wedding cake they look at me like I’m crazy. For the record, yes, I AM crazy. But I’m a crazy broad that makes damn good cake, and why would I want anything less? So yes, cake #1 is for one of my bridesmaids who is getting herself hitched in April. Yay practice! And then on June 12 I’ll be that crazy ass bride wearing a plastic poncho over my dress to protect it from the buttercream while I stack my cake tiers. And you, my dear readers, have a first-row seat.

It seems almost a shame to cover that shiny, yummy chocolate base... almost.

I have a confession to make. Okay, well more than one. But let me start with the most pressing: I think I’m in love… with a dessert. Nanaimo Bars, where have you been all my life??? When I think of all the desserts, all the cookies, the cakes, the bars I have suffered through in my life, I only have one regret: that it took me 31 long years to find you. Was I perhaps a Canadian in my last life? Because I feel like I’ve known you longer than just a week. I feel an almost spiritual connection with you. When I press my lips to your unctuous sweetness, I feel as if I’ve come home. What do I love most about you? How to choose? First there’s your top layer, that dark ganache I can’t get enough of. Then I find your creamy center, so soft and buttery. All of this is supported by the strength and beauty that is your bottom layer, with chocolate and coconut and almonds and everything I could ever want. Put together, your layers make a symphony of deliciousness unlike any I’ve ever experienced.

I don’t quite know how to explain this forbidden love that I feel… what I do know is that I love you, Nanaimo Bars. Forever.

Before I continue any further with my love sonnet to your deliciousness, let me get this formality out of the way:

The January 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Lauren of Celiac Teen. Lauren chose Gluten-Free Graham Wafers and Nanaimo Bars as the challenge for the month. The sources she based her recipe on are 101 Cookbooks and www.nanaimo.ca.

Yes, Nanaimo Bars and I were introduced by friends, namely, the Daring Bakers. Oh, Daring Bakers, I will never be able to thank you enough for bringing us together. There are simply no words…

But now, for the second confession:

I am a failure of a Daring Baker. Or, more specifically, I’m a LAZY failure. This particular challenge came in two parts – to make homemade graham crackers (either regular or gluten free), and then use said crackers in the bars recipe. I could lie to you, my wonderful readers, and say I made the crackers but conveniently “forgot” to document the process with pictures. But I care about you all too much. I’m lazy, and shamefully bought my graham crackers at Whole Foods. But in my defense, I will say this: though based in laziness, my intentions were in the right place. I knew in my heart that if I didn’t buy the graham crackers, I would never get around to making the bars themselves. I guess you could say I’m a lazy pragmatist. And after seeing the recipe for my beloved Nanaimo Bars, I simply couldn’t wait. I knew they had to be mine, even if I cheated to get there.

Out of respect for the Daring Bakers, whom I don’t deserve to be among, I’ll repeat the graham cracker recipes below in case you are less lazy than I and want to make them for yourself.

Gluten-Free Graham Wafers

1 cup (138 g) (4.9 ounces) Sweet rice flour (also known as glutinous rice flour)
3/4 cup (100 g) (3.5 ounces) Tapioca Starch/Flour
1/2 cup (65 g) (2.3 ounces) Sorghum Flour
1 cup (200 g) (7.1 ounces) Dark Brown Sugar, Lightly packed
1 teaspoon (5 mL) Baking soda
3/4 teaspoon (4 mL ) Kosher Salt
7 tablespoons (100 g) (3 ½ ounces) Unsalted Butter (Cut into 1-inch cubes and frozen)
1/3 cup (80 mL) Honey, Mild-flavoured such as clover.
5 tablespoons (75 mL) Whole Milk
2 tablespoons (30 mL) Pure Vanilla Extract

Directions:
1. In the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade, combine the flours, brown sugar, baking soda, and salt. Pulse on low to incorporate. Add the butter and pulse on and off, until the mixture is the consistency of a coarse meal. If making by hand, combine aforementioned dry ingredients with a whisk, then cut in butter until you have a coarse meal. No chunks of butter should be visible.
2. In a small bowl or liquid measuring cup, whisk together the honey, milk and vanilla. Add to the flour mixture until the dough barely comes together. It will be very soft and sticky.
3. Turn the dough onto a surface well-floured with sweet rice flour and pat the dough into a rectangle about 1 inch thick. Wrap in plastic and chill until firm, about 2 hours, or overnight.
4. Divide the dough in half and return one half to the refrigerator. Sift an even layer of sweet rice flour onto the work surface and roll the dough into a long rectangle, about 1/8 inch thick. The dough will be quite sticky, so flour as necessary. Cut into 4 by 4 inch squares. Gather the scraps together and set aside. Place wafers on one or two parchment-lined baking sheets. Chill until firm, about 30 to 45 minutes. Repeat with the second batch of dough.
5. Adjust the rack to the upper and lower positions and preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit (180 degrees Celsius).
6. Gather the scraps together into a ball, chill until firm, and reroll. Dust the surface with more sweet rice flour and roll out the dough to get a couple more wafers.
7. Prick the wafers with toothpick or fork, not all the way through, in two or more rows.
8. Bake for 25 minutes, until browned and slightly firm to the touch, rotating sheets halfway through to ensure even baking. Might take less, and the starting location of each sheet may determine its required time. The ones that started on the bottom browned faster.
9. When cooled completely, place enough wafers in food processor to make 1 ¼ cups (300 mL) of crumbs. Another way to do this is to place in a large ziplock bag, force all air out and smash with a rolling pin until wafers are crumbs.

Regular ol’ Graham Crackers (courtesy of 101cookbooks.com)

2 1/2 cups plus 2 tablespoons unbleached pastry flour or unbleached all-purpose flour
1 cup dark brown sugar, lightly packed
1 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
7 tablespoons (3 1/2 ounces) unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch cubes and frozen
1/3 cup mild-flavored honey, such as clover
5 tablespoons whole milk
2 tablespoons pure vanilla extract

topping: 3 tablespoons granulated sugar + 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

In the bowl of a food processor fitted with the steel blade or in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the flour, brown sugar, baking soda, and salt. Pulse or mix on low to incorporate. Add the butter and pulse on and off on and off, or mix on low, until the mixture is the consistency of a coarse meal.

In a small bowl, whisk together the honey, milk, and vanilla extract. Add to the flour mixture and pulse on and off a few times or mix on low until the dough barely comes together. It will be very soft and sticky.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface and pat the dough into a rectangle about 1 inch thick. Wrap in plastic and chill until firm, about 2 hours or overnight.

To prepare the topping: In a small bowl, combine the sugar and cinnamon, and set aside.

Divide the dough in half and return one half to the refrigerator. Sift an even layer of flour onto the work surface and roll the dough into a long rectangle about 1/8 inch thick. The dough will be sticky, so flour as necessary. Trim the edges of the rectangle to 4 inches wide. Working with the shorter side of the rectangle parallel to the work surface, cut the strip every 4 1/2 inches to make 4 crackers. Gather the scraps together and set aside. Place the crackers on one or two parchment-lined baking sheets and sprinkle with the topping. Chill until firm, about 30 to 45 minutes. Repeat with the second batch of dough.

Adjust the oven rack to the upper and lower positions and preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Gather the scraps together into a ball, chill until firm, and reroll. Dust the surface with more flour and roll out the dough to get about two or three more crackers.

Mark a vertical line down the middle of each cracker, being careful not to cut through the dough. Using a toothpick or skewer, prick the dough to form two dotted rows about 1/2 inch for each side of the dividing line.

Bake for 25 minutes, until browned and slightly firm to the tough, rotating the sheets halfway through to ensure even baking.

Yield: 10 large crackers

From Nancy Silverton’s Pastries from the La Brea Bakery (Villard, 2000)

And now, without further ado…

Nanaimo Bars

Bottom Layer
1/2 cup (115 g) (4 ounces) Unsalted Butter
1/4 cup (50 g) (1.8 ounces) Granulated Sugar
5 tablespoons (75 mL) Unsweetened Cocoa
1 Large Egg, Beaten
1 1/4 cups (300 mL) (160 g) (5.6 ounces) Gluten Free Graham Wafer Crumbs (See previous recipe)
1/2 cup (55 g) (1.9 ounces) Almonds (Any type, Finely chopped)
1 cup (130 g) (4.5 ounces) Coconut (Shredded, sweetened or unsweetened)

Middle Layer
1/2 cup (115 g) (4 ounces) Unsalted Butter
2 tablespoons and 2 teaspoons (40 mL) Heavy Cream
2 tablespoons (30 mL) Vanilla Custard Powder (Such as Bird’s. Vanilla pudding mix may be substituted. **out of desperation, I used sugar/fat free butterscotch pudding mix as it was all I had at the time… and it was SUPER YUMMY)
2 cups (254 g) (8.9 ounces) Icing Sugar

Top Layer
4 ounces (115 g) Semi-sweet chocolate
2 tablespoons (28 g) (1 ounce) Unsalted Butter

Directions:
1. For bottom Layer: Melt unsalted butter, sugar and cocoa in top of a double boiler. Add egg and stir to cook and thicken. Remove from heat. Stir in crumbs, nuts and coconut. Press firmly into an ungreased 8 by 8 inch pan.
2. For Middle Layer: Cream butter, cream, custard powder, and icing sugar together well. Beat until light in colour. Spread over bottom layer.
3. For Top Layer: Melt chocolate and unsalted butter over low heat. Cool. Once cool, pour over middle layer and chill.

Don't you just want to put your finger through the screen and lick this straight from the bowl?

See that shininess, kids? That's what we like to call BUTTER. It makes things AWESOME.

Spreading the middle layer... wow that sounds dirty!

My layers, let me show you them!

Oh, Nanaimo Bars, I miss you already!

I tried, dear readers. I tried SO HARD to get a shot of the finished product – cut, out of the pan and ready for eating. But they were literally too delicious to stop and photograph. And then we made a second batch a few days later for my hunny’s work potluck, pressed into muffin tins for single-size OM-NOM-NOM-ing. These too somehow disappeared without a trace. The thought of grabbing the camera was there in my mind, but was quickly obliterated by the OH MY GOD I NEED TO EAT THIS NOW sensation. I call it my dessert-based temporary insanity defense.

Well, also there’s the fact that I never got a bar out of the pan that looked pretty enough for me to photograph. Because I’m a snob that way

Disdainful snowman is disdainful.

The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.

‘Tis the season to be jolly and all that… and what could be more jolly than a good old fashioned gingerbread house? One of my favorite holiday memories as a kid was making “gingerbread” houses with my mom and sister every year. Okay, okay, we cheated and used graham crackers, but STILL, they were beautiful and candy-ful and lovely in every way (don’t be a hater). When we got a bit older, the daughters of my mom’s employer (and our occasional baby-sitting charges) would join us in the house-making extravaganza. Really, it’s not the same unless you’ve got a munchkin there to share in the glory that is sugar and candy and all things sweet. So, in the spirit of my own family tradition, I called up my lovely friend Tipper and asked if her and Nora, age 2 and all things precocious, would like to join me in my holiday daring bakers endeavors.

Tipper is a big fan of the blog, and is an incredible cook and baker herself, and seemed excited by the idea. And hey, a guest appearance on her favorite food blog (it’s your favorite, isn’t it sweetie? ISN’T IT? HINT HINT) could very well make her famous on the interwebz, so can you blame her for jumping on board with my sugar-laden plan?

“Lets bake our gingerbreads the night before,” I said, “So they’ll be nice and rock-hard and ready for construction the next day!” So there I was, 10 pm the night before, and was my kitchen filled with the delicious scent of gingerbread wafting from the oven I’d slaved over all day? Um…. no. Not really. I’d been getting over a cold for days and days, and had a sinus headache that refused to lay down and die no matter how many lovely drugs I threw at it. All day I waited for the headache to pass, to no avail. That’s how it came to be that only 12 hours before we planned to meet and construct our spiced, saccharine monstrosities, I was sitting in a gingerbreadless apartment, feeling like the worst. food. blogger. EVER.

I started talking with Tipper, telling her my tale of woe, describing just what a FAILURE I am… when the skies parted above me and she uttered (well, um, typed) the magic words: “the recipe makes a crapload of dough. maybe there is enough for TWO houses. beats me.” And that, ladies and gentlepeoples, is how Tipper saved Christmas. Or at least my dreams of finally decorating a gingerbread house made from the real stuff.

Believe it or not, she had enough dough for THREE tiny houses, one for each of us and her husband as well. A Christmas miracle indeed. One manic candy-buying shopping trip later and we were ready to go. Sadly, some of my “traditional” childhood candies were not available at our local supermarket (Necco Wafers make the best roof tiles, dammit!), but we found enough goodies to fill two bags – more than we needed, but hey, it’s candy!

By the end of the day we were covered in icing, hopped up on sugar, and I’d introduced little Nora to the art of gingerbread houses and candy-eating. I’m a bad influence. Apparently she now asks for candy with her oatmeal in the mornings. My work here is done.

By the way, if you’re in need of some fine, home-made soaps, bath-bombs or body butters, please for the love of all things holy, visit the lovely Tipper’s Etsy shop! Her products are divine, and as you can see, she’s got an adorable family to support so your soap-buying dollars are going to a worthy (and CUTE) cause.  http://www.etsy.com/shop/robinsdalesoap

- – - – -

Scandinavian Gingerbread (Pepparkakstuga)
from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book by Beatrice Ojakangas http://astore.amazon.com/thedarkit-20/detail/0816634963

1 cup butter, room temperature [226g]
1 cup brown sugar, well packed [220g]
2 tablespoons cinnamon
4 teaspoons ground ginger
3 teaspoons ground cloves
2 teaspoons baking soda
½ cup boiling water
5 cups all-purpose flour [875g]

1. In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar until blended. Add the cinnamon, ginger and cloves. Mix the baking soda with the boiling water and add to the dough along with the flour. Mix to make a stiff dough. If necessary add more water, a tablespoon at a time. Chill 2 hours or overnight.

2. Cut patterns for the house, making patterns for the roof, front walls, gabled walls, chimney and door out of cardboard.

3. Roll the dough out on a large, ungreased baking sheet and place the patterns on the dough. Mark off the various pieces with a knife, but leave the pieces in place.

4. [I rolled out the dough on a floured bench, roughly 1/8 inch thick (which allows for fact that the dough puffs a little when baked), cut required shapes and transferred these to the baking sheet. Any scraps I saved and rerolled at the end.]

5. Preheat the oven to 375′F (190′C). Bake for 12 to 15 minutes until the cookie dough feels firm. After baking, again place the pattern on top of the gingerbread and trim the shapes, cutting the edges with a straight-edged knife. Leave to cool on the baking sheet.

Royal Icing:

1 large egg white
3 cups (330g) powdered sugar
1 teaspoon white vinegar
1 teaspoon almond extract

Beat all ingredients until smooth, adding the powdered sugar gradually to get the desired consistency. Pipe on pieces and allow to dry before assembling. If you aren’t using it all at once you can keep it in a small bowl, loosely covered with a damp towel for a few hours until ready to use. You may have to beat it slightly to get it an even consistency if the top sets up a bit. Piped on the house, this will set up hard over time.

Apparently, baby Ike is distrustful of strange women bearing candy...

Behold! The only appropriate use for holiday tree-shaped Peeps!

You say "fruit roll ups", I say "roof tiles!"

If only I could have found little gummy swords for these gummy bears to hold over the path...

Tipper wisely chose to construct a chimney out of gumdrops.

Tipper's house is too darling for words!

Nora eyes her mommy's delicious creation.

Yeah... uh... that didn't last long.

Sammiches!

Okay, I know. Go ahead and say it. I’ve been a BAD BLOGGER. Bad bad bad. When was my last update? MONTHS ago? Um… yeah… so… like… I moved, and then my new kitchen wasn’t done, and then…. um, yeah, I suck. But I’m back now and ready to rumble. Srsly. Ya rly. Gonna do it this time.

Once again, it’s time for the Daring Bakers Challenge. Your blurb of the month: The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

Okay, so if you look at any other food blogs than this one (and why would you, really? I mean, this one is so awesome and stuff…) you may have noticed a strange cookie trend sweeping the intarnets. A wave of cookies sweeping the nation, crispy bottomed, brightly colored, flipped “foot” to “foot” and joined together in a holy matrimony of sweet fillings and buttercreams and curds… oh my! These funny, footsy little cookies are called Macarons (if you’re french, or suitably pretentious, which I am). Not to be confused with the humble american Macaroon (oh, how that extra O just goes and changes everything), which I also dearly lurve, the macaron is a frothy mix of egg whites, sugars, and finely ground nutmeats (hehehe… I just love saying the word “nutmeats” – it just sounds so dirty!), baked into little crispy-puffy dollops and eaten slathered-together with just about anything under the sun.

I call this one "vanilla bean meets grisly death at the hands of fluffy meringue"

I’ve been watching these little buggers for months now, taking over the food blogs, yet never quite having the excuse to give them a try. “Gosh darnit they’re PURTY,” I’d say, and then forget all about them until the next bit of macaron food-porn launched itself across my computer screen. Well here was my excuse! Daring Bakers picks a winner yet again! Woot!

Little did I know just how tricky these darn things are to get just right. Every one of those pictures I see of perfect, poofy macarons, now that I’ve tried to make them myself, I definitely think should have a bit fat warning label stating “YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY”. Not that my results weren’t delicious, scrumptious even. But not so pretty. And we all know how much I like to make my food pretty. Apparently there are fanatics out there that have dissected the concept of macaron-making nearly to death, spouting all sorts of arcane knowledge about “aging” one’s egg whites, resting pre-baked cookies, not cooking on a dry/humid/cloudy/sunny/rainy/insert-weather-here day. There are pages and pages dedicated to the magical incantations required to create the perfect “foot” on the bottom of the cookie (look at a proper picture and you’ll see what I mean). It’s nutty, I tell ya.

Whatever, I just wanna bake some cookies. So I threw myself into the recipe with enthusiasm, putting my own flavor twist to the buttercream center (caramelized pears with port!). Were they pretty to look at? Not so much. Were they yummy? Yes. Will I make them again? Maybe… who knows. Only time will tell. I packed up half of this batch and brought them over to the house of a couple of sick friends (for the sake of anonymity, let’s call them Joe and Jen). I am firmly convinced that my cookies completely cured them of all their ills. Seriously.

Care package is caring. And packagey. AND DELICIOUS!

Anyway, you can expect to hear from me again soon because I have some cool posts saved up, and in the next year will also be tackling baking my first and second wedding cakes! Always wanted to do that… Meanwhile, please accept this post as my humble offering back to the world of food-blogging. Forgive me for my absence. I promise to be better from now on. Pinkie swear and everything!

Macarons

2 1/4 cups confectioners’ sugar
2 cups almond flour
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
5 egg whites, room temperature

1. Preheat the oven to 200°F. Combine the confectioners’ sugar and almond flour in a medium bowl. If grinding your own nuts, combine nuts and a cup of confectioners’ sugar in the bowl of a food processor and grind until nuts are very fine and powdery.
2. Beat the egg whites in the clean dry bowl of a stand mixer until they hold soft peaks. Slowly add the granulated sugar and beat until the mixture holds stiff peaks.
3. Sift a third of the almond flour mixture into the meringue and fold gently to combine. If you are planning on adding zest or other flavorings to the batter, now is the time [I added the guts of a vanilla bean - save the husk, we'll use it later]. Sift in the remaining almond flour in two batches. Be gentle! Don’t overfold, but fully incorporate your ingredients.
4. Spoon the mixture into a pastry bag fitted with a plain half-inch tip (Ateco #806). You can also use a Ziploc bag with a corner cut off. It’s easiest to fill your bag if you stand it up in a tall glass and fold the top down before spooning in the batter.
5. Pipe one-inch-sized mounds of batter onto baking sheets lined with nonstick liners (or parchment paper).
6. Bake the macaroon for 5 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and raise the temperature to 375°F. Once the oven is up to temperature, put the pans back in the oven and bake for an additional 7 to 8 minutes, or lightly colored.
7. Cool on a rack before filling.

Theoretically, this yields 10 dozen macarons.

Little blorps of "cookie dough"

Alas, my macarons are "foot"less (and fancy free?)

Abbey’s Caramelized Pears with Port Buttercream

(based on Swiss Buttercream from Smitten Kitchen – this was the perfect amount for my half-batch of macarons, but YMMV)

2 pears, peeled and chopped into chunks
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 empty vanilla bean pod
cinnamon
freshly grated nutmeg
2 tablespoons Port

1/4 cup sugar
1 large egg white
6 tablespoons butter, softened
1/4 teaspoon vanilla

Melt the 2 tbsp. of butter and brown sugar over medium heat. Add the vanilla bean pod to the butter and sugar so it can flavor the caramel. Once the sugar & butter are bubbly, add in the chopped pears. Sprinkle in the cinnamon and nutmet to taste, then saute in the caramel for 10-20 minutes, depending on the ripeness of your pears. Once the pears are good and soft, add the Port and let cook for 2-3 minutes more. Take off the heat and let cool thoroughly. Once cooled, prepare the buttercream:

Whisk egg whites and sugar together in a big metal bowl over a pot of simmering water. Whisk occasionally until you can’t feel the sugar granules when you rub the mixture between your fingers.

Transfer mixture into the mixer and whip until it turns white and about doubles in size. Add the vanilla, then add the 6 tbsp. of butter a bit at a time and whip until smooth and luscious. Set aside.

Get your cooled pear mixture and drain off as much of the syrupy moisture as possible, then mash the pears until you get a nice chunky texture. fold into the buttercream, then do with it what you will.

How can you go wrong when you start with butter, brown sugar, and a vanilla bean?

Pears enter stage left. And I swear, the "A" made out of vanilla bean parts was entirely accidental!

My buttercreams, let me show you them

Actual cookie image coming soon - missing due to technical difficulties.

It’s Daring Bakers time again! The July 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Nicole of Sweet Tooth. She chose Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Cookies and Milan Cookies from pastry chef Gale Gand of the Food Network.

First of all, let me apologize for the lack of pictures in this post. I did take them, I promise, but at the moment they are living peacefully and undisturbed in a camera that is about 1800 miles away. Alas. I hope to upload them later, upon returning home from a brief 2-day stint in Los Angeles. Yes, my friends, this post comes to you direct from sunny Southern California! I can see the Shrine Auditorium from my hotel window, which is pretty darn cool. But I know you’re not here for that, you’re here for THE COOKIES!

This month’s challenge consists of two cookie recipes, but despite my best intentions, I was only able to make one – a lovely home-made rendering of the popular Milano cookies by a company I shall refrain from naming here. Though the cookies were delicious, I could definitely tell the difference between them and the original, and I must admit that the dough was not easy to work with. Granted, if I’d used a proper pastry bag and not a ziplock bag I probably would have had more control. As it was, getting any kind of even, uniform shape out of the stuff was difficult. After batch number one, I gave up entirely on the classic oblong shape and went for easier circles. Because of my less-than-ideal oven, they baked unevenly and it was hard to get them to that perfect slightly-crisp but not too brown state. And to add insult to injury, when making the chocolate filling, the chocolate seized on me! A hasty addition of some butter and more heavy cream brought it back into a sort of submission, but my overall impression of the recipe was this: FUSSY.

Regardless, they were REALLY DAMN DELICIOUS and were devoured eagerly by my friends before the night was through, so I must have done something right, right?

This is probably the lamest post I’ve done so far, but I blame Los Angeles and the rigors of air travel. I’m tired, dammit.

Here’s the recipe!

Milan Cookies
Recipe courtesy Gale Gand, from Food Network website

Prep Time: 20 min
Inactive Prep Time: 0 min
Cook Time: 1 hr 0 min
Serves: about 3 dozen cookies

• 12 tablespoons (170grams/ 6 oz) unsalted butter, softened
• 2 1/2 cups (312.5 grams/ 11.02 oz) powdered sugar
• 7/8 cup egg whites (from about 6 eggs)
• 2 tablespoons vanilla extract
• 2 tablespoons lemon extract
• 1 1/2 cups (187.5grams/ 6.61 oz) all purpose flour
• Cookie filling, recipe follows

Cookie filling
• 1/2 cup heavy cream
• 8 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped
• 1 orange, zested

1. In a mixer with paddle attachment cream the butter and the sugar.
2. Add the egg whites gradually and then mix in the vanilla and lemon extracts.
3. Add the flour and mix until just well mixed.
4. With a small (1/4-inch) plain tip, pipe 1-inch sections of batter onto a parchment-lined sheet pan, spacing them 2 inches apart as they spread.
5. Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 10 minutes or until light golden brown around the edges. Let cool on the pan.
6. While waiting for the cookies to cool, in a small saucepan over medium flame, scald cream.
7. Pour hot cream over chocolate in a bowl, whisk to melt chocolate, add zest and blend well.
8. Set aside to cool (the mixture will thicken as it cools).
9. Spread a thin amount of the filling onto the flat side of a cookie while the filling is still soft and press the flat side of a second cookie on top.
10. Repeat with the remainder of the cookies.

Introducing the Banoffee-Bakewell Tartlette! British-British fusion at its best!

The June Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Jasmine of Confessions of a Cardamom Addict and Annemarie of Ambrosia and Nectar. They chose a Traditional (UK) Bakewell Tart… er… pudding that was inspired by a rich baking history dating back to the 1800′s in England.

Is it a tart? Is it a pudding? Is it a pie?

Who the heck knows! It really depends on what slice of the globe you happen to call home and what you like to call your yummy baked goods. But regardless of the name, it is truly and utterly delicious.

The Bakewell tartpuddingpie has its roots in merry old England, and combines a number of traditional dessert elements in an interesting and scrumptious way. First you lay down a buttery, shorbread-like tart crust, slather it with your jam or curd of choice, then top with a mysterious concoction known as Frangipane. This exotic-sounding addition is a somewhat squidgy mess of eggs, butter, sugar, and ground almonds which bakes into a delightful, almost sponge-cake-like flufiness atop your tartpuddingpie. The combination of these three elements is no less than genious. Those 19th century Brits knew what they were doing, I say!

According to this month’s lovely hosts, “like many regional dishes there’s no “one way” to make a Bakewell Tart…er…Pudding, but most of today’s versions fall within one of two types. The first is the “pudding” where a layer of jam is covered by an almondy pastry cream and baked in puff pastry. The second is the “tart” where a rich shortcrust pastry holds jam and an almondy sponge cake-like filling. The version we’re daring you to make is a combination of the two: a sweet almond-flavoured shortcrust pastry, frangipane and jam.”

As for the tart/pudding debate, someone once said something like “The Bakewell pudding is a dessert. The Bakewell tart is that girl over there.” Use that knowledge as you may…

Again, this month’s challenge gave us daring bakers a little leeway in our baking madness: use the tart dough and the frangipane, but choose your own jam or curd for its innards. Making our own jams was heartily encouraged so, with last month’s sad failure still haunting me, I decided to start early in the month and work extra hard to make this challenge a success! And I’m happy to report, I did.

My first attempt began early in June, and true to the daring baker’s spirit, I made my own jam filling out of the fresh lovely produce hitting my local markets. I researched some jam recipes, and decided to just strike out on my own and see what happened. I figured I didn’t need anything worthy of canning (since I just don’t have the equipment for that), and if the texture was a bit runny or dense, it didn’t matter since it was just going to be the jam in my bakewell sammich. The result of my labors was a quite lovely Brown Sugar Stone-fruit Jam (the recipe is listed at the end of the post).

I chose to make my tart dough in the food processor because, well, I’m lazy! If this were something in which the flakiness of the dough was paramount to the dish, I might have taken the time and effort to do it all old-fashioned-like, but f*** that. And hey, this dough is merely a substrate for the jam and frangipane anyway! The frangipane was a breeze to whip up, believe it or not. Though the originators of the recipe warned could sometimes get an unappealing curdled-like texture, mine was nothing but smooth and creamy all the way. I think the trick is really making sure your butter is at room temperature, making sure to mix thoroughly between elements, and having a good quality hand or stand mixer at the ready. My KitchenAid hand-mixer is so freakin’ turbo-powered, I wish it had a *LOWER SETTING* – the 1st notch on the dial is hand-numbingly powerful, and I don’t think I’ve ever even dared to go beyond notch 3!

For my jam-based creation, I also decided to remain traditional with choice of cookware and size – a nice, standard 9-inch tart pan did the trick. I lined the bottom and sides with the pastry crust, oozed on a thick layer of jam (at this point it almost started to look like I was making a deep-dish pizza…), then smoothed the luscious frangipane over the top.

After a half an hour in the oven, it looked nice and brown on top, so I took it out and let it cool. The house smelled AMAZING – like marzipan and shortbread had been makin’ sweet, sweet love in my kitchen all day. I let it cool for quite some time, but upon cutting into it realized that I hadn’t quite baked it long enough: the frangipane in the center inches of the tart was still runny, and the dough beneath it suspiciously soft. That didn’t stop it from being DELICIOUS, however, and it firmed up a bit more after a night in the fridge. Undercooked or not, the boytoy and I inhaled the thing over the next couple of days – it makes quite a good breakfast, I assure you (as long as there are no bacon waffles nearby to compete with them)!

I call this one "The obscene almond"

As good as that first tart was, I was sure I could do better. I wanted to do something a little more bold, now that I’d tackled the basics! First off, I decided to convert the recipe into cupcake-sized tartlettes, hoping the smaller size would help my frangipane to cook through this time. As for the filling, here was where I wanted to try something truly unique. With my mind stuck on yummy-British-dessert mode, I suddenly remembered a divine concoction known as Banoffee Pie: bananas and toffee/caramel are combined in pie format and then slathered with cream. I’ve seen it done a dozen times on my cable channel of choice, the Food Network, and every time found my chin dropped somewhere near the floor with a puddle of drool beneath it. I always imagined this combination to be something truly inspired, but as of yet, have never gotten around to making the damn pie! And here is where the idea came to me: why not make a crazy British-fusion dessert, combining the bananas and caramel of Banoffee Pie with the delicious almond-ness of a Bakewell Tart? GENIOUS! And thus the Banoffee Bakewell Tart was born!

So here I am, once again on the day that the challenge is due, working down to the wire to finish my baking. Yes, I got a head this month, but still, I seem to be a creature of (last-minute) habit. Luckily, this month luck was with me: I found that the single quantity of tart dough was the PERFECT amount for exactly 12 cupcake-sized tartlettes! After the dough was rolled out, I cut circles out of it with a crumpet-ring, then smooshed them into the dozen crevices in my standard-sized cupcake pan.

Is that a crumpet ring or are you just happy to see me?

After a quick chill in the freezer, I filled each little tart with about a tablespoon of canned Dulce de Leche, topped that with a slice of fresh banana, then covered with frangipane like usual.

A quartet of banana slices, mired in delicious caramel goo

Ready for a quick trip to the oven before being ravenously devoured.

They cooked for about 20-30 minutes, until brown and poofy on top. With a bit of whipped cream dolloped on top, these Banoffee-Bakewell tartlettes were a clear winner!

Please try and refrain yourself: licking your computer screen is not recommended...

Here are the official recipes and directions for all the elements of this fantabulous dessert. I highly urge you to give this one a try – it really wasn’t hard at all, and if you used store-bought jam, it would be even easier!

Brown Sugar Stone-fruit Jam:

• Approx. 3 pounds of stone-fruits (I used cherries, plums and peaches in roughly equal proportions, but feel free to play with this as you like), stones/pips removed, and chopped into small chunks
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup white sugar (I used vanilla sugar, but plain works too)
• Juice of 1 lemon

Combine all ingredients in a heavy saucepan tall enough so that you’ve got some room for bubbling without overflow. Cook on medium or medium-high, stirring frequently. Once the fruit has gotten very soft (after 10-20 minutes), start crushing the mixture with a potato masher, breaking up the fruit and syrup into a nice pulp. I let mine bubble, reduce and thicken for about an hour, but use your own judgement.

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble...

There’s a lot of info out there on jam-making and how to know when it has set enough (often involving frozen dinner plates or other strange things), but since texture wasn’t all that important in this case, I just cooked it until it looked thick enough for my needs. Let it cool, uncovered, until it isn’t scorching bloody hot anymore, then move to the refridgerator until you need it.

Sweet shortcrust pastry:

Prep time: 15-20 minutes
Resting time: 30 minutes (minimum)
Equipment needed: bowls, box grater, plastic wrap

• 225g (8 oz) all purpose flour
• 30g (1 oz) sugar (or vanilla sugar, if you have it)
• 2.5ml (½ tsp) salt
• 110g (4 oz, or 1 stick) unsalted butter, cold (frozen is better)
• 2 egg yolks
• 2.5ml (½ tsp) almond or vanilla extract (optional)
• 15-30ml (1-2 Tbsp) cold water

Sift together flour, sugar and salt. Grate butter into the flour mixture, using the large hole-side of a box grater. Using your finger tips only, and working very quickly, rub the fat into the flour until the mixture resembles bread crumbs. Set aside.

Lightly beat the egg yolks with the almond extract (if using) and quickly mix into the flour mixture. Keep mixing while dribbling in the water, only adding enough to form a cohesive and slightly sticky dough.

Form the dough into a disc, wrap in cling and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes

** If you want to make this in the food processor, combine all the dry elements and pulse to distribute evenly. Add chunks of butter, really cold or frozen is best. Pulse about 10 times or so until you have coarse crumbs and small chunks of butter. Add the egg yolks, pulse a couple of times, then start drizzling in water a bit at a time, pulsing in between drizzles. You don’t want to over-work the dough if you don’t have to! Open the lid and check in between each drizzle of water to check the texture. Don’t wait until the dough forms a ball in the mixer – it should look like fine yellowish crumbly crumbs that, when smooshed together with your fingers, hold together in a cohesive dough.

Frangipane:

Prep time: 10-15 minutes
Equipment needed: bowls, hand mixer, rubber spatula

• 125g (4.5 oz) unsalted butter, softened
• 125g (4.5 oz) icing sugar
• 3 eggs
• 2.5ml (½ tsp) almond extract
• 125g (4.5 oz) ground almonds
• 30g (1 oz) all purpose flour

Cream butter and sugar together for about a minute or until the mixture is primrose in colour and very fluffy. Scrape down the side of the bowl and add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. The batter may appear to curdle. In the words of Douglas Adams: Don’t panic. Really. It’ll be fine. After all three are in, pour in the almond extract and mix for about another 30 seconds and scrape down the sides again. With the beaters on, spoon in the ground nuts and the flour. Mix well. The mixture will be soft, keep its slightly curdled look (mostly from the almonds) and retain its pallid yellow colour.

Bakewell Tartpuddingpie Assembly:

Makes one 23cm (9” tart)
Prep time: less than 10 minutes (plus time for the individual elements)
Resting time: 15 minutes
Baking time: 30 minutes
Equipment needed: 23cm (9”) tart pan or pie tin (preferably with ridged edges) or muffin pan, rolling pin

One quantity sweet shortcrust pastry
Bench flour
250ml (1 cup (8 US fl. oz)) jam or curd, warmed for spreadability (or 1-2 bananas and 1 can dulce de leche!)
One quantity frangipane
One handful blanched, flaked almonds

Assembling the tart
Place the chilled dough disc on a lightly floured surface. If it’s overly cold, you will need to let it become acclimatised for about 15 minutes before you roll it out. Flour the rolling pin and roll the pastry to 5mm (1/4”) thickness, by rolling in one direction only (start from the centre and roll away from you), and turning the disc a quarter turn after each roll. When the pastry is to the desired size and thickness, transfer it to the tart pan, press in and trim the excess dough. Patch any holes, fissures or tears with trimmed bits. Chill in the freezer for 15 minutes.

Preheat oven to 200C/400F.

Remove shell from freezer, spread as even a layer as you can of jam onto the pastry base. Top with frangipane, spreading to cover the entire surface of the tart. Smooth the top and pop into the oven for 30 minutes. Five minutes before the tart is done, the top will be poofy and brownish. Remove from oven and strew flaked almonds on top and return to the heat for the last five minutes of baking.

The finished tart will have a golden crust and the frangipane will be tanned, poofy and a bit spongy-looking. Remove from the oven and cool on the counter. Serve warm, with crème fraîche, whipped cream or custard sauce if you wish.

When you slice into the tart, the almond paste will be firm, but slightly squidgy and the crust should be crisp but not tough.

Jasmine’s notes:
• The jam quantity can be anywhere from 60ml (1/4 cup) to 250ml (1cup), depending upon how “damp” and strongly flavoured your preserves are. I made it with the lesser quantity of home made strawberry jam, while Annemarie made it with the greater quantity of cherry jam; we both had fabulous results. If in doubt, just split the difference and spread 150ml (2/3cup) on the crust.
Annemarie’s notes:
• The excess shortcrust can be rolled out and cut into cookie-shapes (heck, it’s pretty darned close to a shortbread dough).

Beware! These tartlettes are guarded by Pearl the attack cat. Should you try and take one, she will promptly attack you with purring and snuggles!

Left: It's PacMan! Right: Is it smiling at me?

As always, I must leave you with the obligatory food-porn shot.

The epic struggle of Mr. Bacon vs. Monsieur Tofu, now available in action-figure form!

Somehow I’m not surprised, but when looking over my blog stats for the past day I noticed that my little ol’ Waffles-of-Love seem to have garnered more clicks than all my other posts to date!  Woot!  Trust me, dear readers, I feel the bacon love in the house. Those of you who know me know that I love bacon more than some people I’ve met.  For serious. It’s only one of the reasons I’ll never have the stomach to turn vegetarian. You know, I think it must be genetic: My parents, bless them, have contemplated going veggie (for their health), but admit they couldn’t resist the lure of bacon. “Can we be bacon vegetarians?” my mom asks. I believe in the power of bacon! Heck, a dear old friend of mine likes to refer to himself as a “bacon-loving Jew”, no lie.

However, I must admit, there are some awesome, rockin’ people in my life (especially you, JennyBakes!) who take their life at a decidedly more vegetarian pace than I. One such person asked me via facebook today if soy-bacon would possibly work in this recipe: “are there any circumstances under which veggie bacon could be considered an acceptable alternative? i am usually a happy-go-lucky vegetarian, but this recipe fills me with longing…”

Well, i thought long and hard about it, and decided that YES, though I wouldn’t personally use fake bacon (or “facon,” as I like to say), should that be what boats your float, then you should definitely go ahead and use it! You see, I realized that unlike other recipes where facon would be pretty noticible, the candying effect of the brown sugar and spices in this case could definitely do the trick of covering up that telltale this-is-not-bacon-you-fool! flavor.

My exact recommendation was as follows: “I would definitely suggest adding some oil or butter to the soy bacon first (I’m assuming it doesn’t have that natural fattiness of real bacon – lol!), to help with the “candying” effect. Also, i’d double the spice amounts in the brown sugar, to give it more flavor. Adding some salt to the sugar mix would also help. What you want is that sweetness combined with the salty-crispy-smokiness…”

She took my advice and hit her kitchen with a vengeance, striking a hit for vegetarians everywhere. “For the record,” she replied a short time later, “soy bacon candies oh-so-well. YUM!”

So there you have it, folks. Should you be of the vegetarian or vegan persuasion, or simply looking to cut back on your bacon consumption (gasp!), you too can experience Waffles-of-Love. <3 <3 XXOO!

A pool of maple syrup, into which I will plunge.

Brown Sugar Bacon Waffles.

Do I have your attention yet? Yes, that’s right, I said waffles, and bacon, and brown sugar, and ohmygod! So back when I lived in North Carolina, there was a popular breakfast joint in my town named Elmo’s Diner. On their large menu of breakfasty-goodness there was one item that never failed to take my breath away – the bacon-waffle. Just finishing one of these monstrosoties of deliciousness was a difficult task, once properly slathered with butter and real maple syrup. Yes, my friends, it is a heart attack on a platter, an untimely (but scrumptious!) early death just waiting to happen… and I loved him. It was a love that dare not speak its name – the kind of guilty pleasure indulgence food straight from the fatty-food-lovin’-Paula-Deen-butter-guzzlin’-southern-nation. You try and hate on it, but in the end you just can’t… because you’re too full.

Since moving away, there have been many things I’ve missed, and that bacon waffle is one of them. Since recently purchasing a Belgian-waffle iron, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of recreating this masterpiece. My first attempt was okay – decent tasting waffle (if a bit heavy), and delicious bacon crumbles. It definitely satisfied, but it wasn’t the kind of gluttonous, beautiful meal I remembered. So what do I usually do in the face of such a challenge? Go to the interwebz, of course! A bunch of googling later, I had some contender recipes, but none that really called to me with the promise of that long lost waffle of love. Until I found this one. The title, the pictures… I was sold. “I must make these,” I said, “and they will be awesome.”

Next step? Tracking down the best possible bacon available for this noble enterprise. I recently discovered a little butcher shop down the street from my work that puts out some of the best meat products I’ve seen in years. On splurge-nights, the boytoy and I get ourselves a big honkin’ ribeye (I’m talkin’ the couple-inches-thick kind) and proceed to have a steak better than a lot of restaurants I’ve been to recently. Their smoked products are out of this freakin’ world, and I was overwhelmed with joy upon finding they offered bacon in both hickory and applewood smoked varieties. I scurried home with a pound of some of the most beautiful, thick-cut bacon I’ve ever had the pleasure to own or eat (hickory, in this instance).

Homer Simpson voice: "Mmmmmmm... bacon!"

What intrigued/thrilled me the most about this particular bacon-waffle recipe was the semi-candying of the bacon itself under a veil of brown sugar. It seemed, to the imaginary tastebuds in my head, to be a great way to incorporate that sweet-salty-meaty-hot combo I love so dearly. So, like any recipe I stumble across, I made a few adjustments and plunged right in:

Brown Sugar Bacon Waffles

(adapted from Joy the Baker)

Step One: cut a hole in the box… um, er, I mean prepare the candied bacon!

The original recipe says to use 10 slices of bacon – which I did – but mine were so thick and luscious, I had to make a few adjustments in the baking time. My 10 slices were just shy of a whole pound, but ymmv depending on the brand and thickness of your bacon.

Lay your bacon out in a baking pan of some sort, with a tall enough edge to contain all the fat that will render off without splashing when moved. In order to fit in my pan I had to overlap the pieces a bit – this is okay. Sprinkle the top of your bacon layer generously with the following mixture:

• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/8 tsp. onion powder
• 1/8 tsp. garlic powder
• 1/8 tsp. smoked paprika
• fresh ground pepper (to taste)

I only bake with the prettiest possible spices.

It's a BACONSCAPE!

My bacon sparkes in the sunlight.

Bake this lovely concoction in a preheated 375-degree oven for 20-30 minutes, again based on the thickness of your bacon. Mine took 30 minutes, while the original recipe called for only 20. I suggest checking it at 20 minutes and adding more time as necessary. You want the bacon to look crisp but not burned. Immediately transfer out of the greasy sugar sludge with tongs to a cutting board to cool (don’t use paper towels for draining – the bacon will stick!). Once cool, chop it into happy bits of a size amenable to the chef (too big and they will make your waffle iron difficult to close, so be wary). Make sure to eat a few to make sure that they are okay… then a few more… oh crap, remember to save some for the waffles!

Bacon candy! *drool*

Now the waffle batter!

• 2 3/4 c. all-purpose flour
• 1/4 c. cornstarch
• 1 tbsp. baking powder
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup canola oil
• 4 large eggs
• 2 tsp. vanilla extract
• 2 1/2 cups buttermilk (I use 6 tbsp. buttermilk powder + water)

In a large bowl combine flour, cornstarch, baking powder, baking soda, salt and brown sugar (if using powdered buttermilk substitute, add it here to the dry ingredients).  Whisk to blend.  In a  medium bowl, whisk together eggs, oil, buttermilk (or water, if using powdered buttermilk) and vanilla extract.  Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and fold.  Once almost fully incorporated, add the bacon bites.  Stir.  Try not to over mix the batter or the waffles will become tough.  It’s ok if a few lumps remain in the batter.

Cook according to your waffle machine instructions. Generally, you should watch the steam coming off of your iron – when it starts to slow down or stop, your waffle is probably ready. It can take a while to get through all the batter – I made at least 8 belgian-waffle sized lovelies from my batch (hard to count when they keep getting eaten). What should you do to pass the time while your waffles are cooking? Well, if you’re me, you start eating waffles! And drink beer, that’s always a good choice (it pairs very nicely with both waffles and pancakes, I’ve found). In desperate times, get out a laser-pointer and make your cat run in circles around the kitchen floor. That’s always good for a laugh! Next thing you know, your waffle will be done!

Hot, steamy waffles!

One of these days she'll catch that damn laser spot!

Behold! The first bacon waffle! (and there was much rejoicing)

Serve immediately (can keep warm in a low oven while batches finish), topped with real maple syrup (none of that fake stuff, you pansies!) and butter if you dare. Be prepared for moans of extasy to escape the mouths of you and your loved ones. Make this for your date and he/she will imminently propose marriage, simply to have these waffles of love be a regular part of his or her meal schedule. Warning : Waffles-of-Love have been known to cause pregnancy in certain circumstances. Please practice safe syrup.