Thursday, April 27, 2017

Laurent's Slow-Roasted Spiced Pineapple

One pineapple, skinned and quartered. Roast at 300 degrees with a mixture of orange juice, apricot jam, and whole star anise, a cinnamon stick, and black peppercorns.  Baste periodically during the 2 to 2 1/2 hours roasting time.  Result - delicious soft, sweet, mildly spiced pineapple.  Wonderful with plain yogurt.
For the recipe see pages 333-334 of Baking Chez Moi by Dorie Greenspan.
Next time I will try it with orange marmalade, vanilla bean, and no other added flavors.  It is fun to have so many choices with jam and spices.

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Lemon Sugar Cookies

Dorie Greenspan's Lemon Sugar Cookies are an easy to make sugar cookie, flavored with lemon juice, lemon rind, and vanilla.

Dorie gives a variety of baking times, depending on your desired texture.  8-10 minutes should result in pale, chewy cookies; 12-14 minutes should give you cookies with chewy centers and crisp edges.  I baked my batch for 12 minutes and got crisp cookies.  Next time I will try reducing the baking time slightly for a slightly softer cookie.

I contributed most of these cookies to a funeral reception where they languished amidst more showy baked goods.  Perhaps some colored sprinkles would have made them more attractive.  I thought the cookies were very good.  Next time I'll add more grated lemon rind or perhaps lemon extract.

Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Anzac Biscuits

Coconut oatmeal cookies are the thing that I bake the most often.  The Anzac biscuits for this week's Tuesdays with Dorie are a version of coconut oatmeal cookies that uses Lyle's Golden Syrup plus sugar for sweetening and does not include eggs.

I was unable to find Lyle's Golden Syrup at the grocery store.  I researched substitutes and went with light corn syrup and molasses in a 2:1 ratio.

My other deviation from the recipe was to use unsweetened coconut.

Dorie says the dough will be soft and a tad crumbly.  My dough was very crumbly.  I used my new cookie scoop which was great for even portions of dough.  I pushed the dough crumbs together and assumed that they would bake up fine into cookies and they did.